Something has brought you here.
Perhaps relationships that keep presenting the same dynamics. A sense of living slightly to the side of your own life. A loss, maybe one that others would not always name as such. A version of yourself that no longer fits, and no clear sense yet of what comes next.
This is a space for depth coaching and therapy, for the practical and the underneath at once, following what you actually need rather than staying within the limits of one approach.
Some people arrive needing to make a decision, to find a direction, to change how they communicate. Others arrive knowing that the surface-level answers have not worked, and that what needs attention is something possibly older and less obvious. Often both are true in the same person, in the same session.
My training and practice span both therapy and coaching which means we can follow what is actually needed, rather than staying within the limits of one approach. Therapy asks what shaped you and what needs to shift. Coaching asks where do you want to go and what is in the way. I work across both because most issues do not sit neatly on one side or the other.
My approach accommodates the language that works for you in that particular moment: whether that is direct and analytical, or whether it arrives sideways, through an image, a memory, a metaphor that suddenly makes something visible that logic has been circling for a long time without quite reaching.
This work does not have a fixed method. It has a direction.
DEPTH & MOVEMENT TOGETHER
That distance between the life you are living and the one that would feel truly yours is not as far away as it seems. The gap is often created by what is happening inside you, not just by your external circumstances.
The practical questions and the deeper ones don’t have to be separate conversations. I work at the place where they meet.
what clients bring to the space
Every piece of work is different. These are some of the themes people arrive with most often. They rarely arrive one at a time.
Illness, loss & what follows
- Your own diagnosis, and what to do with the time
- Caring for someone who is ill, and the exhaustion nobody sees
- Loving someone with dementia: grieving a person who is still here
- The death of a parent, a partner, a sibling, a friend
- Miscarriage and baby loss
- Grief that arrives late, or years later, or all at once
- Anniversaries, birthdays, and the second year, which is often harder
- Life after treatment ends, when everyone else thinks it is over
Rupture, estrangement & repair
- After an affair: whether to stay, and whether trust can be rebuilt
- Deciding whether to separate, and how to do it well if you do
- Estrangement: no contact, partial contact, or wanting to try again
- Caring for an ageing mother while still angry with her
- One of you wants a child and the other is not sure
Closeness, distance & the arguments that repeat
- The same argument, over and over, in slightly different words
- Conversations that always end the same way, whoever starts them
- Living more like flatmates than partners
- Sex and physical closeness that have quietly stopped
- Rows about money, the house, whose work comes first
- Feeling criticised, or never quite good enough, at fifty as much as at fifteen
- Being close without being taken over
- Two languages, two cultures, two sets of expectations about family
Self & Identity
- Being harder on yourself than you would ever be on anyone else
- Perimenopause and midlife: who you are now that the terms have changed
- Feeling like a fraud in a role you have plainly earned
- Knowing what everyone else needs and not what you want
- Saying yes when you mean no, and paying for it later
- Growing up between countries or languages, and where home actually is
- Moving country and having to build a self there
- Children leaving home, and what fills the space
- Living alone for the first time in decades or ever
- Adult adoptees: identity, origin and belonging and sense of betrayal
Parenting & Family life
- Losing your temper more than you want to, and the guilt afterwards
- A teenager who will not talk to you
- Parenting after separation: two homes, different rules
- Step-families, and who gets to say what
- Becoming a parent, and the gap between what you expected and what arrived
- Fertility treatment, miscarriage, a difficult birth
- Raising children between two languages or two countries
- What to tell children about an illness, a death, a separation
Work & the relationships in it
- A manager or colleague who can undo you in a sentence
- Dreading Sunday evening
- Being the reliable one until it costs more than it is worth
- Exhaustion that a holiday does not fix
- A senior role that still feels borrowed
- Leading people for the first time, and finding it is mostly relational
- The conversation you keep postponing
- Redundancy, being passed over, or a career that has stalled
- Whether to leave, change direction, or stay and change how you work
- Retirement, and what work was quietly holding in place
One person, or two
None of these themes belongs to a particular kind of session.
The same pattern can be worked with on your own, or with the other person in the room.
Working one to one gives you space to look at your own part in something without also managing someone else's reaction to it. Working as a pair, a couple, a mother and daughter, two people who still have to parent together, brings the pattern into the room as it actually runs, so it can be interrupted where it happens rather than described afterwards.
Some people do both, at different points. Others begin on their own because the other person is not willing, or not available, or no longer alive. The work is real either way.
WORKING WITH CHILDREN & YOUNG PEOPLE
In certain circumstances, and where it feels right, I also work with children and young people. This is offered selectively, following an initial conversation, and is always led by the needs of the work already underway with the adult. There are times when a parent is carrying something, an illness, a bereavement, a family in reorganisation, and a conversation with their child or children becomes a natural and useful extension of that process. Children are rarely unaware of what is happening around them; they absorb it, often without the language or the permission to ask. What they need is not to be shielded from reality but to have somewhere to bring their own version of it.
In these situations I work directly with the child, facilitating a dialogue that allows both parent and child to be heard creating a space where difficult things can be said more safely, where questions can be asked, and where the distance that fear and protection can create between a parent and child has somewhere to close.
How do we work together
Most people arrive with something urgent: an issue that feels overwhelming or stuck. What keeps it in place is rarely the whole story. It is usually the most visible part of something older and more layered. So we do not rush to fix it. We begin by paying attention, not the kind that interprets or solves too quickly, but a slower and more precise kind, the kind that lets us trace things back to where they began to tighten.
Together we ask:
- Where did this begin?
- What is it holding in place?
- What has it made possible for you, even if it is now causing difficulty?
As we do that, something begins to loosen. Not suddenly, but perceptibly. And in that loosening, clarity: a clearer view of the structure, where the tension sits, where there is space.
Clarity is not the end of the work. Once you can see the structure, the question changes:
- What do you want to do with the space that has opened?
We move from understanding the pattern to testing what happens when you step outside it, in the actual conversation, the actual decision, the relationship as it is rather than as it has been. Small experiments, chosen by you, reviewed honestly. Not only what you want relieved, but what you want to build, and what it will ask of you to keep it.
My role is to keep the work precise and stay alongside you while it settles: noticing when you drift back to the old shape, asking the question you would rather not answer. Over time the choosing becomes yours to do without me.
