WHEN YOU'VE DONE SO MUCH THINKING, WHY DO YOU STILL FEEL STUCK?

You may look like you’re coping on the outside, getting through each day, managing responsibilities and carrying on as expected. But inside, something doesn’t feel quite right.

Perhaps your mind rarely seems to stop. You analyse conversations, question your decisions, try to understand your reactions, or find yourself going over the same things again and again.

You may already have tried therapy, read the books or listened to the podcasts. You might understand attachment, relationships or some of the patterns you’ve developed and yet knowing all of this hasn’t necessarily changed how you feel.

Sometimes, the more information we take in, the harder it becomes to hear ourselves amongst it all.

You might find yourself asking:

Who am I now?

What do I actually want from this stage of my life?

Why do I feel stuck when everything looks “fine”?

Why do I react the way I do?

At times, you may also notice:

You react more strongly than you’d like in certain situations

Relationships feel harder or more emotionally charged than you expect

You understand your patterns but still find yourself repeating them

You feel like a different version of yourself under pressure

There’s a quiet sense that something is missing

These experiences can be confusing and sometimes lonely.

You may feel as though you should be able to work things out for yourself, particularly when you already understand so much.

But perhaps you don’t need another explanation or another answer.

Perhaps you need somewhere you can slow down, quieten some of the noise and begin to hear yourself again.

Therapy doesn’t always need to give you more information, more strategies or more things to think about.

Sometimes the work begins by creating enough space to notice what is already there.

WHY I WORK THE WAY I DO

Welcome, I’m Michele.

Before becoming a therapist, I spent many years working in the corporate IT world. Life was busy and demanding, long hours, constant pressure and always another goal to work towards. From the outside, things looked successful. Inside, I felt increasingly disconnected from myself and unsure what any of it was really for.

Eventually, I reached a point where I could no longer ignore that feeling. I stepped away from the life I had built and began a period of travel, reflection and change. I didn’t suddenly find all the answers. What happened was slower than that. I began to understand myself differently, to recognise what I was feeling, question some of the ways I had been living and become clearer about what mattered to me.

That experience has stayed with me and has influenced the therapist I have become.

But my understanding of people hasn’t come only from professional training. I am also a wife, mother, daughter and sister, and my own life has included many of the changes, relationships and losses that can shape us over time.

I have experienced the end of a marriage and all the change that came with it, and later in life I remarried. Both experiences have taught me a great deal about relationships, about love and loss, change and compromise, and how relationships can challenge our sense of who we are and ask us to understand ourselves in different ways.

I’ve experienced motherhood and how that relationship changes as children grow and need us differently. I’ve cared for elderly parents and experienced their deaths. I have also experienced bereavement through suicide and the lasting impact this kind of loss can have.

These experiences don’t mean that I know what somebody else’s experience feels like, each person’s story is their own. But they have taught me something about the complexity of being human. We can love people deeply and still struggle in our relationships with them. We can grieve what we have lost while continuing to live our lives. We can care for others while losing sight of what we ourselves might need. And experiences can change us in ways that take time to understand.

Life changes us. What once fitted may no longer fit in quite the same way, and the person we have become may need something different from the person we once were.

Alongside my own life experience, more than 20 years working across counselling, therapeutic bodywork, Health Kinesiology and Reiki has deepened my interest in the whole person, not only what we think, but what we feel, how we relate to others, what we notice in our bodies and the ways our experiences can continue to shape us.

I have learned not to rush the process of understanding someone.

When we are struggling, there can be a powerful urge to find the answer: Why am I like this? What should I do? How do I make this stop?

Sometimes answers and practical strategies are useful. But sometimes searching harder simply takes us further into our heads and further away from what we are actually experiencing.

My way of working is thoughtful, curious and patient. I will listen carefully and take you seriously, but I won’t rush to explain you to yourself. I’m comfortable when we don’t immediately know the answer.

You may come to therapy with something very clear that you want to talk about, or simply with a sense that something isn’t quite right. You might find it difficult to put into words, or discover that what you thought you wanted to talk about leads us somewhere quite different.

I’m comfortable allowing that to unfold.

I don’t need you to have worked yourself out before we meet. Part of my role is to listen carefully to what you bring, notice what begins to emerge and help you make connections that may be difficult to see when you’re living in the middle of them.

Sometimes that means staying with something rather than immediately trying to change it. Sometimes it means gently wondering together about a feeling, a reaction or a pattern that keeps appearing.

We don’t have to know where the conversation is going for it to take us somewhere important.

For me, therapy begins with being genuinely interested in you, your experience, your relationships, your questions and the things you may not yet have words for.