Emily McGurk
Clinical Psychologist
BPsych, MPsych(Clinical)
Emily provides a safe space for clients to explore challenges, shift unhelpful patterns, and feel more like themselves.
Emily has a special interest in parenting from an attachment framework, anxiety and depression, health issues, identity, as well as burnout and perfectionism.
She sees adolescents (16+ years) and adults.
Emily works with adolescents aged 16+ years and adults, helping to build skills to improve wellbeing and mental health. She has worked as a fully-qualified Clinical Psychologist for over 10 years, and is experienced working with the following presentations:
1. Parenting challenges (e.g. adjusting to parenthood, impact on your relationship, difficulties managing behaviour or relationships with children/teens, having difficult conversations.). Emily has extensive experience supporting families through difficult times. She uses an attachment framework to help parents understand and navigate their child’s developmental stages, and assists with building practical strategies for emotion regulation, communication and repair. Emily has a great working knowledge of shifting parenting paradigms over the last decade and prioritises supporting parents to find a way through that fits families and their individual needs.
2. Supporting adolescents and their emerging identities. Emily has extensive experience supporting adolescents through this significant period of adjustment with self- exploration and challenges that arise from social relationships, sexuality, individuation from family, social media and academic pressure.
3. Anxiety and depression. Emily helps individuals who find themselves stuck in unhelpful cycles of anxiety and depression to shift thinking patterns and behaviours in order to live a more fulfilling life.
4. Burnout and perfectionism. With a keen interest in supporting those with burnout and perfectionism, Emily helps individuals explore how their expectations impact on wellbeing and performance, set boundaries with themselves and others, and help them to make practical and sustainable changes so they can live in a way that is more aligned with their goals and values. Her aim is to help individuals thrive in life and to become more resilient.
5. Health issues and adjustment (e.g. adjustment to diagnosis, chronic pain in adolescents, health anxiety). Having worked extensively in the hospital system helping adolescents experiencing pain and concurrent mental health difficulties, as well as also briefly supporting individuals and family members diagnosed with cancer, Emily brings a compassionate approach to helping with adjusting to health diagnoses and the resulting impact on psychological wellbeing.
Emily’s therapeutic approach is one grounded in evidence-based research and informed by clinical experience. She draws on techniques from Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Schema Focused Therapy, Mindfulness, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy and has completed further training in Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing.
Articles written by Emily
Emily completed her Bachelor of Psychology (with a minor in Business) at Curtin University, and her Master of Applied Clinical Psychology at Murdoch University. She worked for many years in hospital settings and also with youth, supporting individuals with adjustment and improving wellbeing, mental health, and quality of life.
Emily’s clinic days are Tuesdays.
Book online using the button below, or Contact Us if you are new to The Skill Collective or have not seen Emily before.
As rewarding a role that parenting may be, parental burnout is very real - exhaustion, feeling detached from your children, being less effective as a parent, and feeling fed up with the parenting role. Learn what to do to bounce back and improve your relationship with your children.