Ariana Therapy, Neurodivergent Therapist in Manchester & Online MBACP (Accred) Trauma Specialist

I’ve spent over a decade supporting adults, with the last five years specialising in trauma and people-pleasing, drawing on years of clinical experience alongside hundreds of conversations with people who’ve called themselves a ‘people-pleaser’ long before they ever thought to call it trauma.

I’m Ariana, a BACP qualified and accredited psychotherapist based in Manchester offering online sessions.

You give a lot. You worry a lot. And somehow it’s never quite enough.

There’s often a loneliness that’s hard to explain, even to yourself. A quiet, persistent sense that something is wrong with you. Maybe you’re the one everyone leans on, the one who keeps things together, the one whose own needs have a habit of staying invisible.

You might call yourself a people-pleaser and leave it there. Many of the people I work with do, at first.

It shows up everywhere, not just in romantic relationships. The friendships where you give everything and still feel alone. The family dynamics you can’t seem to escape. The workplace where you over-explain, or brace for criticism before it even arrives. Sometimes, the relationship with your own children, fearing you are carrying patterns forward that were never yours to begin with.

And always the relationship with yourself, the inner voice that’s never quite satisfied, the sense that you don’t know who you are underneath it all, often a quiet echo of what trauma first taught you to believe about who you are and what you deserve.

People-pleasing rarely arrives on its own. It tends to bring company, anxiety that won’t switch off, a habit of avoiding confrontation at almost any cost, a constant low hum of not being quite good enough. 

Sometimes, it can mean saying yes to plans you didn’t have the energy for because disappointing someone felt worse than disappointing yourself.

And for many people, when we trace it back, it began somewhere specific, in childhood, in relationships that were never quite safe enough to just be yourself.

You don’t need the perfect word for what happened. Some people had one clear, difficult experience. For others it was an accumulation, years of small moments that added up to something significant. Both matter. Both are welcome here.

Something I’ve learned across more than a decade of clinical work is that trauma often doesn’t live in the past. It lives in your sleep, your body, and your relationships.

Over the past five years I’ve worked as an integrative trauma therapist within a specialist trauma service, developing deep expertise in childhood trauma and the patterns, people-pleasing, codependency, anxiety, low self-worth, that so often follow it. Before that, I spent five years working across counselling settings including the charity sector, with organisations such as Mind. As a neurodivergent therapist, I know what it can feel like to move through the world feeling slightly out of step, and that understanding shapes how I work as much as my clinical training.

If you’re tired of putting yourself last, and ready to feel safe and comfortable enough to prioritise yourself, even if you’ve tried before and it hasn’t stuck, even if it comes with guilt at first, I’d like to tell you more about how I work.

Getting Started

If any of this sounds familiar, I’d welcome you to get in touch. You don’t need a clear starting point, just a sense that this might be the right space. I respond to all enquiries within one working day.