My approach to therapy combines embodied, creative exploration with psychodynamic and relational work, working with body and mind to explore what may be out of balance. This means that multiple, interrelated aspects of experience can be invited into the therapeutic process, encouraging a holistic understanding of where you find yourself, in body, mind and soul. Personal stories, histories, present experiences and imagined futures can inform a (re)discovery of what it has meant to be you, and what it means to be you in the here-and-now.

Grounded in a soulful perspective on suffering, I hold a space for disowned feelings and denigrated parts of the self to be experienced differently, and viewed as part of one’s survival story. The safely-held therapeutic relationship can foster the development of self-compassion towards aspects of experience that have felt ‘intolerable’, in turn bringing the potential for change and integration.

My training draws on elements of archetypal and developmental psychology, field theory, and psychodynamic understandings of the unconscious. The ‘integrative’ aspect of my approach describes a combination of traditional talking therapy with creative, relational and embodied approaches. The ‘transpersonal’ refers to what is beyond/greater-than the ‘personal’ or ‘individual’ experience, and therefore connects us to a wider whole. Dreams, stories, images, sensation and movement can become rich sources of exploration in this soulful terrain. By considering distress from an integrative-transpersonal perspective, we can view it through multiple interrelated lenses: personal, relational, sociocultural and soulful/transpersonal.

Often we can place a disproportionate value on thinking and cognitive methods of understanding. These are inarguably important skills, yet they can cause us to become stuck in a binary view of distress, as a problem to be solved or a ‘sickness to be cured’. A broader view would include the role the unconscious has played in bringing suffering to light, so that symptoms of distress are viewed not only as ‘pathologies’, but as valuable messengers communicating a deeper imbalance in need of attention.