What is therapy?
At its core, I believe therapy is a confidential and safe space for you to explore whatever you’re thinking, feeling and experiencing. Therapy will feel different for everyone and my role is to hold space for you, ask questions, provide different perspectives and explore and reflect on your experiences with you.
People chose to have therapy to understand more of how they were shaped, gain insight and awareness of their thoughts and feelings and discuss arrangements of new possibilities going forward. With that said, therapy can look into your past, whatever is currently happening for you and look towards the future with different ways of being. There are hundreds of different approaches to talking therapy, however, they all have one thing in common - providing space and support for you and your experiences.
Therapy is not a solution to fix a problem. Therapy is an ongoing reflective process for you to talk, explore your autonomy and hopefully further understand who you are. I am not the expert of your life and it would be unethical for me to tell you what to do.
My approach to therapy
I am trained within an integrative approach to counselling and psychotherapy. This means I work within different modalities of therapeutic thinking. My theoretical and practical approaches include humanistic, psychodynamic, relational, phenomenological, GSRD, existential and pluralistic. I combine all of these approaches to create a therapy experience that is queer and sex positive, kink-affirming and practiced with an open mindset.
Essentially, in a jargon free description, I focus on you and the experiences you’ve had that have brought you to therapy. Depending on what you wish to talk about, we may explore your earlier childhood experiences, what’s happening now for you and your goals and aspirations. My approach encapsulates the essence of your ‘here and now’ experiences which may involve your past, your present and your future self.
I describe my practice and our therapeutic work as collaborative, fluid and adaptable depending on what comes up within our sessions. Ultimately, you’re the expert of your life and I see my role as offering my therapeutic skills, techniques and perspectives to help you gain clarity into your experiences and alleviate any distress you may be feeling.
I am registered with the BACP (400163), meaning that I adhere to the BACP’s Ethical Framework, ensuring I practice counselling - underpinned by a commitment of good practice - with my clients. If you’re interested in knowing more about this, please see: here.
What can therapy help with?
Therapy is a safe space for you to explore anything you want to talk about. You may wish to discuss stresses within your work, finding your purpose, dating, low-moods, your relationship with sex, questioning parts of your identity or political and societal issues. I’ve listed below some more areas of work we can explore within counselling. Please note, this list is not exhaustive and all areas are interchangeable within each other. This illustrative list is to give you a sense of what’s possible within our counselling sessions.
Identity
Sexuality
Gender
Race
Religion
Values and motivations
Career
Self-esteem
Body image
Mental health
Anxiety
Depression
Phobias
Eating behaviours
Suicidal thoughts
Addictions / compulsions
Trauma
Physical abuse
Emotional abuse
Sexual abuse
Assaults
Death
Grief
Bullying
Domestic Violence
Vicarious
Relationships
Family
Partner(s)
Friends
Marriage
Parents
Children
Pets
Polyamory
Monogamy
Open relationships
Sex
LGBTQIA+
Sexuality
Gender
Dysphoria
Shame
Questioning self
HIV/AIDS
Kink
Drag Queens, Kings and performers
Health and neurodiversity
Medical conditions
Autoimmune diseases
ADHD / ADD
Autism
AuDHD
Learning difficulties
Dyslexia / dyspraxia
Disabilities
Chronic illness
Pregnancy
Different approaches to therapy
There are over 400 different types of talking therapy. You may find therapists who practice in a singular approach, or some who encompass a range of theoretical ideas for their therapeutic work. As I highlighted above, my practice is integrative which includes the following approaches: humanistic, psychodynamic, relational, phenomenological, GSRD, existential and pluralistic. I’ve listed below some further brief descriptions of each of these for you to understand more of the theoretical underpinnings of my practice.
Psychodynamic therapy
This approach is derived from theories of psychoanalysis. Psychodynamic therapy is a process of helping you understand what you’re feeling right now and how this may be shaped by your past or early life experiences. Exploration of your unconscious mind, behaviours and defences may bring further awareness to patterns and cycles you wish to understand more of - or to change.
GSRD therapy
This contemporary therapeutic approach (Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity) commits to social justice, enables cultural humility, knowledge of adversity and oppression, being informed of shame, grief and trauma, understanding sexology, encompassing queer theories and having the ability to foster joy within the therapeutic work. Whichever approach to therapy I am working within, I am always aiming to hold a GSRD informed way of being, into our relationship.
Relational therapy
Working relationally focuses on the therapeutic relationship and what’s happening in the room between us. This exploration can then offer us perspective and exploration of your wider relationships to look at patterns, behaviours and relational experiences. My relational approach focuses on the relatedness and differences between us to identify wider perspectives of your experiences.
Existential therapy
Your past and previous experiences play a part in how you’re feeling in the present moment, however, this approach focuses on the ‘here and now’. Your sense of purpose, meaning of life, unknown fears and the choices you have made may be areas that are further explored. Existential therapy is underpinned by philosophical thinking around responsibility, acknowledgment of what’s out of our control and the anxiety that is caused by the conflicts of human existence.
Humanistic therapy
This approach is an umbrella term for many modalities. Humanistic therapy explores your full potential as a human being through your autonomy of self discovery and free will. Humanism looks at the whole picture and aims to offer space and perspective to recognise your strengths and choices in life.
Phenomenological therapy
Phenomenology is simply the philosophy and understanding of the human experience. This philosophical thinking, within a therapeutic approach, fundamentally focuses on your lived experiences through your perspective of life. A phenomenological approach focuses on your descriptions and avoids trying to pathologize or clinically label your experiences.
Pluralistic and integrative therapy
Psychotherapeutic pluralism offers me the framework to collaborate with you across your goals, wants, needs and preferences for our therapeutic relationship. At its core, this approach is collaborative and creates a wider framework for my practice to work diversely across different modalities and ways of thinking with you. Integrative therapy is the process of integration of more than one therapeutic approach. There are similarities and differences between these approaches, however, fundamentally I describe them as frameworks for our sessions to be fluid, adaptive and collaborative.
