About Me

As a person-centred psychotherapist I believe that our deepest yearnings are to grow and to form nurturing relationships. However, life is hard, and these natural tendencies can become compromised or inhibited through difficult experiences. We can even lose sight of them altogether and thus arrive at a profound sense of self-estrangement. When this happens life can feel at its most difficult. Nonetheless we often try to keep going, somehow managing to meet all the external demands placed upon us, all the while feeling worse. The confidence that we need to stop, set boundaries, and make necessary changes eludes us. This way of trying to cope is understandable but seldom effective.

 

All human life takes place in the context of relationships. Thus, as we can lose ourselves through difficult or abusive relationships, so we can find ourselves again through more accepting and nurturing ones. It has been my experience that the therapeutic relationship can facilitate lasting change and growth. It does so by offering a client certain conditions - empathy, acceptance, and genuineness. Person-centred practitioners regard these conditions as essential to therapy, as it is through them that a client begins to feel safe enough to explore difficult thoughts, feelings and memories that may hitherto have been denied or suppressed.

 

As things currently stand in the UK and elsewhere, clients seeking help from a GP or Psychiatrist for mental health difficulties are likely to be diagnosed with a psychological disorder. I have worked with clients with an array of clinical diagnoses, including Depression, Anxiety Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Such terms mean different things to different clients. It is my own view that these labels denote highly complex and practiced ways of relating to the self and others - ways of being that are always, on some level, rooted in the perceived need to defend or protect the self. Thus, when I embark on a relationship with a client, I try to encounter the person, rather than any diagnoses they may have acquired.

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