Dr Amara Bankole-Thomas
Trauma-informed work with first-generation professionals
Dr Amara Bankole-Thomas has spent the past fifteen years in rooms where people are finally allowed to put a thing down. She is a chartered counselling psychologist with a doctorate from University College London and a long working history with first-generation professionals navigating workplaces that were not built for them.
The work
Her sessions are unhurried and exact. The first session is always a careful mapping; the next twelve to fifteen are the working session. She works in fifty-minute meetings, in person and by video, and keeps her case load deliberately small so each person has room to think across the week rather than being held to the hour.
Background and training
Born in Lewisham to Nigerian parents, Amara read psychology at the London School of Economics, then trained at the Tavistock and at UCL. She held senior posts in two NHS adult mental health services before moving into private practice in 2019. She is on the BPS Register of Chartered Psychologists and is an accredited member of the BACP.
What she works with
Most of her work is with people whose professional life has put them at a distance from how they were brought up. The pattern is usually similar: high responsibility, high masking, low recovery, and a sense that no one in the office quite gets it. Amara is unusually skilled at making that pattern visible without softening it.
In practice
She is not a brief intervention. The work is six to twenty sessions, more if needed, and she will tell you up front if she thinks a different therapist would be a better fit. She is gentle in the room and direct outside of it: her assessments are typed up and shared with you, and you can disagree with them in writing.
What I do is unspectacular. The people who come to me are doing the work; I am keeping the page open.
Outside the practice
Outside the practice she sits on the board of a small bursary fund for working-class psychology graduates and writes occasional pieces on representation in the talking therapies for the British Journal of Counselling Psychology.
I think the most useful thing I can offer is permission to be exact about your own life. Most of my clients arrive in the habit of softening everything.