The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived — nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died — through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer.
James Baldwin
Over-identification with the projections, expectations, and demands of our early environments can lead us into adult lives that may all too often feel frozen, frantic, or false. Giving ourselves the time and space to breathe, to think, and to remember – all in the presence of another person – can help us to reconnect with ourselves and with what we actually need from life and relationships in the here and now.
Some of the issues I work with include:
- Addiction (including work addiction, sexual addiction, and compulsive emotional enmeshment)
- Anxiety, panic, and feelings of emptiness
- Attachment and intimacy problems
- Childhood abandonment, betrayal, neglect, and abuse
- Class-related/cultural displacement and “passing”
- Depression and dissociation
- Loneliness, isolation, and emotional anorexia
- Loss and bereavement
- Overwhelm, self-sabotage, and rage
- Parental narcissism and familial dysfunction
- Racialised injury and internalised racism
- Sex, sexuality and the navigation of sexual identities
- Toxic shame and transferred guilt
- Trauma (including complex trauma, developmental trauma, inter-generational trauma, and racialised trauma).
I work in English or French.
My standard fee is £90 for a 50-minute session. For our first meeting, during which we decide together if and how we might proceed, I allow 90 minutes for the consultation and charge the standard fee.
I offer therapy both online and in person, in my consulting room in Bloomsbury.
I am the Editor of the Miscellany section of the psychoanalytic journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality. I organised the conference Sanity, Madness and the Family: An Urgent Retrospective, exploring the cultural, therapeutic and psychiatric legacies of R.D. Laing’s and Aaron Esterson’s classic 1964 study of “schizophrenia” and its relation to scapegoating in family life. You can listen to that conference here and you can find the papers in published form, with an additional contribution by Hilary Mantel, here. In a related vein, you can hear me talking to June Allen about psychotherapy and recovery from racialised trauma here:
Andrew Asibong Therapy 