Most of us struggle with difficult, prickly feelings. I spent a lifetime finding ingenious ways of turning these seemingly uninvited guests away at the door: distracting myself with high octane activities, intellectualising, or managing others' expectations. Anything to avoid the intolerable discomfort that these guests seemed to carry with them. I paid the price with a disconnected life, lived on others' terms. I am slowly learning to communicate, with conviction, feelings and sensations as they arise. It has been both the hardest thing I have ever attempted, and a rebirth.
This kind of communion — with yourself, and with others — lies at the heart of what we most yearn for, human love and intimacy. In the attachment-based approach I practise, that communion is the core ingredient of human development.
Life is hard, but our rigid, inflexible responses to it can turn what is genuinely tough into the impossible. Counselling brings those encrusted response patterns into view, helping you identify them and broaden your repertoire of skills — right at the intersections of your life where they play themselves out so detrimentally.
That process doesn't end with the session. After each one, I send you a short written summary of the main issues emerging from it, and a few gentle questions to sit with — a way of continuing to identify those patterns and make sense of what came up, in your own time, between sessions.
I practise in Summerstrand, Port Elizabeth, and online across South Africa. If this feels like a good fit, you’re welcome to book a session whenever you’re ready.