For many of us, getting what we want in life - doing what we want to do, enjoying our relationships or even just feeling OK - isn't straightforward somehow. Despite our hopes and best efforts and even, perhaps, our self-awareness, things just stay the same. Yet some part of us knows we could be happier.

As children we have to make sense of the world around us. We learn how best to get our needs met, by learning how to navigate the responses and needs of those looking after us. And we must learn, when those responses fail us, how to subjugate our feelings and experiences in order to get what we can. We grow into adults dependent upon, and continually reinforcing, a knowledge of ourselves formed from our early childhood experiences. But we can change. We can come to understand how we experience ourselves and how we relate to others, and how instead we might live as we want to.

Crucial to successful therapy is a shared understanding of what you want to achieve - and what to work on, and for how long, is determined by you. You may be clear about what you want to change, or you may know only that something's not quite right, or that you're lonely or confused, or that things keep going wrong. Coming to understand how you are now - the feelings and thinking you perhaps don't normally notice, and how you relate to others - is not incidental but itself key to knowing how you want to be different.

At the core of my approach are empathy, an acceptance of you and your past, and my own authenticity. While my psychotherapeutic training and professional development underpin and inform my work (in terms of diagnosis, treatment planning and so on) my focus is on your experience, both as you express it and as I understand it from my own experience working with you. Some problems can be successfully addressed merely by expanding our self-awareness, but deeper issues may be resolved through the experience of the therapeutic relationship - a relationship likely different from those of our formative years, in its compassion, mutual commitment, authenticity and potential for change.