Get to know us - Anita Sommers

Known for her warm, proactive, and understanding style, Anita specialises in working with individuals, couples and families looking to make meaningful changes in their lives and relationships. Her focus areas include strengthening relationship connections, healing past trauma and family of origin pain, and helping parents with the trials and tribulations of parenthood.

Imbued with gentle humour, sensitive suggestions, and attentive listening, Anita’s sessions empower clients to act, think, and feel differently; make sense of their experience; better understand themselves and uncover how to break the patterns that hold them back.

Anita is a Systemic Family Therapist, who received her master’s degree in couple and family from Edgewood College (Madison, WI USA). She has provided individual therapy, couple therapy, and family therapy since 2004. Anita has worked in private practice since 2018, but prior to her work in private practice, she was employed as a Specialist Clinician for Children’s Social Care by the Cambridgeshire County Council. Her main role was to provide a systems perspective to social workers to ensure that the multitude of factors that contribute to a client’s needs are discussed and effective interventions are implemented.

Anita also worked as a Program Director of Healthy Within, a clinic in San Diego, California that treated individuals struggling with an eating disorder and other co-morbid diagnoses such as: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Depression, Personality Disorders, and addictions. She conducted individual, group and family sessions using both Systemic and CBT techniques.

She also participated in community outreach to raise awareness of eating disorders, body image and self-esteem issues in schools and college campuses. Anita performed a similar role as a Day Treatment Clinician at KidsPeace New England where I was responsible for conducting individual, group and family sessions while performing detailed assessments and treatment plans for young people with a wide variety mental health challenges.

Anita diverse training and experience enable her to work from an integrative base, drawing from various modalities including Systemic Theory, Attachment Theory, Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy/Techniques, and The Gottman Method. Anita helps individuals, couples and families to reflect on their attachment history, patterns in their family of-origin, views about themselves and their relationships in order to break free from destructive cycles in order to live a deeper, more satisfying life where they feel love and connection in their relationships.

Anita holds a master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and a Supervision Diploma for Systemic Therapy from the Institute of Family Therapy. She is a registered member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP).