Whatever has brought you here, my aim initially will be to provide a safe place for you to express yourself freely. I’ll be keen to hear about your hopes, fears, and expectations and to communicate as best I can how I might be able to help.
If we mutually feel the potential for a therapeutic relationship, we can begin to explore your experiences of yourself, other people, and the world. My role will be to accompany, enable, and empower you as we experiment with different ways of being, seeing, and doing.
Sometimes we get stuck, repeating patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that were previously helpful but that are now limiting our lives. In the presence of a fellow human being who ‘gets us’, it can become possible to access capacities and resources hidden beneath layers of physiological, psychological, and social conditioning.
The path you took to get here has washed out; The way forward is still concealed from you. John O’Donohue
I use the terms counselling and psychotherapy interchangeably while being mindful that not everybody does and that people who do make a distinction aren’t always in agreement about the determining or distinguishing features. See COSCA’s A Description of Counselling and Psychotherapy at www.cosca.org.uk for further details.
A long and winding road brought me into private practice as a therapist in 2016 via the PF Counselling Service (Voluntary Sector), Outreach Support (Homelessness & Complex Needs), Nursing (General), Occupational Therapy (Psychiatry), Administration (Business & Charity), Customer Service, Retail, and Hospitality.
My original training was Integrative: Gestalt, Person-Centred, and Psychodynamic concepts, theories, and practices interwoven around the core theoretical and relational model of Transactional Analysis. Thus, offering a variety of different ways to explore, understand, and appreciate the diversity, complexity, and uncertainty of human experience.
Ongoing personal and professional development means my practice continues to evolve. Recent influences include Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, The Realization Process, Deep Brain Reorienting, Polyvagal Theory, and Internal Family Systems, all of which embrace and enhance an holistic and collaborative approach to the art and science of therapy.
Psychology traditionally approaches trauma through its effects on the mind. This is at best only half the story and a wholly inadequate one. Without the body and mind accessed together as a unit, we will not be able to deeply understand or heal trauma. Peter A Levine
