Humanistic and Somatic Psychotherapist
Psychotherapy provides a safe space to share feelings that may be deeply buried, painful or difficult to share.
Through opening to emotions of grief, loneliness, hurt, rage, jealousy, sadness, loss, shame, fear and many others, it becomes obvious how patterns of resistance to these feelings can keep relationships and professional or creative projects unsatisfying. Once these limiting patterns (that may not look limiting at all) are conscious they can be consciously reorganised. Then the so-called 'problematic' sensations of emotional experience can be restored to their rightful place as the ordinary stuff of life that flows in and around us all.
It can be challenging to see through the ordinary mesh of interpersonal dynamics and your own unconscious habits and to claim your deepest feelings as your own. But in doing so, patterns of holding, avoiding or acting out these feelings can be acknowledged and clarified.
As a fully qualified psychotherapist with over twenty years' experience, I work individually with clients to explore these patterns and with couples to unpick dynamics that hold these patterns in place. I also run therapy groups which are a great place for people to get helpful insight into the impact of their behaviour on others.
I am trained in humanistic and somatic psychotherapy. I am passionate about helping clients free their minds from limiting stories by learning to relax and inhabit their bodies so they can feel and trust their experience. Our experience is our truth, it's not negotiable.
What is Humanistic Therapy?
My primary psychotherapy training is humanistic, which means we will be talking together in a shared, confidential space about your life and your concerns about how you are living it. The relationship between you and I will be part of the work, so if I see things that you can’t see, I will help you see them.
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Safety and warmth are paramount in this exploration and are my primary concern. I always welcome any concerns or questions you have. It’s not easy to uncover unconscious limiting patterns of belief and behaviour, but it is hugely rewarding. Once you can see how you're unknowingly protecting yourself from your own truth, unwittingly creating the very pain you are trying to deny, your life can be your own design and lived fully from the inside, without limitations that you previously thought were ‘out there.'
What is Somatic Therapy?
Another important part of my training and experience is in Formative Psychology, which is concerned with how these patterns become embodied (or somatised). Our job together is to bring awareness to how these patterns are somatised in the body - a collapse, a dissociation, a rigidity or a density, and how to bring awareness to them so they can be reorganised.
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It may be difficult to see these somatic patterns at first, because the issue might seem so intensely about intimacy, food, money, time, other people, work etc. But, say, you feel like a victim and you collapse to avoid the pain of feeling powerless, you create even more powerlessness, then you feel and behave more like a victim. Or, say, you feel pushed into being responsible for things you can't control and you tighten your body to avoid the pain of feeling unsupported, you create even more pressure internally, which leads to feeling more responsible.
This neurological re-wiring entails a discipline that can be hard to commit to when the mind has normalised an inaccurate view of oneself and the body has normalised discomfort, so it can help to have the support of a therapist to establish a routine of practising new ways of being.
I provide therapy and counselling, including couples therapy, to clients in Aldbourne, Marlborough.. People tend to come to me from areas in Wiltshire as far as Chippenham, Salisbury and Swindon, and from Berkshire including Hungerford and Newbury. I also work on Skype and Zoom for clients from further afield.
