My way of working has developed gradually, through more than 20 years of working with people.

I spent around 15 years working in youth justice, 10 years in LGBT+ spaces and four years in alternative education, before moving into careers and employment support.

Working in youth justice was also where my interest in using creativity therapeutically really developed. I was working with young people who weren’t necessarily going to sit down with a professional and neatly explain what was happening in their lives. Drawing and cartooning offered another way to communicate, explore experiences and tell stories.

During this time I trained at the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education (IATE), completing a Higher Diploma in the Therapeutic Application of the Arts. I also wrote and illustrated Cartooning Teen Stories, a book about using cartooning with young people to explore their experiences and tell their own stories.

So long before I trained as a therapist, I was already interested in a question that still sits at the centre of my work: what can we do when talking and thinking aren’t enough?

Another part of the answer came through physical training.

I trained as a personal trainer and spent years strength training, boxing and working with movement. I became increasingly interested in the physical experience of things we often describe psychologically: confidence, boundaries, effort, fear, determination, taking up space and holding your ground.

Then I discovered Bodynamic Therapy, and these different strands of my life began to come together.

Bodynamic is a body-based approach to therapy developed in Denmark. It is based on the idea that psychological and physical development are connected. Alongside conversation, we can pay attention to posture, movement, muscular responses, breathing, sensations and impulses, and to how we physically experience ourselves in relation to other people.

My years working in youth justice, LGBT+ services and alternative education also taught me something important: not everything somebody struggles with originates inside them.

Sometimes people are responding to environments that genuinely don’t fit them. Sometimes they have repeatedly been misunderstood or excluded. Sometimes the problem isn’t that somebody needs to become better at tolerating their circumstances; something in their circumstances needs to change. Practical support and real-world change can matter alongside therapeutic work.

Being diagnosed as autistic later added another piece to my understanding of why this way of working makes sense to me personally.

I know what it is like to try to solve an experience by thinking harder about it. I can analyse, research and understand something from every possible angle and still find that understanding it doesn’t necessarily change how it feels.

Physical experience can give me something different to work with: noticing the pressure of my feet against the ground, muscular effort, the distance between myself and another person, or an impulse to move towards something, away from it, push, reach or stop.

All of this now comes into the way I practise Bodynamic Therapy.

We might talk. We might draw. We might notice what happens physically while you tell a story. We might experiment with movement, strength, distance or support. Or we might spend a session talking because that is what is useful that day.

I don’t assume there is one correct way to experience a body, communicate, form relationships or move through the world. And I don’t want to automatically turn a reasonable response to a difficult environment into something that needs to be fixed within the individual.

My way of working wasn’t created from a single training course. It has grown through years of social and community work, therapeutic arts, cartooning, physical training, my own experience of neurodivergence, and finally Bodynamic Therapy - an approach that gave me a way to bring those different parts together.

Qualifications and training

• Bodynamic Practitioner
• Trainee Bodynamic Psychotherapist (pending thesis and supervised practice hours - working under current supervision)
• Higher Diploma in The Therapeutic Application of the Arts, IATE
• Qualified Personal Trainer
• Boxercise and Kickboxercise Instructor
• PostGrad Dip Careers Guidance
• Youth and Community BAHons