My approach to working with children, young people and families.
 

I do not begin with the assumption that a symptom is simply a problem to be removed. Anxiety, obsessive compulsive difficulties, withdrawal, perfectionism or emotional outbursts can become painful and restrictive, but they may also represent a young person’s best available attempt to manage something that has become difficult to bear, understand or put into words.
 

The first task is therefore to understand. I want to know why this difficulty has appeared in this particular young person, at this point in their development, and within this family and wider set of relationships. Two children may arrive with what appears to be the same symptom and yet be struggling with quite different emotional realities. A useful psychological formulation should make those differences clearer. It should offer more than a label.
 

Where an experience cannot yet be thought about or communicated, it often appears elsewhere: through rituals, avoidance, bodily distress, behaviour, withdrawal or crisis. This does not mean that every symptom conceals a single hidden cause. Minds are rarely that tidy. It does mean that symptoms deserve curiosity as well as intervention.
 

My training as a clinical psychologist allows me to draw upon several traditions, including cognitive behavioural, developmental, systemic, relational and psychoanalytic thinking. I do not choose a model first and then try to fit the young person into it. The approach should follow from the assessment and from a shared understanding of what may be happening.
 

Practical strategies can be important. Some young people need structure, help approaching what they fear, or support in changing patterns that have gradually taken over daily life. Yet a strategy can be technically correct and still arrive at the wrong moment. If a young person feels overwhelmed, misunderstood or pushed into change before the difficulty has become thinkable, even a sensible intervention may become another experience of failure. Good psychological work needs both direction and timing.
 

Children and adolescents do not develop in isolation, and therapy cannot be separated neatly from the relationships around them. My work may involve meeting with the young person, thinking alongside parents, consulting with schools or professionals, or moving between these forms of work as understanding develops. Parents are not treated as the cause of a child’s distress. They are often carrying a great deal themselves and are an important part of helping change become possible.
 

Ultimately, I hope to offer a way of working in which the symptom is taken seriously without being allowed to become the whole story of the child. The aim is not only to help a young person manage distress more effectively. It is to help them recover some freedom to think, develop, relate to others and become more fully themselves.

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