Psychotherapy, Family Therapy & Clinical Supervision
There are different reasons people come looking for a psychotherapist.
Sometimes something has become difficult to live with. Sometimes a relationship has become difficult to understand. Sometimes the ways we have learned to make sense of ourselves, our families, or our lives no longer seem to fit.
My work is concerned with taking those difficulties seriously — not simply as symptoms to be removed, but as problems worth thinking about together.
I work with individuals, families and other clinicians through three forms of practice:
Psychotherapy offers a space to think carefully about what is happening in your life, and about the meanings you have come to attach to it.
People rarely seek psychotherapy simply because they have a diagnosis. Often there is something more difficult to articulate: a recurring pattern, a relationship that has become stuck, a sense of having lost direction, or a feeling that the explanations that once made sense no longer do.
Difficulties rarely belong entirely to one person.
Family therapy creates a space where the relationships, histories and patterns surrounding a problem can be thought about together. This might involve parents and children, partners, siblings, or other people whose lives have become closely entangled.
The aim is not to decide who is responsible for a problem, but to develop a richer understanding of what is happening between people — and what might become possible when it is understood differently.
Supervision is a space for clinicians to think about their work with someone who is outside the immediate demands of practice.
This includes thinking about difficult clinical situations, therapeutic relationships, uncertainty, professional identity, ethical questions and the assumptions that shape our work.
My approach to supervision is informed by systemic and narrative traditions, with particular attention to the ways our own position as clinicians influences what we are able to see.
Thinking deeply about difficult problems
I don’t see these as three entirely separate forms of work.
Whether I am sitting with an individual, working with a family, or speaking with another clinician about their practice, the work is fundamentally collaborative. We bring our different experiences and perspectives together and try to understand something that has become difficult to see clearly.
Sometimes that means finding a different way of understanding the problem. Sometimes it means discovering that an old explanation no longer holds. And sometimes it means making room for possibilities that were difficult to see before.
The work is done together.