About therapy
I’m an integrative relational psychotherapist. Working integratively means I draw on different ways of working therapeutically to offer a responsive, collaborative therapy that is meaningful to you. It also means a focus on becoming aware of and integrating the different parts of you, including parts that might not have had much chance to be heard. Therapy with me is primarily talking, but we might also work with creative imagery, drawing, music and other media, movement, EMDR, awareness practices, clinical hypnosis, dreams or somatic techniques.
Relational means that my work is rooted in relational psychoanalysis, a modern theoretical approach that recognises we as humans have deep needs for attachment and belonging and are shaped by our experiences in relationship with others, especially our experiences in early life. Our work will consider important relationships in your past and present and how they affect you now. We will also likely spend time looking at what happens in the therapeutic relationship between you and me, being curious about your part in it and mine and reflecting on what it might have to teach us about your templates for being in the world and relating to others.
Each of us is having an embodied experience every moment of our lives which holds our truth and influences us profoundly, but many of us suffer from lack of connection to our “feeling of what happens” (some of us experience it instead as thoughts, beliefs or physical symptoms). We will likely pay attention to bodily experience, your relationship with your body and its ways of knowing, feeling and remembering. Our work with the body will always be invitational, with respect for your boundaries, and need not involve physical touch.
Trauma and dissociation are ubiquitous and underlie most psychological suffering. Therapy can open a compassionate space for greater understanding, not of what is “wrong” with you, but of what happened to you and how present difficulties — relationships, emotions, repeating patterns, symptoms or processes of memory, awareness and attention — may arise from what were once needed adaptations that made sense in the context of your life.