My journey to becoming a therapist
Hello, my name is Natalie Salvesen, and I run my therapy practice in Edinburgh and East Lothian, Scotland. I am schooled in both person-centred and psychodynamic psychotherapy, and am currently training in Hakomi therapy. I have also completed Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction training, Breathwork facilitator training, Seasonal Yoga teacher training, and Sacred Dance teacher training. I am a member of BACP and adhere to their ethical code of conduct. I am passionate about nature, conscious dance, spirituality and exploring what it means to be alive in this world.
Prior to training as a therapist I spent a decade working as a doctor in the NHS, with the latter years practicing as a psychiatrist. Whilst this profession equip me with lots of experience working with people in distress of various forms, and a sound knowledge of how the medical model of mental health works, I became disillusioned by the limits of the mainstream approach to distress.
Having been helped by a therapist myself, as well as many other practices such as dance, meditation, breathwork, yoga etc, I decided to retrain in these modalities so that I could offer clients what I believed to be a more nourishing, human, and holistic approach to working through mental, emotional and physical challenges.
my approach to therapy
I believe we are fundamentally social beings primed to seek out relationships, and that we thrive in loving, secure relational environments. I believe our deepest wounds were born in relationships and as such, perhaps paradoxically, relationships are also the key to working through these wounds. I have trained in both person-centred and psychodynamic therapies, modalities which focus therapy around the relationship between client and therapist. It is my experience that this professional relationship has huge potential to help us understand ourselves and our relational patterns, empowering us to move into new ways of relating to ourselves and others in ways which better serve our wellbeing.
The mainstream medical system generally pathologises distressing experiences by calling them ‘symptoms’ or ‘illness’, and tries to eradicate this distress by offering medication. Whilst I believe medication can occasionally be a helpful part of working through distress, I see a limitation in this purely biological approach which leaves the psycho-socio-spiritual root causes of distress unexplored. Pathologising distress by calling it illness also insidiously communicates an unhelpful message that challenging internal experiences mean there is something ‘wrong’ with us.
I find this pathologising framing of distress to be unhelpful as it sets us up to aim to ‘get rid of’ ‘symptoms’. I hold the alternative view that ‘symptoms’ are the cries of emerging parts of ourselves calling out to be listened to, understood, loved and accepted. My view is that ‘symptoms’ surface as our body’s clever way of communicating that a part of us deeply needs our attention, and arise because we are ready and capable of getting closer to these wounded parts. We all have shadow parts, and I believe that wellbeing stems from building awareness of and learning to compassionately embrace these uncomfortable shadow parts of our experience, rather than labelling them as ‘bad’ and trying to get rid of them.
As reflected in the poem on my homepage, I believe that everyone is already whole and has both light and darkness within them, as I have both light and darkness within me. As your therapist, I would aim to act as a compassionate companion as you walk yourself through the unknown and darker territories of your being, on your journey home. I trust deeply in your capacity to do so.
