Barbara Thorpe-Tracey

Existential Psychotherapy asks a fundamental question “Who are you, and how are you to live in the world in which you find yourself?” Perhaps you may already be asking yourself this. What’s really going on? What isn’t happening? What seems to limit you? What choices do you actually have to make, and how did things end up like this? What’s going to happen and how can you bear not knowing? How can you be with the feelings and situations that make you uncomfortable? Why is it so difficult sometimes to be with other people? Our sessions may offer you a different kind of speaking and saying, listening and hearing that you may not find anywhere else in your life. They provide a space for you that is challenging yet contained in its boundaries. It offers true conversation, where meanings and possibilities can come to awareness. It is a place for questions, not necessarily answers. It is a space to bring your immediate feelings, whether sadness or joy. Together in partnership, we will seek to explore your experience in the everyday present, and we may discover how your past experiences and beliefs about the future may be informing this. Through our work, you may learn how to live creatively and happily with others in an uncertain, changing world. We will seek understanding not explanation. Rather than predetermine a goal of change, you will discover openness to the change that is available for you, may already be happening unbeknown, or is to be co-created in relationship with the world of others in which you exist. You may discover it is something else entirely that needs to change or find the courage to stay the same.

Being a therapist is about being available to connect with insight, compassion and open curiosity into the being of another human. In this work I find all my rich and varied life experience drawn together with meaning and yet set aside to be able to explore your world of experience without assumption. I am open to explore all experiences and issues of identity, sexuality, relationships and difference that you may bring. I came to this profession after working life in many contrasting worlds, from a classical music training to careers in professional services firms, and events management in universities, arts organisations, healthcare and government. I have rich interests in the arts and often work with creatives and performers. My demanding and life changing training in Existential Psychotherapy, with its basis in philosophy and phenomenological enquiry offered a continuing process of developing me as a person who can truly be alongside you, the client, rather than seeing you as a problem for me to fix by numbers.