Josephine Brain

I’m a Humanistic Psychotherapist offering individual sessions to adults in central London.  I bring warmth, sensitivity and deep acceptance to my work, helping clients manage distress, explore areas of inner struggle, and find their path to growth.

I work holistically, and with what arises in the here-and-now, using talking therapies and more practical and imaginative methods to facilitate awareness of patterns of thinking, feeling, talking and moving.  I believe that the adaptations, or ways of responding to self, others, and situations, that may be causing us difficulty in the present were our best means of surviving an earlier environment, so I also invite links with the past as a way of contextualising the present and fostering self-compassion.

I hold the quality of contact with my clients at the centre of my practice.  I attend to safety in the therapeutic relationship through a respectful collaborative approach and careful attunement to how the therapy itself is impacting the client.

I have a particular interest in trauma and what therapists call chronic or toxic shame: an enduring sense of worthlessness, badness, or non-belonging that is the legacy of unresolved early attachment wounds and/or the experience of being part of a social group that has been disadvantaged, denigrated or persecuted.  Such unresolved wounds are held ‘implicitly’ in the very musculature and neurochemistry of our bodies, and shape our everyday perceptions of self, others and the world.

I have experience of working with those raised in addictive or otherwise dysfunctional family systems.

I have some concessionary rates available for students, trainee counsellors and those on low incomes.