Our therapeutic approaches

Much of what moves us works quietly, below awareness, and a great deal of it was formed early, in our first relationships, while we were still working out what we needed to be in order to be loved.

Those early solutions were intelligent. A child who learns to read a volatile parent’s mood becomes finely attuned to everyone around her, and may arrive at forty unable to name a single thing she wants for herself. A child who learns that needing things is unsafe grows into someone impressively self-sufficient who cannot quite let anyone close. What protected you then is often what stands in your way now.

This work brings those patterns into view, including as they appear between you and your therapist, where we can look at them together while they are happening rather than long after. It is not about blame, and it is not excavation for its own sake. The aim is to see what has been running you clearly enough that it stops making your choices for you.

It is possible to describe your own life with great accuracy while remaining somewhere else entirely. You can tell the story of a devastating year in a level voice, and that evenness is itself worth our attention.

So gestalt work attends to the present: what happens in your body as you speak, what shifts in the room, what passes between us. It holds that a person is a whole within a context, where body, feeling, thought, and relationship are one living system, and that awareness in the moment is what changes people rather than preparation for it.

This work stays with what is happening as it happens. Your therapist may ask what you notice in your body, or invite you to say something directly to an empty chair rather than describe wishing you had said it. Nothing is done without your agreement and you can decline any invitation. The aim is to have the experience rather than only an accurate account of it.

A child asked directly what is wrong will usually give the answer an adult seems to want. Left alone with a box of figures, the same child shows you something else entirely, and that difference is where the work starts.

So play therapy attends to the play itself: who is left out of the game, what gets rescued, which scene is repeated until it ends differently. It holds that play is a child’s first language, that it is how a problem gets thought through, and that a child who is being steered stops showing you anything.

In practice that means a room the child has real authority in, a therapist who takes what happens there seriously, and parents who are met regularly without the hour being reported back to them. The aim is that a child has somewhere of their own to work something out before they have the words for what it is.

With teenagers the work changes again. An adolescent usually has a clear view of why they are in the room and whether they want to be, so the alliance has to be earned, and what stays private is agreed out loud at the start. Both are set out on our child and teen therapy page.

In our experience the relationship between you and your therapist is itself a good deal of the work, because how you are with us tends to resemble how you are elsewhere.

So the pattern arrives in the room rather than only in the account of it. Someone who never asks for anything does not ask here either. Someone who braces for disappointment braces with us. That gives us something living to look at together rather than a story told after the fact.

What matters most is what happens when something goes wrong between us, and at some point it will. For many people the lasting injury was never the rupture itself but that it went unrepaired. Coming back to it is our responsibility, and the aim is to have that repair happen here, sometimes for the first time, so that it becomes possible elsewhere.

This is less a method of its own than a set of promises about how everything else here is carried out. You set the pace, and we tell you what we are doing and why before we do it.

Nothing is pushed for the sake of catharsis. Overwhelming someone in the name of processing causes harm rather than healing, and people who have been through that once are rightly wary of therapy afterwards. A good deal of the early work is making the room steady enough that nothing has to be forced.

In practice that means taking real time to build that steadiness before going anywhere near the hardest material, watching for the moment your body has left the room, and treating “not today” as a complete answer rather than something to be interpreted. The aim is that you are never taken somewhere you did not agree to go.