Who I work with

‍ A certain degree of anxiety in life is unavoidable and even productive. It can flag that something is important to us, motivate us to action, and direct choices. Kierkegaard called it ‘the dizziness of freedom’, highlighting the human constants of uncertainty, freedom and responsibility that structure our lives.

Sometimes anxiety can become overwhelming, no longer productive but limiting, painful and isolating. Here is where talking it through can be helpful. In therapy we attend to anxiety, not pushing it away, but listening with gentle compassion and curiosity. I often start by attending to the nervous system, regulating with breath and pace of sessions. From this base of grounded presence, we can start enquiring into the messages of anxiety, to clarify its signals and use it to connect with your own values.

Often anxiety emerges from the things we can’t control. But equally often we hook into anxiety and amplify it by the way we relate to it – by avoiding it, numbing it or fixating on it. The work of therapy is to pull apart these threads, to find an easier way of living in life’s unavoidable uncertainty.

Depression is a small word used to describe a huge range of feelings and experiences. While some describe feeling lost or empty, a loss of motivation or hope, others describe an overwhelming heaviness, or painful sadness, collapse or despair. There are many other experiences in between and around, some wild and intense, others dead and flat, all summarised with the simple label ‘depressed’.

This is why, when a client describes themselves as depressed, I start by trying to clarify what depression means to this particular person. What is the quality of your own experience? What factors and threads is it made of? Has it shifted and changed over time? How does it sit within the world around you – events, relationships, history? Together we will attend to the details of your experience, identify connections, assumptions and beliefs that may be keeping you stuck, and reveal new possibilities and momentum.

Existentialists argue that one of the defining features of being human is that we are meaning-driven. Which is why it feels so painful when we lose connection to a sense of purpose and meaning. And yet it is a very common experience, one which most of us will visit at least once in a lifetime. Perhaps you feel you are in the wrong job, or living the wrong life, or just don’t see the point of life at all. You may feel a distance from yourself, your values or where you wanted to be.

Hard as this experience is, it is not definitive, nor final. Indeed, it can be the inflection point from which you reconnect with a path that feels right for you. These moments of ‘lostness’ require us to pause, to become quiet and listen carefully to what our feelings are telling us. This is what our work together creates space for – not to hand you answers, but to help you hear your own.

Relationships are perhaps the most complex and most rewarding dimension of human life, and often the most painful. Whether it is a pattern that keeps repeating, a distance that has grown between you and someone you love, a family dynamic that feels impossible to shift, or a difficulty trusting or being close to others, relationship struggles have a way of touching everything. They can leave us feeling alone, confused, or somehow at fault.

There is no ‘self’ without ‘other’. We are shaped by and in relation to the world around us: other people, culture, history, family. Our relational patterns – the ways we move toward or away from others, the assumptions we carry about what to expect – are rarely chosen consciously. In therapy, we look closely at these patterns, how they appear in your relationships, how they emerge between us, and how you might choose a different step in the relational dance.

Existential philosophers argue that isolation is a human universal. There is no one that can walk our path for us. Even if we are surrounded by people who love us, we are always to a certain degree alone in our experience. There are times when our isolation feels bearable, even pleasant, and others when it is fraught with suffering and panic. The painful pang of loneliness can hit us even in a room full of people.

Loneliness comes in many different flavours. You may be longing for close relationships, a tight group or special individual to share your experiences with. You may be feeling misunderstood by people around you or unable to communicate things that are important or meaningful. Illness and age often bring a profound loneliness, as does the relentless intensity of caring for others. For those of us who have moved away from home, whether to a different city, or a completely new culture and language, loneliness often presents itself as a longing for the familiar - a sense of humour, a way of storytelling, a feeling of being known and understood.

As with anxiety, the task is not to get rid of loneliness, but to find a way to bear it, and to reach through it toward moments of genuine connection. Therapy is one such moment, and at its best, builds the foundation for more beyond the room.

It’s a familiar path for many of us, where busyness tips into overwhelm and on to collapse. Doesn’t it seem to crop up more and more frequently these days? It feels trite and banal to say that life moves faster and faster, the demands ever more immediate. And yet…

The road to recovery is different for each person, and each time. Perhaps the work is to reinforce some boundaries (therapists’ favourite word!). Perhaps it is about a change in direction, to something more aligned with your interests and energies. Perhaps it is more an internal reorganisation – deprioritising stressors, investing in the things that resource and revive you. For each person that landscape of values, resources, interests and relationships will be different. Our work together is to clarify that landscape and find what feels most alive and sustainable for you.

Grief and loss arrive in many forms: through bereavement, ruptures in relationships, loss of identity, shattered hopes, and others. As Nick Cave said, ‘loss is the primary condition of being’. There is no ‘healing’ or ‘solving’ loss, we can only learn to bear it more peacefully.

Grief is a non-linear process. Swings and oscillations between love and rage, integration and collapse, acceptance and avoidance are completely normal. Therapy is a space to bring all the unreasonable, desolate, wild parts of yourself – let them rage, let them settle, allow them to do their transformative work. It is a space to figure out who we are without this person, experience or dream. Our work is not to ‘get over’ a loss, but to live with it and be altered by it.

Bodies come into therapy in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they call explicitly for help, care and attention through illness, eating, self-aversion, violence. Other times they are quieter, appearing almost as a vessel for the mind and emotions. Almost. The reality is that there is no experience without a body – no feelings, no relationships and no therapy. Whether the body is the focus of attention, or silently overlooked, our relationship with it is the ground of our human experience and worth paying attention to.

Is your body a thing you have? Or is it a thing you are? When do you feel most connected and at ease in your body, in a state of flow and coherence? When does that coherence get disrupted, leaving you viewing your body as if from the outside? How much of your life is spent in this state of vigilance?

Whether you have an easy relationship with your body or a painful one, these questions invite you to bring attention to your embodied self. And as Simone Weil argued; attention is the purest form of generosity… it presupposes love.

The paradoxical thing about confidence is that it does not mean to think well of yourself, or to hold yourself in high regard. Truly confident people are not thinking very much about how they are regarded at all. They are engaged in the world, their attention turned outward as they pursue their own individual projects and values. These can be as grand as a political career, fame or fortune, or as simple as a well-loved garden. The common thread is a deep connection to their inner life and instincts, a trust in their guidance.

How do so many of us end up so far from this trust? People-pleasing, shame, fear of failure, impostor syndrome, perfectionism, self-doubt are different expressions of a common core sense of “something is wrong with me”. When we lose connection to our inner selves, to our ‘ownmost’ values, it can feel like something is lacking or flawed. We search outside of ourselves for the achievement, accessory or appearance that will make us feel ok, straying further from our true home-base. What is missing is the connection to ourselves, our gut-instincts, and that is what we can work together to restore.

The only constant is change, and yet some changes feel more fraught, unwelcome or transformative than others. Sometimes they hit hard and fast, sometimes they unfold over months or years, but we all must travel through them – ageing, losses, beginnings, new realities. We may struggle to adapt, resist or rage against the shifts. Perhaps we need to mourn the loss of a phase or identity now past. Perhaps we need to figure out who we are in a new reality. While some of us may be rushing through transitions we don’t feel ready for, others may be yearning for a change but feeling stuck or lost. As well as the transformations happening in us and in our lives, there are also those taking place around us. How do we find ground and traction in an uncertain world?

Whatever the pace or nature of the change, it will be multilayered and complex. Together, we will slow down and try to unpick that complexity. We’ll attend to the parts that don’t want to let go or move on, hear the parts that are impatient, panicked or afraid, and give room to the longings and wishes yet to be fulfilled. Perhaps there is a small voice of optimism and hope that you hadn’t noticed. Therapy is a space in which we bear with uncertainty together, connecting with your inner compass and finding steadiness through change.

There are moments in life where our identity feels strikingly relevant, vital and consequential. For some of us, these will be brief periods. For others, a lifetime.

Identity is often challenged and reformed in moments of conflict, when our various roles and associations feel discordant and stifling, or directly threatened. Equally common is the reformulation of our sense of self through times of change: becoming a parent or when children leave home, the rupture of losses and endings, retiring from work or finding a new role in life. When we are so defined by what we do, where we come from, or who we love and belong to, what happens when these things change? Often there is a sense of being between worlds, or not fitting anywhere, or having to hide or edit parts of yourself in order to do so. Perhaps you feel a sense of discontinuity, of ‘not fitting’ or having to mask as you move between contexts and groups.

In therapy we make space for the silenced or emergent versions of you. The performances of the social world can be left at the door. When your identity no longer needs to defend or secure something, what is revealed beneath our surface descriptors?

Like so many human challenges, trauma comes in many forms; complex, developmental, systemic, generational, interpersonal, just to name a few. Even within these broad categories lies an enormous range of personal experiences. What unifies them is a stuckness, a sense of something snagging. It is the wound that we just can’t move past, which haunts us and holds us back. For many people the pain of their trauma feels as fresh and alive today as when they were in the middle of that experience. Sometimes even more so.

Because there is such a range of experiences within the theme of ‘trauma’, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Having worked in a number of trauma services within the British National Health Service (NHS) and undertaken a range of specialist trauma trainings, I adapt my approach to meet the needs of each person I work with. A few key principles provide a foundation for this flexibility:

• Pace. Working with trauma requires us to really slow down so that we can unpick the layers of the experience on which you are stuck. It is also vital that whatever comes up in a therapy session can be digested and processed, so we will work gently and with care.

• Working with the body. When we have been threatened, frightened or neglected, the body’s threat response kicks into gear. In the normal course of events, once the danger has passed, our body processes the threat and returns a calm state. But sometimes, if the threat continues, or if the calming process fails, the body becomes fixed – vigilant, anxious and braced against danger. Some of us have been in this state for so long, we take it as normal. In all my work, but particularly when working with trauma, I will invite you to pay attention to what your body is telling you. By working directly with the body, you can start to regulate your nervous system, opening space and possibility to move through the tension, to integrate your experiences and move beyond them.

• Agency. Trauma begins with something happening to you that was beyond your control. That is why it is so important that throughout our work together, you feel that you are in the driving seat. We may revisit experiences that were painful or frightening, but you decide what we talk about, when, and for how long. This is why we take things slowly, and we work with the body – both essential in ensuring you feel in control of the process. We can’t change what happened to you, but we will work together to make sure you are the one who decides how those experiences fit within your wider life.