I'm Valentina Reyes
Integrative therapist, anxiety and burnout specialist, and living proof that you can build a life in a second language without white-knuckling the whole way.
I moved from Medellín to Manchester at nineteen, with two suitcases and the kind of English that gets you through a bus timetable but not a bad day. I know the specific tiredness of building a life in a second language: the constant low-level translating, the performing of an ease you don't feel, the way you can be competent all day and still feel far from yourself by evening. It took me years to name that tiredness. It's a large part of why I do this work.
I'm an integrative therapist and I specialise in anxiety and burnout, the twin engines of the white-knuckled life. My clients are usually excellent at coping. That's the problem. Coping is a skill, and like any skill it can quietly take over the whole repertoire until you can't remember doing anything else. My job is not to take your competence away. It's to make it optional.
Why I trained integratively
Because people aren't one method. Some weeks you need to understand where a pattern began. Some weeks you need something practical for Thursday's meeting. Some weeks you mostly need to be heard, accurately, by someone who isn't tired of you. A good integrative therapist moves between those registers on purpose, and tells you what she's doing and why. That's the training, and it's also the point.
Two languages, one therapy
Sessions run in English, in Spanish, or in the mix that real bilingual life is actually lived in. This matters more than it sounds. Feelings have home languages. Some of my clients find that anger is easier in English and grief only tells the truth in Spanish. Whatever combination is yours, you won't spend your sessions translating yourself, terapia sin traducción interna, and you won't have to explain why your mother's voice in your head has an accent. And if you only speak English, none of this changes a thing about the quality of your hour.
You'll find me in a warm second-floor studio on Blossom Street in Ancoats, where the window faces west and the last sessions of the day happen in ridiculous golden light, or online from wherever you are.
- PGDip Integrative Counselling & Psychotherapy
- Certificate in Working with Anxiety
- Fully insured · supervised practice
Behind the name
In Medellín the last hour of daylight turns the whole valley gold. La hora dorada, my mother called it, the hour when the day finally softens. I wanted therapy to feel like that hour: warm, honest and briefly outside ordinary time. Not because we avoid the dark, we go there often, but because the hour itself should be on your side. One bright hour a week, properly used, has a way of changing the other 167.
At work
Start with a free 20-minute call
Twenty minutes on the phone or over video, in English or Spanish. You tell me what's going on, I tell you honestly whether I can help, and you get a feel for how I work before anything is decided. The waitlist is open for autumn: join it and I'll hold you a place, then we'll book your call as soon as a space opens.
Join the waitlistThere is a short waitlist at the moment — join it and I’ll be in touch as soon as a space opens.