Relationships wound, and relationships heal.
A return to the deep pool of awareness.
People come to therapy for many different reasons.
You may be struggling with anxiety, depression, grief, relationship difficulties, work stress, questions around identity, or simply a feeling that something in life is no longer working. You may want relief from painful experiences or a clearer understanding of yourself and your relationships.
These are deeply human reasons for seeking therapy, and they deserve to be met with warmth, curiosity and respect.
My approach does not dismiss these concerns or suggest they are unimportant. Rather, it asks whether our difficulties might also become a doorway into a deeper relationship with ourselves.
Beyond the problem
Over time I have come to understand that our difficulties are rarely the whole story.
Alongside anxiety, sadness, anger or relationship struggles are the ways we have learned to meet those experiences. We may tighten around fear, judge our sadness, suppress our anger, lose ourselves in pleasing others, stay silent, become highly self-critical or simply feel numb.
At one time these ways of being may have protected us.
Now they may be limiting the possibility of living more freely.
Rather than trying to eliminate uncomfortable feelings, Core Process Psychotherapy gently brings awareness to how our experience is continually taking shape through our thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, perceptions and deeply held patterns. As these patterns become known with kindness rather than judgement, they often begin to soften.
Healing is not always about solving our problems. Sometimes it begins by discovering that we are more than the patterns through which we have come to know ourselves.
Returning to awareness
One of the foundations of my work is the understanding that awareness itself is healing.
As our attention widens, we begin to notice that our thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations and moods are constantly changing. Rather than becoming caught within them, we discover a wider field of awareness that can hold them all.
This often feels less like becoming somebody new and more like returning to ourselves.
A return to a deeper pool of awareness allows more creativity, compassion and choice to emerge naturally. We begin to respond to life rather than simply repeating familiar patterns that were once necessary for survival.
"Awareness is our true self, it’s what we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness, we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments.”
— Charlotte Joko Beck
Making room for our whole humanity
Life inevitably includes joy and love, but it also includes fear, grief, anger, disappointment, uncertainty and loss.
Our culture often encourages us to seek the pleasant and avoid the painful. Yet much of our suffering comes from struggling against experiences that are simply part of being human.
A contemplative approach invites us to stay in relationship with our whole experience.
This does not mean liking pain or becoming passive in the face of difficulty. Rather, it means developing the capacity to be with what is present without immediately trying to push it away, fix it or become overwhelmed by it.
As we begin to recognise the impermanent nature of all inner experience, we often discover greater equanimity, resilience and freedom.
The healing power of relationship
The therapeutic relationship is at the heart of how I work.
Many of our deepest wounds were formed in relationship. We learned, often without realising it, how to protect ourselves through withdrawal, perfectionism, pleasing, self-criticism, emotional numbing or other ways of surviving.
These protective patterns deserve compassion.
In therapy, I pay close attention not only to what you tell me, but also to what unfolds between us. Feelings and experiences that could not be fully processed earlier in life can gradually become known, felt and integrated within the safety of a therapeutic relationship.
Relationships wound.
Relationships can also become places where healing begins.
Drawing on both Western psychodynamic understanding and contemplative practice, I am interested in how unconscious patterns continue to shape our lives, and how greater awareness can gently loosen their grip. Rather than seeing defence mechanisms as faults to eliminate, we come to understand them as intelligent adaptations that no longer need to carry the whole burden of keeping us safe.
Living beyond familiar patterns
Many of us live from internalised patterns that once helped us survive but now restrict our growth.
Perhaps there is an inner critic that continually undermines you, a part that strives endlessly for approval, a frightened child carrying old wounds, or a tendency to disappear from your own needs in order to care for everyone else.
These patterns can feel so familiar that they become mistaken for who we are.
Therapy offers the possibility of recognising these patterns without becoming defined by them.
As awareness grows, something more spacious becomes available. We discover that our identity is richer, more fluid and more alive than the protective structures we have inherited.
Relationship with the living world
Alongside my Core Process Psychotherapy training, my work is increasingly informed by ecopsychology, Environmental Arts Therapy and LGBTQ+ affirmative practice through Pink Therapy.
"Nature has many ways of refilling us. When we awake to the glory of a beautiful sunrise she fills us with hope. When we play like children in the waterfall she fills us with joy. When we answer her thunder with our own she fills us with power. When we kneel by the river and surrender an image of our lost one to its currents, she fills us with grief. When we sit with the wisdom that comes from seeing and understanding our journey, watching swans gliding in silence on the dark lake, she fills us with reverence. And when the work is done and we stand alone on the hillside beneath the stars she fills us with grace." - Ian Siddons Heginworth (Environmental Arts Therapy)
I see healing as fundamentally relational: with ourselves, with other people and with the wider living world of which we are part.
For some clients this remains a way of understanding their experience. For others, where appropriate, it may also include meeting outdoors and allowing the rhythms of seasons, landscape and the more-than-human world to become companions in the therapeutic process.
Our wellbeing is shaped not only by our internal lives, but by our belonging within the wider web of life.
Ultimately, my hope is that therapy offers the possibility of a deeper relationship with yourself, with others and with life itself.
As awareness deepens, we begin to recognise that we are more than the patterns through which we have learned to know ourselves. In returning to this deeper ground of awareness, we become freer to participate in life with greater authenticity, compassion and creativity, rather than simply repeating what has gone before.
