Niki D
Niki D
The pleasures and meanings we find in life always come through connection. A connection with other people or animals, through being in nature or urban settings. It comes through enjoying our embodied experiences and through seeking new insights and experiences as we explore this world of ours.
That sense of connection has been the passion and motivation in my life and my work as a psychotherapist and counsellor for 30+ years. It has allowed me the good fortune of meeting and working therapeutically with hundreds of diverse people in a range of different settings. From prisons, domestic violence refuges, alcohol rehabs, homeless services, and in private practice. Working with adults, teenagers, and children. With people individually, in groups, and in their various relationship constellations.
My own training as a counsellor and then psychotherapist started with being involved in the co-counselling community at 19 yrs. I went on to train as a person-centered counsellor, which provided me with the invaluable grounding of deep respect, compassion, and a relational and ethical stance toward clients.
After seven years I found this approach, like everything, had its limitations. The emphasis was individualistic and seemed unprepared to address the harder facts of life, such as death and uncertainty.
“We know what we know, we do what we do, but do we know what we do does?”
Foucault
An MA in existential-phenomenological psychotherapy offered me the rigor I was seeking. There was a call to conscience, to finding your own values beyond the norm and seeing if you could live according to them. Unfortunately, the delivery of this approach in the UK was conservatively mainstream and failed to deliver the political challenges inherent within the theory. It was heavily biased towards the intellect, neglecting the importance of embodied and energetic wisdom, and failed to understand the impact of trauma.
This led me to undertake somatic trauma therapy training as well as GSRD therapy training through Pink Therapy. GSRD is an acronym that brings attention in particular to gender and sexual identities and relationship styles that are de-legitimised, sidelined, or pathologised by oppressive mainstream cultural messages.
The feminist, decolonising, and intersectional perspective I already held found a place here. It brought the misaligned phrase ‘woke’ into therapy more candidly, rather than pretending there is a ‘neutral’ way of delivering therapy.
I was able to bring in some of this mix of philosophy, somatic awareness, and social politics as a visiting lecturer at the various universities and colleges I have worked at. Currently, my focus is on delivering my own CPD programme.
