WHAT HAPPENS IN THERAPY?
Starting therapy often brings up questions: What will this be like? What should I talk about? Will it actually help? All of that is welcome here.
Therapy with me is a collaborative process. I offer a calm, attentive space where we can slow things down and explore your experience together. This might include gentle reflective or experiential exercises that help you gain a clearer sense of yourself and what you’re living with.
People come to therapy for many different reasons. You don’t have to be in crisis or overwhelmed to benefit. Therapy can also be a place to regain clarity or to explore deeper questions about how you want to live and what matters to you.
I don’t see therapy as something done to you. It’s something we actively shape together, through conversation, curiosity, and reflection. Because of this we can always talk openly about how the work is feeling and whether it’s helpful.
I place a strong emphasis on your autonomy. You set the pace, and we pay attention to what feels manageable, especially as therapy can sometimes bring up challenging material.
Over time, we may begin to notice recurring patterns; in relationships, in decision-making, or in how you respond to yourself and others. By bringing these patterns into awareness, they can gradually loosen their hold, making space for change to emerge organically.
SOME ISSUES I WORK WITH
- relationship and family dynamics
- self esteem and shame
- feelings of anxiety, depression, unhappiness
- loneliness and belonging, identity
- difficult decisions, and existential questions
- being neurodivergent in a neuro-typical world
- work stress, life balance, maladaptive patterns
- personal growth and development
- bereavement, loss of any kind, illness, difficult diagnoses
- life changes and transitions
- trauma and related symptoms
MY PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND AND WAY OF WORKING
My training brings together Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy, Existential Psychotherapy, and Somatic Experiencing®.
What these approaches share is a non-pathologising view of life’s difficulties. Rather than seeing people as problems to be fixed, they recognise our challenges as part of being human.
The work is grounded in the present moment, even when we’re exploring the past. It values both what is unique about each person and what we share in common, and understands the body as central to how we experience ourselves and the world.
Alongside my professional training, I draw on my wider life experience, common sense, humour, and a straightforward, open way of working. I see the relationship between us as something that guides the therapeutic process rather than a set method or agenda.
Taken together, this means my work is informed by philosophical ideas from existentialism, psychological understanding, and knowledge of the nervous system.
Throughout, the body remains an important reference point, not separate from thought or emotion, but as the place where experience is felt, understood, and change begins.
Below is some more information on my main influences as a psychotherapist.
FOCUSING-ORIENTATED PSYCHOTHERAPY
I am a certified focusing-orientated psychotherapist and trainer with the International Focusing Institute and with the London Focusing. I also assist with the therapists’ training at London Focusing.
What is Focusing?
Focusing, developed by Eugene Gendlin, is a psychotherapeutic method and self-help practice that helps people connect with their inner bodily sense of experience — what he called the felt sense.
Gendlin observed that people who made lasting changes in therapy weren’t just talking about their problems — they were pausing to sense, in their bodies, an unclear ‘something' about their situation. This ‘something' holds implicit, pre-verbal information about our emotions, needs, and direction for change. Focusing is a way to access and listen to that.
What happens in a Focusing-Orientated Psychotherapy session?
Often we are actually a bit uncertain about what we are experiencing until we pay attention to ourselves at a deep level. In Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy (FOT) I guide you to make contact with your own intricate bodily sensed experience called felt-sense.
We direct our attention to the way our bodies feel from the inside. Including emotions, sensations, and thoughts we invite less defined experiences to be there. The felt-sense, a vague often murky understanding of what we are currently living through has surprising precision and intricacy. Our felt sense tells us about our situation whilst implying future steps.
Often the world of ideas (our heads) get in the way of this sophisticated understanding to fully emerge. Psychological change is understood as emerging from the direct, lived encounter with one’s own experiencing, rather than from interpretation or analysis alone.
Focusing was elaborated by Eugene Gendlin
SOMATIC EXPERIENCEING®
I am in my last year of training as a trauma therapist.
What is Somatic Experiencing®?
Somatic Experiencing (SE) works on the level of the Nervous System. It is a Trauma-Therapy approach that aims to re-negotiate traumatic experience (rather than re-living) by fostering nervous system regulation. It is hard to stay calm, focussed, content when our nervous system is stuck on red.
SE works with shock trauma, developmental trauma, PTSD and complex trauma aiming to help the nervous system to release and contain states of high stress that might be trapped in the system.
What happens in a Somatic Experiencing® session?
In a SE session we work with inner states of Nervous System activation by tracking bodily sensations and increasing the capacity to stay with uncomfortable states and their movements through our bodies in a safe, gradual manner. Rather than revisiting the full intensity of a traumatic event, SE works with small, manageable portions of activation — this is called titration.
I invite you move back and forth (pendulation) between sensations of distress and sensations of ease or neutrality. This gentle oscillation helps the nervous system release stored tension without overwhelm.
Somatic Experiencing was developed by Dr. Peter Levine.