Profile

Lay San is a counsellor and Accredited Family Mediator who works with individuals and couples, with a particular focus on couple and marital counselling. Her work is informed by an integrative and relational perspective. 

She works with individuals facing anxiety, grief, bereavement, significant life transitions, and interpersonal difficulties, and couples and families facing relational distress, family-of-origin concerns, and recovering from affairs and marital conflict. With couples and families, she is particularly interested in interactional cycles that can leave people feeling misunderstood, disconnected or stuck. 

She practises from an integrative, evidence-informed framework, drawing primarily on CBT, ACT, systemic approaches, IPT, psychodynamic principles, and grief-informed counselling. For marital work, she incorporates interventions from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT/EFCT) and the Gottman Method. She looks beyond presenting concerns to the developmental, relational and contextual factors shaping a person’s responses and recurring patterns. 

Her postgraduate clinical training involved counselling a range of individuals and couples in distress, as well as specialised crisis interventions for clients experiencing significant emotional distress including suicidality and bereavement. 

Lay San’s professional and life experiences have deepened her appreciation of the complexities of relationships, caregiving, work, loss, and changing family roles. With many years of lived experience across different stages of life, she brings curiosity, compassion and thoughtful challenge to the therapeutic relationship. She hopes to help clients develop greater understanding and make meaningful, sustainable changes.