the question that shaped my life
I would watch birds singing their hearts out, trees growing in unique shapes always reaching for the sun and water flowing without hesitation. Everything around me in nature clearly knew how to be fully itself. And I kept wondering: what happens that makes us humans lose that?
I've since spent my life asking what actually makes people flourish - not just survive or cope, but truly feel alive and fully themselves.
I studied psychology in the early 2000s, but during my training I kept coming up against the same wall - mainstream psychology was trying to manage symptoms, to help people cope better and treated them as if they existed in isolation. As if healing could happen without recognising that we're fundamentally relational beings. That we need connection to ourselves, to others, to something larger than our individual struggles to actually flourish. And it wasn't asking those deeper, essential questions: what clouds over who we actually are? What makes us lose touch with our essence?
I realised I wasn't going to find what I was looking for in traditional training.
what wilderness taught me
At the same time as studying psychology I was guiding groups through wilderness experiences in Southern Africa and I kept noticing something: when people stepped away from human-made environments and into natural spaces they'd suddenly have access to something they couldn't easily reach before. They'd encounter something more essential, they'd meet a deeper part of themselves.
It took me years to understand what was happening and connect this to the questions I'd been asking.
In wilderness everything is completely being itself. A tree doesn't perform being a tree. Water doesn't adapt to please. The sunbird does not try to be more like a robin, everything contributes to the whole by being fully who it is.
And when humans are in that field - our eyes on real horizons, surrounded by these diverse others being, a tuning fork effect takes place. We are reminded of our own essence. The tuning fork of the natural world recalibrates us into who we actually are, underneath all that we learned to be.
FINDING THE FRAMEWORK
For years, I could see this happening but I still didn't fully understand why we lose touch with this essence.
Until I found NARM (NeuroAffective Relational Model).
And suddenly everything clicked.
When we're young and our fundamental needs are not consistently met - needs for safety, for being truly seen, for attunement, for trust, for the space to be ourselves, we become brilliantly adaptive. We figure out how to survive the environment we're in. We develop patterns - ways of being, thinking, relating that help us navigate what we're given. And these patterns really work - they protect us incredibly well and they get us through.
But they also shape everything that comes afterwards - how we see ourselves, how we experience emotion, how we inhabit our bodies, how we show up in relationships.
These adaptations emerge from a gap, between what we really needed and what was actually available. But this brilliant adjustment doesn't just live in the body, it becomes a whole way of being. It shapes how we see ourselves and the world ... and gradually pulls us away from who we actually are.
My questions had been answered.
I realised that the wilderness work and the NARM work were the SAME work.
Both are about helping people access who they actually are underneath the adaptations. One recognises nature as a natural tuning fork. The other uses relational presence and nervous system understanding.
That's when I came back to therapy - but with this completely different lens.
my work now
I work as a trauma-informed psychotherapist specialising in complex-PTSD and attachment wounding.
I help people access their essence - what's always been there but got buried under layers of adaptation.
I'm a NARM Master Therapist and registered Social Worker, with a Master's degree in Environmental Humanities.
I bring that 25-year wilderness exploration and learning with me: the understanding that everything thrives when it is fully itself. Including you.
I live and practice in Hoedspruit, South Africa, offering both in-person and online sessions.
