I want you to understand my inspirations and influences as a therapist so you can know if I am the right fit for you.

My Therapeutic Approach

Humanistic, relational, embodied and decolonial therapy

I do not believe that any single theory can fully explain a human life.

We are shaped by relationships, bodies, emotions, nervous systems, histories, cultures, communities, social conditions, spirituality, choices and the mysteries we cannot easily name. Therapy needs to be spacious enough to meet this complexity without reducing a person to a diagnosis, a collection of symptoms or somebody else’s theory.

My approach is integrative, but it is not an assortment of techniques chosen at random. Humanistic and person-centred therapy provides its foundation: a profound trust in your humanity, your capacity for growth and the healing possibilities of a genuine therapeutic relationship.

Relational, experiential, existential, trauma-informed, parts-aware, embodied, decolonial and contemplative perspectives deepen that foundation. Each offers a different way of listening, but the relationship between us remains at the heart of the work.

Theories can provide valuable maps. They should never become more important than the living person sitting in front of me.

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Everything begins in sacred relationship

I believe that healing happens through relationship.

Many of our deepest wounds were formed in relationships where we were not adequately seen, protected, understood or allowed to be fully ourselves. We may have learned to hide our feelings, abandon our needs, perform for acceptance or disconnect from parts of ourselves that felt unwelcome.

A different kind of relationship can create different possibilities.

Drawing particularly upon the work of Carl Rogers and the person-centred tradition, I try to offer empathy, authenticity and a deep, consistent respect for your personhood. This does not mean idealising you, agreeing with everything you say or avoiding difficult conversations. It means believing that honesty and challenge are most transformative when they arise within a relationship grounded in care.

I do not position myself as an expert standing above you. You are the person living your life, and your experience carries knowledge that no theory can replace. I bring training, perspective, curiosity and a willingness to accompany you into places that may be difficult to enter alone.

The therapeutic relationship is not equal in responsibility—I am responsible for maintaining its professional and ethical boundaries—but it is equal in human worth.

I will not hide behind a cold professional mask. When it genuinely serves your process, I may name something I notice between us, share my emotional response or allow you to encounter my humanity. This will never be about making the session mine. It is about creating a relationship real enough for meaningful work to happen.

The whole person is welcome

You should not have to divide yourself into acceptable and unacceptable pieces before entering therapy.

Your intellect and your body are welcome. Your grief and your humour. Your tenderness and your anger. Your certainty and confusion. Your culture, spirituality, sexuality, gender, class and racial identity. The parts of you that long for connection and the parts that are terrified of it.

No part of the self is beyond welcome.

This does not mean that every action is harmless or that we never need to take responsibility. It means that even the parts of ourselves associated with shame, rage, avoidance, jealousy, dependency or self-destruction can be approached with curiosity rather than contempt.

A part of you may want intimacy while another prepares for rejection. One part may be exhausted while another insists that you must never stop. You may genuinely desire change while another part fears what change could cost.

These contradictions do not make you false or broken. They tell us something about the different experiences, needs and survival strategies living within you.

Rather than trying to defeat the supposedly difficult parts, we can listen for what they fear, what they protect and what they might need in order to loosen their grip.

Experience before explanation

Understanding your history can be profoundly helpful. But insight alone does not always create change.

You may already know why you struggle, yet continue to feel the same fear, shame or tension in your body. You may be able to explain a pattern perfectly while finding yourself repeating it whenever an old wound is touched.

Influenced by Eugene Gendlin and experiential therapy, I am interested not only in what you think about your experience, but in how that experience is living within you now.

There are times when we may slow the conversation down and notice:

What is happening in your body as you speak.
Where an emotion seems to be held.
Which words feel true and which do not quite fit.
What changes in your breathing, posture or energy.
What remains just beyond the edge of language.
What is happening between us in the present moment.

This is not about analysing every movement or forcing you into bodily exercises. It is an invitation to listen to forms of knowing that can be missed when we remain entirely inside explanation.

Emotions are not irrational interruptions to be controlled as quickly as possible. They often carry meaning. Anger may contain violated dignity. Grief may speak of love and loss. Fear may be trying to preserve safety. Shame may reveal the conditions under which belonging once depended upon hiding.

When an emotion can be felt with enough safety, space and companionship, it can begin to move rather than remaining frozen within us.

Trauma, protection and the nervous system

Trauma is not only the memory of something terrible that happened. It can also live in the body’s continuing expectation that danger, abandonment, humiliation or powerlessness may happen again.

This can appear as hypervigilance, anxiety, emotional flooding, numbness, dissociation, compulsive coping, overthinking, people-pleasing, perfectionism or a relentless need to remain in control.

A trauma-informed approach asks not simply, “Why are you behaving this way?” but:

What happened?
What did you have to do to survive?
What has your nervous system learned to expect?
What is this response trying to prevent?
What would help you experience greater safety and choice now?

We will respect your pace. I will not push you to disclose details or revisit painful experiences before there is sufficient trust and stability.

At the same time, safety does not mean that therapy will never feel uncomfortable. Change can require us to encounter grief, anger, uncertainty or truths we have spent years avoiding. Our task is to approach these experiences carefully enough that you can remain present rather than becoming overwhelmed or abandoning yourself again.

The aim is not simply to manage symptoms. It is to help you develop a wider capacity to feel, respond, choose and remain connected with yourself when life becomes difficult.

Freedom, responsibility and meaning

My approach is also existential.

Life presents realities that no psychological technique can remove: uncertainty, loss, mortality, freedom, responsibility, loneliness and the need to create meaning without complete certainty.

Therapy cannot protect us from being human. It can help us become more honest and courageous in how we inhabit our humanity.

We may explore questions such as:

What matters deeply to you?
Which values are genuinely yours?
Where have you surrendered your freedom to fear, approval or expectation?
What choices are available within the limits you face?
What gives your life meaning, direction or vitality?
What kind of person do you wish to become through the life you are living?

Acknowledging freedom does not mean blaming you for everything that has happened. Our choices are shaped and sometimes severely constrained by trauma, oppression, poverty, illness, responsibilities and circumstances beyond our control.

But even within real limitations, there may be places where greater awareness makes another response possible.

You are shaped by your history, but you are not reducible to it.

The personal is relational, cultural and political

No person develops in isolation.

Our inner lives are shaped by families and intimate relationships, but also by race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, neurodivergence, culture, religion, migration, work, community and experiences of power.

Following thinkers including Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Jennifer Mullan and Lama Rod Owens, I understand psychological life and social reality as inseparable.

Racism, colonialism, classism, ableism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia are not merely background issues. They can affect the body, nervous system, relationships, identity, spirituality and a person’s basic sense of safety and belonging.

Many experiences described as personal dysfunction are also understandable responses to harmful conditions.

A decolonial approach therefore asks:

Whose definition of normality is being used?
Which parts of you were taught to become smaller or more acceptable?
Has an understandable response to oppression been treated as an individual defect?
What cultural, communal or ancestral knowledge has been ignored?
Who benefits from the shame or inadequacy you have learned to carry?
What might healing mean beyond adapting more successfully to an unhealthy system?

This does not mean reducing every difficulty to politics or imposing my beliefs upon you. Your experience remains particular and personal. It means refusing to pretend that suffering occurs outside history, culture and power.

It also means remaining attentive to power within therapy itself. My training and role give me certain authority, but they do not make my worldview neutral or universally correct. I aim to practise with humility, remain open to challenge and recognise that you may hold forms of knowledge that professional psychology has historically ignored or devalued.

Personal healing and collective liberation are not identical, but neither are they completely separate.

Mind, body, community and spirit

Much of Western culture has taught us to separate the psychological from the physical, the spiritual from the rational and the individual from the community.

My understanding of healing is more holistic.

Our emotional lives are embodied. Our identities are relational. Our ways of understanding ourselves are shaped by culture and ancestry. For many people, spirituality, ritual, faith, land and community are central sources of meaning, strength and belonging.

My own life and practice have been shaped by Zen Buddhism, Reiki, Catholic contemplative and mystical traditions, African-Caribbean spirituality, ancestral practice and my experience as a non-initiated practitioner of Haitian Vodou.

These are distinct traditions, and I do not collapse them into interchangeable versions of the same thing. Each has its own history, teachings, practices and responsibilities. Together, they have taught me different ways of attending to relationship, suffering, spirit, mystery, embodiment, ancestry and care.

Zen continually returns me to the immediacy of experience: this breath, this body, this moment. It reminds me to listen without rushing to fix, interpret or escape what is here.

Ancestral and African diasporic traditions remind me that the self does not exist alone—that we are shaped by those who came before us, sustained by visible and invisible relationships and responsible to those who will follow.

Contemplative Christianity has deepened my understanding of love, mercy, incarnation and the sacred dignity of human life.

These influences shape the quality of presence I bring, but therapy with me does not require spiritual belief. I will never introduce ritual, prayer or spiritual language as though it were automatically appropriate for you.

People understand spiritual experience in different ways: as sacred reality, energy, archetype, symbolism, psychology or some combination of these. I do not need you to adopt my understanding.

Where spirituality matters to you, it can be welcomed. Where it does not, it need not become part of our work.

For people intentionally seeking ritual, Reiki, spiritual cleansing, ancestral work or other explicitly spiritual forms of support, I offer these within a separate service frame through Legba’s Gate.

Enter Legba’s Gate

What this can look like in the room

There is no fixed formula for a session.

Some sessions may involve sustained conversation and reflection. At other times we may pause with a feeling, notice a change in the body or explore something happening between us.

We might connect a present difficulty with an earlier relationship, listen to conflicting parts of you, examine a belief shaped by shame or oppression, or consider what a dream, image or spiritual experience means to you.

Sometimes the work is quiet and tender. Sometimes it contains laughter, frustration, anger or challenge. Sometimes the most important thing is finally saying something aloud. Sometimes it is discovering that you do not yet have words.

In practice, I return repeatedly to:

Presence: What is happening here, now?
Relationship: What becomes possible—or difficult—between us?
Embodiment: How is this experience living in your body?
Meaning: What does this reveal about what matters to you?
Protection: What has this pattern been trying to do for you?
Context: Which relationships, cultures or systems have shaped it?
Choice: What response is becoming possible now?
Compassionate challenge: What truth may need to be faced with care?

I will not use every possible method with every person. Our work will develop in response to who you are, what you need and what feels meaningful to you.

The roots of my approach

The principal roots and influences within my therapeutic work include:

Humanistic and person-centred therapy, particularly Carl Rogers’ trust in the person and the transformative power of empathy, authenticity and unconditional respect.
Relational therapy, which understands that we are formed, wounded and healed through relationship.
Experiential and focusing-oriented therapy, influenced by Eugene Gendlin’s attention to the body’s implicit sense of experience.
Existential therapy, including the work of Irvin Yalom and Rollo May on freedom, mortality, isolation, responsibility and meaning.
Trauma-informed, somatic and parts-aware perspectives, which recognise protective adaptations and the embodied effects of overwhelming experience.
Decolonial and liberation-focused thought, including Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Jennifer Mullan and other thinkers who locate psychological suffering within culture, history and power.
Zen, contemplative and spiritually integrated practice, which deepens my attention to presence, non-fixing, compassion, mystery and the sacred dimensions of ordinary life.
Lived experience, community practice and collective care, including what I continue to learn through teaching, therapy, Ubuntu, spiritual practice and my relationships with the communities I serve.

I draw upon these influences rather than following any of them as a rigid script.

The question is always: What helps me meet this particular person more truthfully, respectfully and deeply?

Healing is the slow, brave return to reality

I do not understand healing as erasing the past, eliminating every painful emotion or becoming invulnerable.

Healing may mean being able to remember without being entirely pulled back into what happened. It may mean recognising your needs without shame, setting a boundary without collapsing into guilt or allowing yourself to rest without feeling worthless.

It can mean becoming less governed by old fear, more able to receive love, more capable of repairing harm and more willing to inhabit your own life.

To heal is to stop abandoning ourselves.

This does not mean becoming self-absorbed or escaping our responsibilities to others. It means developing enough inner relationship that we no longer have to betray our bodies, feelings, values or dignity in order to belong.

The aim is not to turn every wound into a gift or pretend that suffering was necessary. It is to honour what happened, mourn what was lost and discover what can still be reclaimed.

It is to turn wounds into medicine without romanticising the wound.

The endpoint is not escape from life.

The endpoint is intimacy with life.

A greater capacity to meet sorrow without becoming permanently hardened. To experience joy without waiting for punishment. To tell the truth without losing tenderness. To participate in relationships and community without disappearing from yourself.

Therapy is one possible space in which this return can begin.

Could this approach be right for you?

This way of working may suit you if you are looking for therapy that:

Feels warm, engaged and genuinely relational.
Goes deeper than short-term symptom management.
Recognises both your pain and your capacity.
Welcomes emotion, embodiment, identity, culture and meaning.
Understands protective patterns without shaming them.
Makes room for spirituality without imposing belief.
Recognises the effects of racism, oppression and social context.
Values collaboration while still offering honest reflection and challenge.
Helps you become more fully yourself rather than more successfully perform what others expect.

You do not need to understand any of the theories described on this page. You only need a sense that this way of meeting you might offer something valuable.

If you would like to explore working together, you are welcome to contact me.

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