Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell 

​Chartered Psychologist · Author · Keynote Speaker 

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I am Dr Chloe, a Chartered Counselling Psychologist, author, and keynote speaker with over 25 years of experience working with people through some of the most profound and painful experiences of their lives.

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My work spans two worlds that are more connected than they might first appear.

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In one, I sit with individuals - privately, one to one - who are navigating grief, trauma, loss, and the kind of emotional pain that resists easy answers. People who have lost someone they love. People rebuilding their lives after relationship breakdown, serious illness, or a loss of identity they struggle to name. People who have held it together for so long that they have forgotten who they are beneath the effort.

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In the other, I work with organisations - leadership teams, HR directors, partners, and executives - helping them understand what invisible loss is doing to their people, their culture, and their performance, and building the psychological safety and human intelligence to respond to it well.

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What unites both worlds is a single conviction: that lasting psychological change does not come from fixing ourselves. It comes from learning to be present with what is already here.

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One to one therapy and coaching

At the heart of my work is the individual therapeutic relationship - the private, confidential space where real change becomes possible.

I work with adults from all walks of life who are navigating:

Grief and bereavement - the loss of a person, a relationship, a life that was planned and never came to be. Trauma and its aftermath - the experiences that leave a mark long after the event has passed. Identity loss and life transitions - redundancy, divorce, serious illness, retirement, becoming a parent, losing a sense of purpose or direction. Invisible losses - the endings that never get acknowledged, the grief that has no name, the pain that others cannot see. Emotional exhaustion and burnout - the depletion that comes from giving too much for too long without being genuinely supported. The search for meaning - the quiet but urgent question of what this life is for, and how to live it with greater authenticity, connection, and vitality.

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My therapeutic approach is depth-based, trauma-informed, and existentially grounded. I do not offer quick fixes or manualized programmes. I offer presence, clinical rigour, and the kind of honest, compassionate understanding that allows people to meet their own experience without fear.

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Sessions are available online, allowing me to work with clients across the UK and internationally.

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For organisations

Alongside my clinical practice I work with organisations to address what I call invisible loss - the grief that accumulates inside teams and cultures through restructuring, redundancy, departure, burnout, and the relentless pressure of professional life that never gets named or acknowledged.

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One in four employees is grieving at any given moment. 91% report a significant drop in productivity. UK businesses lose over £20 billion a year to grief-related presenteeism and absenteeism. And only 11% of managers can correctly identify grief as the source of the performance issues they are seeing.

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My organisational work includes keynote speaking, leadership workshops, executive coaching, employee webinars, and strategic psychological consulting. I have worked with some of the UK's most demanding organisations and have seen what becomes possible when leaders develop a genuine fluency in what their people are actually carrying.

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Trusted by: Goldman Sachs · Allen & Overy · Freshfields · Cleary Gotlieb · Weil Gotshal · Sidley Austin · BNP Paribas · Accenture · Aviva Allianz · Ogilvy · Tesco · EBRD · Clyde & Co · Department of Transport · This Can Happen

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What people say

"Dr Chloe held my grief with such steadiness and care. For the first time in years I felt truly understood. The work we did together changed my life."  Individual therapy client

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"In the aftermath of team trauma, Dr Chloe offered insight and steadiness when we needed it most. Our team is better for it."

Partner, City Law Firm

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"Her webinar gave language to what so many of us had silently carried. It opened the door to a new way of caring for each other at work."  Wellbeing Lead, Financial Services

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"Dr Chloe's approach to grief at work is human, trauma-informed, and refreshingly honest. She doesn't just talk about support; she models it. I wish every leadership team could hear what we heard."  

HR Director, Tech

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My books and writing

I am the author of The Loss Prescription (HarperCollins, 2024)  a clinically grounded, compassionate guide to navigating grief and the pain of all loss, widely read by individuals navigating personal loss as well as professionals working in health, mental health, and caring roles.

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My forthcoming book The Stranger Within explores what becomes possible when we stop running from loss and begin to meet the person it has been quietly making us - a book about freedom, identity, and the deeper self that grief reveals.

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I have also published academic work on Existential Trauma Therapy with Routledge and PCCS.

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The Anchored Model - My Clinical Framework 

The Anchored Model is a three-part therapeutic and coaching framework I developed through 25 years of clinical practice with individuals navigating grief, loss, and self-estrangement. It sits at the heart of my forthcoming book The Stranger Within and informs everything I do - in individual therapy, in group programmes, and in my organisational work.

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The model emerged from a simple clinical observation: that the people who struggle most in the aftermath of loss are not those who feel too much, but those who have lost contact with themselves. They have adapted, performed, coped, and held it together — and in doing so, they have quietly drifted from any grounded sense of who they are. The Anchored Model is the framework I built to help them find their way back.

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The Inner Anchor

A grounded, embodied sense of presence that belongs to the self -rather than to external conditions, other people's needs, or the relentless demands of a life that was never designed to hold a human being.

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The Inner Anchor is the foundation of everything else. It is the capacity to locate yourself - in your body, in your breath, in the felt sense of simply being here - even when the world outside is uncertain, demanding, or in grief. For most of the people I work with, this is not something they lost suddenly. It eroded slowly, over years of over-functioning, self-abandonment, and emotional labour on behalf of everyone but themselves. The first work of therapy is often simply to find it again.

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The Appreciative Heart

The capacity to meet oneself and one's life with genuine, sustainable kindness - including its difficulty, its imperfection, and its ongoing uncertainty.

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This is not gratitude in the way the wellness industry uses the word. It is something quieter and more clinically substantial: a way of being with yourself that does not collapse under the weight of grief, does not harden into self-judgement, and does not require your life to be other than it is before you can feel it. Drawing on compassion-focused therapy, existential psychology, and the self-compassion research of Dr Kristin Neff - whose questionnaire forms one of the core prescriptions in The Loss Prescription - this anchor addresses the inner critic that grief amplifies, and rebuilds the relationship with the self that loss so often dismantles.

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The Outer Nest

The practical, sustainable redesign of daily life, relationships, and environments around what the return to self has found.

The Outer Nest turns inward work outward. Once the Inner Anchor is established and the Appreciative Heart is active, the third anchor asks: what needs to change in the actual architecture of your life? Not a dramatic reimagining. Not a burning-down and starting again. Small, honest, sustainable redesigns - of roles, routines, limits, relationships, and the environments that either nourish or deplete. This is where therapy becomes practical, and where the insights of the consulting room become the lived experience of a life that actually holds you - rather than one you are permanently, exhaustedly holding together.

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​The Anchored Model is designed to be clinically rigorous and genuinely portable - usable by individuals in the middle of full, demanding lives, and adaptable for organisations seeking to build cultures that can hold the full complexity of human experience. It is the framework at the centre of The Stranger Within, and the thread that runs through all of my work.

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My background and credentials

I hold a Doctorate in Counselling Psychology and have practised for over 25 years across clinical, organisational, and academic settings. I lecture at the Existential Academy and the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London, and have been a visiting lecturer on the Cambridge University Executive MBA programme in Mental Fitness and Resilience.

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My work has been featured on BBC Radio 2, CNN, and in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Huffington Post.

Chartered Counselling Psychologist (CPsychol) · Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society (AFBPsS) · Doctorate in Counselling Psychology (DCPsych) · Author · Keynote Speaker · Executive Coach

 

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For Press and Media Use 

The following biography is cleared for press use. Copy and paste as needed.

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Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist, author, and keynote speaker with over 25 years of clinical practice. She is the author of The Loss Prescription (HarperCollins, 2024), an Amazon bestseller in grief and bereavement, and is currently writing The Stranger Within: How We Lost Ourselves - and the Way Back Home. A contributor to Routledge's academic literature on traumatic bereavement, she works at the intersection of grief, existential psychology, and the neuroscience of emotional healing. She consults with organisations on invisible loss - the grief that cultures fail to name - and has appeared on BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 4, CNN, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph.

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For interview requests, press enquiries, and high-resolution images, contact: cpaidoussis@me.com

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Lets Talk​

Whether you are an individual looking for one to one support, or an organisation seeking to understand the hidden cost of invisible loss, I would welcome a conversation.

Email:  cpaidoussis@me.com