Approach
This page is for readers who are curious about how therapy works in practice.
There are many different types of talking therapy, each shaped by different ideas about what people seek help for — whether distress is an illness or a response to life’s difficulties — and what therapy can do — whether it is enough to understand more or whether some change is needed — all grounded in a view of what it means to be human.
Clients, too, may find themselves drawn towards an approach to therapy that resonates with their own sense of what it is to be human — and what might help.
Approach to therapy
None of what is described below needs to be understood or read before coming to therapy.
What a person says about their life matters, and so does how they find themselves saying it: the words they choose, the memories and stories they return to, and the things that are difficult to put into words at all.
I pay attention not only to what is said, but to the act of speaking itself: the hesitations, asides, quick denials, and slips that break through the more prepared account. These often mark where something we have not yet been fully aware of wanting to say is finding half‑expression — often involving the very difficulty that has brought a person to therapy.
Our suffering is one way we let ourselves know that something is out of sync with us. The more it is ignored without addressing what underlies it, the more insistently it can disrupt our plans, our relationships, and our sense of what we want.
When we do start to take it seriously, there is still a choice: we can try only to quieten the symptom with structured techniques and tasks, or we can begin to give this suffering a voice and listen to what it is pointing to. My work belongs to this second approach.
Over time, people often find that, with help, hearing what they are actually saying — and how they say it — allows them to stand to one side of their usual picture of themselves and to ask, perhaps for the first time, whether that is a picture they want to keep living by. They may even begin to ask whose picture it is.
What has seemed like “just how I am” or “that’s the way things are” can begin to be recognised as a way of being in the world — a position, a role — that once made sense, but may now be keeping life narrower and more painful than it needs to be.
Saying more of what has until now remained half-said — including things that have never been put into words before, such as the gaps in one’s own history — can, over time, loosen this fixed picture and make room for other possibilities in how a person lives, relates, and understands themselves.
Related Reading
If you would like a fuller sense of how therapy works in practice, the two articles below from our Reading page explore some of these themes through everyday examples.
Therapy and the half-said ↗
Therapeutic listening also attends to traces of unspoken feelings, what a person is not saying: the hesitations, unprovoked denials, repetitions, and slips where something half-said finds expression.
Symptom as message ↗
Many start therapy after their day-to-day life has become disrupted by a symptom — a repeated behaviour, an intrusive thought, a reaction that feels out of proportion, or a difficulty they cannot quite account for.
Continuous practice in Manchester since 2011.
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