Approach
It's an interesting question and one therapists are often asked: what is your approach? Over the years of working closely with people, I would say that I have a theoretical orientation, which is psychodynamic, but that my approach tries to take each person as I find them. So while we might be working together on patterns, and making associations about your life in order to bring repetitive patterns and grooves into consciousness so that perhaps you become lighter and freer in your daily life, my approach is about taking the relationship between us seriously so that new forms of learning emerge out of a process of attentive collaboration; that in effect we are both experts in the room.
I have the training and you have your life: we are in conversation with one another about where you are now and where you might want to get to; what you wish to take with you and what you wish to shed. Therapy is about learning from experience, about putting into words and thought what we might feel (particularly those feelings that we might have hidden from ourselves and others).
I take much guidance from thinkers such as Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein, as well relational analysts such as Jessica Benjamin. My work is also informed by practitioners who work with the psychosocial and those taking therapy outdoors into natural settings - many of whom recognise the way that over time the human subject has been de-coupled from the social and natural context. But this is theory and the learning we do in books; the learning that we will do in therapeutic spaces is live, is lived, experiential and embodied. For me therapy is not about cures or fixes, but is about an understanding that gradually allows us to de-vest of ourselves the armours that may have prevented us from engaging with ourselves, with others and with the world at large. And the therapeutic encounter cannot be manualised, is unique and is largely about a commitment to oneself and a process of development and change in conjunction with another, albeit professional and often well qualified, human being.