Kate O’Halloran~ Embodied-Relational Therapist, Counsellor and Psychotherapist, in Norwich, Norfolk
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Welcome to my website
I am a counsellor and psychotherapist in Norwich, Norfolk.
I aim to keep you company in the unfolding of your process and follow where it takes you.
I have over 20 years experience of supporting process, as a facilitator, counsellor, psychotherapist and workshop leader.
I practise as an Embodied-Relational Therapist, Counsellor and Psychotherapist, in Norwich, Norfolk, and also remotely, by Zoom and telephone.
as if...I am welcome~as if...it’s ok to need~as if...I am seen~as if...I can take my time~as if...I can act~as if...I can choose
Counselling and Psychotherapy can be an "as if" space. Somewhere to explore the patterns and the experiences that have both expressed and constrained us so far, but also somewhere to play, to relax into spaciousness and expansion.
We can imagine and embody the growing edges that have been trying to catch our attention, maybe in dreams, symptoms, odd little things half noticed, great big "problems". We can live "as if" we were not a finished, done-deal, but an alive, growing, curious organism, in relationship with ourselves and others, and also with the other-than-human and the more-than-human world.
In this "as if" place, we can create a relationship of enough safety, challenge and trust, with enough contact and awareness, to invite things to unfold, of their own accord, the way they've been trying to all along.
More about Embodied-Relational Therapy
Embodied-Relational Therapy (ERT), emerged primarily from the body psychotherapy tradition, and now works at the meeting place of relational, process and body psychotherapy. For more information about its history and development, click here
ERT takes an holistic integrative approach, focusing on two facts about human beings: we are embodied and in relationship. To be alive we need to be a body, to be alive we need to relate to others; our greatest challenges and our greatest joys follow from this.
The fundamental assumption of Embodied-Relational Therapy is that we all do the best we possibly can - the best that we know so far. Each individual has come up with a brilliant solution to the conditions in which they have found themselves - the optimum style of relating, the optimum balance between body and spirit. Equally, each person is seeking, consciously or unconsciously, to change their behavioural style in accordance with current conditions - which may be very different from the conditions in which we grew up. Whatever appears in a person's life as a problem, a symptom, a conflict, can also be understood as an incomplete attempt to change and grow.
Embodied-Relational Therapy takes a position of profound trust that what ever is trying to happen in someone's life needs to happen, and whatever needs to happen is trying to happen.
...we are all hungry for a relationship with land, with place, with our bodies... (Rust, 2008)
Counselling and psychotherapy so often happen in a private space between two people, it's easy to imagine it's an isolated activity. But we bring our networks with us all the time, our place in the world, our histories- personal, generational, political, ecological. One part of a complex system meets another, and in the interaction, things change, we're changed. Sometimes it seems to me like a mutual paying attention, to the shared experience of what it's like to be alive. We bring our shared awareness to the feeling of what happens, in this moment, in this embodied relationship, and the patterns shift a little. New possibilities and ways of relating, to ourselves, others, and to our world, can begin to emerge.
We can pay attention to the other-than-human and the more-than-human in our shared spaces, maybe a spider, or the sound of trees or traffic, the dream we had last night, or the news on our phone, a grief we can’t name, or a joy in belonging forgotten or remembered.
Therapy is always, already, a political act, is always engaged with the wider world, even, or especially, in the privacy of attentive relationship.
Something shifts in this place, the locus of awareness that we are and inhabit, and like Indra’s net, where each jewelled node of the web reflects all other facets simultaneously, everything shifts and is changed.
Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things. Let very old things come into your hands. Let what you do not know come into your eyes...Be always coming home - Ursula Le Guin
Norwich
Sessions also offered online, and by phone.