Feeling that we don’t belong creates our deepest wounds

Therapy with Davina Robertson MA

Connect with Davina

Watching a child who feels as if they don’t belong breaks something open in us.

  • Is your child feeling pressured to change who they are in order to fit in at school—and do you feel powerless to protect them?

  • Or perhaps you're looking back at your own schooling and realising: maybe you weren't the problem. And you are still feel deeply affected by what you went through.

  • Or both are true: You're parenting a child who feels they don’t fit-in at school as they are, and it's cracking open your own unhealed wounds from school.

I work with parents who feel powerless, blamed and exhausted—some carrying the double weight of their child's struggle and their own unhealed school trauma.

And I work with adults who want to understand and heal what school did to them—whether that's recent or decades ago.

This isn't about educational strategies or parenting techniques. It's about healing the emotional toll that this journey takes.

When we're told we don't belong, we internalise it as shame—that sick feeling that something is wrong with us.

Our work together aims to support you to move:

  • from shame to knowing you are enough and never too much

  • from trauma reactions to feeling calm and grounded

…with the understanding that you've always done the best you could in a system that wasn't built for you or for your child.

Maybe you want to...

  • If you're a parent: Become the steady presence your child can count on when the world says they're wrong

  • If you're healing your own story: Finally trust that your struggle to fit in wasn't a character flaw—it was a mismatch

  • Start to trust your own intuition about what you or your child needs—instead of looking to others' views

  • Understand that feeling of not belonging wasn't your fault (or your child's fault)—and feel the relief of laying down that burden and replace shame with self-compassion

  • Start to heal the trauma held in your body—whether from watching your child struggle, from your own schooling, or both

I know this territory intimately—from both sides.

I watched my son struggle. I spent years fighting for schools to understand him whilst I didn't fully understand him myself. When he was nineteen, he took his own life.

I also worked as a teacher and a head of year in a large comprehensive school and I saw how things worked, and too often failed to work effectively, for young people, from that perspective too.

I understand the years of internalised shame. The exhaustion of fighting for your child. The trauma held in your body from your own schooling. That's the work we can do together.

The neurodivergent lens

Many of us are neurodivergent—autistic, ADHD, highly sensitive, gifted, twice-exceptional, dyslexic or dyspraxic. Sometimes we didn't know this until long after leaving school. Sometimes we don’t have any diagnosis and we don’t know how to account for our experience.

A neurodivergent lens can help us to understand: we aren't the problem. The system simply wasn't designed for minds and physiologies like ours.

I'm Davina

I'm a qualified and experienced trauma-informed psychotherapist. I identify as neurodivergent myself.

I have many years of lived experience—as someone the system failed, as a parent who fought for my son, as someone who lost him, and now as a grandparent still walking this path.

My focus is on helping you process the trauma, find your voice, and reclaim yourself.

If you want to work with me:

I offer therapy in the format that works best for you:

  • Weekly video sessions for those who prefer real-time connection.

  • Email-based therapy for those who find writing allows deeper reflection, need flexibility around unpredictable schedules, or simply communicate better in written form. Many neurodivergent individuals find email therapy particularly helpful.

I work with a small number of clients so I can give each person my full attention. If you would like to discuss coming for therapy with me, please book a free 20-minute chat with me to hear a little more and to ask any questions you have. I will be very happy to have a conversation with you.

I welcome clients of all identities and backgrounds. I understand that many forms of difference—including neurodivergence, race, sexuality, and gender—can lead to experiences of marginalisation, and I work with awareness of these intersecting experiences.