The connection between your thoughts, feelings and body
For many of us, life moves quickly, and over time we can lose touch with what we feel and what our body is trying to tell us. We become used to functioning, coping, and moving forward without having much space to notice what is happening with our bodies and nervous systems.
I work from the understanding that the body holds very important information. It can tell us a lot about what we’ve been through, what feels safe or unsafe, and what we may be needing even before we can put it into words. Paying attention to the body is not separate from therapeutic work - it is often a central part of understanding ourselves more deeply.
In therapy with me, I will help you strengthen the muscle of noticing bodily sensations, emotional reactions, and thought patterns, and support you to understand how they connect. The aim is not to analyse you from a distance, but to cultivate a more intuitive and grounded relationship with yourself, in which your thoughts, feelings, and bodily signals can begin to work more closely together to understand every corner of who you are and what you need.
Trauma-informed approach
Trauma that has not had the chance to be met or processed can become a heavy companion. It can leave us living in states of alertness, shutdown, shame, or disconnection. Long after the original experience has passed, we might still feel the effects on our nervous system, our relationships, our worldview and its influence on our self-worth
I have deep respect for how much it can take to approach traumatic experiences. That is why we will work collaboratively and carefully, with attention to the timing of when something needs to be approached directly and when it needs more support around it first. The goal is not only to help you understand what you’ve been through, but also to help you regain a greater sense of safety, agency, and connection with yourself today.
A trauma-informed approach means that I pay close attention to safety, pace, and regulation. We do not move into difficult material simply because it is there. We move in a way that your system can tolerate. That may mean slowing down, working with grounding, noticing signs of overwhelm, and making space for both protection and vulnerability. Therapy should not repeat the experience of being pushed past your limits.
Experiences as a minoritised or double minoritised person
Living as a minoritised person can shape how you move through the world, how you relate to others, and how you come to relate to yourself. If you have a minority ethnic background, are LGBT+, or live in the overlap between those experiences, you may carry both visible and less visible forms of strain. This can include minority stress, hypervigilance, shame, fragmentation, loneliness, or the ongoing effort of having to explain, translate, or protect parts of yourself.
From a psychotherapeutic perspective, it matters that these experiences are not separated from the context in which they arise. Some reactions make profound sense when understood in light of the cultures, political climates, environments, and structures you have had to navigate. Therapy is not a place where these experiences should be reduced to individual sensitivity or treated as if they exist outside of your reality.
There is room here to work with questions of belonging, identity, loyalty, visibility, and the cost of adaptation. This may include the experience of being stretched across cultures, communities, or expectations - or of not feeling fully at home in any one place. My intention is that therapy can be a space where these complexities don’t need to be defended or explained, but can instead be met with openness, nuance, and respect.