Couple Work

I work with a variety of couples and I have specialist training, research and teach on therapeutic conversations about gender and sexual diversity. It is very common for one person to be seeking therapy more than the other, and for both people to have different hopes or envisioned paths for the future. Therefore ensuring safety, carefulness and non-judgement is super important. Unlike most couple work - I make it clear that the values of your unique couple are at the centre of our therapeutic conversations, not my own.

Ironically, most approaches to couples therapy rely on an individualistic understanding of the self and, as such, are focused on helping each completely separate individual in the relationship to better communicate their own wants
and needs to another completely separate individual. This isn’t sound practice. No relationship exists in a vacuum so it is important to put problems and people into the unique contexts in which they exist.

With this in mind, the work hopes to guide couples through conversations that explore preferred stories of self, and I encourage couples to listen in an appreciative way. When in a couple relationship, we are in a relational system: our actions and inactions, our words and our silence, inescapably shape our partners sense of self. It is important to remember this is true, whether or not the effects of our everyday interactions are intentional.

Good couple work then, is not about being more individual, it is about getting clear on our shared stories of self and how we hope our partners feel about themselves when they are in our presence, what everyday ‘signals’ we wish to be sending them. I help couples to identify their own hopes for how their partners experience themselves as a partner and as a person. It is often very useful to explore potential ways that actions and inactions play a role in contributing to our partners story of their self. When our actions unintentionally shape our partners self in negative ways, we can firstly become more aware of this. Acknowledging these effects can be very healing to hear. This opens space to actually hold ourselves accountable and ask “Is this cool by you?”. By stating our own position, we can then begin to notice what kind of everyday interactions shape our partners sense of self in more positive ways, and ways that we (and they!) prefer. Here is a digital contact card with information you may want to share with your partner:

Therapy With Families & Chosen Families

I have over 13 years experience working in the NHS in children and family services. 

A family can be defined in a way that is meaningful to you. Your family may be birth or blood family or the family of your partner. For some, chosen families are important, “we are like sisters”, or “he’s our uncle but he isn’t technically related”. I hear stories of birth families sometimes being estranged and queer-families, tribes or clans being important. In some communities, people who have died and are not present in body, are still invited a place at the table, literally and symbolically, and in narrative therapy we talk about bringing their special ideas, wisdom, legacies and so on, back into our lives so to speak. Some families are broad reaching, and some more select in number.

I often work with parents or carers who may wish to support their child or young person indirectly, by thinking about the situation and how to respond creatively and effectively. We know that often, two heads are better than one! Looking after yourself as a parent or carer, can be like putting  on the oxygen mask on a plane before attending to those around you.

I believe that it is impossible to not communicate when in a network, and even doing nothing or silence effects others. As such, therapy can be a place to consider carefully, how to go on. We may decide to invite someone in your family or network along to hear their perspective and stories.

Whatever your gang, their ideas and values might be really important to hear!

Therapy As Celebration

I also offer something which you might not immediately think of in western culture since therapy is sometimes seen as ‘solving a problem’, but arguably, it can also be a space for baring witness and celebrating things people have already done to overcome struggles themselves.

By acknowledging the ways we have already responded to hardship, and finding how to celebrate this, we can learn a great deal and build upon what we know works well already. It can be transformative and deeply meaningful. In many communities, overcoming life’s storms is a rite of passage, and something to be celebrated. 

We all have the right to have people who are important to us, invited to bare witness to our stories of hardship and overcoming, and to recognise the way this has shaped us. I can help facilitate baring witness to stories, sharing narratives of struggle with the people that matter. When people bare witness in a particular way, they carry the way they see us into their everyday lives. This can help to shape our identity in a way that we want to me known. 

In the therapy world this work is known as ‘outsider witnessing’ and ‘definitional ceremony’. It emerges from anthropological observations of real communities who listen in special sort of ways, and who mark their rites of passage to punctuate important changes which shape how they are seen by others.