READING ROOM

I kept a bookshop before I kept a practice, and some habits survive. This room is one of them: essays, images and a shelf of books — for anyone who would like a fuller sense of how I see this work before we meet.

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 where appropriate.

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 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.

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 asks what happens when the spell of flight meets the ground, body and holding that allow experience to take form.

It follows a split many of us live between thinking and feeling, flight and ground, the mind that understands and the body that knows.

Rather than resolving one side by defeating the other, the inquiry asks what becomes possible when they meet—when imagination, given ground, becomes a way of dwelling rather than escaping.

At its centre is a thought close to my practice: that we are changed less by rising above what hurts than by coming down into it, together.

Embers

Collective care inside a climate movement

BACP’s Therapy Today interviewed me in March 2020 about my work in the climate movement: 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.

The work I spoke about was the quieter tending: the embers—rest, grief given somewhere to go, attention to conflict and power, and the slow glow that keeps warmth within a movement between its flarings and allows it to kindle again.

It is also about imagination as fuel, and collective joy—the kind that shows up in movements and, now and then, on the terraces.

The article can be requested through BACP’s member archive.

Waterhouse's Circe Invidiosa (1892)

“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

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.

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 explanation 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 sometimes 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 (trans. Kabir Helminski)

Kabir Helminski — Living Presence (not poetry, but the living tradition the poems grow from)

Poetry and wild writing can speak where ordinary explanation becomes too flat.

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 shape.

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

John Bradshaw — Homecoming

Melody Beattie — Codependent No More

Pia Mellody — Facing Codependence (worth it for the chapter on property lines/boundaries alone)

Charlie Mackesy — The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (much younger than everything else here — which is rather the point)

These books can offer useful first frames — a way to begin naming boundaries, childhood patterns, codependency and the ways we lose ourselves in relationship.

The work often becomes more nuanced than any frame can hold, but a clear frame is often a good place to start.

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 also a wonderful doorway into the voice and aliveness of the work.

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 give language to what lives beneath the surface: shadow, childhood, longing, defence, dream, symptom, and the parts of us that wait to be known rather than fixed.

Rewilding