Why I Won't Niche Down (And Why That's Actually the Point)

There's something I've noticed since moving from NHS psychology into private practice — a shift in language that took some adjusting to. In specialist services, we talked about expertise, about formulation, about the whole person in front of us. In private practice, people talk about niches.

And, so, for a long time now, I've sat with the question — what is my niche, who do I serve best, what should my brand be? — and went around in circles for longer than I'd like to admit.

If you've followed my content for any length of time, you'll have noticed I don't exactly stick to one lane. One week I'm writing about perimenopause. The next, about late-discovered neurodivergence. Then birth trauma, or matrescence, or breaking emotional cycles in parenting, or the particular exhaustion of raising a child with additional needs.

The algorithm, I'm told, doesn't like this. The algorithm wants consistency. A clear topic. A defined audience.

And I do understand the logic of social media platforms using an algorithm to manage the flow of content. But every time I try to pick one lane and stay in it with my content creation, something in me really strongly resists this — and I've spent a long time thinking about why.

The problem with niching is that people aren't niches

Here's what I know from decades of clinical work: however specific a referral looks on paper, the therapy that actually helps someone is always about the whole person. Their whole history. Their whole family. The culture and community they're embedded in. The version of themselves that existed before whatever brought them to therapy, and the version they're moving towards.

I could niche down. I have the depth of experience to do it in any number of directions — perinatal trauma, fertility, pelvic health, matrescence, perimenopause, chronic anxiety, rage and shame, low self-worth, cycle-breaking parenting, child mental health, women's health psychology, late-diagnosed neurodivergence...

But to choose just one of those areas would mean abandoning not only my own breadth of experience, but the breadth of experience that my clients bring with them.

And I don't think that serves anyone well.

I know this because I have also had therapy, and I am on my own healing journey

As a woman navigating my own life, I am constantly aware of how rarely professionals can hold all of me at once. I am neurodivergent, and a mother, and a SEN parent, and in perimenopause, and recovering from burnout, and working through birth trauma, and running a business, and renegotiating relationships, and breaking patterns I inherited from my own childhood — all simultaneously, all interconnected.

When I try to separate any one thread out and work on it in isolation, I don't get anywhere. The threads are too tangled with each other to pull cleanly apart.

I suspect you know this feeling too. Most of us do.

There's also a developmental dimension that gets lost when we niche too narrowly. The woman navigating motherhood was also a daughter for decades before that, and that history is still shaping her. The woman in perimenopause has a whole relationship with her body, her hormones, her identity across her lifespan — not just what's happening now.

A niche of "motherhood" needs expertise in womanhood.

A niche of "perimenopause" needs to hold adolescence too.

We don't arrive at any chapter of our lives without all the previous ones.

So what do I actually offer?

While I don't offer a 'niche' — I do offer a very specific, thoughtful, intentional approach. I consciously offer a commitment to holding the entire, complicated, sometimes contradictory tapestry of a woman's psychology: the individual and the systems around her, her past and her present, the feelings she's proud of and the ones she thinks she shouldn't have.

I work within a feminist, trauma-informed, intersectional framework — always. I never look at a woman in isolation from her history, her relationships, or the broader world she lives in.

If there is one thread running through all of it — the anxiety, the rage, the burnout, the grief— that thread is shame. Shame is woven through so much of women's experience, and it deserves far more space than a paragraph. I'll be writing about it more fully, more often, in future blog posts and newsletters.

For now: you do not need to fit into a neat category to work with me. You do not need to arrive with a single, clearly defined problem. You are allowed to be all the things you are, all at once.

And my content will keep reflecting that complexity of us too — not because I can't settle on a topic, but because I refuse to pretend that women's lives can be simplified in that way.

When your complexity is genuinely held, rather than edited down to fit a framework, that's when real change becomes possible.

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I'm Dr. Jenny Turner, Clinical Psychologist, Mum, late-discovered AuDHD human, and founder of Mind Body Soul Psychology - a specialist, feminist, trauma-informed, neuroaffirmative, private psychological therapy service for women.

I can help you at any stage of your life journey - whether you need support to enter adulthood, navigate perimenopause, heal from trauma, finally transform your relationship to your own anxieties, shame, guilt, rage and/or overwhelm - I can support you to enrich your life, relationships and psycho-spritual development.

My services are collobrative, non-pathologising, compassion-focussed, and always offered through an intersectional feminist lens - while most of the people I work with identify as a woman, my services are trans & non-binary inclusive.

I offer online appointments to women based all over the UK, and I offer in-person appointments in Ripon, North Yorkshire - click here to find out more: www.mindbodysoulpsychology.co.uk

You might also like to follow me on Instagram, @drjennypsychologist , or perhaps you'd like to receive regular doses of solidarity and compassion right into your inbox? If so, you can sign up here to my Substack newsletter for regular moments of solidarity in the challenges of being a woman in this patriarchal world, as well as compassion & inspirations for guilt-free self-care - so we can all stay resourced for the experiences we're navigating, and fights we're facing.