How I
work.
I don’t think good psychotherapy is about fitting somebody into a theory.
Sometimes we need understanding. Sometimes we need to feel something that has been pushed away. Sometimes we need to experiment with a different way of relating, speaking, moving or setting a boundary. Sometimes what is needed is practical change. And sometimes the most therapeutic thing we can do is recognise that the problem was never located entirely inside the person in the first place.
The skill, for me, is learning to tell the difference.
Five things I try to hold at once
Understanding
Sometimes the work begins with finding accurate language. That might mean understanding a pattern, making sense of a relationship, recognising grief, naming shame, understanding why something keeps happening, or simply hearing an experience properly without immediately trying to change it.
Understanding is not the same as explaining somebody away. Sometimes being accurately understood is itself significant.
Feeling
Insight can be useful, but knowing why something happens does not always change how it feels. There are times when therapy needs enough space for anger, grief, fear, shame, relief, longing, pleasure or uncertainty to be experienced rather than immediately analysed, managed or turned into a lesson.
The aim is not emotional intensity for its own sake. It is greater freedom to recognise what is actually there.
Experimenting
Therapy can also be somewhere to try something different — finding a new sentence, noticing what happens in the body, practising a boundary, approaching a difficult conversation differently, exploring an image or part of yourself, or simply noticing what happens when you do not follow an old automatic response.
I tend to think of these as experiments rather than prescriptions. We try something, notice what happens and decide together whether it was useful.
Practical change
Not every difficulty needs deeper psychological interpretation. Sometimes somebody needs information. Sometimes a boundary needs to be set. Sometimes an inaccessible situation needs to be challenged. Sometimes a conversation, referral, accommodation or practical plan matters more than another hour of analysing feelings.
Psychotherapy should be able to recognise when psychotherapy is not the only answer.
Recognising when the problem is not inside you
This matters particularly in disability-informed work. Distress may be personal. It may come from a relationship. It may emerge between people. Or it may be a reasonable response to something happening in the wider world.
An inaccessible building is not an unconscious conflict. Being repeatedly underestimated is not necessarily distorted thinking. Needing assistance is not automatically failed independence. Discrimination does not become less real because it has psychological consequences.
I use Mine, Yours, Ours, System → as one way of repeatedly asking where responsibility, meaning and change actually belong.
Sometimes independence is not doing everything yourself. Sometimes it is having meaningful control over how support happens.
What this means in therapy
I work pluralistically, which means I do not assume that one school of psychotherapy has the answer for everybody. Different moments may call for different kinds of work.
We might spend time talking and making sense of something. We might work with patterns from earlier relationships. We might notice what happens in the body. We might use imagery, reflection, parts work or a practical exercise. We might focus very directly on what is happening this week.
The method can change. The collaboration should remain.
I am particularly interested in work around disability, embodiment, shame, identity, grief, anger, dependency and interdependence, relationships, major life changes, medical experiences and the ways people learn to adapt themselves around other people’s expectations.
But I do not want disability to become the explanation for everything either. A disabled person still has relationships, sexuality, ambition, humour, contradictions, work, boredom, ordinary problems and an inner life that cannot be reduced to disability.
Good disability-informed therapy should create more room for the person, not another way of categorising them.
The body is welcome here
My background includes body-oriented psychotherapy, and that influences how I listen. The body can sometimes tell us something important through sensation, movement, tension, fatigue, stillness, pain, breath, impulses or changes in energy.
But I am very cautious about assuming that a bodily experience has one psychological meaning. Pain can be pain. Fatigue can be fatigue. A movement difference can simply be how somebody’s body moves. A wheelchair is not a defence mechanism.
At the same time, experiences such as shame, vigilance, medicalisation, being watched, having to prove competence or repeatedly suppressing anger can become embodied.
The question is therefore not: “What does your body secretly mean?”
It is: “What is happening here, and how do you understand it?”
The person’s own knowledge of their body matters.
Disability sharpens the questions
Disability has a way of exposing assumptions that psychotherapy sometimes leaves unexamined.
What does a theory mean by independence?
What kind of body does it imagine when it talks about grounding, regulation or health?
When is acceptance helpful, and when does it become pressure to tolerate something unjust?
When is avoidance psychological, and when is somebody tired, in pain or protecting limited energy?
When does helping support autonomy, and when does it quietly become control?
Those questions inform my clinical work, my research and much of the writing across this Hub. I am interested not only in making psychotherapy more accessible to disabled people, but in what disabled experience can teach psychotherapy about itself.
My work beyond the therapy room
Therapy is one part of what I do. My research explores disability, psychotherapy, embodiment, professional identity and the assumptions that can enter therapeutic relationships before anyone deliberately puts them there.
My writing takes those same questions into a more public space. Some pages on this Hub explain psychotherapy theories. Others challenge them. Some offer practical tools. Others explore ideas such as shame, archetypes, embodiment, dependency, ableism, access and what it means to live in a body that does not always fit the assumptions built around it.
The aim is not to create one new theory that everybody must follow. It is to make the conversation larger, more accurate and more human.
What working together is like
You do not need to arrive knowing exactly what you want to work on. You can bring uncertainty. You can disagree with me. You can say an exercise is not useful. You can tell me I have misunderstood something. You can need things explained differently. You can want practical work one week and deeper reflection the next.
Therapy should have enough flexibility to respond to the person actually sitting in the room rather than an imaginary “ideal client.”
I will bring psychological theory, clinical training, curiosity and attention. You bring knowledge of your own life. Neither should cancel out the other.
What this page is — and isn’t
This is not my CV. It is not a list of every theory I have studied. And it is not a promise that therapy will always feel comfortable or immediately clear.
It is simply the best description I can give of the stance I try to bring to my work: curious rather than certain, collaborative rather than prescriptive, psychologically thoughtful without turning every problem into psychology, and willing to keep asking what belongs to the person, what belongs to the relationship and what belongs to the world around them.
If that sounds like the kind of therapy you are looking for, you are welcome to get in touch.