“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. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life.”
James Baldwin, Another Country
I am a professionally trained, qualified and BPC-registered psychodynamic psychotherapist. For a brief explanation of what psychodynamic or psychoanalytic psychotherapy is, see the BPC’s overview here.
My standard fee is £80 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 work in English or French.
Some of the issues in which I have expertise include:
- Addiction (including work addiction, sexual addiction and compulsive enmeshment)
- Attachment and intimacy problems
- Anxiety, panic and feelings of emptiness
- Childhood neglect and abuse
- Class and cultural displacement
- Depression and dissociation
- Family dysfunction and estrangement
- Loneliness, isolation and emotional anorexia
- Loss and bereavement
- Racism and racialised injury
- Rage and self-sabotage
- Sex, sexuality and the navigation of sexual identities
- Shame and low self-esteem
- Trauma (including complex trauma, developmental trauma and inter-generational trauma).
I find this poem by June Jordan remarkable in its creative acknowledgement of various environmental obstacles to our physical, emotional and spiritual capacity for full aliveness. My therapeutic approach strives to integrate a comparable level of acknowledgment of “the world out there”, focusing all the while on the shifting conscious and unconscious aspects of our internal and relational worlds.
