If you’re patient and wait for the clouds to disperse, you will see the brightness of the moon.     (Chinese saying)

I work creatively with clients who are seeking to tackle, or who are immersed in, all sorts of transitions, relationship issues, personal dilemmas, perhaps with symptoms of anxiety or depression, and experiences such as phobia or obsessive-compulsive behaviour patterns including addiction, issues of sex and sexuality, communication problems, conflicts, boundary issues, anger management, stress and psychosomatic difficulties.

Some people are aware of feelings of disconnection, lack of meaning, invisibility or formlessness. Others tell me they feel their present lives lack, and they long for, qualities like satisfaction, warmth, humour, ease and spontaneity, which I believe we all deserve to experience.

I seek to work in ways appropriate to the needs of each particular person at each moment, rather than following a rigid methodology.

Compulsion is wrapping ourselves around an activity, substance or person to survive, tolerate and numb our experience of the moment. Love is a state of connectedness, vulnerability, surrender, self-valuing, steadiness and a willingness to face the worst of ourselves. Compulsion is a state of isolation, self-absorption, invulnerability, low self-esteem, unpredictability and fear. Love and compulsion cannot co-exist.    - Geneen Roth

I am eclectic and work with every tool to develop and maintain contact and connection with the client. I draw inspiration from humanistic and existential psychotherapy modalities, humanistic family therapy and from the innovative work of Stanley Keleman in the field of formative psychology.

Humanistic psychotherapies have a vision of the human being as innately striving towards health – a respectful style of psychotherapy, in which the therapist sees himself or herself as the client’s equal and interacts with them as one human to another. The client’s individual experience in the here and now is seen as a basis for their self-knowing, so the therapist intervenes with a direct focus on what is actually happening now. The person who comes to see the therapist is fundamentally a unique whole adult, not a condition requiring a cure or a neurosis requiring interpretation. The trouble with a label is that it’s the label that gets the attention. Gestalt is a humanistic psychotherapy that focuses on awareness, responsibility and the internal dialogue.

The body feels real hunger, real thirst, real joy in the sun or the snow, real pleasure in the smell of roses or the look of a lilac bush; real anger, real sorrow, real tenderness, real warmth, real passion, real hate, real grief. All emotions belong to the body and are recognised by the mind.
   -  D.H. Lawrence

Existential psychotherapy also aims at enhancing self-knowledge in individuals. It recognizes their capacity to give shape and value to their lives. It asks questions like: What risk do I really take in being who I am? It affirms that we have the choice to live or be lived. It emphasizes individual responsibility.

Eventually, we must all give up trying to be something special.   - Chogyam Trungpa

Humanistic family therapy is open, flexible and adult in discussing what really is and what real relationships are actually like.

Formative psychology supports a person to be the author of their life. It looks at how we influence and regulate ourselves, and how we experience our living process. It’s about developing ourselves more than ‘curing’ ourselves. It asks questions

 We generally think of an attitude as a mental set. An attitude is a bodily set. Our attitudes are the framework of our form.    - 
Stanley Keleman

like: “What is growing?” and “What is trying to take shape“. This is very different from traditional psychology’s historical or causative focus which is so logically attractive, especially as we have been conditioned to think in terms of cause and effect, and yet can leave us helpless and passive victims of our past. Formative psychology doesn’t deny the gift of our inheritance but says that we can create a second body within it, another layer, a second adult reality.

I am very interested in synthesizing formative psychology with the (F.M.) Alexander Technique, because both in their different ways offer us effective practices for forming gradual, incremental changes in our body-mind unity.

 I came to understand that death has had a bad press. Though there is little joy to be found in it, still death is not a monstrous evil that drags us off to some unimaginably terrible place. I learned to demythologize death, to see it for what it is – an event, a part of life, the end of further possibilities. ‘It’s a neutral event,’ Paula said, ‘which we’ve learned to colour with fear’.
   - 
from Irvin Yalom’s Momma and the Meaning of Life

Coming to therapy is a responsible act. It means taking charge of our lives. We all want to function better, but the pressures of the modern world over-stress us. They lure us away from a connection to ourselves, our families, communities and natural environment. The consequence is anxiety and depression in their many forms. Change comes when we meet new challenges and, in my view a therapist’s job is not to impose their own agenda, to judge, label or diagnose, but to challenge the person, from a place of goodwill and respect, to make their own changes towards a richer and more satisfying life.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?    - Marianne Williamson

We change and transform constantly from the instant of conception until we die. The task for us is to learn how to influence who we are in our constant changing. We do this by paying close attention to ourselves, by handling ourselves lovingly and receptively, and deciding to live with self-acceptance and compassion.