At Home in the World - Counselling, Nature Re-connection & Community building

At Home in the World

Counselling, Nature Re-connection & Community Building

Supporting you to navigate life's up and downs, to identify and address the defenses that stop you from living your best life and to reach your true potential.

Nature Re-Connection

Walking alongside you as you explore your relationship to the natural world and (re)-establish your sense of connection to the web of life.

You do not have to be good

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver 'Wild Geese'

Counselling & Psychotherapy

Life can feel hard - even overwhelming at times - but it doesn't have to stay that way. Often, people find talking to someone who understands can help to shift difficult feelings and allow them to fully engage with life once more.

There are many reasons that people seek counselling and psychotherapy; perhaps you feel stuck? Perhaps you are anxious, angry, depressed, or in emotional pain? Maybe you notice your relationships are unsatisfactory, they always follow the same pattern? Or maybe life, with all its demands, is just grinding you down? Spending some time exploring these issues with a trained counsellor and psychotherapist can offer clarity, insight, and relief.

After an initial free 15-minute phone chat, our first session is an opportunity for you to explore your key issues, ask questions about the process and clarify what you want to get out of our time together. If it feels right to work together, we will contract for a period of time and review after 6-8 sessions. Some people will want to engage in short-term work, focusing on one key issue, whilst others might want to spend longer exploring their core issues and their emerging purpose in life. The choice is always yours.

I offer a safe, nurturing, confidential and compassionate space for you to explore your material. I take an integrative approach, pulling on many modalities to suit your individual need, and hold a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychosynthesis Counselling from The Psychosynthesis Trust. Find out more about Psychosynthesis here. I am a registered member of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), adhere to the BACP Ethics and am fully insured. Please read more about me and what clients have said about our work together.

CONTACT ME TODAY

About Me

Hello, my name is Caitlyn McCarthy. I am an experienced and qualified counsellor and psychotherapist. I hold a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychosynthesis Counselling from The Psychosynthesis Trust, I am a member of the BACP and attend fortnightly clinical and peer-supervision to deepen my practice. As well as my own private practice based in Brighton & Hove and London, I have worked as an honorary therapist and continue to support practice sessions for trainee counsellors at The Psychosynthesis Trust and I also volunteer for RISE, a Brighton & Hove charity working to eradicate violence against women and girls. I have over twenty years of experience supporting survivors of abuse and people with multiple disadvantages; working both in the statutory and third sectors.

I am passionate about the benefits of therapy as it has been instrumental for me in navigating my own life's challenges. Walking alongside a warm, understanding and compassionate therapist, who was able to see my potential when it was lost to me and navigate me successfully through the quagmire, was pivotal. I hope I can do the same for you.

In 2011, I received a Winston Churchill Memorial Award to travel to the US to explore radical and innovative community responses to the issue of domestic abuse. I have a keen interest in mindfulness, Buddhism, yoga, somatic and trauma-informed practices, as well as ecotherapy and nature-based therapies. I am also fascinated by the power of imagination, creativity, and mythology in the pursuit of wholeness.

Through undertaking my own pilgrimage to feeling at home in the world; I whole-heartedly believe that anyone can achieve a sense of belonging. I look forward to walking alongside you for a while on your journey to re-connect to yourself and to the wider world.

Testimonials

Ria, London

Always wise and warm, Caitlyn became a grounding presence in my life as I navigated a particularly challenging year. She accompanied me with gentleness, acceptance, and, at just the right times, humour. I highly recommend her to anybody who is seeking personal growth. It was a transformative experience for me.

Kate, Brighton

Caitlyn is a warm, connected, courageous woman who brings her all and creates a space where people can bring their whole selves in the service of their vision. Not everyone has this capacity, but Caitlyn has it in spades.

Emma, London

Caitlyn provided a safe, non-judgemental space where I could bring my whole self. She fostered an atmosphere where I could truly open up in a way I hadn't been able to in a long time which enabled me to work through the barriers I was facing. I always felt truly heard and found her approach very healing and nourishing.

Psychosynthesis

Psychosynthesis is a school of psychology with groundbreaking concepts and experiential techniques for people interested in personal and psychospiritual transformation.

Where suffering can be caused by a loss of contact with who we really are, psychosynthesis seeks to restore and renew this contact.

Psychosynthesis is part of a wider movement of psychospiritual development, exploration, and inquiry. It is an integrative model that pulls from and integrates core concepts and principles from Psychoanalysis, Behavioural, Humanistic and Transpersonal frameworks.

As a transpersonal approach, psychosynthesis includes the human experience and moves beyond to integrate the spiritual aspect of existence.

Working in this psychospiritual way includes enhancing our awareness and expanding consciousness, meeting and embracing our challenges, pain and shadow aspects, as well as our light and joy. It means including the full range of the human experience whilst working in the present moment with what blocks or stops us, allowing an inner freedom to connect with the essence of our being-ness.

Psychosynthesis acknowledges our individual uniqueness and our connection to the whole.

Text from The Psychosynthesis Trust website.

Nature Re-Connection

'I believe a great part of the lostness we feel a a culture is a result of how alienated from the natural world we've become. Not only are we disconnected from nature but anaethetised to the enormity of that loss.....there is a deep well of pain: our unbelonging to the earth herself' (Toko-pa Turner)

Re-connection to nature and exploring our place in the natural order of things can be hugely therapeutic.

I offer all-weather hour-long therapeutic walking sessions outside in nature to explore your inner world reflected outside in the landscape around you.

Once we have established a therapeutic alliance, we will discuss the best location, landscape and setting to suit your needs and we will walk together - observing, noticing and reflecting on what is occuring both inside and out.

For more information about Nature Re-Connection Walks, please contact me for a free, preliminary 15 minutes chat

Community Building

'When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.' (Ram Dass)

Psychosynthesis is not only concerned with the manifestation and unfolding of the uniqueness of the individual, it also recognises the importance of our connection to the whole.

It has been proven that being in community, with a sense of belonging and purpose with others, can positively impact your physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing.

Contact me to find out about my Community Building offerings