Therapy is a place of safety and connection where you feel received and witnessed unconditionally. My fundamental role is to provide a regulated and containing presence for your thoughts and feelings.
I am a relatively active therapist, and will offer responses, challenges, and ideas. Your subjectivity and lived experience will however always have primacy; I do not apply a “method” to you and have no agenda to which you need to conform.
We will attend to both your day-to-day struggles and the deeper work of understanding their origins. You may play an ongoing role in your difficulties, and I help expand your awareness of this.
Your life has been a flow of cause and effect. Much of it may feel as if it happened to you, and probably rightly so, as our agency is always incomplete. Nevertheless, we will work together on aspects of your experience that you can take responsibility for, increasing your sense of ownership of yourself and your destiny.
Read these frequently asked questions if you are unfamiliar with therapy and considering starting it, look at the issues I work with, and see my posts and videos to get a sense of me as a therapist.
The jargon
My approach is Integrative and broadly Psychodynamic, informed by Object Relations, Attachment Theory, and Relational Psychotherapy. I also hold that the experience and ultimate goals of therapy are essentially Humanistic/Existential.
Psychodynamic – considers that past experiences unconsciously shape your adult behaviours and way of relating. By bringing your old patterns and inner logic into awareness, you can begin to navigate the present with greater clarity and loosen obsolete fears and defences.
Object Relations & Attachment Theory – sees your relational style and emotional reactions as an outcome of how you related and were yourself responded to in early life. Noticing how these continue to influence your relationships today, you can learn to lessen their hold and foster more secure and fulfilling bonds.
Relational – focuses on the interaction between us as a chance to understand you better. I might share how you make me feel or the way we’re connecting, shedding light on how, for example, you disempower yourself, act performatively, or have unrealistic expectations of others.
Humanistic/Existential – proposes that you ultimately need to accept constraints and frustrations in life, and find a way of experiencing gratitude for the fact of your existence, however absurd or painful it might be.
Be assured that all these are my concerns, not yours. Your only concerns are yourself, your thoughts, your story, your feelings. In therapy, all expression is welcome: tears, playfulness, silence, swearing, stream of consciousness, or whatever it is that comes up for you.