About Ana:
Biography:
Before I became a psychotherapist, I was a social worker.
And I still am.
My background in social work taught me to look at people in context: at families, relationships, communities, services, culture and the circumstances in which a life is being lived. It taught me that what appears to be an individual difficulty often makes much more sense when we understand what surrounds it.
Psychotherapy gave me another way of looking. It allowed me to stay closer to the inner experience of a person, to the meanings we make from what happens to us, the patterns we develop, and the relationships that shape how we understand ourselves.
I don't think of those as two separate ways of understanding people. They inform each other.
Today, I am a psychotherapist and a CORU-registered social worker working in Ireland. Alongside my clinical work, I supervise social work students at master's level and develop continuing professional development training for therapists.
Qualifications:
BA (Hons) Social Work, Universidad de Malaga (Spain)
M.A. Counselling & Psychotherapy, Family Therapy, ICHAS
Professional registrations & memberships:
CORU Registered Social Worker, Registration No. SWTL044243
APCP Member, Membership No. MBR11356
Foyht Member, Membership No. FO-OI7497UI
Associate Member of the Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI), Membership No. AM17467
Professional indemnity insurance in place
Therapeutic approach:
I am interested in what happens when the explanation we have been given for ourselves doesn't quite fit.
Sometimes people arrive in therapy already carrying a language for what is happening: a diagnosis, a label, an idea about what is wrong, or a story they have been telling themselves for a very long time. Those things can be useful, and for many people they come as a relief after years of being told that their difficulties were a question of character. If a name or a diagnosis has helped you make sense of your life, I am not going to spend our time arguing with it.
What interests me is what comes after that. An explanation can be a place to start from, and I don't think it should close down curiosity.
My first task is not to decide what category you belong in. It is to understand what is happening, what it means in the context of your life, and what you would like to be different. That is why my approach to psychotherapy is integrative, relational and systemic.
I don't believe that one therapeutic model can adequately describe every person, and I don't think people exist separately from their relationships, histories, cultures and environments. Sometimes the work will involve change. Sometimes it will involve acceptance. Sometimes it will involve recognising that something you have spent years trying to change about yourself was never quite the problem you thought it was. And sometimes we won't know at first.
Not knowing is allowed.
Areas of particular interest
I work with a broad range of people and difficulties, but there are areas of psychotherapy to which I am particularly drawn.
One is neurodivergence.
I am interested not only in diagnosis, but in what it can mean to live for years feeling somehow out of step with the world around you.
I work with neurodivergent adults, and with families where a young person aged 10 or over is neurodivergent. This includes adults with a formal diagnosis, those waiting for assessment, and those who are simply beginning to wonder whether neurodivergence might help them understand parts of their experience differently.
Another is relationships and relational diversity.
I work with couples, individuals and families across different relationship structures, including LGBTQ+ relationships, chosen families, open relationships, polyamory and other forms of consensual non-monogamy.
I am interested in relationships as they are actually lived, rather than in measuring them against a single idea of what a relationship is supposed to look like.
These interests have something in common. They both ask us to be careful about confusing difference with dysfunction.
What it is like to work with me
I am warm, but I am not a therapist who will simply agree with everything you say. I will listen carefully. I will ask questions. I will be curious about the things that don't quite fit, including contradictions, patterns and assumptions that may have become so familiar that they are difficult to see. Sometimes I may challenge you. Often that means asking about something you describe as a personal failing when, to me, it looks more like the circumstances you were living in.
You can challenge me too.
If I misunderstand you, I want you to tell me. If an idea doesn't fit, we don't have to make you fit the idea. Therapy is collaborative, but that doesn't mean either of us has to know exactly where we are going from the beginning.
I bring my training, experience and attention to the room. You bring something I can never have: your experience of being you.
We begin there.
Therapy in English and Spanish
I work in both English and Spanish, offering online psychotherapy across Ireland.
I am originally from Málaga and live and work in Ireland, so I also understand something personally about living between languages and places.
Language is more than a practical consideration in therapy. There are experiences we learned to name in one language, relationships that belong to another, and parts of ourselves that can sound subtly different depending on which language we are speaking.
For some people, being able to move between languages in therapy matters.
There is room for that here.
About Shoreline:
A place to understand before deciding what something means
Shoreline is an independent online psychotherapy and social work consultancy practice based in Ireland. It was created around a simple idea:
People make more sense in context.
What looks like anxiety, burnout, conflict, difficulty coping or a problem within one person can look very different when we also consider relationships, family, history, culture, environment, services and the circumstances in which somebody is trying to live.
That does not mean that individual difficulties are not real. It means that understanding them properly sometimes requires us to look beyond the individual. At Shoreline, the first task is not to decide what category somebody belongs in.
It is to understand what is happening.
More than one way of understanding a person
Shoreline brings together psychotherapy, systemic and relational thinking, and social work. These are different professional disciplines, and the services themselves remain clearly separate. But they share something important. They all ask us to pay attention to context.
Psychotherapy can help us understand inner experience, patterns, relationships, meaning and change. Systemic thinking asks what happens between people, and how families, relationships and environments shape what becomes possible.
Social work brings attention to the wider systems in which people live, including services, institutions, communities and the practical realities that affect everyday life.
Shoreline does not assume that one way of looking will explain everything.
Sometimes the most useful understanding comes from being able to hold several perspectives at once.
Difference is not automatically dysfunction
Shoreline has particular professional interests in neurodivergence and relational diversity.
Those areas may look very different, but they raise a similar question:
When are we looking at a genuine difficulty, and when are we looking at difference through expectations that were never designed for this person or relationship?
Being affirming does not mean pretending that everything is easy. Neurodivergent people can experience very real difficulties. Relationships outside conventional structures can still involve conflict, hurt, inequality, jealousy, betrayal and change. The aim is not to romanticise difference. It is to avoid deciding that difference itself is the problem before we have understood what is actually happening.
My work starts before the explanation.
If you are considering therapy and would like to know whether I may be the right person to work with, you are welcome to get in touch.