Welcome
I am a psychotherapist offering sessions online and in person, based in St Just, Penzance.
With a thought to the questions you might be wanting to ask, I have included a few notes about psychotherapy: What is it? Who is it for? What to expect? and my approach.
But nothing compares to speaking together, and so after you’ve had a look through these pages, I invite you to contact me for a free initial session to discuss what brings you here today: your thoughts, your feelings, your questions.
Why therapy?
Why might someone seek therapy?
For many reasons - psychotherapy can help with anxiety, depression, addiction, relationship issues, bereavement, physical illness, stress, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, phobias, or a feeling of not being able to cope. For some they might feel like they’ve lost a sense of purpose, who they are, or what matters.
For others they may be working out how to thrive and flourish with their own ways of being, gender, sexuality, ways of seeing and experiencing the world. To be, and to flourish, is for many directly threatened by the hostility and “norms” of the very world in which they are trying to live. We can think together about the impact this may have had in the past and the present.
But that doesn’t even begin to cover the many reasons why - the list would be long because everyone is different. Each person’s experience, and the difficulties they are facing, the ways in which something isn’t working for them, is particular to them.
There is no criteria that qualifies you to begin therapy, and also there is nothing that you cannot bring - no experiences, thoughts, or fears, that I do not welcome. In fact, the only “rule” of psychoanalysis is to say whatever is on your mind without censoring what might seem wrong, unspeakable, or nonsensical. Not as easy as it sounds, we have been told all our lives when, how, and what we can and cannot say. Which is why we’ll take our time. The time and the space for you to find your words, your language.
Who is therapy for?
Everyone is the short answer
And the long answer? That would take us into the history of psychoanalysis and therapy. A history in which it has come to be seen as an expensive and elite practice only for the privileged, or a last refuge for those in crisis.
These two extremes have resulted in many people feeling it is not for them - an expensive indulgence or something that carries the stigma of failure. No surprise then that the very thought of beginning therapy can be daunting and full of uncertainty.
What is psychotherapy?
Psychotherapy is the invitation to speak, and to be in relationship to another who brings their careful and thoughtful attention to your words. We will listen and think together about your ways of being, your suffering, and your felt sense of difference.
What is it about speaking that can lessen suffering and bring about change?
Psychoanalysis may only be 130 or so years old, but throughout human history the practice of speaking to another has been recognised as an act and a relationship that can initiate profound change. What made the introduction of psychoanalysis so extraordinary - and unlike those older practices - is the attention psychoanalysis gives to the unconscious, to hearing something of the unconscious motivations and conflicts that remain enigmatic to ourselves.
Enigmatic…? So how about self-reflection, and self-help, why can’t I work this out on my own?
Enigmatic in the sense that although we experience the manifestations and effects of what is unconscious - in repeated behaviours, depression, anxiety, relationships to others, the struggle to find our place in the world, in our suffering and symptoms - we cannot see the causes or understand why.
We feel we want to change, we work to change, but time and again we find ourselves in the same patterns, back at the same place. It is an impossible task to identify the “why” by ourselves, for we are blind to our unconscious motivations, and to the internal conflicts that shape our lives and relationships. Without understanding we are subject to the same cycles of feelings, thoughts, and behaviours.
That is why psychotherapy, a practice of speaking and being in relationship to another, enables us to have an experience of ourselves, and the unknown of ourselves, which we cannot have alone.
What is also unknown, unseen, is how we have been shaped by what is external to us: by the times and places, cultures, societies and language in which we live, and have lived. Questions press upon us of how to loosen the bind of our struggles and frustrations - in work, in relationships, in love - but often what is overlooked is the unconscious impact of that same world in which we strive to make a life. Inequality, oppression, new technologies, climate catastrophe, political violence, and economic crisis shape us in ways that make it feel impossible to find any agency outside of their hold. We feel subjected to the blows, hurts, injustices, and disappointments, with no time and space to make sense, find meaning, or register our loss.
Psychotherapy is the opening up of time and space to be curious together about what is happening. In speaking and thinking together we begin to give a different shape and meaning to the past and the present, to unlock a different future.
What to expect
So what will therapy be like?
It might sound rather mysterious to say “well, it is different for each person”, but in fact that takes us to the heart of what matters: your language, your ways of being, and how you find meaning, are all particular to you. And we will be giving careful and thoughtful attention to the specifics of your subjectivity, of what is happening in your life. This experience will in turn also be unique to you.
Importantly there is something that stays consistent and stable: Each session is 50 minutes at the same time each week, at a frequency of once or twice a week. Unlike some other forms of short-term therapy, there is no limit set to how long we continue to work together, enabling a richer and deeper unfolding over time.
The time and place is consistent, but what you speak about, and how you speak, can take any path. You are invited to divert from the well-trodden route, those ways where you have become stuck in how you speak, think, act. As your speech finds new avenues, and opens up, so the same becomes possible in your life.
To begin to speak is to discover the language of your singularity. Away from the demands of “normal” communication and intended meaning, the psychoanalytic session is an “other” time and space. What takes shape will be a conversation unlike any other, one in which something new can happen. It is a space where time is a little different, one in which the past, the present, the future touch.
What emerges can surprise us and change us.
