About
Helping people call themselves into presence
Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist with an existential integrative approach. For 25 years she has helped people call themselves into presence amid the distress of loss, trauma, grief and deteriorating mental health, and recover, heal and return to themselves.
Background
Twenty-five years at the threshold
Chloe was born in Athens and has lived and practised in the United Kingdom for more than three decades. She now divides her time between London and Athens, and sees clients online around the world.
Her clinical work began with people facing bereavement, illness, trauma, divorce, redundancy and relationship rupture. Over time she noticed that clients were asking questions that went beyond symptom relief. Who am I now? Why don’t I recognise myself? How do I live in a life I didn’t choose? Those questions became the centre of her practice.
She founded The Grief Clinic to offer specialist psychological care for loss, trauma and grief in all their forms, including the losses that come without a funeral: of identity, health, belonging, certainty and an imagined future. It is the home of her approach, Calling Ourselves Into Presence.
Alongside her clinical work, Chloe teaches existential therapy at postgraduate level, supervises doctoral research, acts as an expert witness on grief and loss, writes, and speaks to organisations about what their people are carrying.
Approach
Existential integrative, and holistic
Recovery is not only about reducing symptoms. It is about the whole person, and restoring a living relationship with yourself after loss, trauma or distress has fragmented it.
Fragmentation
When a major loss arrives, the inner map we live by no longer matches the world. What follows is not personal failure. It is a human response to profound change.
Presence
Therapy begins by turning towards what is actually happening, in the body, in relationships and in meaning, with steadiness and compassion rather than judgement.
Becoming
The aim is not a return to who you were. It is learning to belong to who you are becoming, and to live more fully in the life you now have.
Recovery attends to the whole person
- Identity
- Roles
- Relationships
- The body
- Emotions
- Daily life & work
- Meaning & purpose
- Spirit
Chloe’s approach is existential integrative. It is grounded in existential philosophy and therapy, and integrates attachment theory, trauma science, compassion-focused psychology and the neuroscience of grief. Suffering is not pathologised: recovery is approached holistically, physically, emotionally, socially, personally and spiritually, as the work of the whole being rather than the whole doing. It works alongside diagnosis, medication and other evidence-based treatment where they are needed.
Credentials
Qualifications & appointments
- Qualifications
- Doctorate in Counselling Psychology and Psychotherapy (DCPsych)
- Registration
- Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) and Associate Fellow (AFBPsS) of the British Psychological Society
- Teaching
- Lecturer in Existential Therapy, NSPC / Middlesex University, and the Existential Academy, London; doctoral supervisor
- Expert witness
- Expert witness on grief, bereavement and loss. Instructing Dr Chloe
- Executive education
- Guest lecture series in Mental Fitness and Resilience, Cambridge University Executive MBA
- Publications
- The Loss Prescription (HarperCollins, 2024); contributor to Psychological Growth After Trauma: Insights from Phenomenological Research, ed. Simon Wharne (Routledge); academic work on traumatic grief, bereavement and existential trauma therapy
- Media
- BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 4, CNN International, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, HuffPost
- International
- Workshop series for the Australian Society for Existential Practice
The question behind the work
What do human beings need when life is no longer the life they expected?