READING ROOM

A little of my thinking, for anyone who’d like a fuller sense of how I see this work before we meet.

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Broken Holding

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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 is visible in a place where services exist, but continuity can still fail.

It explores mental health care, community, crisis, diagnosis, medication, informal support, and the need for forms of holding that can stay. Its concern is not only whether help exists, but what kind of care it becomes once someone is frightened, overwhelmed, burnt out, hiding, or too tired to keep presenting themselves as a manageable case.

I found myself thinking about broken holding: not only the absence of help, but the way help 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.

Available on request.

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The Spell of Transformation

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My dissertation — 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, the inquiry asks what happens when the spell of flight meets the ground, body and holding that let experience take form.

The inquiry traces a split many of us live — between thinking and feeling, flight and ground, the mind that understands and the body that knows. What it found was not that one must defeat the other, but that they can meet: that imagination, given ground, becomes a way of dwelling rather than escaping.

Its central finding is close to the heart of my practice: that we are changed less by rising above what hurts than by coming down into it, together.

Available on request.​​

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“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

— C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, CW 13, §335

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In Therapy Today

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I was interviewed for BACP’s Therapy Today in March 2020, in a feature on the emotional life of climate action, from my time co-ordinating Regenerative Culture for Extinction Rebellion UK.

It is about care, grief, imagination, and the collective joy that can show up in movements — and, now and then, on the terraces.

Read it here: https://www.bacp.co.uk/bacp-journals/therapy-today/2020/march2020/in-focus

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