Individual psychotherapy
As a psychotherapist, I often have people telling me they find the idea of therapy self-indulgent, or they fear it might do more harm than good. Why open Pandora's box if it is firmly shut? Why not leave well enough alone? I often say that if we do not understand what has made us behave the way we behave today, we will never be able to change. Change begins with self-understanding. Self-understanding means looking at where we have come from, the culture we grew up in, the relationships that surround us, and the choices we have made that have come out of that environment. To quote Jean-Paul Sartre, "The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself." We cannot understand ourselves without understanding the people who have formed us.
This process is not easy: you do not pay a psychotherapist to do the work for you. I am here to accompany you through whatever you are ready for, and to encourage you to go deeper. For those who are prepared to do the work, it becomes something invaluable, albeit not easy. It can fuel changes we have long been wanting to make, but did not know how. Or, changes that, perhaps, we didn't even know we wanted to make. Sometimes exactly when the process of therapy starts to feel tired and pointless, we have a session that reveals to us a magical key that opens a door to a different way of looking at things, a different way of being. Possibilities appear when we least expect them: this is the value of ongoing therapy.
For those who turn to therapy with particular issues, perhaps with the intention to have only a fixed number of sessions, therapy can also be a life-safer. I work from an existential perspective, meaning I do not pathologise. This means I do not see a person who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder as defined by that diagnosis, though of course I know the diagnosis can be useful. My goal is to support you in making sense of where the anxiety has come from, what it might be trying to tell you: we will go under the anxiety – somatically (via the body), mentally (via the mind), emotionally (via your feelings) – and try to access it from a different angle. My goal will be to help you work out what changes might be needed in order to move beyond it or, if that is not possible, to learn to live alongside it. Living a life with light is something I believe we can all learn to do.
I have a deep interest in working with individuals who have experienced childhood emotional and sexual abuse, as well as victims of sexual harassment and violence. For such individuals, therapy is a relationship of safety through which you can take gradual steps to learn to trust yourself and others.
I work with individuals living with depression, anxiety, OCD, low self esteem and panic disorder. I work with many individuals who are seeking to make sense of an increasingly frightening world of social oppression and climate change. I work with neurodivergent individuals (Autism, ADHD, AuDHD), those seeking diagnosis and those not: making sense of what it means to live in a world made for the so-called "neuro-typical," and what it might look and feel like to live by one's own rules, listening to one's own needs. I work with individuals going through life crises (career, relational, financial, personal meaning etc.), and those moving countries with or without family. I provide grief counselling to those who have lost a loved one and are struggling. I also work with women enduring infertility or going through IVF, or who want to make peace with their choice not to have children. Lastly, I have a growing client base of women facing peri-menopause or menopause.