Grow, Soothe, Heal

My role is to accompany and support you as you discover your deepest self and start to grow, soothe and heal.

I will offer you unconditional acceptance, sincere empathy and deep listening as we explore the issues which are causing you pain. This is a space for you to bring to the surface what’s there and move through it safely together in a relationship of trust, care and support.

I am able to welcome any client aged 16+ across a range of issues: loss, grief, trauma, change, sadness, depression, anxiety, and addiction. I can offer particular support and care around LGBTQi+ identities and ‘gay shame’, and am also able to work with you where religion may have touched your life in painful or difficult ways.

My Approach

Through careful talking, listening, reflecting and supportive challenge we will gently bring the issues to the surface and feel our way together to a more growthful you.

My therapeutic practice is ‘person-centred’, integrated with psychodynamic approaches. Central is the idea that in each person is a deep ‘self’ which wants to grow and fulfill its whole potential - to ‘actualise’. Problems arise when this innate potential is blocked, either by significant events in the world around us (grief, loss, change, trauma, illness) and/or by lack of acceptance by others. This can lead us to set our ‘self’ aside in order to make ourselves more 'accepted' - and therefore loved. We can end up living instead with the distorted messages others give us about ourselves and what is ok. Often this can lead to unhappiness, tension, shame and defensiveness. Much of this may be beyond our current awareness but can manifest through addictive tendencies, relationship difficulties, unexplained chronic pain, feelings of depression, sadness or anxiety, obsessive or repeated behaviours which feel beyond our control, and perhaps sometimes suicidal thoughts. Coming to a fuller sense of who YOU are, rather than who others might want or need you to be, can release you from these feelings and set you in a new, more fulfilling direction.