Individual Therapy
Is this you?
My typical client is a purpose-led professional who’s created a life and career led by their values, passions and interests. Whether you're a teacher, therapist, healthcare professional, wellbeing practitioner, charity leader, coach, social entrepreneur or environmentalist, you’re doing work you love; you’re putting your body, heart and soul into caring for other people, places or causes.
On the surface, it looks like you’re thriving. But the reality is you’re not. The demands, expectations and distractions of today’s modern life as well as unconscious drivers developed early in your life have left your nervous system struggling with overthinking, anxiety and overwhelm.
Do any of these feel familiar?
You’re passionate about your work but exhausted by the pace, and demands of day-to-day life?
You notice that you’re always “on” in some way, thinking ahead, holding responsibility for others, worrying about your finances, health, what’s going wrong in your local community, the world, etc?
You feel that you’re failing in certain areas of your life - perhaps in your relationship with certain family members or your sense of success around your work
You’re sensitive to your environment and the people around you, feeling things deeply and perhaps even connecting with fear and grief around the state of the world and the future?
You find yourself getting sucked in to the distractions of tech and social media and missing out on real physical contact with your friends and family?
You’ve lost sight of your own wellbeing while helping others thrive?
You often wish you could get off the mad merry-go-round of modern life?
If this sounds like you, you may already have spent a long time trying to feel better able to cope with life. Perhaps you’ve listened to experts sharing their wisdom on how to ‘get life right’, learnt strategies for managing your thoughts and emotions and even been to therapy already. And yet despite all the insight, skills and knowledge you’ve gained, you still feel emotionally burnt out and struggling to give yourself - or others that matter to you - the care you or they need. What if you could continue making a difference to the lives of others without burning yourself out?
🍃Imagine if…
You could stop zooming through life at what feels like 100mph.
You could care deeply about your work, your community and the world without it being a burden that you carry with you at all times.
You could switch off at the end of the day, be fully present with your family and friends, and have energy for the hobbies, pastimes and other activities you simply don’t have time for right now.
You could be kinder to yourself and take the pressure off yourself to be buoyant and optimistic all the time.
You could wake up feeling rested rather than exhausted.
You could learn to recognise and respond to stress before it becomes burnout, create healthier boundaries, reconnect with your own needs and develop a more balanced and sustainable way of living and working.
The result isn’t that you become less caring, sensitive or engaged; it's that you can learn how to live with those qualities in a way that doesn’t keep depleting your energy and your capacity to thrive.
🍃Why Change Feels So Hard
If you've been living with constant pressure, stress and overwhelm for a long time, you may think it will be difficult or even impossible to change what you may feel are the habits of a lifetime. You might even have some resistance to change - perhaps it will require you to alter something fundamental about who you are.
In some ways this is true. Over our lifetime and often rooted in early childhood, we develop ways of coping with what life throws at us, which may not always be healthy or helpful. This isn’t our fault. Those patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving have been our way of surviving emotionally, socially and even sometimes physically.
Therapy can help us to:
honour who we are and how we’ve got here
explore and makes sense of our patterns
get the support we need as we connect with difficult truths
liberate parts of us that may have become repressed or lost early on in our lives
grow as we act from our own new internal compass and not the expectations or demands of others.
In therapy, change is an organic process - it’s not about following strategies, instructions or guidance; we discover that we are naturally beginning to make different, self-led decisions about how we want to lead our life.
🍃How we’ll work together
Many of the people I work with are longing for a slower, more sustainable way to live. They are looking for greater emotional balance, spontaneity and energy in more areas of their private and professional lives.
Together, we explore how your nervous system has adapted to the experiences, pressures and expectations you've encountered throughout your life. The strategies it has developed may once have helped you cope, but they can also keep you stuck in patterns of overwhelm, self-criticism, anxiety or depletion.
Somatic awareness and movement, creative exploration and reflection, and being present in nature allow you to listen more deeply to what your body is communicating. This helps us to discover what is leaving you feeling disconnected, distressed or overwhelmed but can also awaken strengths and capacities that have been long overlooked or pushed aside. By attending to who you are and not who you have been trying to be, your nervous system starts to relax and you begin to operate from your spontaneous, self-directed and unburdened self thereby organically changing your relationship with yourself, other people and the wider world.
Where appropriate, I can also offer Integrated Eye Movement Technique (IEMT), which can help release the emotional impact of difficult experiences, memories and long-held beliefs about yourself.
The work is collaborative, supportive, and paced according to your needs.
🍃 The Relationship
Coming to therapy is an act of courage, self-respect, and kindness. The relationships we develop with others from a very young age have a significant part to play in who we are and who we have become - with their negative and positive impacts. The relationship that you as my client and I as your therapist build together is an important part of your process of self-discover, change and healing. My role is to listen, support, encourage and guide you. And sometimes, challenge you. Your role is simply to be yourself as you are and share what feels important when you are ready.
🍃Ready to take the next step?
If you’re ready to gift yourself this opportunity for change and healing, I offer a 20-minute initial conversation where we can begin to explore whether my approach feels right for you. There is no obligation to take it forward after this. I won’t be pushing you to ‘book that first session’; you’re in charge and can take the time to think about whether we’re a good fit. You can even have a couple of trial sessions if you’re still unsure. So book yourself an appointment, grab yourself a cuppa and let’s have a chat.
"I had just 5 sessions with Lucinda after a series of extremely stressful events had left me feeling panicky and anxious. I felt stuck in a loop, unable to make objective decisions. Her calm approach and ability to make me look at the person I really am has opened my mind to a different way of thinking and encouraged me to push my boundaries. Working outdoors was different and special; it took me back to my childhood and reminded me of how restful and restorative nature can be."
Sally, social worker