Areas of Expertise and Interest
Relationships
The health of our relationships has a enormous impact on our overall health. It's no surprise then, that relationship issues are what prompt a lot of people to come to therapy.
What are your patterns in relationships? Do you come up against the same problems again and again? In therapy we can look at these habitual patterns and experiment with new ways of relating to others and getting our needs met.
We might also explore your ability to trust – both yourself and others.
Anger
Anger is one of our most maligned emotions, but it doesn't have to be. For my Psychology Msc I researched women's experience of anger and how it affects their mental health.
I am interested in the ways in which we direct anger towards ourselves, and in what happens when we don't express anger at all.
Shame
If you live with a fundamental sense of not being good enough, not being worthy, then it is going to continue to be extremely difficult to get what you want and need from life. Maybe this has even stopped you identifying what it is you need in the first place. Shame can feel like an abyss, and we can work with it at your pace.
Shame likes to stay in the shadows; naming it here was an intentional choice – it's important to me that you know your most challenging and perhaps unspoken and unspeakable feelings are welcome.
The Body
I'm a black-belt kickboxer and PT-in-training with a strong interest in how emotions and trauma are stored in the body, and the profound impact of finding both physical and mental strength, assertiveness, and flexibility through movement and embodied presence.
I am also interested in working with conditions like chronic pain.
Therapy with Alice
My Approach
You are a point of view, a perspective – I'm here to get to know you and how you construct your reality. Why are you who you are? What has happened to you? What has been done to you? What are your strengths, what holds you back, and in which ways do you limit yourself?
We exert an enormous amount of influence on how we perceive the world around us – the question is whether we use this innate and powerful creative ability to grow or to limit ourselves. We can all get stuck and become rigid in how we look at the world, and - most importantly - how we look at ourselves. Therapy is a space to experiment with looking at things differently, to see whether we can find a new way of being that serves us better, here, today, rather than feeling held down by the past, or left feeling like we don't have agency over the direction of our lives.
Regardless of what has happened or is happening to you, you have choices available to you, both big and small. I know this can be hard to see and you may feel hopeless now. Holding hope and taking action are two key components of therapy. Hope and action.
I'm compassionate and gentle in my approach. This doesn't mean that therapy won't be hard work or challenging sometimes – good therapy is likely to be both of those things, especially as we might, in time, explore your blind spots and those tricky relational things that make you feel the most defensive.
Gestalt therapy emphasises the importance of the therapist-client relationship – I will strive to be authentic, present; a companion, involved in our work, not merely standing back and offering interpretations from afar. I won't objectify you or box you in, I will engage with you with active curiosity. I will offer you a place in which you feel accepted, and will strive to meet you where you are today, whilst holding firm the belief that anyone can and will grow and develop in the right circumstances and the right relationship. Being with you in a way that honours the complexity of who you are, means therapy can be a place for laughter and playfulness, as well as exploring your shadows.
I am a diligent and ethically-minded therapist and take my position as your therapist extremely seriously. You are welcome to ask me any questions about my training, values, and my professional associations.