Areas of Expertise
Who I Work With
Allison works with caregivers, helpers, leaders and high achieving people who are often accustomed to supporting everyone around them while receiving too little support themselves. This includes healthcare workers, teachers, psychologists, leaders, carers and other helping professionals, as well as people experiencing perfectionism, burnout, chronic over responsibility and the cumulative emotional impact of caring for others. She also works with women navigating health concerns, parenting and reproductive life transitions, neurodivergent and gifted adults, couples experiencing relationship difficulties, and people adjusting to trauma, disability or significant changes in their health, identity or functioning.
Areas of Practice
Caring for the Caregivers: Psychological support for healthcare workers, teachers, psychologists, leaders, carers and other helping professionals experiencing burnout, compassion fatigue, moral distress, vicarious trauma, perfectionism or chronic over responsibility. Allison has a particular interest in supporting highly capable people who have continued functioning for others while becoming depleted themselves.
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Workplace Psychological Health: Therapy addressing occupational burnout, workplace psychosocial hazards, occupational violence, bullying, conflict, moral injury and psychologically unsafe workplace environments. Allison understands how organisational systems, leadership, workload and workplace culture can affect psychological wellbeing, particularly within healthcare and other caring professions. Let It Go Psychology provides psychological therapy and support. It does not provide legal advice, workplace investigations, organisational risk certification, independent medical examinations or workers compensation assessments.
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Women's Health, Parenthood and Attachment: Support for women experiencing psychological concerns associated with reproductive health, hormonal conditions and significant life transitions. This may include PCOS, PMDD, fertility concerns, pregnancy, adjustment to parenthood, parenting pressures, birth related experiences, and perinatal or postnatal anxiety and depression.
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Trauma, Adjustment and Complex Presentations: Trauma informed psychological therapy for people experiencing complex or cumulative trauma, major life disruption, disability, brain injury, changes in functioning, identity adjustment, housing instability or significant social adversity. Therapy focuses on trauma-informed psychological adjustment, emotional wellbeing, relationships, identity, meaning and functioning. This service does not provide medical treatment, neurological rehabilitation, housing assistance or case management.
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Neurodivergence, Giftedness and Twice Exceptionality: Affirming psychological support for autistic and ADHD adults, gifted people and those who are twice exceptional. Therapy may explore identity, masking, burnout, sensory and emotional needs, perfectionism, relationships, workplace experiences and the impact of navigating systems that have not adequately understood or accommodated the person.
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Couples Therapy: Psychological therapy for couples experiencing communication difficulties, disconnection, recurring conflict, attachment concerns, major life transitions, caregiver strain or the impact of work, trauma, health and parenting pressures on their relationship.
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Clinical Supervision: Clinical supervision for psychologists and other eligible professionals. Allison is a Psychology Board of Australia approved supervisor with more than eight years of supervision experience. Her supervision style is reflective, formulation based and grounded in ethical practice, clinical reasoning, therapist development and sustainable professional wellbeing.
Psychological Questionnaires and Treatment Planning
Let It Go Psychology works exclusively with adults aged 18 years and over. Validated psychological questionnaires and outcome measures may be used to support assessment, treatment planning and progress monitoring, with results always interpreted in their clinical context.
Personality measures, including the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 from the American Psychiatric Association, may be used as one component of this process.
Let It Go Psychology does not provide child or adolescent assessment, cognitive or achievement testing, or formal diagnostic, forensic or medicolegal assessment services. Where a formal autism, ADHD, cognitive or neuropsychological assessment is required, referral to an appropriately specialised assessment service can be discussed.
About
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Allison Welch is an Endorsed Clinical Psychologist and a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society College of Clinical Psychologists, with more than twenty years of experience across mental health and disability, much of it in Queensland's hospitals, in people's homes and alongside the staff who hold our health system together. She understands long hours and the quiet cost of always being the one who copes, because she has lived them. For more than eight years she has run her private practice on evenings and weekends while working full time in the hospital during the week. Today she specialises in caring for the people who care for others: healthcare workers, teachers and educators, carers, and women navigating burnout, trauma, reproductive health and the pressure of holding everything together. Allison enjoys time with her partner, friends, family and her fluffy white Samoyed named Minty.
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Preferred Therapeutic Approach
Allison's therapeutic approach is predominantly mindfulness-based cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), influenced by a third wave type of CBT called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). This approach is a means of understanding how life events or situations can influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviours in a variety of ways. The ACT approach centres on the link between language and the mind. By simply being more open to noticing how we internally frame problems to ourselves, which can in fact be open to interpretation due to the limitations and complexities of language itself, this is turn helps individuals respond according to their chosen values. Allison's approach centre's largely on the notion of accepting or being at peace with what is out of your personal control and committing to action that improves and enriches your life.
"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." — Carl Jung.
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Allison's counselling approach is also heavily influenced by humanistic, existential and flexible psychotherapy with Rogerian foundations; such as unconditional positive regard, person-centred and congruence within the therapeutic alliance.
"This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life" ---- Carl Rogers
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"Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment" ---- Lao Tzu
Further to this, Allison's background working with family dyads is also heavily influenced by attachment, object relations and Masterson's Disorders of Self psychodynamic foundations. Across time, Allison has recognised that we are heavily influenced by our past experiences, sometimes even prenatally and it is vital individuals feel safe and secure in relationship before any healing can occur.
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“What is a normal child like? Does he just eat and grow and smile sweetly? No, that is not what he is like. The normal child, if he has confidence in mother and father, pulls out all the stops. In the course of time, he tries out his power to disrupt, to destroy, to frighten, to wear down, to waste, to wangle, and to appropriate . . . At the start he absolutely needs to live in a circle of love and strength (with consequent tolerance) if he is not to be too fearful of his own thoughts and of his imaginings to make progress in his emotional development.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott
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Qualifications
Master of Clinical Psychology
Bachelor of Psychology Science (Honours)
Endorsement as a Clinical Psychologist (AHPRA)
Fellow, APS College of Clinical Psychologists (FCCLP)
Supervisor Training and Approval Programme (STAP) Accreditation
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Memberships and Affiliations
Registration, Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA)
Circle of Security Parenting Programme Provider
Circle of Security Classroom Master Course Programme Provider
Circle of Security Core Sensitivities Trained
Triple P Programme Provider
The Kazdin Method Provider
Emerging Minds - Child Aware Practitioner and Supervisor
