Sarah Blossom

I was in my early 30s and in the middle of a big hiking day when I realised that I didn't want to carry my feelings of sadness (which I didn't understand at the time) around with me any longer and I needed some help.  That was the beginning of my therapy journey where I learnt the impact of events in my past, the patterns I was maintaining and the reasons behind them.  It was hard going but liberating.  Nobody forced me or even suggested it, it was a realisation and something inside me submitting to the fact that I had struggled enough on my own and wanted the help and support of someone else. 

Years, and lots of therapy, later I became frustrated that I couldn't offer others the same life changing therapy that I had benefited from.  That was the start of a new direction in my life.  10 years ago I graduated as a psychotherapist and since then I have had the privilege of working with many people from all around the world with many varied cultures and backgrounds.  I specialised in working with traumatised people and have been employed working with traumatised asylum seekers and refugees for the past 6 years.  I am also qualified to supervise and have experience of supervising therapists of all different therapeutic backgrounds and people who are not therapists but frontline workers.  

My therapeutic approach could be described as humanistic integrative.  What that means is, I believe that you have within you the wisdom and resources to heal and to resolve psychological distress.  I respect diagnoses and can understand the group of symptoms they explain but the diagnosis is not my main concern, my main concern is to use the skills I have fine tuned over the years to help you to unravel, evaluate and integrate your own way forward.  I am an equal partner in the process and maintain that you are the expert on what you think and feel.  I bring to the relationship my skills that have been refined over many years .  I help by providing a space that is supportive and containing, developing with you a rapport that aids our working together, identifying patterns and themes which may be outside of your awareness by listening, careful questioning and applying my own reflective wisdom and knowledge.  

Trauma seems to be a buzzword these days and so I  think it is important to clarify what I mean.  A medical diagnosis of trauma relies on certain symptoms.  Some purists would say that without those symptoms a person is not traumatised.  However, I have a broader approach to trauma.  I agree with Gabor Maté who suggests that the world we live in currently is at odds with human need and so we all bare some sense of trauma.  Some people will go through life never perceiving  the need to address this trauma, others will feel it acutely at times or will develop patterns to avoid it.  My work with people who have diagnosable trauma has helped me to see the impact on mind and body.  I was also privileged to work alongside a body therapist and to see how effective addressing the 'somatisation', bodily symptoms, of trauma is.  I am now studying body therapy and will be able to offer treatments in 2024.  However, in the meantime I have incorporated more recognition of the bodily impact into my therapeutic work.  Perhaps you have recurrent thoughts of past events, people, places that just get stuck in your mind or that you find yourself being reminded of and thinking about when you don't mean to, maybe it is an emotional response that keeps emerging and seems out of control.  These could be addressed in a trauma informed way.  

Other essential experience has come from. managing a very busy and demanding therapeutic service in a busy local charity.  This management position and the complex role gave me a personal understanding of the impact of work related stress.  Working through the pandemic in this role helped me to understand the pressures of being the support to staff that I managed and being responsible for the programming and running of funded projects.  Having addressed my own responses to work related stress I feel able to work therapeutically with others who need to do the same.  

Having worked across language and culture for many years, I am competent at working with people from other cultural backgrounds.  I am also experienced and efficient at working with interpreters and happy to arrange for an interpreter at extra cost if it is necessary or beneficial to the therapy.  

Living cross culture, cross culture relationship issues