How Therapy Can Help

The story of how I can help you will be distinct according to your unique circumstances and individual needs, but I understand that the prospect of coming to therapy can feel daunting and so to demystify the process a little, the support I offer can be understood as a balance of these three elements:

Thinking

This means working together to notice and name the unhelpful and often critical thoughts that turn up the volume on your unease and distress. These thought patterns often take the form of stories you tell yourself again and again that skew your view of who you are in the world and impair the decisions you make there. Together, we can experiment with different ways of thinking that both challenge old patterns and introduce more self-compassion and understanding, creating new stories to live and thrive by. Thinking about your thinking helps you find some higher ground, a quiet space above the din of your inner world where you can take a broader perspective on what is troubling you and get a clearer sense of what choices you have.

Feeling

This involves discovering safe and trustable ways of tuning in to your bodily experience to help understand and digest confusing emotions and manage pain and distress. Linking bodily sensations to your experiences and memories, finding a meaningful language and imagery for them, helps you to feel more connected, making sense of obstacles that are clouding your vision and loosening the ties that are holding you back from a fuller, richer life. Locating and channelling the body’s resources to calm and self-soothe can support you to feel more anchored in times of stress and less overwhelmed by painful thoughts, feelings and memories, building a place of safety in the present moment that you can rely on in the face of past traumas and future uncertainties.

Meaning

This sensitively intuits and identifies the deeper roots of what is troubling you. It seems like a cruel paradox but symptoms of mental pain and emotional difficulty often start life as coping mechanisms; adaptations that once met vital needs but which have outgrown their usefulness and turned saboteur. Exploring these mechanisms together and bringing the unconscious needs that they serve safely into awareness will help you make sense of your experiences, identify the unhelpful patterns woven into your life, and empower you to change them. Finding meaning is often a wellspring of hope; the journey between dismissing yourself as dysfunctional, helpless or broken and gaining a deeper understanding of the resilient, resourceful and remarkable human being you really are.

Here are some issues that I work with: