About Graham
Choosing a therapist can be difficult. Qualifications and therapeutic approaches matter, but they don't necessarily tell you what it might feel like to sit down with someone and begin talking about your life.
I'm naturally curious about people. Not just about the problem that brings someone to therapy, but about the person around it: what matters to you, what makes you laugh, what you find difficult, the relationships that have shaped you, the things you hide or protect, and the ways you've learned to find your place in the world.
Why this work matters to me
My own route into therapy began partly through trying to understand myself. Anxiety, relationships, belonging, vulnerability and the ways we adapt ourselves to other people have all been part of my own life and development.
I don't assume that makes your experience anything like mine. If anything, it has made me more cautious about assuming I know what somebody else's experience means.
That's probably one of the most important things to know about how I work.
I want to understand before trying to change something.
People develop ways of coping, relating and protecting themselves for all sorts of reasons. Something that seems frustrating or inexplicable now may begin to make considerably more sense when we understand where it came from, what was happening around it and what it has been doing for you.
Understanding doesn't mean leaving everything as it is. It can give us a more compassionate and informed place from which to decide what, if anything, you want to change.
How I work
When we work together, my starting point is understanding rather than trying to fix something. I’m interested in what is happening for you now, but also in the experiences, relationships and ways of coping that may have shaped how you came to be here. Often, things that cause difficulty in the present began as understandable ways of adapting to something earlier in life.
My approach is integrative and relational. We might explore deeper patterns and different parts of yourself, while also using more practical ways of working when they are useful. I don’t believe one method fits everyone, so the work develops around you, what we discover together and what you actually find helpful.
The relationship we build is an important part of that. I’ll bring curiosity, honesty and what I know, but I also trust that you know things about yourself that nobody else can know for you. My role is to help us uncover and make sense of those things together, at a pace that feels manageable.
Conversation is at the heart of my work
I believe there can be something powerful about two people paying sustained attention to one person's experience.
By conversation, I don't mean simply having a chat. I'll listen carefully, ask questions, reflect what I'm hearing and sometimes offer an idea or connection for us to consider. You might correct me, disagree with me or find yourself saying something neither of us expected.
I don't think the therapist has to possess the answer for a conversation to be therapeutic. Sometimes something begins to change because we have understood it differently, found words for something that had remained vague, noticed a pattern as it was happening, or allowed something difficult to be spoken and properly heard.
For me, therapy is something we do together. I bring psychological knowledge, experience and curiosity. You bring something equally important: the lived experience of being you.
How change can happen
Sometimes change is quite deliberate. We might use practical approaches drawn from CBT, mindfulness, breathing or grounding techniques, observation and other ways of experimenting with how you respond. You can try something, notice what happens and gradually develop greater choice.
But not every change in therapy happens because we deliberately practise a technique.
Sometimes something shifts because it has been understood, experienced or spoken about differently. Connections continue developing between conversations. An old belief begins to feel less convincing. You recognise a need you have habitually dismissed, understand a reaction differently or simply notice one day that something which once happened automatically no longer has quite the same hold over you.
I think both kinds of change matter:
Change through practice, and change through discovery and integration. Often they overlap.
Your therapy, your direction
There is something else I consider fundamental.
The direction belongs to you.
I can ask questions, notice things, wonder about connections and sometimes invite you to look somewhere you may not have considered. But I don't decide where your therapy should take you.
We explore what you are willing to explore. You can slow something down, leave something alone, change direction, disagree with me or decide that something isn't useful.
My role isn't to reveal some version of the “real you” that I somehow understand better than you do. It's to help you become increasingly able to recognise and understand yourself: what you feel, what you need, what matters to you, which patterns restrict you and what you might want to do differently.
For me, that is where self-understanding, authenticity, agency and growth begin to connect.
What you can expect from me
I don't present myself as somebody who has finished figuring himself out. I continue my own personal therapy, clinical supervision and professional development. I think being willing to examine ourselves matters in this work, particularly when we're asking somebody else to do the same.
Nor do I see therapy as helping you become my idea of a healthier person. I'd rather help you understand yourself more fully and become increasingly free to decide what you want to carry forward, what you might want to change and what a more authentic life means to you.
Your therapy isn't about finding yourself in my story. It's about making room for yours.
If you'd like to know about my training, experience and professional status, you'll find those below. And if you're curious about the longer and rather less straightforward story of how I came to be doing this work, you can read My Story further down the page.
What Makes It Happen
I created What Makes It Happen as a quiet, thoughtful place where I could bring together my curiosity about people, my professional training, and the different strands of my work. It is where I continue to explore the questions that have shaped me, and share the things I have learned along the way in the hope that they may help others find their own way forward.
Professional Information
My route into psychotherapy has been less conventional than the contemporary UK pathway, so I think it's particularly important that you have clear information about my training, experience and professional status before deciding whether you would like to work with me.
Credentials & Continuing Development
My original training was undertaken in Ireland through the Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy (ICHP).
My principal ICHP qualifications are:
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Foundation Certificate in Hypnotherapy
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Diploma in Hypnotherapy & Psychotherapy
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Advanced Diploma in Practical Hypnotherapy & Psychotherapy
NCFE CACHE
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Level 3 Diploma in Counselling Skills
Alongside my psychotherapy training, I have undertaken further study including:
- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) approaches
- Internal Focused CBT
- Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
- Additional clinical hypnotherapy training
I receive regular clinical supervision and undertake my own ongoing personal psychotherapy.
Both are important parts of my practice. Supervision provides somewhere for me to reflect critically on my therapeutic work, recognise limitations and blind spots, consider ethical questions and ensure that my own responses do not become the client's responsibility.
My own therapy provides a different kind of continuing development: the experience of remaining willing to examine myself from the other chair.
Affiliations & Memberships
I am a member of:
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Association for Professional Hypnosis and Psychotherapy (APHP)
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National Register of Psychotherapists and Counsellors (NRPC)
These memberships reflect my professional background and areas of practice.
My principal psychotherapy and hypnotherapy training was undertaken through ICHP in Ireland rather than through the conventional contemporary UK training and accreditation pathway.
I am not currently registered with UK organisations such as BACP, UKCP or NCPS.
I believe it is important that prospective clients understand the route a therapist has taken, as professional titles, qualifications and memberships can represent different things.
Focus & Experience
I began therapeutic work following my training in Ireland and have worked with people therapeutically in different settings and at different stages of my career.
My work focuses on helping people better understand themselves, their experiences and the patterns that shape how they think, feel and relate.
Areas I commonly work with include:
- Anxiety and overwhelm
- Self-understanding and personal growth
- Shame and self-criticism
- Identity and authenticity
- Relationship patterns
- Life transitions and periods of change
- Understanding recurring thoughts, feelings and behaviours
My therapeutic experience includes work through 7 Cups and What Makes It Happen, alongside earlier roles supporting people through bereavement, health difficulties, life changes and complex personal circumstances.
Those experiences strengthened my belief that people need to be understood in context. Psychological understanding matters, but people's lives are also shaped by their relationships, health, circumstances, resources and the world around them.
Limits of my work
I take the limits of my competence seriously.
My work is particularly oriented towards self-understanding, relationships, anxiety, identity, authenticity, patterns of thinking, feeling and relating, life transitions and personal growth.
There are circumstances requiring specialist treatment, crisis intervention, psychiatric or multidisciplinary care, or particular expertise that I cannot responsibly provide.
If I believe your needs fall outside my competence, I will be open about that and, where possible, encourage you towards more appropriate support.
Finding the right help is more important than trying to make my way of working fit everybody.
My Story
Because I am often asked and it can come up in conversation I have written below an account of my life from a therapeutic pathway point of view. I leave it here unsure of its true meaning for my website. At the very least I hope that something about it resonates with you too and in that sharing we find ourselves more real.
Finding my way
I don't think I became a therapist because I always knew that was what I wanted to do. My route here has been much less direct than that.
As a young child, I had significant hearing problems because of glue ear. For a period of my early childhood, I simply wasn't hearing the world around me properly. I was quiet, withdrawn and often absorbed in my own world.
I don't know how much one caused the other, and I'm wary of constructing explanations backwards from adulthood. But I sometimes wonder what it was like learning to understand people when parts of what they were saying weren't always available to me.
I developed a rich internal life. I could disappear into imagination for hours. Stories, music, ideas and imagined worlds fascinated me. That imagination was genuinely creative and pleasurable and remains an important part of who I am. I also wonder whether sometimes it gave me somewhere to go when the world outside felt harder to negotiate.
As I grew older, I became fascinated by people too. I wanted conversations about why we behave as we do, consciousness, identity, meaning and what makes somebody who they are. I certainly wasn't thinking about any of this therapeutically. I was just interested.
Another tendency became familiar. When I wasn't sure how to be, I became quite good at working out how I thought I was supposed to appear. I could be funny and sociable. I could have ideas and ambitions and imagine interesting futures for myself.
Underneath that, I was often much less certain than I appeared.
I was trying to find my place.
Becoming an adult
My late teens were difficult. I left home young and became involved in an important relationship. For a while, I felt as though I'd stepped straight into adulthood. I was independent, in love and imagining the life ahead of me.
The reality was more complicated.
When the relationship ended, I discovered how little independent structure I had actually built beneath the life I'd been imagining. I struggled considerably and eventually my parents helped me home.
I don't want to retrospectively diagnose that younger version of myself or pretend I now completely understand him. But I can recognise something that continued through much of my early life.
I found it extremely difficult to say that I needed help.
I could present myself as coping while privately struggling considerably more than people realised. I wanted them to see the person I was trying to become rather than the person who was struggling underneath.
My twenties became less about finding a dramatic answer and more about gradually constructing an ordinary life.
I worked in warehouses, returned to college to study professional gardening, built a small gardening round, worked on an estate and eventually became a delivery driver travelling around Britain.
There wasn't a coherent career plan. But there was work, routine, friendship, somewhere to live and money coming in.
There were pubs, laughter, music and writing. There were conversations that lasted far too long because somebody had started talking about consciousness, the soul or the meaning of life. I loved travelling around Britain for work and discovering how different somewhere could feel after only a few hours on the road. I could leave Swindon, get out of the van in Leeds and suddenly everybody sounded different.
There was a great deal of ordinary life going on.
And I was beginning to function again.
The anxiety hadn't disappeared. I had simply become quite good at keeping much of it to myself.
Looking back, I also recognise how much of those years involved searching for somewhere to belong. I could readily organise myself around the people I was with.
I liked people and people generally seemed to like me. I could be sociable, amiable and funny.
But being liked and allowing myself to be properly known weren't always the same thing.
Building a life
I met my wife in 2000, back when meeting somebody online meant Yahoo Messenger rather than dating apps.
I was actually looking for an artist to help with an idea I had for making Japanese lanterns. I noticed from her profile that she appeared creative. More importantly, she was online. More importantly still, she was local. And, if I'm completely truthful, perhaps most importantly at that particular moment, she was a she.
I said hello. She said hello back.
Something began.
What struck me was how comfortable she seemed expressing herself. She could be emotionally open while also being strong, direct and very much her own person. I found that combination both attractive and challenging.
I had spent years retreating into thinking when feelings became uncomfortable. She had considerably less patience for that. What do you think? What do you feel? What do you actually want? “I don't know” didn't always get me very far.
We moved in together and began building a life.
More than twenty-five years later, we're still doing that.
The years between have contained the things lives contain: family, children, work, moves, responsibilities, travel, plans that worked and plans that didn't, losses, arguments, laughter, mistakes, new ideas and ordinary evenings.
There were people to think about other than myself and responsibilities that couldn't remain theoretical.
Gradually, the life I'd spent so much time imagining was being replaced by something much less perfect and considerably more valuable.
A life I was actually living.
Trying to understand
Anxiety remained part of that life. In my early thirties, I was diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder and had a short course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
CBT helped. Perhaps most importantly, it gave me a framework. Thoughts, feelings and behaviours could influence one another. Anxiety wasn't simply something mysterious happening to me. There were processes I could begin to notice and understand.
Talking about myself was difficult, though. I wasn't accustomed to turning towards my own experience with another person and trying to put it into words.
Even so, something had opened.
Having a framework for one part of my experience seemed to create a much larger collection of questions.
My old curiosity was still there. What was consciousness? How did memory work? Why did people experience themselves so differently? How much of who we are is shaped by what happened to us? What happens inside the mind that we don't consciously understand?
Some of those interests took me considerably further outside conventional psychology than I would probably venture today.
One was past-life regression.
At the time, I was fascinated by the possibility that consciousness might somehow continue beyond death. Regression appeared to offer a way of investigating that question experientially, so I explored it and eventually practised it professionally.
My understanding of regression has changed considerably since then. I don't claim that experiences occurring during regression provide evidence of previous lives. Memory, imagination, suggestion, symbolism and narrative are far too complicated for me to make that claim.
But something important happened while I was doing that work.
I became less interested in proving where an experience came from and increasingly interested in what the experience meant to the person having it.
The psyche was becoming more interesting to me than the paranormal.
That shift eventually led me towards hypnosis, hypnotherapy and psychotherapy.
Learning the craft
I trained in Ireland with the Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy.
There were things about hypnosis that suited the person I was then. It offered structure. There were processes to learn and techniques that could be practised. After so many years of uncertainty, there was something reassuring about having a method.
There was probably something else in it for me too.
Being the practitioner gave me a role.
I could prepare. I could know things. I could have some idea what was supposed to happen next.
Then I had to sit opposite an actual person.
That was considerably harder.
I was anxious when I began practising. I could overprepare and sometimes talk too much. There were times when I felt as though I was performing the role of therapist rather than inhabiting it.
But something began happening that no amount of preparation could control.
Clients kept being themselves.
Thankfully.
Some people seemed to benefit considerably more from having somewhere to talk than from the intervention I'd carefully prepared. Initially, that could leave me wondering whether I was actually doing therapy at all.
Gradually, I began wondering whether the conversation was the therapy.
People challenged my assumptions in other ways too. Sometimes something I'd been taught to regard as therapeutically important wasn't what the person sitting opposite me considered important. Sometimes people didn't fit the explanation. Sometimes the intervention I'd prepared wasn't what the hour needed.
And sometimes the most useful thing I could do was stop trying quite so hard to be the therapist and pay closer attention to the person.
I was beginning to discover psychotherapy.
I became increasingly interested in what happened around the techniques.
How did somebody understand what had happened to them? What were they frightened of? What did they believe about themselves? What happened in their relationships? Why could something that seemed perfectly sensible to one person feel completely impossible to another?
The questions that had once been intensely personal were becoming professional questions too.
But other people weren't me.
Their experiences didn't exist to confirm what I'd discovered about myself, any more than they existed to confirm a therapeutic theory.
Theories can be enormously useful. They help us recognise patterns, organise complexity and notice possibilities we might otherwise miss.
But the person sitting opposite us does not exist to demonstrate that our theory is correct.
The more I learned, the less interested I became in appearing to possess the answer.
I became more interested in the quality of the question.
Outside the therapy room
When I returned to the UK, I imagined psychotherapy would become the next chapter of my working life.
It didn't.
My practice didn't establish itself and eventually I went to work for Nationwide Building Society.
Looking back, I don't regard those years as therapeutically irrelevant at all. People don't stop being psychologically complicated because the conversation happens over a phone rather than in a therapy room.
Later, as a Community Navigator within public health, my understanding broadened considerably. I visited people in their homes. Suddenly, somebody wasn't arriving in a controlled room and telling me about their life. I was entering the life.
I saw how health, housing, money, family, bureaucracy, opportunity, relationships and the resources available to somebody could profoundly affect their ability to cope. It reinforced something that now sits close to the centre of how I understand people: We make sense in context.
Psychology matters enormously. But psychology isn't everything. Sometimes what looks like an individual's inability to cope makes considerably more sense when we understand what they're actually being asked to cope with.
During this period, I also developed recurrent problems with dizziness and balance. Medical investigations didn't initially provide a clear explanation and anxiety was suggested.
There was an obvious logic to that. I had a history of anxiety. But the explanation didn't feel right to me.
Eventually, I worked with a physiotherapist who identified significant problems with my neck. Treatment and exercises directed towards the physical problem substantially improved my symptoms.
That experience stayed with me because an explanation can be plausible, professionally delivered and consistent with everything we already know about somebody and still be wrong.
Or incomplete.
When professional theory and somebody's lived experience don't quite fit, I think that's a reason to become more curious, not more certain.
Finding my way back
My Community Navigator role eventually ended during that period of ill health and once again I found myself outside therapeutic work. But therapy hadn't really left me.
In 2017, I began working online through 7 Cups. It offered me a way back. By then I was different from the practitioner who had originally trained in Ireland. My work became increasingly conversational, relational and integrative.
Person-centred thinking became important to me. Psychodynamic ideas helped me think about development, relationships and how earlier experiences can continue to influence present life. I became interested in the different and sometimes contradictory parts of ourselves: our needs, protections, vulnerabilities and ways of relating.
Practical approaches such as CBT remained useful when they genuinely fitted what somebody needed. But I became less concerned with deciding which theoretical box somebody belonged in.
Theories are maps. They are not the person.
Increasingly, when somebody brought anxiety, depression, shame, trauma, a diagnosis or a behaviour they desperately wanted to change, I found myself wondering about the person around it.
What happened around this? When did it begin to make sense? What might it protect? What does it cost now? What happens in relationships? What has somebody learned they need to be in order to belong?
Sometimes the question isn't simply:
How do we get rid of this?
It may also be:
How did this way of being come to make sense?
Understanding doesn't mean something must remain unchanged. Sometimes understanding how a way of responding developed allows us to approach it differently and then decide whether we still need it in quite the same way.
The therapist is in the room too
There was another part of my development that took me longer to understand.
For years, I think I'd been trying to become sufficiently therapist-like. Professional boundaries, therapeutic roles, techniques and theories matter enormously. But somewhere within that, I could repeat something I'd done elsewhere in life: work out what I thought the role required and try to perform it convincingly.
Experience has gradually taken me in another direction.
There is Graham outside the therapy room and Graham the therapist. They aren't identical, but neither are they completely separate people. I bring training, experience, theory, supervision and professional responsibility into my work. But I also bring myself.
I have vulnerabilities. I have blind spots. I have misunderstood myself. I have been anxious, defensive, uncertain and wrong. I have needed other people. For much of my earlier life, vulnerability felt dangerous. I don't understand it in quite the same way anymore.
Unexamined vulnerability can certainly interfere with therapeutic work.
A therapist's needs should not become the client's responsibility. But I don't believe being human makes somebody less capable of being a therapist. What matters is whether we're willing to recognise our vulnerabilities, think about them and take responsibility for them.
More recently, I returned to personal therapy myself. There is something different about understanding therapeutic ideas professionally and encountering yourself from the other chair.
My own therapy has brought me back to questions that have accompanied me for much of my life.
Who am I when I'm not working out what somebody else needs me to be?
Which ways of responding genuinely express me, and which developed because they once helped me belong, avoid criticism, feel safe or maintain relationships?
Which of those ways of being do I still need?
Those are questions rather than conclusions.
I don't think there's some perfectly authentic Graham buried underneath everything else waiting to be excavated.
The searching boy is still here. So is the dreamer. The person who can become completely fascinated by an idea is definitely still here. The humour is here. And anxiety hasn't been erased from my history.
What has changed is that I recognise more of myself. There are now two strands to my development that continually overlap: learning more about myself and learning more about the craft of therapy.
I don't expect either to finish.
What I believe now
After everything I've learned about psychotherapy, my understanding of it has actually become simpler.
I think people make sense.
That doesn't mean everything somebody does has a neat psychological explanation waiting to be discovered. People are contradictory. Biology matters. Circumstances matter. Chance matters. And there are things about ourselves that may remain uncertain.
But feelings, behaviours and ways of relating that initially appear incomprehensible can often become more understandable when we know more about the person experiencing them.
Understanding doesn't mean everything should remain unchanged.
Sometimes change is deliberate. We learn something, practise it, experiment with another response and discover that we have more choice than we thought.
Sometimes change seems to emerge differently. Something we've talked about continues developing beyond the conversation. Connections are made. Meanings shift. We find ourselves responding differently before we've entirely worked out why.
Often the two processes meet.
What matters to me is that the direction remains yours.
I don't think my role as a therapist is to tell somebody who they really are. I'm increasingly suspicious of anybody who thinks they can. What I can offer is curiosity, experience, psychological understanding and another human being willing to pay close attention while we try to understand things together. I won't know exactly where that will lead. I don't think I should.
Because ultimately my work isn't about helping somebody become my idea of a healthier person. It's about helping them become increasingly able to recognise, understand and inhabit themselves, with greater freedom to decide what happens next.
Therapy for self-understanding, authenticity and personal growth.