Identity, mental health and psychotherapy
gender/therapy is about gender, sexuality, mental health and psychotherapy.
This is where I share my writings about these topics. I’m a transgender woman, a psychotherapist who has been practicing for more than a decade, a professional presenter, trainer, and mum of two kids. The combination of these roles gives me insight and perspectives into issues around identity and psychology that I want to share in the hope that they might be helpful – to clients and therapists in particular, but also to anyone interested in better understanding these topics.
Gender, sexuality and identity exist as internal concepts – what we think, feel and experience in our own minds, the realm of therapy. They also exist as social constructs and things that we live, breathe and perform in relationship with others. The distinction between the internal experience of identity and the external experience of how we are seen and treated by others is a complex multi-directional process where one informs and influences the other and is turn informed and influenced by it. It’s this complex interaction that I want to reflect on here, and the implications it has for therapy (in particular) and for our lives and well-being more broadly.
If you’d like to contact me you can reach me through my practice page here, or you can find out more about the work I’ve done around technology overuse and addiction (and particularly gaming) here.