How I work

This is when you and I learn about you. Telling me your story helps you and I understand how your how your experiences have shaped and affected you and also how they have helped you and also possibly hindered you.

This is particularly helpful in terms of making connections between your experiences and your mood, emotions, thoughts and actions. Developing this self understanding paves the way for considering alternative self beliefs, building self esteem and self compassion, and widening your choices. It gives you an opportunity to start a journey towards a different story - one that brings improved health and well-being.

My work is grounded in a Compassion Focused Approach, and Person-Centred Theory. This means I offer compassion and acceptance to all of you and your different feelings, thoughts and behaviours. This, in turn, helps you develop your own understanding of what it means to be you and come to your own conclusions about how to navigate your way through challenges. My understanding of other theoretical approaches including Psychodynamic, Attachment, and CBT, and Embodiment inform my Person-Centred work. I also offer Creative Interventions where appropriate and Pyscho-education, to help foster greater personal insight and awareness.

From my trauma informed training I'm aware that the body can interpret experiences as traumatic, whether each individual considers them traumatic or not. This impacts the body and nervous system in ways that can make it challenging to tolerate feelings. The survival mechanisms of Fight, Fright, Freeze and Fawn (Submit) are likely to be easily triggered and lead to feelings of dis-regulation. In these cases engaging the safety system of the brain and body creates an environment which allows for the possibility of learning new ways of thinking and relating.

I work collaboratively - taking into account what you want and need and how you want to work. I will also offer insights and suggestions if I think this may be of help to you, without directing our work together.

Aloe Leaves in the sunlight symbolising growth and regeneration

'We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought'.

(Oliver Sacks)

My commitment to the non-judgemental acceptance of my clients stems from my understanding that:

'Our suffering comes from those parts of our psyche that are unseen, that are unfelt.' (Karl Young)

A diagram showing the Activation and Deactivation of the Nervous System and the Window of Tolerance

Many symptoms can be in response

to, or an attempt to regulate a

dis-regulated nervous system.

Alongside

Therapeutic counselling