Why I started this practice
Personal1 min read
Long before I trained in psychology, I spent two summers volunteering with children with cerebral palsy in Beijing, and later caring for orphaned infants with special medical needs.
I went in expecting to be useful. What I mostly did was sit. I held children who could not tell me what hurt. I learned the difference between a room where someone is being managed and a room where someone is being met.
What the training added
Years later I trained in the UK and worked as a psychological wellbeing practitioner in NHS England services, delivering evidence-based support for anxiety and low mood. The training gave me structure: protocols, outcome measures, a clear model of what maintains a problem and what shifts it.
What it did not do was replace the thing I learned sitting on those floors. The techniques work — but only after someone believes you have actually understood the shape of their week.
Understood first, challenged second
That order is the whole reason this practice exists.
Plenty of therapy is warm and goes nowhere. Plenty is rigorous and lands like a lecture. I wanted to build something that holds both: a room where you feel genuinely met, and where I will still tell you honestly what I am seeing.
That is the practice. If it sounds like what you have been looking for, the free fifteen-minute call exists so you can find out without committing to anything.