About Me
In my early 30s, in the middle of a big hiking day, I realised that I didn't want to carry my feelings of sadness (which I didn't understand at the time) around with me any longer and I needed some help. That was the beginning of my therapy journey in which I learnt the impact of events in my past, the patterns I was maintaining and the reasons behind them. It was hard going and at times I wanted to give up or think I had made a mistake, but it was liberating, and it gave me options and more meaning in my life, I gained far more than I ever thought possible. Nobody forced me or even suggested it, I realised that I needed it and something inside me submitted to the fact that I had struggled enough on my own and needed the help and support of someone else.
After years, and lots of therapy, I became frustrated that I couldn’t offer the same life-changing therapy that I had benefitted from to others who I could see needed help. That was the start of a new direction in my life. In 2013, I graduated as a psychotherapist and since then I have had the privilege of working with many people from all around the world with many varied cultures and backgrounds.
I specialise in working with traumatised people and have been working with traumatised asylum seekers and refugees for the past 6 years. I am also qualified to supervise and have experience supervising therapists of all different therapeutic backgrounds and people who are not therapists but frontline workers.
My Therapeutic Approach
My therapeutic approach would be described as humanistic integrative. What that means is, I believe that you have within you the wisdom and resources to heal and resolve psychological distress. I respect diagnoses and can understand the group of symptoms they explain but the diagnosis is not my main concern, I want to meet the person behind the diagnosis and my main concern is to use the skills I have fine-tuned over the years to help you to unravel, evaluate and integrate your own way forward. I am an equal partner in the process and maintain that you are the expert on what you think and feel. I bring to the relationship my skills that have been refined over many years. I help by providing a space that is supportive and containing, developing with you a rapport that aids our working together, and identifying patterns and themes which may be outside of your awareness by listening, carefully questioning and applying my own reflective wisdom and knowledge.
Trauma seems to be a buzzword these days and so I think it is important to clarify what I mean. A medical diagnosis of trauma relies on certain symptoms. Some purists would say that without those symptoms a person is not traumatised. However, I have a broader approach to trauma. I agree with Gabor Maté who suggests that the world we live in currently is at odds with human needs and so we all bear some sense of trauma. Some people will go through life never perceiving the need to address this trauma, others will feel it acutely at times or will develop patterns to avoid it. My work with people who have diagnosable trauma has helped me to see the impact on the mind and body. My personal experience helps me to empathise deeply with those affected by trauma, both diagnosable and the trauma of living in a world at odds with us. Perhaps you have recurrent thoughts of past events, people, or places that just get stuck in your mind or that you find yourself being reminded of and thinking about when you don't mean to, maybe it is an emotional response that keeps emerging and seems out of control. These could be addressed in a trauma-informed way.
I have been privileged to work alongside a body therapist and to see how effective addressing the 'somatisation', bodily symptoms, of trauma is. I am now studying body therapy and will be able to offer treatments in 2024. However, in the meantime I have incorporated more recognition of the bodily impact into my therapeutic work.
Other essential experience has come from managing a very busy and demanding therapeutic service in a busy local charity. This management position and the complex role gave me a personal understanding of the impact of work-related stress. Working through the pandemic in this role helped me to understand the pressures of being the support to the staff that I managed and being responsible for the programming and running of funded projects. Having addressed my own responses to work-related stress I feel able to work therapeutically with others who need to do the same.
Having worked across languages and cultures for many years, I am competent at working with people from other cultural backgrounds in a sensitive and helpful way. I am also experienced and efficient at working with interpreters and happy to arrange for an interpreter, at extra cost, if it is necessary or beneficial to the therapy.