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You may be thoughtful, capable and used to carrying a great deal. You may have read, reflected and coped for years. You can explain yourself fluently — and still remain caught inside the very thing you understand. Or you may not be able to explain it at all — only feel it. 

 

Explanation is not the same as change.

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People come to me with anxiety, grief, shame, burnout, trauma, addiction, relationship difficulties, questions of identity and belonging — or because they have begun to realise they are just getting through the days. Sometimes there is no clear name for what is wrong — only the recognition that something has to change.

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My name is Debbra Winton. I am a UKCP-registered psychotherapist and a registered member of the BACP. I know this work, and I trust it — I have witnessed it working before either of us could say how. Therapy is not a formula, and I will not treat you as a problem to be solved. The work is not to make life painless. Pain that has been met hurts differently from pain carried alone. The work is to return more of your life to you.

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You do not need to have found the words for it yet. Finding them may become part of the work.

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Why people work with me

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The relationship is the work. I listen closely, ask real questions and say what I notice. I can challenge you, and you can challenge me. The patterns that trouble you elsewhere will not stay outside the room — perhaps you apologise before you disagree, turn anger into tiredness, or make your needs small enough to be no trouble. When they appear between us, we can work with them rather than repeat them. You do not have to perform being well, interesting, grateful or easy.

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I go beneath explanation. You can think your way around a feeling for years and never meet it. Or you can be so far inside a feeling that there is no room to see it at all. I slow the work down to what is actually happening — in the body, between us, in the images and dreams that know things before you do.

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No feeling is turned away. Anger, grief, envy, desire, fear, joy: each carries information. I do not arrange emotional life into a hierarchy in which calm means health and pain means failure. This work has room for the full palette — including whatever you have learnt to keep out of sight.

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A place that stays. For most of human history, no one was expected to make sense of a life alone. There were people you could take yourself to — someone outside the family who had been down into their own depths and was not frightened of yours. Modern life has quietly removed them, and offers instead endless contact and remarkably little continuity. Therapy cannot replace friendship, family or community, and should not try. What it keeps alive is older and rarer than advice: a relationship that continues, with a person who knows the territory — and enough time for what is less obvious in a life to surface.

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What rewilding means here

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Much of what constrains us began as protection. We learnt to be acceptable, useful, impressive, quiet, self-sufficient or endlessly accommodating — and the parts of us that did not fit were locked away. We became highly competent at living around the locked room.

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What is shut away does not cease to exist. It returns as anxiety, dreams, compulsion, numbness, repeating relationships or bodily symptoms. Sometimes it is quieter: life continues, but you feel further and further from it, as though you have been pulled out to sea.

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Rewilding is not the recovery of some untouched, ideal self. There is no untouched self. It is the work of loosening what has become too rigid — without despising the intelligence that formed it — until more feeling, imagination, choice and connection become available.

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Most of us are less of ourselves than we could be. Not broken. Narrowed.

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Roots do not prevent movement.

They make it possible.

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How it begins

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A short call — around fifteen minutes, with no charge.

 

A first session — a full meeting, with no obligation to continue.

 

Weekly psychotherapy — beginning with an initial three-month commitment.

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I work in person in Archway, North London, and online by Zoom.

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You do not have to be certain. A short conversation is enough to begin finding out.

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Arrange a short call.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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