About Shagoon Maurya

Hi, I'm Shagoon. I'm a counsellor and psychotherapist, and my work is simple at its heart: to give people a space where they can finally exhale, be honest, and feel genuinely understood. So many of the people I meet have been holding everything together for a very long time, and they're quietly exhausted. If that's you, you're in the right place.

My style is warm, collaborative and practical. I don't sit behind a clipboard analysing you from a distance. We work together to make sense of what's happening, and to build steady, sustainable change you can actually feel in your everyday life. You'll leave sessions with real tools, not homework that gathers dust.

My approach

I work integratively, which means I'm trained in a wide range of evidence-based approaches and draw on whichever fits you, rather than forcing you into one fixed method. Depending on what you need, that can include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), DBT-informed skills, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), person-centred, solution-focused, psychodynamic and motivational interviewing, as well as IFS, EFT, the Gottman Method, narrative therapy and REBT, always shaped around you, your history and your goals. Some sessions are about learning tools; others are simply about being heard. Both matter. You can read how I work with talk therapy using CBT & MBCT, DBT skills, IFS, EFT, the Gottman Method, narrative therapy and trauma.

Who I work with

People come to me for anxiety, stress and burnout; depression and low mood; shaky self-esteem; big life transitions like moving countries or changing careers; and the relationships that shape us, including complicated family dynamics. I bring a deeply culturally-sensitive, multilingual lens to this work, so you never have to translate your feelings before we can begin.

I'm based in Australia and work entirely online as a virtual therapist, supporting clients across the globe via secure telehealth, across time zones. Wherever you are and whatever you're carrying, you're welcome here.

You are not alone in this journey. Reaching out is not weakness, it's the first, bravest step toward feeling like yourself again.

What a first session is actually like

People arrive braced for something more clinical than it is. There is no couch, no interpretation of your childhood in the first ten minutes, and no expectation that you cry.

Mostly I want to understand two things: what is happening now, and what you want to be different. We will cover some history, because context matters, but not exhaustively and not in the first hour. If you do not know what you want to be different, which is extremely common, that is a perfectly good starting point and we work it out together.

You will not be pushed to disclose anything you are not ready to disclose. Saying there is something you do not want to talk about yet is a legitimate thing to say, and I would rather you said it than sat with it. If talking about yourself is the part you are dreading, tell me that in the first five minutes and I will change how I ask.

By the end of a first session you should have some sense of what the work might involve and roughly how long it might take. If you leave unsure whether I am the right fit, that is worth saying too.

What integrative actually means in practice

The word appears on a great many therapist profiles and is often doing very little. What it means in my work is that the method follows the problem rather than the other way round.

If you have a specific fear that has been shrinking your life, we do structured exposure work, because that is what resolves it. If a repeating relationship pattern is the issue, that is couples or relational work. If something from years ago is still setting the terms in the present, that is trauma-focused work, and the sequencing matters more than the method. And where what you actually need is an hour a week with someone who is not in your life, that is open-ended talk therapy, and it is not a lesser option.

What I will not do is stretch one approach to cover everything. If a different method fits better than the ones I use, I would rather say so early than take six sessions to get there.

Who I am not the right person for

I think this belongs on a page like this, because a therapist who claims to work with everything is telling you something.

I do not prescribe and I do not diagnose. If what you need is a formal diagnostic assessment or a medication review, that sits with a psychologist, a psychiatrist or your GP, and I will say so and help you find the right person rather than keeping you in the room. It is worth knowing that most psychiatrists no longer provide ongoing therapy, so for many people the answer is both, running alongside each other.

I am also not the right fit for anyone who needs crisis support or same-day availability. Weekly therapy is not built for acute risk, and if that is where you are, an emergency service or crisis line is the appropriate first call, not a waiting list.

Writing and media

Alongside clinical work I contribute expert commentary to the press, and my work has appeared in HuffPost, Psych Central, Parade, mindbodygreen, Bustle, TLC, Fatherly, TheLadders, InsideHook, AskMen, SHE DEFINED and The Body.

One thing worth saying about that: no client has ever appeared in any of it, in any form, including anonymised. What I write about publicly is the general shape of things people struggle with, never anyone's particular story. That distinction matters a great deal to me, and it matters more to the people I work with who are themselves in public life.