Website Search

Recognising mental health issues and then finding a counsellor sometimes isn’t an easy process. With this in mind, my website is designed to provide an understandable overview of the world of psychotherapy and counselling to help you take the first step towards a life of positive mental health. Contact Me Contact Me There are a number of ways to contact me so please choose your preferred method from the options below and I will respond to you at my very earliest opportunity! Email You can email me directly using my email address lynn@lynnsomerfield.com . Alternatively, contact me via one of the contact forms I have provided below. Phone You are welcome to telephone me. My mobile phone number is 07762 738 238 . Location I tend to work at different locations throughout each week. I have a Central London clinic as well as a clinic in Lidlington, Bedfordshire . Contact Forms I have made two Contact Forms available on this page. Please select the one you require from the list below. Ask a Question Book an Initial Consultation Ask a Question Ask me anything, but please keep in mind that my expertise will be best utilised if your questions are related to Psychotherapy and Counselling! Your Question* First name* Last name* Email* Phone I consent to you processing the information I provide (which may include health information) for the purpose of responding to my enquiry * Please subscribe me to future communications and offers. Your personal details will remain confidential and will never be shared with any party outside me therapy practice Submit your Question Ask a Question Book an Initial Consultation The first step in any therapy journey is for us to meet for an initial consultation and get to know each other a little. At this first meeting, I will be asking you questions about the issues you’re struggling with right now and what you’re hoping to address in therapy. If you would like to book an initial consultation with me, please complete the form below. Please describe what you would like help with...* First name* Last name* Email* Phone I consent to you processing the information I provide (which may include health information) for the purpose of responding to my enquiry * Please subscribe me to future communications and offers. Your personal details will remain confidential and will never be shared with any party outside me therapy practice Submit your Request Book an Initial Consulation

Recognising mental health issues and then finding a counsellor sometimes isn’t an easy process. With this in mind, my website is designed to provide an understandable overview of the world of psychotherapy and counselling to help you take the first step towards a life of positive mental health. Workshops Introduction I run a number of workshops for members of the public as well as for professional CPD. Please come back and check this page regularly to see what workshops are planned, or simply Contact Me for more information. Information about current workshops is provided below. Most workshops are held in Central or West London, but I’m happy to consider travelling to other locations on request. Workshops A Matter of Life and Death A two-day workshop for those working with dying, death, grief and bereavement. Our beliefs about death shape the way we live. To fear death is often to fear life; to live more fully, we must find a way to meet loss, love and endings with greater honesty and compassion. Through creative and experiential exercises, we will explore our own relationship with death and the losses we have lived through. Drawing on writers and teachers including Stephen Levine, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Rumi and others, we will ask how we can support others in their suffering while also tending to our own unfinished grief. Download Leaflet Date & Price Enquiry Book Workshop Workshop - A Matter of Life and Death Addictions A 2-day workshop, part-lecture and part-experiential, aimed at counsellors, psychotherapists, students of counselling and psychotherapy, life coaches, trainers, and members of the public. I have over 30 years’ experience in the field of addiction. This exciting workshop is designed to get to the root of the addiction and help the layperson understand their addiction and student and graduate counsellors and psychotherapists assist people suffering from this debilitating condition. Download Leaflet Date & Price Enquiry Book Workshop Balancing the Chakras A two-day workshop for members of the public and interested professionals exploring the psychological, emotional and spiritual dimensions of the chakra system. When the chakras are out of balance, the natural flow of life force can feel blocked, often manifesting as emotional, physical, or repetitive patterns of behaviour. Drawing on the work of Anodea Judith, Caroline Myss, Alexander Lowen and others, this workshop offers a practical and creative approach to chakra balancing. Through massage, sound, breathwork, targeted yoga postures and reflective exercises, we will explore how the chakra system can support greater self-awareness, vitality and inner balance. Download Leaflet Date & Price Enquiry Book Workshop Gestalt and the Dreaming Body A two-day experiential workshop for counsellors, psychotherapists and student practitioners interested in working creatively with the body, dreams and lived experience. Drawing on Gestalt and process-oriented psychotherapy, this workshop explores the “dreaming body” as a source of meaning, imagination and psychological insight. We will work with sensation, movement, image, gesture and symptom as doorways into what the unconscious may be trying to express. Through practical exercises and guided exploration, participants will learn ways to listen more deeply to the body and to bring its hidden messages into therapeutic work. Download Leaflet Date & Price Enquiry Book Workshop Holding Difference A Workshop for Therapists A one-day staff development workshop exploring how therapists, trainers and facilitators can navigate difference in polarised times. We will look at what happens when dialogue becomes difficult, when certainty replaces curiosity, and when nuance begins to feel unsafe. Through reflection, discussion, and experiential exercises, we will explore how to stay grounded, thoughtful, and connected when working with sensitive socio-political themes, including race, decolonisation, Israel/Gaza, and other areas of conflict. The focus is on teaching stance, facilitation skills and the capacity to hold complexity without retreating into certainty or silence. Download Leaflet Date & Price Enquiry Book Workshop Women and Weight In this 2-day workshop we will explore our unwanted excess weight and look at this from a different point-of-view. Is our weight a burden we’re forced to carry or does it hold a message from the unconscious that we need to hear? When we discuss our struggles with food and weight, we are talking not just about bodily urges but issues such as emotional appetites and wanting to be loved. Download Leaflet Date & Price Enquiry Book Workshop New Book In her first book, psychotherapist Lynn Somerfield explores the subtle processes through which change begins to take root in our lives. Through reflection and insight, she considers how moments of awareness, courage, and compassion can gradually shape meaningful personal transformation Explore the Book Workshop Date & Price Enquiry Form Please use the form below to enquire about forthcoming workshop dates and pricing. Which workshop(s) would you like date and pricing information for (select all that apply)?* A Matter of Life and Death Addictions Balancing the Chakras Gestalt and the Dreambody Holding Difference Women and Weight Please indicate which type of workshop attendee you are?* Private Attendee Professional Attendee First name* Last name* Email* Phone I consent to you processing the information I provide (which may include health information) for the purpose of responding to my enquiry * Please subscribe me to future communications and offers. Your personal details will remain confidential and will never be shared with any party outside me therapy practice Submit your Enquiry Workshop Booking Form Please use the form below to book your place on one or more of my workshops. Once I receive your booking form, I will get in touch with you to reconfirm workshop dates and locations and to request payment. Which workshop(s) would you like to book (select all that apply)?* A Matter of Life and Death Addictions Balancing the Chakras Gestalt and the Dreambody Holding Difference Women and Weight Please indicate which type of workshop attendee you are?* Private Attendee Professional Attendee First name* Last name* Email* Phone I understand that bookings cancelled within eight weeks of the workshop will be charged in full * I consent to you processing the information I provide (which may include health information) for the purpose of responding to my enquiry * Please subscribe me to future communications and offers. Your personal details will remain confidential and will never be shared with any party outside me therapy practice Submit your Booking

Recognising mental health issues and then finding a counsellor sometimes isn’t an easy process. With this in mind, my website is designed to provide an understandable overview of the world of psychotherapy and counselling to help you take the first step towards a life of positive mental health. Thank You! Thank you for contacting me. I endeavour to respond to enquiries within 24 hours, however, if your enquiry is urgent, please phone me on 07762 738 238.

Credit: Photo by Blake Cheek for Unsplash A client of mine—I’ll call her Sarah— dreamt that she was rescuing her cat from a pack of dogs. When she examined the cat, she saw that its right eye had been injured and was weeping pus. Sarah awoke feeling anxious, then relieved when she realised it had only been a dream. Her first associations were: cat, pus, pussy. I enjoy the puns and wordplay that dreams sometimes offer us. They can seem almost too obvious, even faintly ridiculous, but the unconscious is not above using a pun to get our attention. The Cat According to von Franz Marie-Louise von Franz gave a series of lectures on the symbolism of the cat, later published as The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption. She was not interested in assigning one fixed meaning to the cat. Her concern was with what the animal might represent when the feminine has become enchanted, wounded or unable to appear in fully human form. For von Franz, the cat belongs to the realm of instinct, embodiment, sensuality and the feminine. This does not mean “feminine” in a narrow or conventional sense. The cat represents something independent and self-possessed: a creature that may live alongside us and love us, but can never be entirely owned. Unlike the dog, the cat does not live to obey. It knows its own mind. It withdraws when approached too forcefully, appears when it chooses and retains something wild, even when curled up beside the fire. Tenderness and Claws Nor is the cat merely soft, pretty or vulnerable. It embodies opposites, which is one of the things I love about it. A cat can be tender and ruthless, playful and predatory, languorous one moment and intensely alert the next. It also has claws. This feels important. The instinctual feminine is not only nurturing and accommodating. It can say no. It protects itself. It may know something long before the rational mind has caught up. The Enchanted Princess In the fairy tale explored by von Franz, a princess has been transformed into a cat. She is not naturally a cat; she is under a spell. Something that might have developed into conscious feeling, authority, relationship or creativity has become trapped at the instinctual level. The question, then, is not simply: what does the cat mean? It is: what human possibility has become imprisoned within the cat? One Cat Against the Pack A useful way of approaching a dream is to begin with the idea that every person, animal and object in it represents some aspect of the dreamer. So, when we look at Sarah’s dream, the cat is not only her beloved pet. She also represents a part of Sarah herself. The cat seems to embody something instinctive, feminine and deeply vulnerable. She is attacked by a pack of dogs: one solitary cat against a collective force. The dogs may represent something louder, more aggressive or more socially sanctioned. The cat does not belong to the pack. She remains singular. Perhaps Sarah is rescuing a part of herself that has retained its own instincts but feels threatened by collective demands: duty, noise, aggression or the needs of others. She recognises that the cat belongs to her and that she needs protection. Yet perhaps this instinctual part of Sarah has remained in the form of a wounded creature that must continually be rescued, rather than becoming a conscious authority in her own right: a woman with language, boundaries, clear sight, and teeth and claws of her own. The Injured Eye The injured eye is particularly striking. The cat’s ability to see and orient herself has been damaged. The pus suggests that this is not simply a fresh wound, but an infected area attempting to drain. Sarah’s spontaneous association—“pus, pussy, cat”—also matters. The image may link the wounded animal to the female body, sexuality and the vulnerability of the instinctual feminine. But the dream may not end with rescue. The deeper question may be how the wounded cat—this wounded part of Sarah—can be healed, so that instinct, body, sight, independence and authority are able to coexist within her. About Lynn Somerfield Lynn Somerfield is a psychotherapist, supervisor, trainer and author with more than thirty years’ experience. She is a trustee of the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education in London, where she worked for many years as a lecturer, supervisor and group facilitator. In The Secret Language of Symbols, she writes about dreams, symbols, psychotherapy and the curious ways in which the inner and outer worlds sometimes seem to speak to one another. Her book, The Seeds of Change: How Therapists Cultivate Personal Growth, is published by Routledge. Subscribe free of charge to receive new pieces directly in your inbox. Any client material included here is shared with the client’s permission, and identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality.

It’s been a hard year. My husband has had several operations, culminating in heart failure and two weeks in the cardiac care ward. He is recovering well now, and perhaps that is what finally did it. The adrenaline wore off and, for the first time in months, I felt able to breathe again. Unfortunately, without the adrenaline to keep me upright, I crashed. This weekend, after a relatively minor setback to our plans — it is often the pebbles underfoot that hurt more than the rocks — I told him how low I had been feeling. I had kept it from him because he had been so ill, and the last thing I wanted was to add to his worries. Some part of me knew it would pass. I am naturally an optimist. Nevertheless, I felt flattened and rather defeated. I found myself rummaging through the archives of my life, looking back at various choices and disappointments and wondering, “What happened?” My husband was upset to hear me speak like that, and I was upset to have upset him. I knew the feeling was temporary, but there is a part of me that sometimes longs to stop trying quite so hard and simply give in to defeat. Something in the Night At around three o’clock the following morning, I woke to go to the bathroom. I really should keep a record of what happens in the middle of the night, because there is often something. As I climbed back into bed, I glanced out of the bedroom window. There, on the garden path, was a dead duck. I went downstairs to investigate. The top of its bill was curved upwards, as though it had struck something at speed. Perhaps it had flown into the house or hit the ground and broken its neck. I couldn’t be sure. What I did know was that I felt an immediate sense of recognition and pity. The duck seemed to embody a part of me I knew very well: something exhausted, spent and no longer able to keep itself afloat. Ducks appear so calm as they glide across the water, while beneath the surface their feet paddle furiously. That was what I recognised: the part of me that had kept going, kept working, kept fighting, making telephone calls, writing complaints and trying to hold everything together. And now, as dawn broke, it lay still on the path. I recognised this as synchronicity. Synchronicity is Jung’s term for a meaningful coincidence: two or more events that are not obviously connected, yet seem linked by the meaning they hold for the person experiencing them. It might be a dream, a thought, a fear or a question that is suddenly echoed by something in the outer world. Jung did not suggest that such moments proved the existence of fate. Rather, he saw them as occasions when the inner and outer worlds briefly align, leaving us with the unmistakable feeling that something significant has occurred. What Ducks Symbolise A dead duck is not difficult to read as a symbol. Something has ended or lost its life: a hope, a plan, a relationship or perhaps an old part of ourselves. Ducks belong to water, land and air. They can swim, walk and fly, moving between different worlds with apparent ease. The dead duck, by contrast, could no longer move anywhere. It seemed, to me, to speak of exhaustion and the loss of the ability to adapt, recover and carry on. There was vulnerability in it, too. It looked small and helpless, lying there. Whatever had happened had happened quickly. One moment it had presumably been flying; the next, it was on the path. And, of course, there is the phrase itself. Something described as a “dead duck” is hopeless, finished, beyond saving. That fitted rather too neatly with the defeatism I had admitted to only a few hours earlier. But perhaps the duck did not signify the death of hope. Perhaps it marked the end of a particular way of surviving. The part of me that had paddled furiously beneath the surface had done its job. It had carried me through fear, anger, hospitals, operations and uncertainty. Perhaps something in the psyche was saying: you cannot go on like this. That way of staying afloat is over now.

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash The Chapel of Bones The Sedlec Ossuary, near Prague, is a small chapel decorated with the bones of thousands of people whose graves were cleared over the centuries. In 1870, a woodcarver called František Rint arranged the bones into chandeliers, garlands and even a coat of arms. Macabre, certainly, but not intended simply to horrify. The chapel is a memento mori. The phrase is Latin for “remember that you must die”—or, more simply, “remember death”. It is a reminder of our mortality and of the need to live consciously while we still can. I visited the ossuary some years ago and found it deeply moving. I left feeling sobered, reflective and rather more in touch with my own mortality than when I went in. It is also, in its way, an alchemical image: death, dissolution and the remains rearranged into a new form. Although I’m not sure I’d want to end up as part of a chandelier. Given a choice, I’d opt for something a little more dignified. An Early Dream Perhaps my interest in bones began much earlier. The earliest dream I can remember was about life, death and what remains. I was about eight years old when I had it, although the dream itself seemed to belong to another time. I was in a very hot country—possibly ancient Greece. The setting was an old ruin. It was rather like a hospital ward, except that instead of beds there were slabs of stone. There were separate rooms, but the walls had worn down so much that it was easy to see from one into another. In the dream, I was not a child but a young woman lying on a stone slab. Around me were other slabs, some with people lying on them. Attendants moved quietly among us, offering sips of water from stone drinking vessels. Somehow, I knew that I was dying. I also knew what would happen next. Once I was dead, my body would be carried into the room next door and laid on another stone slab. What struck me is that I was not frightened. The movement from life to death seemed orderly and inevitable—almost ordinary. It did not feel like the end of everything, but more like the next stage of a process. Beneath it all was an awareness of the bones. Beneath the flesh, beneath the shroud and beneath whatever identity I had carried in life, something more enduring would remain. Bones in Alchemy In alchemy, bones are closely associated with death and with the stripping away of everything that is no longer needed. They belong particularly to mortificatio and nigredo: the dark stages of the work, when an old form has broken down and cannot simply be patched up and carried on as before. Alchemy is not terribly sentimental about this. Sometimes something has to die before anything genuinely new can emerge. Bones can represent our deepest structure—the framework beneath appearances, roles, ambitions and the various disguises the ego likes to wear. When life strips us back to the bone, we may discover what is actually holding us up. They may also represent the part of us that survives loss, illness, humiliation, disappointment or change. The ego may feel thoroughly dismantled, but something essential remains. Bones also belong to the imagery of calcination (or in alchemy - calcinatio). Burned down to white ash, bones become associated with fire, purification and reduction to the bare essentials. There is not much room for padding at this stage of the alchemical process. Psychologically, bones may represent what is left when an old identity has died away. They remind us of mortality, certainly, but also of endurance. Something has been lost, but something else has survived. When Bones Appear in Dreams In dreams, the condition of the bones matters. Broken bones may suggest that a supporting structure has failed. Buried bones may point to something hidden, forgotten or inherited. White or polished bones may suggest purification, while bones being reassembled may carry the promise of restoration, resurrection or the rebuilding of the self. So bones are not simply symbols of death. They may also ask: what remains when everything superficial has fallen away—and what might be built from it?