My therapeutic approach

I work in an integrative trauma informed way with lots of tools to choose from depending on what best fits with you.

Any therapeutic process needs to start with building a sense of safety where you can feel seen, heard and psychologically held. The foundations of this may be laid quickly, or may take longer if relationships are a source of difficulty for you. We will go at your pace and I will guide you with compassion, no judgement, a willingness to see the world through your lens, curiosity, hope and a bag of varied tools. I will encourage you to set an intention for the work if this feels helpful which makes it easier to monitor changes and we will have regular reviews to make sure you are getting what you need from the therapy.

I will draw on psycho-education, trauma theory or more specific techniques such as parts work and EMDR to nurture your curiosity, insight and self compassion.

We will work with your body and your nervous system alongside your thoughts and feelings, helping you notice triggers and embedding tools for emotional regulation.

How I can help

Being your guide and ally

I am deeply committed to being the most effective ally and guide to people negotiating the challenges of living in these times. As a survivor of complex trauma, it has been a life long quest of mine to find ways to live easier with this legacy. I know what it's like to be in the "other chair" on the receiving end of therapy and the vulnerability this can expose and this informs my role as therapist, to hopefully help you feel more at ease and less stuck. My professional development has to some degree been driven by a search for my own answers. In my younger life, I experienced purely talking therapies as retraumatising and avoided them, looking to nature, activism, dance and solitude instead. I later trained in Integrative Counselling but found that some of the basic premises, such as being my own best expert, did not align with my experience. In therapy. I didn't know how to use the space and sat in silence feeling alienated, exposed and even more alone and distressed and I realised what I needed more than anything was a map and a guide and that is what I've worked on creating.

I broadened my research and found some metaphorical sign posts in trauma theory and the idea that trauma is not a purely narrative experience but is stored in the body and impacts the way we respond to the world way after the event has passed. I read Babette Rothschild's body of work and felt deeply reassured by her assertion that therapy should focus primarily on stabilization in the here and now. I read and researched extensively about the impact of early attachment experiences and developmental trauma and was inspired by the work of Dianne Poole Heller and Karen Triesman. Watching Peter Levine work with Somatic Experiencing and engaging with some of his training gave me more insight into the way trauma is stored in the body and how to work with it. Deb Dana's work of translating Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory offered another solid framework in which to understand and work with building nervous system capacity.

I also see things from a systemic perspective, acknowledging the ways we struggle (especially in these pandemic times) are inseparable from our history, families, culture and planet.