About
Two practitioners. One practice. A shared belief that mental health care can do better.
Why The Talking Couch exists
The Talking Couch started with a frustration.
Anne had spent years working in government mental health programs — good intentions, real resources, genuine effort. And yet, again and again, the systems she worked within failed the young people they were meant to serve. The programs were designed around what services could offer, not what clients actually needed. The relationship — the thing that actually helps — kept getting crowded out by protocol, paperwork, and a model that treated people as problems to be managed.
We had lived in Sydney, London, the Blue Mountains. We ended up in Nowra, liked it, and looked around. What we found was a gap: no private practice dedicated to young people in the Shoalhaven, very few services equipped to work with younger adolescents, limited access to psychological assessments without travelling to Sydney. CAMHS and Headspace were increasingly selective. Young people were falling through.
So we built something.
The Talking Couch opened nearly four years ago with a simple idea: a safe place where any young person could come and sit on a couch and talk — or not talk — and simply figure things out, with someone genuinely in their corner. What we’ve learned in those four years, from the long line of people we’ve had the privilege of accompanying, has only deepened our conviction that this is the right way to work.
Anne Reuter — Psychologist
Anne brings two Master’s degrees — in psychology and in pedagogy — and a career that has taken her across three countries and through some of the most demanding roles in the sector. She has seen what the system looks like from the inside, and she came away with a clear view of what it gets right and what it consistently gets wrong.
She is an AHPRA registered psychologist and a member of the Australian Association for Psychologists Inc (AAPi). She reads widely, trains continuously, and is currently deepening her practice through studies in Buddhism and meditation at the Nan Tien Institute in Wollongong — not because it’s required, but because she’s genuinely curious about what it means to be well.
Anne is particularly drawn to the complexity of adolescence — the identity formation, the intensity, the way this period of life sets patterns that can last for decades. She brings warmth, genuine curiosity, and an open mind to every person she works with — and a firm refusal to reduce them to their presenting problems.
Sascha Wolter — Mental Health Social Worker
Sascha came to social work by a longer road. He studied both computer science and philosophy — liked the latter so much he almost changed course entirely, but concluded there weren’t many jobs in philosophy that didn’t involve academia, and that wasn’t the path for him. He spent over a decade in IT as a developer, manager, and consultant before finding his way back to the questions that had always interested him most.
Social work caught him immediately — and in hindsight, it makes sense. The intersection of person and environment, the systemic thinking, the explicit commitment to social justice: it gave shape to things he’d been circling for years. He has also commenced studies in psychology, continuing a trajectory that was probably always pointing in this direction.
His philosophical background isn’t incidental to how he practices. Sascha works from a postmodern, existentialist perspective — which in plain terms means he believes people have genuine choices, and genuine responsibilities, and that there is no single correct way to live a life. His job, as he sees it, is to help people find and follow their own path: to author their own story, with clear eyes, rather than living out one handed to them by circumstance or other people’s expectations. That work is grounded in sociology — because we are social creatures, shaped by the relationships and systems around us — and in an honest recognition that we are also biological ones, with bodies and desires and drives that are part of the picture too.
Sascha is a member of the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW). He works with curiosity, directness, and a particular interest in identity, meaning, and the ways people get stuck in patterns they didn’t choose — and how they get unstuck.
Between us, we bring backgrounds that don’t look like a typical psychology practice — and we think that’s part of what makes this place work. We are not neutral observers. We are people who have lived in the world, changed direction, made choices, and found ourselves here, doing work that doesn’t feel like work.
We also happen to be a couple. The Talking Couch is ours in every sense — built from scratch, shaped by everything we believe, and sustained by the clients who keep showing up and trusting us with the hard stuff.
We are grateful for that trust every day.