Rewilding
Rewilding Therapy
Counselling and Psychotherapy · Archway, North London & Online
READING ROOM
I kept a bookshop before I kept a practice, and some habits thrive untended. This room is one of them — essays, photographs, books — for anyone who would like a fuller sense of how I see this work.
Every room in this house is an image room. This is the one that talks about it.
Here for the books? Go straight to A small shelf.
Browse as long as you like — no one here will ask if you need any help.
The pieces here move between psychotherapy, image, culture, community and the living world. They are shared in versions adapted for the site. Longer versions are available to practitioners and researchers on request.
Broken Holding
From crisis to continuity: mental health care in Archway
This piece grew from living and working in Archway, and from thinking about what happens when distress becomes visible in a place where services exist, yet people can still be left to begin again.
It explores mental health care, community, crisis, diagnosis, medication and informal support. Its concern is what care becomes once someone is frightened, overwhelmed, burnt out, hiding, or too tired to keep presenting themselves as a manageable case.
The image that stayed with me was broken holding: the way support can begin and then weaken; appear and then thin; reach out and then fall back into management.
What is needed is not only more crisis response, but stronger continuity — care that remains.
Embers
Collective care inside a climate movement
BACP’s Therapy Today interviewed me in March 2020 about my work in climate activism: what it takes to hold grief, fear and hope within a group trying to change the world—and why care is not the soft edge of collective work, but part of what keeps it alive.
Movements are often pictured as fire: the blaze of protest, the burning conviction. But fires that only blaze burn out, and so do the people inside them.
I spoke about the quieter tending: the embers—rest, grief given somewhere to go, attention to conflict and power, and the slow glow that keeps warmth alive and gives fire somewhere to return. Not every blaze needs putting out.
It is also about imagination as fuel, and collective joy—the kind that shows up when people act together and, now and then, on the terraces.
The article can be requested through BACP’s member archive.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, CW 13, §335
“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”
— Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
The Spell of Transformation
An inquiry into the flight from feeling, and how it softens
My dissertation explored what I called the Puella’s spell: a psychic and cultural climate organised around brightness, performance, idealisation and the refusal of weight.
Working with the myth of Circe, and with image, dream, clinical material and reflection, it traces a split many of us live between thinking and feeling: the mind that understands and the body that knows.
Rather than resolving one side by defeating the other, it considers what becomes possible when they meet—when imagination, given ground and holding, becomes a way of dwelling rather than escaping.
At its centre is a question close to my practice: what would it mean to live symbolically, not only literally?
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Waterhouse's Circe Invidiosa (1892) — envy, mid-pour.
A small shelf
Books are part of how this work breathes.
What follows is not a syllabus — just a shelf: things I return to, lend, or find myself quoting. Nothing here is kept under glass.
Take what calls to you.
Novels and stories
Susanna Clarke — Piranesi
Donna Tartt — The Goldfinch
Elspeth Barker — O Caledonia
Madeline Miller — Circe
Natalie Haynes — Stone Blind
Olga Tokarczuk — The Empusium
Michel Faber — The Crimson Petal and the White
Ursula K. Le Guin — A Wizard of Earthsea (the truest book about shadow I know — a story of turning to face what follows us, and finding it answers to our own name)
Fiction can sometimes reach places reasoning cannot.
A novel may give shape to loneliness, beauty, exile, longing or transformation before we have language for it.
Stories also take us elsewhere — into houses, islands, myths, cities, sanatoriums, childhoods and other lives — and that movement away from ourselves brings us strangely closer to what is true.
Poetry, image and wild writing
Mary Oliver — Devotions
Rainer Maria Rilke — Letters to a Young Poet
David Whyte — Consolations
Adrienne Rich — Diving into the Wreck
Anne Carson — Grief Lessons
Audre Lorde — The Collected Poems
Hélène Cixous — Stigmata: Escaping Texts and “The Laugh of the Medusa”
Rumi — The Rumi Collection (ed. Kabir Helminski)
Kabir Helminski — Living Presence (not poetry, but the living tradition the poems grow from)
Poetry and wild writing matter where plain prose runs out.
These are writers of image, body, voice, longing, grief, anger, spirit and freedom — writers who do not only tell us what something means, but let us feel its heft.
Relationships, childhood and patterns
Esther Perel — Mating in Captivity
Alice Miller — The Drama of Being a Child
Some books help us see the patterns we have mistaken for personality:
how we love, protect ourselves, repeat old roles, long for closeness, or lose ourselves in the attempt to keep connection.
Places to begin
Pia Mellody — Facing Codependence (the frame can narrow as much as it names — but the chapter on property lines is worth digesting)
Charlie Mackesy — The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (much younger than everything else here — which is rather the point)
These books help name boundaries and the ways we lose ourselves in relationship.
A life exceeds every frame, but some give us a way in. So does kindness.
Culture, power and belonging
bell hooks — Talking Back · Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center · Ain’t I a Woman
Audre Lorde — Sister Outsider
James Baldwin — The Fire Next Time
Reni Eddo-Lodge — Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
Paulo Freire — Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Carolyn Steedman — Landscape for a Good Woman
Rebecca Solnit — Men Explain Things to Me
Robert Macfarlane — The Wild Places
David Abram — The Spell of the Sensuous
We do not become ourselves outside culture.
These books think about voice, silence, power, race, gender, class, education, place, belonging — and the systems that shape what can be spoken, felt, imagined or allowed.
Therapy, psyche and the unconscious
C.G. Jung — Memories, Dreams, Reflections
James Hillman — A Blue Fire and The Soul’s Code. His recorded talks are another doorway — he thinks in images, out loud.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés — Women Who Run With the Wolves
Francis Weller — The Wild Edge of Sorrow
Joseph Henderson & Dyane Sherwood — Transformation of the Psyche
Robert Romanyshyn — Ways of the Heart
Merlin Sheldrake — Entangled Life
Nick Totton — Wild Therapy
Some of these books take shadow, dream, symptom, childhood, longing and defence seriously
— as forms of psychic life with meanings of their own.
