"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

Søren Kierkegaard, 1843

My particular way of working is humanistic and uses a blend of ideas from gestalt and existential therapy. But what does this really mean?

Are you living your life or the life of someone else?

An existential approach to therapy focuses on looking at ideas of choice, responsibility and authenticity in your life and how we can often feel conflicted about some of the ‘givens’ of living life: freedom, responsibility, finding meaning in life, isolation, mortality. It looks at how much of our difficulties come from avoiding responsibility for our life and what we choose to do with it. Here I can work with you in identifying where you might be stuck in some of these conflicts and help you to navigate some of the paradoxes, helping you make choices that are more aligned to what you value in life and to work together to help you become a more authentic version of who you are. An existential approach helps us confront the reality of living, it doesn’t see life as something to be solved, as there is no cure for the human condition.

Making sense of where you have been, to understand where you are going…

Working in an existential way means largely focusing on what is happening now: the things you are avoiding and the choices you are making today. But often we are stuck because there may be things in our past which we haven’t resolved yet, a theory from gestalt therapy called ‘unfinished business’. The problem we seek therapy for isn’t necessarily what we end up focusing on, as we start to explore the patterns you are stuck in we may uncover things from our past which need work to resolve. The choices you made when you were younger may have worked for you back then but can keep you stuck in rigid patterns or cycles which no longer serve who you are today. By working through our unfinished business we can become ‘unstuck’ and start to make new choices with greater awareness.

Still none the wiser?

In more practical terms my way of working is very open and loosely structured, one session can feel very different from the next. Sometimes we may be working deeply on things from your past and the next session involves something important you want to focus on in the present. I try to hold theory very lightly and, to me, building a strong therapeutic relationship with you is much more important than what a textbook says. Research shows the two biggest factors which determine successful outcomes in counselling are client engagement in the process and the strength of the relationship between you (the client) and me (the counsellor).

Sessions involve talking (lots of), silence (not as awkward as it might sound), questions, curiosity, challenging assumptions, laughter, tears, uncertainty and a bit of psychoeducation (where I share a bit of relevant knowledge about what might be happening). The work is often in walking the tightrope between acceptance and change, that we can't change our past but we can change our relationship to it and that most of the time the key to changing something is to first accept it how it is. We all tell ourselves stories about who we are and what has happened in our lives, but those stories can often feel quite one-sided and may be influenced by some of the difficult things we may have experienced. By working together we can rewrite the story of your past and help you become the author of your future.

How I work