'Like a snake, my heart has shed its skin. I hold it here in my hand, full of honey and wounds.' - Garcia Lora
'May we transform what hinders us, so it becomes a support' - Buddhist Prayer
Therapy can help you to connect to your emotions and process your feelings. This process helps you to feel emotional pain without becoming overwhelmed by that experience. I work with clients who have:
- anxiety,
- sadness,
- fear,
- disassociation,
- panic,
- low self-esteem or low self-worth,
- life transitional pain,
- and trauma.
I also work with clients with problems around their sexuality and gender diversity. I also work with clients who want to deepen into their relationship with themselves and their connection to their inner life, and who want to explore unresolved childhood pain. A relational mindfulness approach can help you self-regulate and stabilise, and integrate neural change.
I use relational mindfulness tools that help you to become more reflective. You can contain your experience and develop contemplative skills to be both in your experience and also to observe your experience. We learn we are much more than our thoughts, feelings and emotions, and become more responsive and less reactive to pain, distress and difficulties.
You can make wise, grounded choices for yourself that make your life feel better. You can feel stable in yourself so that you are self-regulated and working in your window of tolerance. With compassion, kindness and curiosity you can take control of your problematic patterns and re-structure a Self that works better for you in this stage of your life.
"Awareness is our true self; it's what we are. We don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments."
- Charlotte Joko Beck
Qualifications
I have over 10 years' experience as a counsellor and psychotherapist. Before moving to private practice, I also had over 20 years' experience as an English teacher to adults in Further and Higher Education. I am both BACP (Humanistic Counsellor) and UKCP (Mindfulness Psychotherapist) accredited.
Specialities and Expertise
I work with clients who are struggling with anxiety, low self-worth, trauma, or emotional pain in their internal and external lives. We will work with stabilising the nervous system to work within a window of tolerance in order to meet your therapeutic needs. Most of my clients appreciate the tool of shuttling from feeling stable to changing early patterns, so that neural changes are real.
Approach
I use relational mindfulness therapy in my practice. This helps you to develop compassionate awareness for your defended patterns, and understand them as important survival tools, which you needed in order to be in the world. Acknowledging this can help you to replace problematic patterns with ways of being in a better relationship with yourself. Self-acceptance can naturally lead to change.
Links
Karuna Institute
