Perhaps you have reached a point where you know that something needs to change, but you don't know exactly what.
You may have had therapy before. You may be thoughtful, emotionally self-aware and able to reflect on yourself and your relationships. You may understand some of your patterns and where they came from.
And yet, you may still find yourself repeating things you don't really want to repeat.
Perhaps you find yourself staying out of relationship with yourself or with other people. You may people-please, fawn, withdraw or avoid situations where you might feel exposed. You might stay at home because it feels safer, while another part of you longs to go out, connect, meet people or feel more alive.
You may feel anxious much of the time. Or perhaps the anxiety has become so familiar that underneath it there is a sense of emptiness or nothingness: a longing to actually feel something.
You may wonder why your self-esteem is so low, why you are so hard on yourself, or why you can feel such dislike towards yourself even when you know, intellectually, that you don't want to live this way.
Perhaps you want to feel more confident, but not by simply putting on a confident persona. You want confidence that comes from somewhere deeper: from a sense of self-worth and being able to remain connected to yourself.
You may want to let go of the past, without continuing to carry guilt, shame or fear about what has happened.
You may long to change your life completely: to leave, to go somewhere else, to do something you love, to become someone different.
Or you may find yourself wondering whether you are actually unhappy at all.
Perhaps you are functioning well and can even say that you are happy, but when you sit quietly with yourself you don't know what you want, or who you really are.
And perhaps being asked “What do you want?” can itself feel like a pressure.
You might think:
“I don't know what I want. I wouldn't be here if I already knew.”
When You Don't Know
Sometimes we become so accustomed to adapting to other people, meeting expectations and trying to get things right that it becomes difficult to know what we ourselves feel or want.
We can become very good at thinking about ourselves without necessarily being deeply in relationship with ourselves.
Therapy doesn't have to turn this into another problem that you need to solve.
Instead, we can become curious about the experience of not knowing.
What happens inside you when you don't have an answer?
Is there a part of you that believes you should know?
What happens when you feel you are getting it wrong?
What might happen if we don't rush to decide who you are, what you want, or what you should do?
There may be different parts of you with very different needs.
One part may want closeness while another wants to withdraw.
One part may want to leave everything behind while another is frightened of change.
One part may want to be seen while another wants to hide.
Rather than deciding that one part is right and another is wrong, we can become curious about the different experiences within you.
Sometimes I feel worthless.
Sometimes I feel powerful.
Sometimes I feel frightened.
Sometimes I want to hide.
Sometimes I want to be seen.
You don't necessarily have to choose which of these experiences is the “real” you.
Part of becoming more fully yourself can be learning to hold the complexity of your experience with greater awareness and compassion.
Understanding the Patterns That Keep You Stuck
Some of the ways we relate to ourselves and others began very early in life.
We learned how to be in relationship with our parents and caregivers, and we adapted to the emotional environments around us. We developed ways of protecting ourselves, getting our needs met, avoiding conflict, seeking approval or staying safe.
These patterns can continue to shape our relationships long after the circumstances that created them have changed.
They can show up as people-pleasing, fawning, withdrawing, self-criticism, difficulty trusting, fear of intimacy, feeling responsible for other people's emotions, or repeatedly finding yourself in relationships that don't give you what you need.
We may also develop familiar inner voices or parts of ourselves - perhaps an inner critic, inner child or inner saboteur - that continue to influence how we see ourselves and how we respond to the world.
Therapy can help us become more aware of these patterns rather than simply acting them out.
This doesn't mean blaming your past or trying to get rid of the parts of yourself that developed to protect you.
Instead, we can become curious about them.
What did this way of being once make possible?
What is it protecting you from now?
And what might become possible if you no longer have to live entirely from these old patterns?
From Reacting to Responding
When we become more aware of our thoughts, feelings, emotions, perceptions and the ways in which we experience ourselves, we can begin to create a little more space between what happens and how we respond.
This can be particularly important when we feel overwhelmed, anxious or caught in familiar relational patterns.
Rather than automatically following an old script, we may begin to notice what is happening as it happens.
We can become more aware of our felt sense: what is happening in our bodies and emotional experience, including experiences that may not yet have words.
This growing awareness can help us become less identified with any single thought, emotion or part of ourselves.
You are not simply your anxiety.
You are not your inner critic.
You are not the story you have learned to tell about yourself.
And you don't have to replace one fixed idea of yourself with another.
There can be more space for curiosity, creativity and choice.
Making Space for Difficulty
Life contains difficulty.
Fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, grief, loneliness and despair are not necessarily evidence that something has gone wrong with us. They are part of human experience.
When we believe that difficult feelings are problems that must be fixed, minimised or overcome, we can sometimes become caught in another cycle of struggling with our own experience.
Therapy can offer a different possibility.
We can learn to stay with difficult feelings in relationship, with compassion and curiosity, rather than immediately trying to push them away or correct them.
If you have not had the emotional space or relationships in which your fear, sadness, anger or distress could be fully experienced, you may not have had the opportunity to learn how to stay with these feelings.
A therapeutic relationship can provide a space in which they can be felt and explored.
Relationships can wound us.
Relationships can also become places where something different is experienced.
Becoming More Fully Yourself
As we become more aware of our conditioning and the patterns through which we have learned to relate to ourselves and others, we may begin to have more freedom about how we show up in the world.
This can include exploring the expectations and frameworks that have shaped you: family, education, friendships, work, culture, race, gender, sexuality, social and political systems, and the wider environments in which you have lived.
Some of these frameworks may have helped you.
Others may have taught you that you need to be different from who you are in order to belong, succeed or be acceptable.
Part of therapy can be gently examining these assumptions and developing greater freedom in how you understand yourself.
This can include shadow work: becoming more conscious of aspects of ourselves that we have rejected, hidden or found difficult to acknowledge.
The aim isn't to become perfect, completely healed or permanently certain.
It may instead be to develop a more compassionate relationship with the person you actually are.
Sometimes that means discovering greater clarity.
Sometimes it means recognising that something is genuinely ambiguous.
Sometimes it means being able to hold two apparently conflicting truths at the same time.
And sometimes it means allowing yourself to remain uncertain for a while, without experiencing that uncertainty as failure.
Spirituality, Consciousness and Growth
You may also feel that your questions are not purely psychological.
Perhaps you are interested in spirituality, consciousness, personal growth or questions about meaning and existence.
My training as a Core Process psychotherapist has brought Buddhist psychology and wisdom into my understanding of psychotherapy, alongside Western psychodynamic approaches. My Humanistic-Existentialist training also informs the way I work with questions of meaning, freedom, choice, responsibility and what it means to live authentically.
You don't need to be Buddhist or have any particular spiritual beliefs to work with me.
I'm interested in the possibility that becoming more aware of ourselves doesn't necessarily mean becoming more fixed or certain about who we are.
We are continually shaped by our relationships, our environments and our experiences.
There can be something liberating about recognising that we are dynamic and continually becoming, rather than needing to arrive at a final version of ourselves.
Wild Therapy and the More-Than-Human World
I am currently training in Wild Therapy, with the intention of developing a deeper relationship with our inner and outer ecosystems.
This is bringing more awareness to the environments we inhabit and our relationship with the more-than-human world.
For me, this is connected to questions about how we have learned to understand ourselves, and to the possibility of de-colonising the psyche by becoming more aware of the assumptions and structures that shape our experience.
LGBTQ+ / Queer Inclusive
I am LGBTQ+/queer inclusive.
I have undertaken my own therapy and training around my identity as a gay man and around becoming more authentic in how I show up in the world.
If questions around sexuality, identity, authenticity, belonging or relationships are part of your experience, these can be explored openly within our work.
How We Can Work Together
I offer depth-oriented psychotherapy for people who want to develop a deeper relationship with themselves and explore what may be keeping them stuck.
You don't need to arrive knowing exactly what you want, or with a clear explanation of why you are struggling.
We can begin with what is actually happening for you.
Together, we can become curious about your thoughts, feelings, relationships, patterns, contradictions and uncertainties, and create space for parts of yourself that may have been difficult to hear.
The aim isn't to turn you into an idealised version of yourself. It is to develop a deeper capacity to be in relationship with yourself: with greater awareness, compassion, freedom and choice.
Sessions are 60 minutes and usually take place weekly.
I offer face-to-face psychotherapy in Cardiff, as well as online sessions.
Fee: £70 per session.
If something here resonates with you, you're welcome to get in touch.
We can arrange an initial conversation and see whether working together feels like a good fit.
