This professional is available for new clients.
This professional is available for new clients.
About me
While my formal training as a qualified psychotherapist combines person-centred and psychodynamic frameworks, I ultimately believe that therapy is about developing a relationship that fosters trust, empathy, and collaborative meaning-making. Facilitating an environment where a client can become curious about themselves, where they can test and probe language in order to give voice to their own unique experiences—this is the underlying spirit of the practice that I wish to engage with my clients. Therapy is relational, not just as a matter of relating to others, but of discovering how one relates to themselves.
I have been deeply affected by my work with clients with complex traumas, who have experienced depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and bereavement. My time working with Venture Trust Outdoor Therapy, in particular, with war veterans having suffered from PTSD, was especially informative for me in my understanding that therapy is dynamic, a constantly moving, intuitive space where one can feel not only heard but supported in a myriad of ways, all dependent on the unique relationship established with each client. This means allowing time to unearth old understandings of the self, many of which have remained dormant since a traumatic event, hidden in habits and behaviours and within the body.
Training, qualifications & experience
- MCouns in Interpersonal Dialogue – The University of Edinburgh
- MA in Social Sciences (Philosophy) – McMaster University
- BA in Religious Studies and Philosophy – Canadian Mennonite University
- Member of the BACP
- COSCA Qualified
My post-graduate research interests have focused on exploring gender discourses around masculinities and, as such, I feel inclined to work with men who continuously have felt suffocated by limiting constructs around how they can express and experience themselves. Men increasingly feel that they have no spaces to share their emotions openly. I wish to create a space in which men can begin to feel reflexively and engage with these parts of themselves so often cordoned off by society and by those around them, as well as to collaboratively question some of the assumptions and roles that so often have inhibited men from experiencing themselves as complex, embodied, and feeling individuals.
My research background being in existential philosophy, I am eager to work with clients who feel a sense of isolation and loneliness from the collectives around them, who feel anxiety about death, who struggle with meaninglessness in their lives. One quote by Irvin Yalom sums up my interest in working with those anxious about death and dying: “It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen forever, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.” My hopes would be to work with clients in generating methods of softening this “terror” and helping them to articulate their own sense of self in a world that can often feel senseless. Such anxieties can often occur in individuals who have suffered a loss of faith, or who have been abused by a faith community, or who have been ostracized by their communities they were raised in. For many of these individuals, the world lies disenchanted, vacuous, emptied of all meaning and life. My background in religious studies and my experiences dialoging within and between various religious communities also informs my understandings of these complex traumas related to religion and the loss thereof. Post-religious trauma is an increasingly common experience and is growing in awareness. Whether through engaging with memory by lyrics, poetry, stories, songs, drawings, or developing new rituals of meaning together, I aim to meet my clients wherever they are.
Member organisations
BACP is one of the UK’s leading professional bodies for counselling and psychotherapy with around 60,000 members. The Association has several different categories of membership, including Student Member, Individual Member, Registered Member MBACP, Registered Accredited Member MBACP (Accred) and Senior Registered Accredited Member MBACP (Snr Acccred). Registered and accredited members are listed on the BACP Register, which shows that they have demonstrated BACP’s recommended standards for training, proficiency and ethical practice. The BACP Register was the first register of psychological therapists to be accredited by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA). Accredited and senior accredited membership are voluntary categories for members who choose to undertake a rigorous application and assessment process to demonstrate additional standards around practice, training and supervision. Individual members will have completed an appropriate counselling or psychotherapy course and started to practise, but they won’t appear on the BACP Register until they've demonstrated that they meet the standards for registration. Student members are still in the process of completing their training. All members are bound by the BACP Ethical Framework and a Professional Conduct Procedure.
Accredited register membership
The Accredited Register Scheme was set up in 2013 by the Department of Health (DoH) as a way to recognise organisations that hold voluntary registers which meet certain standards. These standards are set by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA).
This therapist has indicated that they belong to an Accredited Register.
Areas of counselling I deal with
Therapies offered
Fees
£45.00 - £60.00
Concessions offered for
Health Insurance/EAP
Additional information
I offer concessional rates in certain circumstances which can be discussed during the initial consultation.
