A Therapist's Guide to Being Human

... and February seems a great place to start!

Well here I am! A first step to an exciting new space for writing about all the things I love to contemplate; writing as a tool for wellbeing; creativity, curiosity, gratitude, self-care, CYCLING - and what it is to be human.

Who am I?
I’m a BACP accredited therapist and writer living and working in the New Forest on the UK’s south coast. Over the nearly-thirty years I’ve been in practice, writing is a thread that’s run through everything I do, and I see that it’s a way of Making Meaning, processing and untangling the stuff of life.

What’s this about?
Confronting life-changes, coping with personal loss - I’m lifting a veil on the often-closed persona of the therapist as I explore how I negotiate the lumps and bumps of life. No stone will be left unturned as I draw on and share aloud all the many kinds of tools and messages usually reserved for clients behind closed doors.

I’ll be exploring some of the best bits of how therapy works, plus cycling in the forest and further afield, coping with becoming older, children leaving home, the thorny issue of contemplating how retirement works and more recently - an exciting house-move deeper into the forest, with plans for renovations afoot. Also - the process of making space for writing, and how this has led me to the creation of a book - more of this later!

Why Now?
With the arrival of the pandemic, I said goodbye to Write your Mind, a project I developed alongside my therapeutic practice, which brought groups of people together for self-exploration and self-development through expressive and creative writing.

I loved running these workshops from my home, where I baked, made hummous and served up sourdough, homemade soup and other goodies for attendees. People were free to wander in the garden during the summer months, finding inspiration from the reflective exercises I set, which were designed to tap into unconscious processes, bringing them into the light to be explored in a supportive setting.

People noticed how, when they started writing about something, it was so often about themselves. It takes courage to share what we’ve written with others, but the support within each group was part of the magic that enabled attendees to feel they could read out poems written, or even just a few words that had surprised them. The feedback was always positive and encouraging and we were often blown away by the words people chose to read aloud. It would be wonderful if these pages could provide a similar space for the sharing of what emerges from our writing.

I branched out to run groups in other settings, such as schools, hospices and therapeutic charities, bringing people together to write reflectively. When we were no longer able to meet up in this way, I brought Write your Mind to a close, but now I’m resurrecting a space for reflection here on Substack. My hope is for us to think about how writing can support wellbeing and to offer something inspirational that might be mutually supportive.

Why bother subscribing?
This isn’t a space for dry lecturing in therapy-speak; I prefer to explore how confronting our vulnerabilities - our humanity, with all its flaws, sustains and salves us, and can lead to new understandings of what it is to be human - something that has deep relevance for us all. So often, it seems it’s the simplest tools and practices that can really make the difference when it feels as if our world is collapsing.

I’d love to hear what you think, or what you’d like to see emerging in these pages ☺️

Please subscribe here if you’d like to receive more Write your Mind postings:

Perhaps you’d like to share this post with someone whom you think might find these pages inspirational or helpful: