Kate Bracefield

Being human is to encounter distress. Navigating these times is of importance and interest. Distress is a shared experience which without support and understanding can feel just the opposite: isolating, lonely and sometimes frightening and lacking in hope.

Areas of Special Interest

I work with all manifestations of distress and have a particular interest in:

• traumatic stress
• eating disorder and mind/body disharmony
• grief
• relationships
• cultural dislocation
• depression
• anxiety

Counselling/Therapy Services

In the course of living our lives we can find ourselves lost from connection with aspects of ourselves and others, displaced from our strength, agility, joy and capacity to experience our self belonging in the world as unique and complete. In an age of counterfeit individualism, heightened materialism, competitiveness and disconnected modes of communication, it is easy to come adrift, becoming unconnected and stuck.

The ways we withdraw from our self-world connection are many and varied and are given names like depression, anxiety, or traumatic stress. They show up in our relationships as arguments and resentment, in ourselves as punitive and critical thinking, lack of confidence and self-harm or as physical illness, loneliness and isolation.

All circumstances that lead to disconnection present as places of new possibility. Retrieving our uniqueness as a carrier of our vitality and self enables engagement with our lives, the people in them, and our own potential in the world: our own authenticity. I offer Psychotherapy as a way of reaching a place where we are held less by fear, anxiety or emptiness and numbness and are guided by our capacity to experience life richly, expansively and with a greater capacity for satisfaction.

Counselling/Therapy Approach

Gestalt therapy is an awareness-based form of Psychotherapy. That means the therapeutic focus comes to rest on what is happening in the moment as a way of studying the self. We discover what is influencing how we experience and evaluate our living and determines how we respond to it. Exploring how we are active in shaping and maintaining these experiences allows opportunity for new responses, inviting alternatives and achieving a living harmony of mind and body-self. We work at your pace, gently and collaboratively.

I am intrigued with the Japanese concepts of wabi / sabi. And bring this aesthetic to my life and my therapy: presence, authenticity, and knowing with compassion that true beauty lies in imperfection and our fallibility.

About Me

I have experience working in both the education and mental health sectors before training as a psychotherapist. Prior to establishing a private practice, a number of years ago, I spent time working in several community agencies where I saw a variety of people from differing cultural backgrounds and developed a wish for greater access to therapy for all.

My early background revolves around the arts and oil painting in particular. Art continues to be a defining influence in my life and aesthetic awareness guides my responses in the therapy room. I draw on my creativity to empathise attune and respond with freshness therapeutically.

I work with adults both young and old for short or long term therapy.