I think of a person as more than a bundle of symptoms. How we feel and act is tied up with our bodies, our past, the people around us and what gives our lives meaning. These things rarely stay in separate boxes, and they don’t in the therapy room either. In our work, we attend to all of this together, and to how it fits into your own story.
None of us live outside the world we grew up in. Race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, colonial history, the pain whole communities carry: all of it shapes how we see ourselves and how safe we feel to be ourselves. Some of it we notice. A lot of it we absorb long before we can question it. My approach is anti-oppressive, anti-colonial and trauma-informed, so these things are part of the conversation, not a footnote to it. Naming them can loosen their grip on how you think, feel and act.
My understanding of the mind comes from psychoanalytic theory. Much of what shapes us happens out of sight: the patterns we repeat, the things we can’t quite say, the parts of ourselves we learned to push away. We take our time, follow what comes up, and get curious about what lies underneath. Nothing needs to be explained perfectly or in the right order. Therapy is a relationship before it is a technique. The way you relate to me often echoes how things have gone with others, and that gives us something real to work with. Over time, we can notice the habits that once protected you and no longer do, and get to know what you had to leave behind. Other ideas about growth and change inform my work too, but this is where I start from.
You don’t have to arrive sorted. What has been silenced or cut off can be welcomed back, slowly, in a room where you are listened to. That is what integralis means: all the parts, with room to belong.