Therapy
A unique dialogue with yourself.
There are conventional reasons to seek therapy: anxiety, emotional distress, relationship difficulties, grief, periods of change, feeling overwhelmed, or finding that something in your emotional life is making it difficult to move forwards.
Those aren’t the only reasons. You might be professionally successful and privately dissatisfied. You may find yourself repeating patterns that you understand perfectly well intellectually and yet somehow cannot shift. You might have reached a transition in life and discovered that the person you have always understood yourself to be no longer quite fits.
Or perhaps nothing is particularly “wrong”. You may simply be interested in what happens when you understand yourself better. Anybody can seek out therapy. You don’t need to wait until your life has become unbearable before becoming curious about it.
You don't have to arrive with a diagnosis.
One of the things I am interested in challenging is the idea that every difficult human experience needs immediately to become pathology. Pain is real. Anxiety is real. Trauma is real. Depression is real. These experiences deserve to be taken seriously and treated with care.
A person is considerably more complicated than the name we give to the part of their experience that currently hurts. My work therefore doesn’t begin with “What is wrong with you?” I’m more interested in what has happened; what you are experiencing now; what you have learned to do in order to live with it; which of those strategies are still serving you and which have perhaps outlived their usefulness.
Eventually, once we have understood some of that, we can begin asking another question: What would you like instead?
Change has to feel safe.
Fear places strain on the beautiful, elaborate system that is our mind. When we are fearful, we often hold more tightly onto our existing beliefs, many of which may themselves have grown from pain. This is one of the strange frustrations of being human: we can know perfectly well that something isn’t good for us and still find ourselves returning to it.
Insight is enormously valuable, but insight alone doesn’t always produce change. If we genuinely want to shift our perception, change has to become a desirable choice for the frightened mind, and desirable, to the psyche, means safe.
This is one of the reasons I don’t think therapy needs to feel relentlessly heavy. There will be difficult conversations, certainly. There may be things that hurt to look at and moments in which we encounter parts of ourselves we have spent a long time avoiding. Therapy can also be gentle. It can be surprising. Sometimes it can even be funny.
Talking is where we begin.
At its heart, my practice is conversational. Talking gives us the opportunity to slow things down, follow a thought a little further than we normally would, notice contradictions, hear the stories we tell ourselves and perhaps begin to recognise where those stories came from.
The mind doesn’t operate only through language. My work therefore integrates talking therapies with parts work, mindfulness, hypnotherapy and neurofeedback. Which of these we use — and how much — depends entirely on the person and what emerges through the work.
Parts work can help us become curious about the different voices and protective mechanisms within us, rather than treating internal conflict as something that needs simply to be silenced. Hypnotherapy offers another way of working with attention, imagination and the less consciously accessible parts of our experience. Mindfulness can help us notice what is happening without immediately being carried away by it, and neurofeedback gives us another route entirely: allowing us to work with patterns of regulation at the level of brain activity itself.
A note about where this approach came from
My interest in bringing different ways of understanding the mind together began long before I trained as a therapist. Growing up with my father as the therapist that he is was an important influence in the way I learned to think: not only about psychology, but about the meeting point between Western scientific thought and the philosophical traditions of the East. This formed his practice and modality of work, which has clearly influenced my own. You can find out more about his work here.
What might bring you here?
There doesn’t need to be a neat answer. You may be experiencing anxiety or overwhelm, stress or burnout, relationship difficulties, grief, a period of transition, difficulty regulating emotion, or simply the feeling that you have become stuck somewhere in your own life.
You may want to understand a pattern that keeps repeating itself, feel differently about something that happened in the past, become more confident in your own decisions, or find a way of living that feels more like your own. Therapy does not have to be reserved for crisis. Sometimes wanting to understand yourself is reason enough.
Beginning therapy
Private therapeutic work is by enquiry. I deliberately don’t operate an instant online booking system for therapy because I think it is useful to establish first whether I am the right person for what you are looking for, and whether the way I work is likely to suit you.
You don’t need to send me your entire life story in an enquiry. A few lines about what has brought you here are enough. From there, we can decide what the most useful next step might be.