Forget the spa weekend, the smartest self-care for the high achiever may be an hour in a very comfortable chair. Here we go inside London Bridge Therapy, the Square Mile clinic for people brilliant at everything except, occasionally, being themselves…
You will know the type, and a good few of us have sat next to him at dinner. He runs a business with offices on three continents. He can read a balance sheet like a menu and a boardroom like a balance sheet. But ask him what his ten-year-old is reading, or to produce a boiled egg (soft, ideally, though he would settle for edible), and something in the machinery seizes. The empire is fine. It is the Tuesday evening that is the problem.
He is, I should say, an archetype rather than a patient, but he is precisely the person Dr Stephen Mahan-Taylor has built a clinic around. Stephen, a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, opened London Bridge Therapy in the Square Mile in March 2024, offering private therapy to adults and couples. Its particular specialism is the high performer: the person who looks, from the outside, magnificently capable and is privately running on fumes.
It begins, unusually, with Steven himself. Every enquiry is reviewed by him, and he speaks personally to each prospective client before they are paired with a therapist, asking about needs, goals and personality rather than slotting them into the next free diary gap. (The clinic calls this bespoke matching; the rest of us might call it the opposite of a call centre.) The first session is a fifty-to-sixty-minute assessment, ending with an honest recommendation. The menu runs from CBT and EMDR to psychodynamic work, adapted to the person in the chair.
Steven’s own preferred model is schema therapy, and it is where our dinner-party CEO comes in. A schema, he explains, is simply ‘the way in which we make sense of, and interpret, the world’, and trouble starts when a child who felt neglected or unseen concludes that there must be something wrong with them. A common strategy at the clinic is what Steven calls the ‘perfectionistic demanding mode’: pour everything into work, collect the praise, feel good enough for a moment. Because it works, the cycle reinforces itself, and the belief beneath hardens into ‘I’m only good enough if I’m successful’. Clients often rename it, and ‘the sergeant major’ is a popular choice. Our man’s sergeant major has been so effective in the boardroom that nobody has thought to send him home.
Many clients arrive after years of therapy elsewhere: they can recite their patterns, but knowing why you do something and being able to stop are different skills. Schema therapy is longer-term and more experiential, and its most striking tool is imagery rescripting. The client closes their eyes and returns to an early memory of feeling small, perhaps a playground in the rain. The therapist steps into the scene, tells the bully, ‘I’m not going to let this happen’, and leads the child away, before saying what nobody said at the time. The vulnerable child, Steven is careful to add, is not the problem but ‘a really valuable part of who we are’.
The same thinking applies to couples, and Steven’s example is worth borrowing for your next argument. One partner, rooted in a fear of being left, pursues for reassurance; the other, who learned young that safety means going quiet, retreats. The more one shuts down, the harder the other chases, and the dialogue runs something like ‘As soon as things get emotional, you always flee!’ against ‘You rant at me, you’re too much!’ Both are simply trying to get their needs met in the only way they know. The therapy hands them a shared vocabulary, so that ‘I love you, but I need five minutes on my own’ can replace a slammed door. Nor is it a last resort before the solicitors: plenty of couples simply want reassurance that they are not falling apart.
Behind all this is a conviction that therapy should not be reserved for the crisis. ‘Not enough people know you can come to therapy when you aren’t struggling,’ says Steven, who would like it thought of in the same breath as the gym. He agonised over the chairs (‘I wanted them to be comfy and feel a bit like you were being held’), and there are no scratchy tissues or tired water glasses; the designer Leigh Herbst advised on lighting, carpets and wall tones. ‘For me, it’s a case of small kindnesses.’
Steven, for what it is worth, is a self-confessed perfectionist who has to talk himself down with a quiet ‘It’s OK like this’, even as he preaches ‘good enough’ to everyone else. He keeps the clinic deliberately small so that it does not swallow the rest of his life: some days he works until eleven, others he collects his two sons at 3.15 and kicks a ball around the park. A sixty-hour week is sometimes fine, he tells clients. ‘We can work long hours whilst also nurturing ourselves. It’s just about finding out how to do this.’ (His French bulldog, Teddy, sits in on online sessions as an unofficial co-therapist, and by all accounts a stroppy one.)
Which brings us back to our man. Nobody is trying to make him less formidable, and the empire will survive. Steven’s usual yardstick is more modest: a better choice, made often enough, can improve a life by five per cent now and more further down the line. Five per cent is not a new man. But it might be the difference between a boardroom that runs beautifully and a kitchen on a Tuesday night where, somewhere in the middle of a saucepan, an egg is being boiled and a ten-year-old is explaining her book.
London Bridge Therapy is a premium, private psychology clinic in The City of London that is committed to fostering personal transformation and lifelong mental wellbeing. The clinic delivers expert, evidence-based therapy for adult individuals and couples. For more information, please visit londonbridgetherapy.com.
