Erica Cleverly

When you have been on medication for a long time and discover you no longer need it, it can take time and planning to work out how to come off the medication safely. Having a space to discuss this, with someone who is not your GP but a neutral other, will enable you to take the time to explore how you want to do this, what you may need in terms of environment and other forms of support to make this happen. In my experience learning body skills, learning to listen to your body deeply can be a great way to prepare to come off medication safely. To have someone to speak to who is not part of your history and so who does not have an agenda as to whether you come off the medication or stay on it, is a good place to start this journey.

I provide a space for you to bring your issues with Covid that you may be struggling to resolve in your close relationships. Having a space to put stuff down, look at other ways of thinking about things, and discover what you really think and feel can be invaluable at a time when we are all being encouraged to polarise.

Are you getting ready to retire? Have you given years of dedicated service to an organisation? Are you used to living your life in a particular structure and context? Have you had the time or space to think about the kind of life you wish to create when you retire?

I offer a space to reflect with you on your themes and interests and the things you want to look at regarding your retirement.

Are you exploring a career change? Are you fed up with your current position? Maybe you have been passed over for promotion, maybe you feel stuck? You might be struggling with deciding whether to invest more where you are or is it time to move on? You could even be listening to that still small voice prompting you in the direction of your dreams? Whatever it is, let's work together to help you create your next step.

I can support you in making a challenging decision. We can map the whole terrain, the different levels of feelings and thoughts and explore what your possible choices are. By rehearsing the possible you can visit the possible outcomes of your choices prior to making them.

If you have a challenging choice to make, need a neutral space to explore, could benefit from working with a professional who has no agenda as to what direction you choose, then let's get started.

I think parents are having a particularly challenging time at present. Sharing lockdown with the whole family, parenting children through challenging times, trying to keep the whole family in some kind of balance as well as meeting your own needs is no small task.

If you would benefit from a space out of the hurly burly of family life, a space just for you to recharge, explore things with someone outside the family unit, construct a self care plan or anything else you need to attend to. I look forward to hearing from you.

It is my experience that mainstream counselling and therapy do not recognise some of the very harmful behaviours that people who are deeply damaged can engage in. Often these behaviours are covert, difficult to reality check or in some other way get under the radar. It is very important to get good support if you feel that this is something that is going on in your life. A no bullshit, direct, strongly boundaried relationship can help you to get your own boundaries back and decide how you need to proceed.

You may be struggling either with your own worries and overwhelm, or particular family members may have become the 'voice of doom' around all things Covid related.

If you want to explore healthy ways of navigating your way through this pandemic, ways that will lead your family through a boundaried experience of their own day to day wellbeing, irrespective of what happens to be going on in the media, I would love to work with you.

We can explore reframing, setting wellbeing boundaries with family members and address the importance of language in these challenging times we are all navigating.

Holding the Broader Context Together
The relief when you discover where systems are involved, you are not the sole cause. You may be on the effect end of structural and systemic abuse which by it's nature is unconscious, collective and does not factor in the impact on certain individuals who are particularly vulnerable to picking up this level of process as they find themselves on the effect end of a collective causal process.

The system seems to work for the majority, because people adapt, sometimes against their own best interests.

Those people who speak up can find themselves treated as pariahs, villified and otherwise victimised. The fact they do not consent to being oppressed may mirror the position of scapegoat in the family system.

Finding and holding onto your self boundary and protecting your line in the sand is so important. It is not always easy when we are dealing with unfamiliar systems where we are responding in the role of being a user. The unfamiliarity of what we are being exposed to along with stumbling into unusual practices in line with the personal preferences or needs of a professional, can effect us deeply at the family systems and personal level. When this has all taken place without our agreement and in the face of our trust placed in the professional. Privileges gained by the professional shielding themselves within complex systemic structures for which no one person is responsible can impact on the individual. The abuses that derive from such behaviours, abuses which are largely invisible to everyone else, but felt by us because we have inadvertently become on the impact end of some interaction that fails us monumentally, dangerously and irrevocably. It is when that line disappears that we can experience ourselves as taken advantage of, abused or otherwise wronged or misunderstood, because someone else is controlling our position of consent invisibly or visibly through some gained entitlement that then becomes the vehicle for abuse. I call it abuse because all protest is pathologised, overridden and ignored and the usual vehicle of communication between two people gets off to a very bad start from which it never fully recovers. What remains in the place of the healthy contact that could have happened is a distortion that is denied and unresolved.

Supported by my understandings from my therapy training, and the many years of personal therapy, I aim to create resources for those who may feel exempt from the skills based aspects of the wonderful support that good therapy can give.

It is inevitable that those professionals who buy into diagnosis as valid, may unwittingly create some compromise to the client or patient in the alliance without necessarily meaning to.

It is the case sadly that diagnosis, and medication, or some other contraindication can obstruct the healthy unfolding of a healing relationship between the professional and client because whatever happens in that space happens within a power dynamic.

A diagnosis and medication can become an ongoing force for causal impact sanctioned at the highest levels in our society.

At the relational level this can configure a sense of entitlement in the people around the person carrying a diagnosis and can constellate their relationships at times in hierarchical constructs where power, entitlement and the tyranny of the well, can all figure in the mix.

It has been my experience that at a structural level the psychiatric, medical and therapy industries hold uncompromising neutrality about aspects of each others practice as a professional courtesy.

This can mean that there is a population of people, their service users, who simply don't get the support they need on this boundary.

These patients and clients may instead find themselves manipulated or coerced into accepting forms of support at an adult level for which they are then made personally responsible, and yet that compromises the very autonomy that makes this choice possible on this and other levels, or in some other way causes harm instead of the good intended.

There is a long history of patient's who 'for their own good' have been subjected to ECT or medication, delivering long term ongoing harmful effects for some.

Worse still, some people never get their autonomy or their health back.

Where family, systemic or structural agendas lead to lies and bystanding, the individual patient or client can find themselves oppressed by forces greater than them and silenced and compliant, or silenced and fighting the world, as the unmet needs for understanding bypass them due to professional conviction, neutrality, boundaries, and more sinister perhaps, the hidden agendas of family members.

The resulting sense of utter despair, and the diminishment of trust, can over time produce a person who seems without care, or defeated, or desperate. When attention from the other can at times feel like the worst kind of negligence, masquerading as care, arguably it is safer to remain lost in the wilderness. Some people opt for belligerence, or are in some other way intractable, as the only form of communication left to them when words fail, denial is rife and only a stand can be made. Authenticity or fawning is all that is left to you, and there isn't always a choice, because you may feel completely exhausted. This is a moment's exchange for the people you are dealing with whilst for you, it is your life, your one precious life you are seeking to protect, as the forces you feel raised against you, continue to do their own thing.

The core truths of what is being transacted through this form of managed neglect at one level, can remain invisible at a systemic, structural, or family level with the person who holds the awareness not having the power to speak up or be heard because of the structure of the professional healing relationship that confers a selective hearing based on the architecture of the healing modality. Add to this the agendas of family members who either through their silence or their willing participation, may deny the truth, because normal healthy forms of accountability can be missing from such family dynamics in respect of this family member.

I believe a definition of oppression is when you are in a position that is denied and each person's agenda can feel like you are only ever recruited into their understanding of your context, when in fact there is a context between you operating they are not even aware of because it sits in an unquestioned entitlement in them. All that is being offered is on their terms, and you are likely to be misunderstood when you stray into speaking up about the core of what you are experiencing.

You may experience yourself as misunderstood because the denial is so institutionalised as a given and so wrapped up in entitlements not extended to you, because you are on the effect end. If you are heard to any extent, words like extraordinary, unusual can be bandied about, giving you the clear message you are not on the map.

Where systems don't thoroughly take cause and effect into account, the very heart of your experience will not be visible anywhere except perhaps in your behaviour - hence you get made responsible.

Worse still you can end up feeling pathologised for having a deep experience and sense of awareness when power dynamics creep in as they inevitably do.

For the individual who finds themselves in this situation, the enormity of the task of having to give unwelcome feedback to the professional support person that is failing to deliver the support needed,(through no fault of their own) can feel totally distressing and utterly crazymaking.

For the professional involved who may have given their all to helping you, you can become a case, a text book case, the one all the literature warns practitioner's about, the client who self sabotages, who does not wish to recover etc etc...there is a myriad of explanations given as to why clients don't thrive. The explanations or contraindications are all personalised as if a context, system and other subjective forces at play do not exist.

Add to this the inability to clearly think things through because of the sheer level of complexity of what you are being exposed to, none of which belongs within your personal boundary. This can mean that when you do make an attempt to speak with some credibility about what you are experiencing, the moment you say something that does not logically link, it becomes about you in their eyes.

If you are empathic it can be deeply painful to have to keep asserting your authentic position in a relationship that is constellated at a systemic level to be structurally unable to hear you.

Unfortunately the boundary compromise is one of entitlement conferred by role, and the consequences of being on the receiving end of this may have outcomes that ricochet into many areas of your life.

When you know also there is a great deal of sincere desire to support you in the mix, perhaps coming from a professional you have formed a good relationship with, it can be existential agony to have an elephant in the room with you both.

I believe both parties suffer, because you can both feel.

The professional gets to go home at the end of the day and put it down.

Because you are on the impact end of it, you feel compelled to keep trying to get your own sovereign boundary in place again. In my experience the body can become the container for this process, because there is no container for the material that this complex situation produces and not surprisingly people resist being recruited into this role as the material is toxic, systemic and not digestible.

In respecting the boundaries of the different professionals and disciplines involved, you can find yourself unwittingly colluding with your own ongoing and eventual complete abandonment.

In trying to speak up or worse still waiting for them to get it, you can find yourself pathologised as being difficult, when the truth of the matter is, it has very little to do with you.

Except you are the person who has been put in a difficult situation.

The sense can be that everyone is participating in your health on their own terms with their own agendas, rather than understanding or empowering you to meet your unmet needs on this boundary.

Whilst I can't offer you a therapeutic relationship as I no longer practise, I can walk alongside you creating skills based resources to support you in making progress on your own terms.

Do you long to resolve certain relational miscommunications that repeat in some of your key relationships? If so, I can share a skill set with you that you can take away and practise and watch how your understanding of what goes 'wrong' in your contact with others can start to resolve.

We all play unconscious games. It usually happens when people feel under threat and unable to transparently address whatever is bothering them. This is when the games begin.

If you have a pattern in your life of some repeat games that keep happening then you can benefit from learning how to stop playing games, engaging in other's games, and enabling a clearer exchange about whatever is bothering you and/or the other person.

If you are ready for more honest communication in your relationships, more intimacy and less drama, then I would love to work with you and pass on this skill set to you.

Have you realised the importance of establishing a good self-care practice? It can be particularly helpful in challenging times to have a regular practice to come back to time and again no matter what the other vicissitudes of life.

If you are interested in establishing or re-establishing your self-care we can map the territory and get you started.