My Approach
Therapy is not dissimilar to an ordinary conversation with a good friend, but the type of questions we ask are daring and bold. Such questions do not always lead to comfortable answers.
The therapeutic conversation can feel playful and irreverent at times. Therapy is not an exercise in formality and keeping face. It is not an appraisal, a job interview, a performance review or a medical assessment. We may find ourselves laughing out loud and even swearing occasionally. We may play with images and metaphors. We may find ourselves exploring incompatible positions and paradoxes.
The idea is to learn to attend to what is present, without demanding certainty, to learn how to live with what we don't know and to accept what is. I want to move away from a medical or managerial style of therapy. Most corners of your life will be shaped around tasks, goals and outcomes. How about finding a space where there are no demands, where you can just explore what it is like being you, every thought, every emotion, every sensation being evoked here, now. Although having a sense of direction is important, we will hold this lightly and allow ourselves to explore paths less travelled, to take detours and revisit the same place with a different perspective.
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More and more I think about therapy as a reconciliation between the different parts of ourselves and as rewriting our story. What do you want to write on the next page? Each moment can be seen as another word in that story, each day another paragraph etc. We are what we do and the stories we tell ourselves, and each moment is a grain of sand in which a whole world can be read.
