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 35 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 abuse refuges, alcohol rehabs, homeless services, and in private practice. Working with adults, teenagers and children. I have worked with people individually, in groups, and in their various relationship constellations.
My own training as a counsellor and then psychotherapist began in the co-counselling community when I was 19 yrs. I went on to train as a person-centred 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 had its limitations - as everything does. 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. However, the delivery of this approach in the UK was conservatively mainstream and failed to address 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 social prejudice and personal 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 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. The personal, professional and political always overlap.
I brought in this mix of philosophy, somatic awareness and social politics as a visiting lecturer at the universities and colleges I have worked at for 19 years before deciding to develop and deliver my own CPD programme,. This has included short workshops in the UK and Australia and an ongoing 6-day course for therapists working with clients in polyamorous and open relationships https://openingupcpd.com/
