Dr Kirby Sainsbury

Clinical Psychologist | Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor | Board Approved Supervisor | Health Psychology Researcher
PhD, DClinPsych, BA (Psych Hons)
Psych Reg No. PSY0001626627

Kirby lives in Melbourne and is currently offering telehealth appointments only. She is also available for case consultation in the areas of HAES, intuitive eating, body grief, and non-diet approaches, the intersection of eating disorders with chronic health conditions and neurodivergence, DBT, and running groups.

Kirby’s therapeutic approach

One of Kirby’s favourite tasks in therapy is helping people to better understand themselves and their experiences through the (new) lenses of weight science/non-diet approaches, neurodivergence, and/or trauma adaptation, and to develop self-validation, self-acceptance, self-trust, and self-compassion skills, by rewriting their historical self-narrative (spoiler alert: everything makes sense in context; it’s not your fault but more likely an unfortunate person-environment/demands mismatch). She loves a good formulation/personalised logic model and would love to support you to map your experiences to what is known from research evidence, theory, and lived experience accounts of navigating diet culture, emotional sensitivity, chronic illness adjustment, and late diagnosed autism and ADHD (and anything else for which a theory/model exists)!

With new personal understanding can come a mixture of grief and gratitude, and the need for grief processing and radical acceptance work, as well as figuring out what authentic, unmasked living looks like. Kirby has experience in guiding people through the grief that comes from both situational loss and the loss of functioning and privilege often associated with adjusting to late diagnosed neurodivergence or a chronic illness and recovering from disordered eating into a larger body, as well as the grief of what might have been, had neurodivergence been recognised sooner in life. She is a huge advocate for embracing dialectics (and sees them everywhere), helping people to honour the reality of having done the best they could AND now wanting to do better.

Kirby is also passionate about providing positive corrective therapeutic experiences to people who have encountered systemic invalidation; for example, by the medical profession, the diet, wellness, and self-help industries, and the education system, many of which were probably well-intentioned but ultimately missed the mark because of outdated or outright incorrect and damaging processes and beliefs, which resulted in the failure to recognise an underlying neurotype, vulnerability, or mental health condition and, therefore, meant that necessary supports and accommodations were not forthcoming.

It is these experiences that have often contributed to people’s own internalised self-invalidation and stigma around their ability to trust their body and brain to illuminate and meet their own needs. Using her strong social justice orientation, Kirby helps people get appropriately angry, encouraging self-advocacy and placing the blame where it deserves to be, while continuing to prioritise and balance personal safety, growth, and effectiveness.

Following (or concurrent with the development of) a newfound self-understanding, Kirby supports people to listen and lean into their internal body wisdom, guiding them to make behavioural choices that feel right for them, as matched to their sensory, emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal needs, and within (rather than beyond) their current capacity. She finds that, as people start to recultivate self-trust (which has typically been eroded through years of external- and self-invalidation), they are often able to generate their own solutions and strategies.

Kirby is also, however, uniquely placed to support people (if and as needed) to develop personalised strategies for improved motivation and behavioural stability, while ensuring that any suggestions are not going to exacerbate or jeopardise recovery from disordered eating, body distress, or the unmasking process. She draws heavily on theories of behaviour change, motivation, and habit formation (which can be pretty dry and academic), bringing them to life by combining them with DBT and ACT skills to support people to make meaningful and adaptive changes, grounded in the radical self-acceptance that actually makes these things stick.

Areas of Practice: Eating and body image

Kirby enjoys working with adults (18+ years) who are experiencing

  • Binge eating disorder and restrict-rebound binge cycles
  • Atypical anorexia nervosa (i.e., anorexia in individuals living in larger bodies)
  • Bulimia nervosa
  • Disordered eating, and chronic or yoyo dieting
  • ADHD- and autism-related eating difficulties (e.g., sensory and executive functioning challenges)
  • Body image distress
  • Body grief and loss of body trust
  • Weight stigma and internalised weight bias
  • Disordered eating resulting from the adjustment to dietary-controlled chronic health conditions (e.g., navigating medical nutrition therapy for coeliac disease, Crohn’s disease, diabetes mellitus, while maintaining value-based social and occupational engagement) and those in which functional and aesthetic body changes are the result of a chronic illness or its treatment (e.g., lipoedema, lymphedema, migraine, chronic pain)

Additional Areas of Practice

Kirby also enjoys working with people with

  • Borderline personality disorder
  • Emotion regulation difficulties
  • ADHD and autism
  • Addictions
  • Mood disorders (e.g., bipolar disorder, PMDD)
  • Chronic health conditions (with a focus on illness adjustment, acceptance, and behaviour change)

Treatment modalities

Kirby uses the principles of HAES, intuitive eating, and a non-diet approach to treat eating disorders and help individuals normalise their relationships with food and body while maintaining body autonomy (including respecting food preferences for sensory and/or ethical reasons) and without a focus on intentional weight loss. She also incorporates body grief and acceptance work (Body Image with Bri) to both the body image concerns that accompany eating disorders and the loss of privilege that can come with recovering into a larger body and navigating life in a body that functions differently.

Across conditions, Kirby support’s people to practice acceptance and develop self-management skills (e.g., distress tolerance, emotion regulation, self-validation, self-regulation). She works with a neurodiversity-affirming lens, predominantly from a Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) perspective, with skills also drawn Motivational Interviewing, Compassion-Focused Therapy, and trauma-informed therapies, and guided by her knowledge of behaviour change, motivation, and habit formation theory.

Qualifications & Professional Credentials

Qualifications (all from the University of Sydney)

  • Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Health Psychology
  • Doctor of Clinical Psychology
  • Bachelor of Arts (Psychology Honours I)
  • Bachelor of Education (Secondary Humanities and Social Sciences)

Professional Credentials

  • ANZAED Credentialed Eating Disorder Mental Health Clinician
  • Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor
  • Board-Approved Supervisor

Continuing Professional Development

Kirby has been engaging in body image supervision and education on the body grief framework for the past 12-months with Body Image with Bri LLC and has completed foundational training in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) with Behavioral Tech. She has recently done a deep dive in high masking, internalised female presentations of ADHD and autism, and continues to engage in education and supervision in this area. She has previously completed extensive training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), including for ADHD, grief and loss, trauma, addictions, relationship issues, and motivation, and has completed somatic psychology training for complex trauma.

Professional Experience

Kirby’s background includes significant experience providing group-based psychological treatments to inpatients and outpatients of private psychiatric facilities. She worked at Ramsay Clinic Northside over a 12-year period (2012-2014 and 2018-2024), where she facilitated eating disorders (total of 7 years) and youth day programs (3 years), and a dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) skills group (3 years) in the outpatient service, and has worked on the eating disorders, mood disorders, addictions, and general mental health inpatient units.

Since relocating to Melbourne in 2024, she has continued to work for Ramsay Clinic (Albert Road) in the DBT day program and adult general mental health inpatient unit. She also has experience in private practice (2013-2014; TPHC since 2022), including 2 years on the TPHC comprehensive DBT team, and was the clinical lead for online group therapy programs at Oshia (2024-2025).

    Research & Professional Contributions

    Kirby also has a strong research background in health psychology. She completed her PhD on the topic of psychological factors impacting adherence to a gluten free diet in adults with coeliac disease, culminating in the design and delivery of an online behaviour change intervention to improve GFD adherence.

    In her Research Associate role in the UK, she was involved in the design and delivery of several behaviour change interventions to aid weight loss maintenance in adults with o*esity (one of the experiences that pushed her firmly back to her eating disorders roots and the principals of HAES, intuitive eating, and the non-diet approach to eating disorders), as well as n-of-1 research leading to the design, delivery, and implementation of a highly personalised and tailored intervention to improve adherence to photoprotection recommendations in people with the rare disease, xeroderma pigmentosum, which has since been rolled out within the XP specialist clinical service in the NHS.

    Kirby has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers in this field; presented more than 25 papers at domestic and international conferences; been an invited speaker for Coeliac UK, Coeliac Australia, and the Dietitians Association of Australia; co-coordinated an eating disorders module for undergraduate psychology students; been a guest lecturer for various undergraduate and postgraduate psychology subjects; provided research supervision to Honours, MSc, and medical students; was editor of Health Psychology Review (journal of the Health Psychology Division, British Psychological Society); and been an invited peer reviewer for numerous health psychology and behavioural medicine journals.

    To enquire about an appointment Contact Kirby at The Psychological Health Centre.

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