Do you want to feel your spontaneity, creativity and aliveness?

Do you want to feel confident in social situations?

Do you want to feel joy, embody your power and authority? 

Do you want to find your path in live and connect with your inner resources and innate potential? 

If you feel you have difficulty with some of the experiences I describe above it might be related to you suffering from generalised anxiety, crippling anxiety, social anxiety, panic attacks, trauma, sadness, depression, difficulty in relationships, low self-esteem or other experiential states. 

In life there are times when we can feel a great emptiness inside ourselves. When life for whatever reason confronts us with, or exposes us to this emptiness we can feel a deep, overwhelming and profound pain. Sometimes we are able to identify or locate the origins of this emptiness but most times it alludes us and we walk through life feeling disoriented, without purpose, dissatisfied, overwhelmed with anxiety, obsessively and compulsively trying to fill it up with destructive and damaging behaviours, thoughts and feelings. 

On the other hand there are times when we feel that we are lacking the basic motivation, zest, energy to live and agonize to change but we lack the strength, inner resources, inner support or the support of our environment, family, friends to be able to make the necessary changes. In these instances we might like to do more activities, meet new people, take up new hobbies, career, job or new relationships but our self-esteem is so low that just thinking about these possibilities can cause enormous anxiety. 

Anxiety can be the only expression that our minds and bodies have to alert us that there is something that needs to be looked at, paid attention to in relation to the ways in which we confront/experience life’s moments. Anxiety is an indication of the existence of a conflict that needs resolution and whenever there is a conflict there are therefore myriad possibilities to resolve it and find the meaning to that conflict. So in away even though anxiety might not feel positive it can be the platform that guides us to a new beginning and growth if attended to in a supportive, caring, non-judgemental and compassionate space. 

In therapy  

I will support you in your journey to access all you have been longing for.

I will do this by being a constant, attentive and attuned presence, a source of unconditional holding, a witness to your loneliness, a companion to your pain. The only thing you need to do is come as you are. 

I will with the support of embodied techniques, metaphors, dream work, empathic listening and focusing support you to connect with your self, your inner experience, and what ever you feel in that moment. I will help you to develop a more attuned awareness about what moves you, the reasons you act the way you do and the steps you need to take in order to create the change you want. 

I will do this by establishing with you a therapeutic relationship based in dialogue and a relational stance based on trust, cooperation, creativity, exploration and compassion. One of the skills that I bring to the therapeutic process is a fine developed empathic attunement to people’s inner experiences. I will support you to develop the awareness you need to find the support or strategies to support your experience in order that you find your genuine solutions to your conflicts and fears. I will support you to discover the meaning of your anxiety and from that discover what you do to stay in that anxious/fearful place and what you can chose to come out of it.  

The first steps will be for us to establish a safe space so that you can start to feel you can risk being open to your experience. I will provide you with a confidential and creative space for you to make your own. 

My therapeutic stance

The way I work is informed by developmental and attachment theories looking at the ways we have, over the years and especially in our childhood and adolescence learnt to relate to ourselves and to others. These ways even though they were the best creative adjustment that we could possibly make at the time due to context and circumstances may now be a source of suffering and difficulty in our lives. In Gestalt we call these ‘unfinished business’ that are clamouring for resolution that is why it doesn’t matter how much we try to avoid them or ignore them they pop up in one way or another through somatic illnesses, worry, anxiety, tension, obsessions, isolation, depression, panic attacks, anger, naming a few.  

I am a relational and embodied therapist as such I do not see a separation between body and mind and focus on the ‘lived body experience’ as the centre of enquiry into our experiences and sense of ourselves. As a Gestalt Therapist I believe that human beings are inter-connected and inter-related, co-create our experiences with each other and have an innate capacity to fulfil our own unique potential and self-regulate within our inter-dependent contexts. 

I see the therapeutic relationship between you and me as fundamental in creating the conditions for change and healing and believe in the healing power of the here and now, present moment as the space whereby in staying with “what is” you can discover the meanings of your experience. I hold dearly that the capacity to be with one’s own experience (feelings, thoughts, sensations, images, metaphors) is in itself where healing and change happens. 

About Me

I am an experienced and professionally qualified Individual and Group Gestalt Psychotherapist with many years experience seeing clients. I am an UKCP accredited clinical member. I have worked in a range of counselling services, have a background in Clinical Psychology and worked in the Mental Health field (Day Hospital supporting inpatients and outpatients in the Acute Mental Health Unit). Over the last twenty years I have professionally taught and supported children and adolescents with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders as well as their families within schools and in private therapeutic practice in their environment. 

Contact me 

You can email me or call me. I offer people the opportunity to have a brief phone call to get a sense of each other, say a little about yourself, what you are looking for and if appropriate at that stage arrange an initial session. An initial session is a 50minute session, a time for you to share where you are, what your needs might be and to get a sense about if you want to make that journey with me. You can also find out a little about me and how I work.