JESS HENLEY
PSYCHOTHERAPY & EMDR
How I work
Therapy tailored to you
I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to therapy. We are all shaped by different experiences, relationships and ways of making sense of the world, so the way I work will be individual to you.
I draw on different approaches depending on what you’re struggling with, what may be sitting underneath it and what I feel will be most helpful. You don’t need to arrive knowing what kind of therapy you need — part of my role is to understand what’s happening and guide the work from there.
My approach includes EMDR, Attachment-Informed EMDR (ai-EMDR), parts work and somatic therapy, often bringing elements of these together to create therapy that is tailored specifically to you.
EMDR
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) can help us work with difficult or traumatic experiences that continue to affect you in the present.
Rather than only talking about what happened, EMDR helps the brain work through experiences that may not have been fully processed at the time. This can help reduce the intensity of the thoughts, emotions and physical responses connected to them, helping your brain understand that these feelings belong to something that happened in the past, rather than something that is happening in the here and now — so you don’t have to keep feeling them as though it still is.
Attachment-Informed EMDR (ai-EMDR)
ai-EMDR builds on traditional EMDR and can be particularly helpful when what you’re struggling with isn’t connected to one particular event, but to experiences that happened repeatedly over time.
These earlier experiences can shape how you feel about yourself, what you expect from other people and how you respond to them now. You may understand where some of these patterns come from, but knowing whyyou feel the way you do doesn’t necessarily change how you feel.
ai-EMDR allows us to work with these formative experiences, while paying particular attention to attachment and the different parts of the self. This can help us reach things that may be harder to access through traditional EMDR or talking therapy alone.
Parts Work
We all have different parts of ourselves that can think, feel or respond in different ways. One part might want something while another resists it. There may be parts that feel anxious, angry, critical or frightened, and others that try to stay in control or protect us from being hurt.
Rather than trying to get rid of these parts, we can become curious about why they are there, where they came from and what they may be trying to protect us from.
I often use parts work alongside EMDR. Understanding and working with the parts of you that may feel frightened or protective can help us gently access experiences that might otherwise feel difficult to approach, allowing those parts to feel heard and understood rather than something that needs to be pushed away.
Somatic Therapy
What we’ve been through isn’t only reflected in our thoughts and emotions — it can also show up in the body. We might notice tension, tightness, heaviness, agitation, numbness or other physical sensations that don’t always make sense to us.
Somatic therapy brings attention to what is happening in the body and what those sensations might be communicating. By noticing and working with these responses, we can access experiences and emotions that aren’t always easy to reach through talking alone.
Learning to listen to your body and trust what it’s telling you can feel daunting, particularly if you’ve always relied on your thoughts to make sense of things. I often think of it like learning a new language. You wouldn’t expect yourself to be fluent straight away. With time and attention, you begin to recognise the signals and understand what they mean, until listening to your body starts to become second nature.
Once you’re able to really ‘hear’ and trust your body, it can offer up a huge amount of information about what feels right or wrong for you — and that can be truly transformative.
We’ll work at a pace that feels right
You won’t be expected to tell me everything at once or go straight into your most difficult experiences. We’ll take time to understand what you need and work with difficult material when you’re ready.