Amy Launder Psychotherapy

Amy Launder Psychotherapy Hi 👋
I'm Amy, and I'm a private therapist working in SW London and online.

14/08/2026

I am not here to judge or push or convince. I am here to listen, to explore, to ask…

12/08/2026

Emotionally immature parents will have you jumping through hoops to explain the simplest thing.

“I can’t come and see you on Saturday”
“I think it’s too early for me to leave my baby with anyone/you”
“I don’t have time for a phone call today”

Simple concepts that they will have you explaining to the point that you’re questioning your own sense of space and time!

You can just say ‘I just can’t’ or ‘I just don’t want to’👏🏻

“But why.. you never do x, y, z… you’re changing, you used to do a, b, c…”

‘Yup, but I can’t anymore’

You don’t need to justify, explain, placate…

In fact, the more you do, the more they have to ‘grab on to’ to make you change your mind.

08/08/2026

It never comes out of nowhere.

A child doesn’t ever want to cut their parent off.

It usually comes with years of suffering and bids for repair and connection.

It usually comes with months or years of therapy afterwards.

It often comes with multiple attempts to reconnect and repair the relationship, often to their own detriment.

If someone tells you they are estranged from their parent, don’t judge them, don’t question them… because, believe me; they’ve done that to themselves enough already.

08/08/2026

Who was there for you? Who is there for you now? Where can you take your ‘stuff’?
Therapy can give you that space that is just for you; where you aren’t thinking about how you’re impacting the other person, where you aren’t worried about being judged or arguments starting… you can say what you need to say, process what you need to process, and be who you need to be - in a safe and supportive environment.
counselling emotionalimmaturity emotionalneglect psychology parenting

08/08/2026

Sometimes the world can make you forget. Sometimes it was never instilled in you to begin with. Whatever the case, I want you to know this and remember this from now on 🥰

08/08/2026

Conversations I have with every client… 🤍

The government announced 159 new NHS mental health centres this week and I want to be fair about it, because the walk-in...
06/08/2026

The government announced 159 new NHS mental health centres this week and I want to be fair about it, because the walk-in part is a real change. 100 of them take you without a GP referral and without a waiting list. I’ve sat with too many people who gave up at the first hurdle for me to be cynical about removing the first hurdle.

I also can’t be sniffy about the design brief. They’re going into high streets, old banks and libraries, and the plan says out loud that they should not look clinical. I’ve spent six years arguing that the room does part of the work, so I’m not about to object when someone puts £343 million behind it.

What I’d want you to know is what it doesn’t fix.

The money is for buildings. There was no new staffing money in the announcement, and two-thirds of the sites are NHS buildings that already exist, being refurbished. And NHS therapy is still short-term; 6-12 sessions, then it ends.

If you’ve had NHS therapy and it helped and then stopped before you were finished, that is not you being difficult or ungrateful. You completed what you were offered. You needed more of it. Those are different problems and only one of them is about you.

I work in person in Clapham Junction and online. from September there’s also the Middle Ground Therapy Service at our Lavender Hill site; £35 a session, supervised throughout, for exactly this middle.

You know exactly how the conversation will go. And you ring them anyway.Attachment isn’t something you age out of. It’s ...
03/08/2026

You know exactly how the conversation will go. And you ring them anyway.

Attachment isn’t something you age out of. It’s a system that runs for life (until actively challenged and repaired) and it gets louder under stress, not quieter. It’s built to seek closeness to a caregiver.

The difficulty with an emotionally immature parent isn’t that they never respond. It’s that they sometimes do. Occasionally with warmth, mostly with deflection. And unpredictable responses produce far more persistent seeking than consistent ones do.
A parent who comes through 1/10 times is harder to stop reaching for than one who never does.

Which means that the going back isn’t weakness. It’s a system doing exactly what it was designed to do, aimed at someone who can’t complete the loop.

What tends to help isn’t trying harder, and it isn’t going cold. It’s grieving a response that was never going to come.

Save this if you needed to hear it today (because you will need to hear it again)!

29/07/2026

The purpose of therapy isn’t to tell you what to do. The purpose of therapy is to help you remove the blocks in your life.

I believe, as many therapists do, that we are all self-actualising. Meaning that we all have the ability to reach whatever our individual full potential is. But sometimes life, our own minds, our unhealthy relationships get in our way.

But therapy really does just help to remove the roadblocks and allow you to thrive 👏🏻

27/07/2026

In the simplest terms; think of your life like a Venn diagram.

When you’re a child, (and you have emotionally immature parents), your main goal was ‘good son/daughter’.

Then you get a bit older and meet your partner and you have two circles on your Venn diagram to balance. Your emotionally immature parent may resent your partner because their portion of your Venn diagram feels smaller. In an emotionally healthy family, a parent typically feels happy that their child has met a lovely partner. An emotionally immature parent may resent your partner for ‘taking you away from them’.

With two circles in your Venn diagram, it gets slightly tricker but you can often manage it. Maybe you see your parent without your partner there. You swallow down the underhanded comments or snide remarks counting down the minutes until you can leave.

If and when you have children, this gets slightly more complicated. Three circles, that compete even more now.

‘Good child’, ‘good partner’, ‘good parent’.

If you have an emotionally immature parent that you feel would be unsafe, unboundaried, in anyway harmful to your child; you may find yourself needing to choose between being the ‘good child’ and the ‘good parent’.

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73 Battersea Rise
London
SW111HN

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