I have always been interested in how we become who we are.

Not simply through the things that happen to us, but through the relationships, places, cultures, identities and experiences that shape us along the way. I am particularly interested in what happens when belonging is complicated, when the place we are expected to call home does not always feel like home, or when we have had to find our own way of becoming.

My own journey into psychotherapy has not been a conventional one.

Long before I entered a university or a psychotherapy training room, I knew something about survival, adaptation and finding ways of making sense of experiences for which there were not always words.

I experienced the care system and homelessness as a teenager and have lived through experiences of trauma that inevitably shaped the woman and therapist I became. I know something about beginning again, about navigating uncertainty and about creating a life from circumstances that did not necessarily provide an obvious map for how to do so.

These experiences are part of me, but they do not define me.

They have instead contributed to a deep curiosity about what human beings do with the lives they have been given and the lives they eventually choose to create.

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Finding a Voice

As a mixed race woman, I have also spent much of my life thinking about identity, belonging and the spaces that exist between categories.

There can be a particular experience in inhabiting more than one cultural world. Sometimes there is belonging. Sometimes there is displacement. Sometimes there is a sense of being asked, explicitly or implicitly, to decide which part of ourselves is the most legitimate.

I have come to think of something within this experience as a third voice. A place that does not necessarily require us to choose one identity over another, but allows something more individual to emerge between them.

This sensitivity to the complexities of identity informs my therapeutic work.

I am interested in the many ways people find themselves negotiating who they are in relation to family, race, culture, gender, sexuality, relationships and the expectations of others.

For some people this may include exploring sexuality or LGBTQ+ identity. For others it may involve race, mixed heritage, womanhood, ageing, relationships, family expectations or simply the difficult question of where and with whom they feel able to belong.

Therapy does not need to decide who you should be.

Sometimes it provides the first sufficiently safe place to discover who you already are.