Welcome — and what this journal is for

This is the first post on what I hope will become an occasional journal, so it seems right to begin by saying what it's for.

Why write anything at all

Choosing a therapist is a strange task. You're asked to make a fairly consequential decision about someone you've never met, usually on the basis of a page listing qualifications and a photograph. Credentials tell you someone is safe to work with. They tell you very little about how that person thinks, or what it might actually feel like to sit with them.

So this is partly practical. If you read a few of these and find the way I think useful, that's a better basis for getting in touch than a list of trainings. And if you read them and think this isn't for me — that's a useful outcome too, and considerably cheaper than finding out in session three.

What I'm likely to write about

The themes that run through my practice, mostly. Identity and belonging, particularly for people living between languages and countries. Relationships in their various shapes. Grief, including the kinds that don't get recognised as grief. And the odd business of trying to make a meaningful life inside circumstances you didn't choose.

I came to counselling through anthropology — a PhD, years of fieldwork, a long apprenticeship in taking other people's worlds seriously on their own terms. That background changes what I notice. Where one training might hear a family conflict and reach for attachment, anthropology also asks what that family expected of a daughter, what the culture around it counted as a good life, and what it cost to fall short of that.

Neither reading is the true one. But the second is often missing, and its absence leaves people trying to solve as private pathology something that was never only private.

Much of what arrives in therapy as personal failure turns out, on closer inspection, to be the ordinary friction of a person meeting a world not built for them.

What I won't write about

Clients. Not disguised, not composited, not "a client I once saw" with the details changed. Confidentiality isn't a technicality to be worked around with careful anonymising, and I'd rather not have anyone reading a post and wondering whether it's about them. Where I use examples, they'll be invented or drawn from published material, and I'll say so.

I'm also not going to write advice columns. Five steps to manage anxiety, how to know if your relationship is healthy — there's plenty of that, much of it fine, and none of it knows anything about you. What I can offer here is a way of thinking, not a set of instructions.

A note on tone

Therapy writing tends to divide between the clinical and the inspirational, and I'd like to avoid both. I'm not going to write in diagnostic categories, and I'm not going to tell you to be gentle with yourself. Somewhere between those is the register I actually use in the room: careful, curious, reasonably direct.

Posts will appear when I have something worth saying rather than on a schedule. I'd rather write four things a year that are worth your time than something monthly that isn't.

Nothing here is a substitute for individual therapy, and nothing describes a real client. If something in this resonates and you'd like to talk about your own situation, you're welcome to get in touch — the first conversation is free and carries no obligation.