Dr Claire Bloxsom

The heart of my therapeutic approach is relational and appreciates our uniqueness as individuals and on your developing sense of ‘psychological integration’ in the cultural world. This means that I would invite you to consider ways in which you might experience a deeper sense of wholeness, connection, and comfort within yourself in relationship to others and the cultural world around you. I consider each therapy relationship to be different, and so I draw on a wide variety of theoretical approaches to help us reflect on how your thoughts, feelings, and behaviour may interact, converge, or diverge. For example, I appreciate the importance of the mind (thoughts), body (physiological experience), socio-political culture and oppression, how we make meaning in our life existentially, our ‘spiritual’ and creative selves, and how all these aspects can impact us in our everyday lives. We all take in messages of some sort from the world and we will have our own way of reacting to these. These messages might be explicit and direct or implicit, say through body language, and might come from our parents, peers, siblings, larger family, from society as a whole, the media, or from our culture, racialised identity, and religion. Sometimes the messages we take in are supportive and helpful, but other times they may not support our needs and identity and this might create difficult feelings and a sense of unease and conflict.

I have experience of long, mid-term, and shorter-term work, though I most typically work medium to long-term (6 months +). I'm open to working creatively, and consider the potential role of metaphor, symbolism, the arts such as music as a listener or as a musician, and the language and sensation of the body in addition to an explicit verbal narrative. As a focus of our work would be to support your personal empowerment, I cannot 'tell you' what to do. However, I do offer suggestions and feedback that we can evaluate together. My general interactional style is actively involved and I work collaboratively and relationally. To me, 'relationally' means that I value the process of the therapy relationship we co-create together, which may be useful to use and discuss when exploring insights into your life.

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