Work With Me
Private SOUL Mentoring
You can understand your patterns and still keep repeating them.
Knowing why you do something doesn’t always stop you doing it .
Private SOUL Mentoring is Tess’s signature 12-week private experience for those ready to turn self-awareness into meaningful change.
Built around The SOUL Method™ - Self-Responsibility, Connection to Ourselves, Unmet Needs and Love - the programme looks beyond the surface of what is happening to explore the patterns underneath it.
Where are you giving your power away?
Where have you stopped listening to yourself?
What are you repeatedly seeking outside yourself?
And what might become possible if your choices began to come from love, self-respect and your own values, rather than fear?
This is highly personalised work.
Your programme begins with an in-depth SOUL Mapping session, creating a bespoke roadmap around your individual patterns, relationships, needs and what you want to change.
From there, there is no standard programme to follow. Tess draws on her psychotherapeutic training, clinical experience and the SOUL Method™ to shape the programme around what you need, combining deep psychological understanding with practical work designed to create change in everyday life.
The work continues beyond your sessions. You’ll have carefully chosen practices and personalised resources where useful, alongside private between-session support so that we can work with patterns as they are actually happening - not simply talk about them afterwards.
12 weeks | Private 1:1 mentoring | Personal SOUL Map | Between-session support | Bespoke tools & practices
Tess works with a maximum of four Private SOUL clients at any one time.
Apply for Private SOUL Mentoring >Bespoke Private Mentoring
Tess also works discreetly with a limited number of men and women seeking change around compulsive, self-defeating or destructive patterns of behaviour.
Highly personalised and private packages can be created for individuals and, where appropriate, alongside existing professional support.
Professional, organisational and family enquiries are welcome.
Make A Private Enquiry >About Tess
I know transformation from both sides of the room.
I’m Tess Ridgeway - a Master’s-qualified, BACP-registered psychotherapist, writer and creator of The SOUL Method.
But my understanding of change didn’t begin in a classroom.
Long before my life visibly fell apart, I had become disconnected from myself.
I spent years looking outside myself for belonging, reassurance, identity and love - often in relationships that were unhealthy, sometimes destructive and, at times, abusive.
I also spent much of my life not understanding my own mind. Living with undiagnosed neurodivergence shaped far more of my story than I realised at the time: the intensity, impulsivity, sensitivity, search for stimulation and persistent feeling that somehow, I experienced the world differently.
Eventually, the ways I had learnt to cope became destructive too.
My life unravelled through dependency, treatment and relapse. There were periods when I had no place to call home - literally or emotionally - and, most painfully, the involvement of social services led to a period of separation from my daughter.
That was not the beginning of my story.
And it wasn’t the end either.
Rebuilding my life required far more than stopping a behaviour.
It required responsibility.
It required learning to hear myself again.
It required understanding the needs I had spent years trying to meet outside myself - through relationships, destructive behaviours and external validation.
And it required completely reconsidering what I understood love to mean.
I rebuilt a life that had once seemed impossible to imagine. I regained full care of my daughter. I completed my master’s degree and psychotherapeutic training and went on to become a BACP-registered psychotherapist, working clinically with people experiencing complex emotional, relational and behavioural difficulties.
But it was during my master’s research that something began to take shape.
Through the interviews I conducted for my dissertation, four themes emerged again and again.
Looking back at my own life, I began to see those same themes everywhere - in the ways I had lost myself, the things I had searched for outside myself, and ultimately in what had helped me rebuild.
My subsequent clinical work only deepened that interest.
I became professionally fascinated by the very questions my life had forced me to answer.
That intersection between lived experience, postgraduate academic research and clinical practice became the foundation of my work today.
And eventually, it became The SOUL Method™.
The SOUL Method™
Four foundations for coming home to yourself.
The SOUL Method™ began long before it had a name.
Its foundations emerged through Tess’s postgraduate academic research into attachment and relational dependency and have continued to develop through psychotherapeutic training, clinical practice and lived experience.
S - Self-Responsibility
What is mine to change?
Not blame. Not shame. Not taking responsibility for everybody else.
Self-Responsibility means recognising where our power actually lies - in our choices, boundaries, behaviours and the way we participate in our own lives.
O - Connection to Ourselves
What is true for me?
Beneath other people’s expectations, old roles, fear and conditioning, there is a self worth listening to.
SOUL explores how we reconnect with our feelings, values, instincts, identity and the things we genuinely want.
U - Unmet Needs
What am I really looking for?
Behind many repeated patterns is a need - for reassurance, safety, validation, belonging, attention, certainty or love.
Understanding what we are seeking, where that need began and how we respond to it now can fundamentally change the choices we make.
L - Love
What would love do?
Not romantic fantasy. Not endless self-sacrifice. And not simply “self-love”.
Within SOUL, love includes compassion, honesty, boundaries, gratitude, courage, responsibility, reciprocity and self-respect.
It asks us to consider what changes, when we stop allowing fear to make our most important decisions.
The behaviour is rarely the whole story.
The SOUL Method helps us look underneath it.
In their words
Anonymous, 41
"The biggest thing for me was realising I do actually have the ability to create the life I want. I was stuck and very low and I didn't really believe things could change for me. Now I have broken through that old story with Tess's help, and I like my life and who I am, for the first time in a long while."
Jenny, 33
"Tess helped me see that my exhaustion wasn’t failure, it was a sign to care for myself, not just everyone else. Our home feels calmer now. I am more present as a mum and just happier in myself"
Clare, 38
"I've known Tess since 2016 and her journey has been incredible. She's overcome so much with courage, and everything she teaches, she’s lived. She’s the real deal, and there’s no one I’d trust more to guide others through their own healing "
Nisha
"I would absolutely recommend Tess to anyone for real lasting change...."
*All testimonials featured on this page are from real therapy with tess clients. To respect client confidentiality identifying details have been withheld, though this may change in the future with client consent. Your privacy and trust are always my top priority.
Soul-Full
A book by Tess Ridgeway
When I was small,
the world shimmered.
Then, slowly,
it didn’t.
Soul-Full is a story about the things we do in search of love, belonging and somewhere to call home.
About losing ourselves.
About the strange and sometimes destructive places that search can take us.
And about what can happen when, eventually, we stop searching for home outside ourselves.
This is the story of how the shimmer came back.
Part memoir, part reflection on the psychology of why we become who we become, Soul-Full is Tess’s most personal work.
This story is still being written.
Speaking & Workshops
Conversations that stay with you
Tess brings together psychotherapeutic insight, academic research and lived experience through warm, candid storytelling. Her talks explore complicated human experiences in ways that feel accessible, thought-provoking and inspirational.
Signature Talks
The Way Back to Yourself
From Survival to Self-Leadership Through the SOUL Method™
Why can we understand ourselves intellectually and still repeat the same patterns? Drawing on The SOUL Method™, Tess explores how our experiences, relationships and unmet needs shape the way we live and love - and what it takes to find our way back to ourselves.
Ideal for conferences, corporate wellbeing, women's events, retreats and community settings.
Breaking the Cycle
Raising Emotionally Secure Children
We all bring a childhood into parenthood. Tess explores how our own emotional experiences can shape the way we respond to our children - and how greater understanding can help us break generational patterns without blame.
Ideal for parents, schools, family organisations and community settings.
Also delivered as: The Child Who Isn't “Too Much” - Understanding Emotional Distress, Neurodivergence & the Children We Miss, tailored for schools, SEN settings and education professionals.
Unfiltered
Self-Worth, Beauty Culture & Validation in the Digital Age
Tess explores how social media, beauty culture and the pursuit of external validation can shape identity, confidence and emotional wellbeing - and why being seen, desired or admired is not the same as feeling secure within yourself.
Ideal for schools, universities, women's groups, corporate wellbeing events and retreats.
Bespoke Workshops
Tess's talks can also be developed into interactive workshops and bespoke sessions.
Speaking & Workshop Enquiries >
Press & Media
For interviews, commentary & conversation
Tess is available for expert commentary, interviews, podcasts, features and broadcast contributions, bringing together clinical understanding, professional experience and, where relevant, lived experience.
Areas of particular interest include:
Relationships & attachment · Self-worth & identity · Parenting & childhood emotional development · ADHD & neurodivergence · Body image & beauty culture · Social media & its psychological impact · Compulsive & destructive behaviour · Recovery & behavioural change · Mental health & emotional wellbeing
Tess is equally comfortable contributing psychological insight to topical conversations or speaking more personally about relevant aspects of her own story.
For press and media enquiries, please use the contact form below.
Learn with Tess
Prefer to begin in your own time?
Tess’s self-guided courses bring psychologically informed ideas and practical tools into everyday life, allowing you to explore the work privately and at your own pace.
The Insecurity Cure
For anyone tired of allowing insecurity, reassurance-seeking and other people’s responses to determine how they feel about themselves.
Unfiltered
A psychologically informed programme created for young people and parents, exploring confidence, emotional wellbeing, identity and the pressures of growing up in today’s world.
A Little Something From Me
If you're not ready to work together, you can still begin.
Explore complimentary Therapy with Tess resources created to help you understand yourself more deeply, reconnect with what you need and begin making meaningful changes in your everyday life.
From guided meditations to practical workbooks, each resource offers a simple way to pause, reflect and take something useful away with you.
Explore Free Resources >Ready to come home to yourself?
If you've done the thinking, read the books and begun to understand your patterns - but still find yourself returning to the same places - it may be time to do something different with what you know.
Private SOUL Mentoring is available to a maximum of four clients at any one time.
Apply For Private SOUL Mentoring >Contact Me
Complete the form below if you would like to get in touch.
