When the shape of things changes.
Some of it you chose. Most of it you did not. Either way you are now living somewhere you did not plan for.
Some of what comes through the door
Separation and divorce
The end of a marriage is a bereavement that everybody treats as an administrative problem. There is a house to sort out and children to protect and a version of the future that quietly stopped existing, and almost nobody asks about the last one.
Work, and the end of it
Redundancy at fifty-five is not the same event as redundancy at twenty-eight. Neither is a promotion into something you privately think you cannot do. For a lot of people — men especially — work has been carrying more of their identity than they had noticed, and the weight of that only becomes visible when it goes.
Fatherhood
New fathers, fathers of teenagers, fathers who see their children on alternate weekends, fathers whose own father gave them nothing to copy. This is one of the least-discussed and most common things I sit with.
Ageing
Your parents need looking after. Your body has started making decisions without consulting you. You have begun doing arithmetic about how much time is left. None of this is a pathology and all of it is worth thinking about properly.
Children leaving
The house gets quiet and the thing that organised twenty years of your life simply stops. People are often ashamed of how hard they find this, which makes it worse.
Loss of direction
No event, no crisis, nothing to point at. Just the sense that you are living a life that belongs to somebody else, and that saying so out loud would sound ungrateful.
Transitions are hard less because the new thing is frightening and more because the old thing has not finished ending.
What we would do with it
First, we would slow it down. Most people arriving mid-transition are moving fast, making decisions on limited information, and have not had a single hour in which to think without someone needing something from them.
Then we would separate the strands, because they are usually tangled: the practical problem, the grief underneath it, and the older story it has reactivated. These need different things, and treating them as one thing is why they feel unsolvable.
And then, slowly, the question of what you actually want — which is often the hardest one, because a lot of people have spent thirty years being extremely reasonable and have genuinely lost track of the answer.
Questions people ask
Nothing has actually gone wrong. Is that a reason to come?
Yes. A number of people here have nothing to point at — no crisis, no event, nothing they could reasonably complain about. They have simply lost the sense that their life is theirs. That is worth taking seriously, and it rarely improves by being ignored.
I am in the middle of separating. Is this the wrong time?
It is often exactly the time, though the work is different: less reflection, more standing somewhere steady while a lot moves. I see individuals rather than couples, so this is a place to think about your own position rather than negotiate.
Will therapy make me leave my marriage or my job?
No. Therapy is not a lever. What it tends to do is make it harder to keep not deciding — which some people experience as pressure, though the pressure was already there. What you then do with it is entirely yours.
I am not sure I can afford this indefinitely.
Then say so at the start and we will work to a shorter, more defined piece of work — six or eight sessions with something specific in view. I also hold a small number of places at £45.
If you want to start
Sessions are 55 minutes, weekly, £70. The first step is a short phone call — 20 minutes, free of charge.
If this is your first experience of therapy, this page covers the practical worries people tend not to ask about.