How I work

Approach

The foundation of my work is existential psychotherapy, which provides the fundamental ethos and purpose of my practice. Into that, I draw approaches and ideas from humanistic and psychodynamic therapy, bringing different perspectives and frameworks for understanding clients’ experiences and relationship dynamics. In practice this comes together in a few guiding principles:

1. Human-to-human. There are no experts, nor patients in the room. I do not work or think in terms of pathologies, models nor mechanisms. My role is to create and hold a space that allows us to be alongside your experiences and understand them. Together we will try to find different perspectives on ‘how things are’, bringing light to assumptions and beliefs that may be keeping you stuck, revealing values that may have been stifled or forgotten.

2. A creative process. From storytelling around fires to painting cave walls, creativity is the means by which we humans make sense of our world and create meaning in it. The challenges brought to therapy are all in some way a rupture in the creative process of meaning-making, a deadening of prospects and purpose. The therapy I offer is a shared project of reconnecting with a hunger for discovery, of widening possibilities, of connecting with inspiration and a sense of aliveness.

3. Care not cure. The aim of our work is not to be rid of any emotion, but to find a way of being with and moving through 365° of human experience. Within a relationship of care and trust, we will bear-with and look at difficult and painful feelings, to find compassion for them, to learn from them, and ultimately to draw strength from them.

Existential therapy is not about being given tools or techniques, or having someone tell you what to do. It is a collaborative process, an authentic, human conversation, in which we explore the layers of your life experiences and understandings. Over time, we all develop ways of seeing ourselves and the world that can become fixed in stories and assumptions we carry blindly. Our work together is to bring some of these into the light, opening new possibilities, different perspectives and a wider range of choices.

My style is collaborative and curious, involving quite a bit of back-and-forth conversation as we try to open up and understand the nuances of your experiences. It suits people who sense that the answers, when they come, will need to come from within, and who want a thinking partner in that process, rather than an expert with a prescription.

You remain in control of the process throughout. My role is not to lead you toward any particular conclusion, but to help bring clarity to things that may have felt confused or stuck, so that choices that were previously out of view begin to come into focus. What you do with that clarity is always yours to decide.