Hi, I’m Cara Lester (she/her)
I’m a therapist who believes that healing doesn’t come from trying to be “normal”; it comes from exploring who you really are, in all your complexity. I practice from a phenomenological-existential and intersectional feminist lens, which means I hold space for the big questions about identity, meaning, freedom, pain, and belonging, while always honoring the realities of the systems we live within.
My style is both challenging and compassionate. I’ll ask the hard questions, but I’ll sit with you as we unpack the answers together. I believe in therapy that’s relational, human, and affirming; especially for queer, trans, non-binary, polyamorous, and kink-identified folks, as well as those navigating body diversity.
As a queer woman, living with PCOS and endometriosis, I understand what it means to live in a body that doesn’t align with societal expectations, especially Western, cisnormative, and fatphobic ones. I carry that lived experience into the therapy room with humility and care. Prior to being a psychotherapist, I worked in the wine industry in London and Buenos Aires. I believe that all my past experiences have helped me become more attuned to various challenges and difficulties in life, and have helped me understand clients from all backgrounds.
I don’t believe in fixing people. I believe in witnessing them and helping them reconnect to the parts of themselves that have been silenced, shamed, or forgotten.
You don’t have to be anyone other than who you are to begin.
• Certificate in Psychotherapy and Counselling - Regents University, London 2022
• PGDip In Psychotherapy and Counselling - Regents University, London 2025
• MA in Psychotherapy and Counselling (Existential Pathway) - Regents University, London (projected completion date 2026)
• Registered Member of British Association of Counselling and Therapy (BACP)
Qualifications
Specialised Training...beyond the norms
• OpeningUp: Working with open and polyamorous relationships
• Pink Therapy
• Working with Shame in LGBTQ+ Clients
• Therapeutic Focusing
“The Other faces me and puts me in question”
- Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961)
My Approach
What Is Existential Therapy? It’s No Normal Therapy.
Making Meaning Beyond the Norms
Existential therapy is a less conventional, but deeply powerful approach to healing. Rather than focusing on “fixing” symptoms or fitting people into diagnostic boxes, it invites exploration through deconstruction and reconstructing your understanding of the big questions of life: Who am I? Why does this hurt? What do I value? How do I live authentically in a world that often tells me not to?
Rooted in philosophy and human experience, existential therapy helps us confront the realities of being alive; uncertainty, freedom, identity, mortality, isolation, and meaning. It’s not always easy work, but it can be profoundly liberating.
This approach is especially powerful for those whose lives don’t fit into narrow norms, whether because of gender, sexuality, body, relationship style, neurodivergence, disability, or simply the experience of feeling othered. Existential therapy doesn’t pathologize difference. Instead, it asks: What does it mean to be you, here and now, in a world that can often seek to conform? And how can you live in alignment with your own truth, not someone else’s definition of normal?
It’s not the most common way to practice therapy, but for those looking for depth, honesty, and a space where all parts of their identity are welcomed and witnessed, it can be life-changing, offering a broadening of possibility by recognising the responsibility of autonomy and choice.
