Portrait of Stephanie: In conversation with Adam

I would like to paint more, draw more, and write more. Although I'm writing more than I was; so maybe it's the painting and the drawing, because that is a kind of - for me, anyway -taking in, absorbing and relating onto the page as much as you can… and trying to catch the beauty of the moment.

Oh, I still enjoy Oxford. It has changed recently but I still enjoy it. There’s a lot more traffic. So you get stuck in it, rather than being able to move around it, unless you're on a bicycle and in that case it's a bit dangerous. But the timelessness of the buildings, the sun on them, the light, and the colours of the stone - it's just lovely to be there. It's also changed in that there are quite a lot of people who've moved here from London, bought up a lot of buildings and made them more liveable but brought different, quite materialistic, values. They want to dig up very nice Oxford gardens and put things like saunas and huge swimming pools in them. It's all right for them to have swimming pools, but it just feels like another culture coming in that I don't disrespect, but that I feel jarred by.

So you don't identify with those kinds of choices?

Not easily. I've recently seen a house absolutely decimated. They bought it one month, decamped, and left it to be pulled completely to pieces. It’s outrageous! There's no recognition of the history, the period in which that house was built. And the houses in Oxford are conservation buildings. It's just been torn apart- (makes tearing noise). It was only bought because of its size.

It's like a sort of stamping; almost like what the Communists did to Eastern Europe, you know, made blocs. It is strange. It's hard to swallow, and one does feel divided and separated. It's a shame. It divides communities. And I think it's not just the style, it's learning that's been cut out. I suppose the Chinese have been in the process of doing this. They used to respect former generations, and now they're in the process of demolishing that. And we are all doing it, or a lot of us are. It's as if computers will replace everything. I mean, they're very useful, they're very handy. But at the same time, you're looking at a sheet of glass with reflected letters on it. You know? Trying to make sense of people behind it. And one’s sitting there, conveying messages from one end of the world, and there may be warmth, to the other end of the world. But there’s no contact. And then what keeps you going when you turn off the computer? Maybe it's all right and maybe it isn't, but it does feel very solitary.

I see people getting very, very lonely. And it's brought up this rash of people advertising to meet other people. The past was also cruel and difficult, yes. But actually- this bit is really getting to the spirit of man, and man in tribe - there have been tribes for years, or little groups and then tribes. And they had to function interdependently. We're much more independent of each other now. You can get your goods sent on the computer. You can bypass everybody on your street and still have a sort of life. You don’t interact with people. You're actually removing collective memory, if there is such a thing. And it's also, I think, reducing a whole section of the community who can't afford computers, to outsiders. I often think when people say on TV, 'Contact us on www...' what about the people who can't? There is, in England, a growing awareness of a larger section of the population getting poorer than before. They certainly can't have computers. And if they do, they can't have anything else in their lives.

There is a solitary bit in man - for meditation, for thinking - that needs to be addressed, and that shouldn’t be interrupted by noise. We need it. But we need a balance. Even Monks, on the whole (apart from hermits) lived in groups. They may not have worked together but they sang together, prayed together. There is strength to that; going round cloisters chanting, producing this awareness of something higher, this music, and wonderful buildings, timeless buildings. I've felt that same feeling in synagogues too, in fact. The timelessness of taking out the Torah, reading it and bowing and putting it back again… there's a lot of - and I have a lot of it - awareness and inherited memory. Down the centuries and centuries and centuries of going across Europe and the Middle East, the strength of surviving is extraordinary; the belief and the practicality of just picking up a Torah and going off with it because you couldn't pick up anything else - and it's highly movable, unlike the big Bible.

So do you think that the idea of God was essential for the survival of the Jewish people? Or do you think this strength came from somewhere else?

I think it held them together when they escaped from slavery, really. I think it was central, because whatever happened, whether there were plagues or not (perhaps the Red Sea had a sort of mild tsunami, who knows?) it was very important to keep them all together, with nothing much round them but desert and hope. So it’s almost as if there needs to be a lode star out there always, to keep the hope going and the survival. This is the purpose of ritual and passing down stories, which is what all the celebrations are about. It's sort of nourishing, if you allow it to be, or if you want it to be.

There has been a lot of denial in England, and I've had my own personal denial. I was brought up by a stepmother who was Church of England, but my family, my original family, was all Jewish. So, I didn't know anything about Judaism really. But because of the war, we were sent frequently away to avoid the bombing. And at one point we were sent to an aunt, my mother's sister - my mother had died when I was very young - and we were suddenly in the middle of observing Judaism. It was fascinating. I loved it, because it was family-oriented, it was regular, it was warm, it was humane, and although I got very confused and didn't know how to manage it when I returned home, it stayed with me. And so I had a long journey, apart from psychotherapy, of moving from this uncertain denial of being Jewish to finding my way back, in my own way, into a Jewish community. Not completely inside it, but as near as I can get, at the moment.

But to be brought up not knowing and in England, which until very recently was mostly Anglo-Saxon, with a very strong colonial history, was tough. The Foreign Office worked very hard to make things happen and get on better with the Arabs, which is fine, but it meant they were rather anti-Semitic though they didn't openly say so. When at school I returned from this visit to my aunt and told the class about Passover, one girl said to me, 'Oh, how do you know? Are you Jewish?' 'No, no, no,' I said, like Judas Iscariot. I was twelve. So I was very confused at the time.

We were sent away four different times because of the bombings. I just got a bit confused, that's all. But it meant a lot, and things sort of dribbled through. My father had given up being an observant Jew, from his own experiences in the First World War. It was so horrific that he decided that ritual observance was not important. He wanted to help humanity in a different way so he decided to study medicine. I think, for Jews, given the enormously long history, especially in Europe, of not being wanted, of having to leave, having to go away, that there's this feeling of something nostalgic you'd left. And because of that, a lot of Jews in Europe had extremely strong instincts.

My father went to the Baltics shortly before the Second World War and saw Hitler's Brownshirts; these men in brown shirts and brown trousers. This instinct came up, he came back and he turned our big cellar into a shelter. He put in an escape door and the neighbours thought he'd gone mad. And that was what we lived in. He was aware that if twenty-five miles away across the Channel Hitler managed to cross that small piece of water, we would be in for it.

He saw persecution, and he instantly picked up on what was going to happen very clearly; the anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism. I do think there's a lot of this shared memory that does pass down from generation to generation. It sometimes gets stuck, but it's interesting. My sister, in fact, moved to Newfoundland, Canada, became a nurse and married a vicar - a reverend, a Church of England vicar! And I stayed here and found my journey back to Judaism - it's quite an interesting mixture!

My father didn’t find a connection with ritual. But, it's interesting. I was thinking about it yesterday and today. There is a difference somehow between prayers and spiritualism. They don't necessarily have to be one and the same thing. I think the prayers are there to keep the rhythm going. And ritual... it's rather like a mantra if you want to meditate. The message is always the same, isn't it, in synagogue? For me, the spirituality comes when, inside, I feel the calm, a glow, and a moment. It doesn't have to be in synagogue, or in a church or whatever. It is just moments when I can pull this feeling out of myself. It feels fine and warm and it's as if… there it is. Whatever 'it' may be.

I can remember working with a client when I was very new at psychotherapy. He needed supervision. And I wasn't careful enough about his needs. Being a man he was very defensive because he'd been in business and he knew how to manage business, but the change for him between business and psychotherapy was too large. He got quite upset with me and didn't want to continue. And I was upset because I hadn't been a good enough therapist. So we were both upset. At one point in session, I took a deep breath, and, from somewhere, I don't know how I managed it, out came this enormous warmth for him. Just towards the end. And he was amazed, and I was amazed at myself. I didn't know where it had come from. That was a kind of extraordinary spirituality, I felt. I hadn't gone flying like Peter Pan, but almost.

It’s like someone who puts themselves so musically into what they're playing, once they're able to play well, they do lift you and themselves above the everyday practice. It’s like watching David Barenboim. Do you know him? He was a conductor, a brilliant solo pianist, an Israeli. And, he was married to an even more brilliant cellist named Jacqueline du Pre. He and Edward Said started the East-West Divan Orchestra, which is an orchestra made up of young people taken from the melting pot of the Middle East: Syria, Palestine, Israel, and Lebanon. The musicians were taken to a training camp somewhere in Europe before performing at the Albert Hall as part of the Proms. I managed to get tickets. A week before this came up, there'd been another suicide bomb in Israel, and you knew that some of these young people had suffered, and might be very upset.

Some had suffered on either side and were trying to manage this with their music. And they played, and lifted the whole Albert Hall, six thousand people, into that state of spirituality which was absolutely extraordinary. You knew that everybody at that moment wanted things not to be ghastly, not to fight, not to hate, not to bomb. And at the end they all spontaneously at once, stood up. It was the most moving, amazing thing. It was so incredible that everybody was sharing it. It's rather like passages in the Bible where you read about people being full of light; this is what it is. It’s part of it, anyway. It was above and beyond, 'Oh, he played quite well,' or, 'Oh, the first passage he didn't put his F sharp in.' You know? It was extraordinary. And it was through this channel that he had taken these young people and given them this ability to love, to share, and to perform. So that is a sort of spirituality, which is so difficult to hold onto, yet you knew it was there because it passed, as music does. The sharing was there that night. You wanted to put the dreaded Mr Bush in the middle and say, 'Now listen.' I don't know if he would, or if he could have. Most religion is sharing.

I think the thing that really brought me back to Judaism was my father’s death. My stepmother gave him a Christian funeral, and I was so deeply upset. I didn't feel I belonged anywhere, really, England being such a settled kind of country to live in. And I knew I didn't feel English though I couldn't quite work out what it was. It was there under the surface for a long time, and it didn't really come out until later. My stepmother said, 'Well, it wasn't too Christian, was it?' (I have to add that my stepmother was a classic stepmother. She was very unkind to both my sister and I, and we had quite a difficult childhood.) In any case, my father’s younger brother had come down especially for the funeral, and I think he was upset too. He very tactfully went back to my parents' flat and said, 'I would like to read a Jewish prayer,' which was probably the Kiddush. At which point, the neighbours, who were there, scuttled off looking frightened. And I felt very much a part of that. I think that was the beginning of the way back for me, and it was an even longer road back because my second husband was a Quaker, which was ultimately helpful for me. When we married, I said we couldn't marry in a Church. I didn't want to marry in a register office and neither did he. So I said I'd have a Quaker wedding, which was fine, although I didn't want to be a Quaker. I just didn’t have any feeling towards it; there’s no music. And I couldn’t manage the way burials were conducted, so silently. At a Jewish Orthodox burial, they’re buried in a coffin. And then the relatives have to shovel on the dirt. And that sound of the earth on the coffin. It’s very powerful.

When my second husband, who was older than me, was very ill, and going towards his death, he suddenly said to me - we were talking about his funeral - he suddenly said that this uncle of mine had been so sensitive about my father's funeral. And he said, 'I always remember his funeral (my uncle’s funeral was a very orthodox Jewish funeral. It was very moving.). I'd like a mixture between a Quaker meeting and a Jewish sitting Shiva.' I was absolutely amazed. I called in a man from the community, we talked it through, and we did it that way. I set it up. It was an English burial, not a specifically Jewish one - and he wasn't Jewish – so he wasn’t buried right away; there was nearly a week between. So we turned it around and had the Shiva three days before the burial.

It worked brilliantly. As everybody was mourning, and waiting for the burial to happen, some of the Quaker people didn't quite know what had hit them. They stood up and said things about Geoffrey, and then I got this lovely man who'd talked to me and Geoffrey to say the Kiddush. He said it one night in Aramaic. It was lovely, absolutely wonderful. And everybody found it really, really helpful, which is the whole idea of a Jewish funeral. Where, if you're the person who's bereaved, you're looked after and have people with you all the time, supporting you. The Jewish way is just so... humane and warm. Church of England people aren't quite sure whether to talk to you or not. They all sort of stand back a bit, you know. They have no equivalent to the Shiva, because you have the burial, and you have people around for something, and then everybody goes home. They say things at the burial, or after it, and they write you letters, but that's it. It is hard. I find that given the way that communities here are much more fragmented than they ever were, ritual is something that really holds people together. Computers are not a replacement.

So I can’t think that I can see a time when people won’t be joining into some sorts of groups. Well, think about very small human beings when they’re first born; their optimum need is survival. That is endemic in human beings, and most animals. So they will grab at a mother’s breast and really make sure they’ve got it and are going to get their fill. There are genes and instincts in man that simply cannot be suppressed. However much you’re schooled or badly treated, those are the things that go awry first. And in fact if you look at the brain, the human brain, it’s a basic human need to survive and to be attached. I remember hearing of Romanian orphans brought up through poverty and a dictatorship who were almost constantly locked to their cots. They have great holes in their brains where this attachment and belonging hasn’t grown. They’re like wild animals: just surviving. So I can’t see that human beings won’t go back to searching. They are searching. They’re desperately searching, I think, at the moment.

I have a belief in two things: One is man’s need for attachment: to something beyond just their family. And the other is the search for that something. I see it going on in so many ways. I see people going to groups where they go away and meditate. I see groups going away to certain talks by Burmese monks.

I was very shaken talking to a friend of mine who had worked happily as a BBC correspondent in Washington but who has been unhappy since relocating here. He told me how the BBC here is full of people who simply mock religion. With a sort of, ‘Do you really need that? And does anybody need it?’ approach. That seems to be a growing fashion for some younger clever people. But the boundaries that children learn in those sorts of backgrounds are hard to manage, all over the place, very fragmentary. We all need something as we go along, to hold ourselves steady. We come against extraordinary things during a lifetime. Decisions. Paths, actions. And we do need, at those times, something to help us.

My son in law has been very, very ill since June. And my daughter wasn’t particularly religious, but she has found some kind of support through a growing belief that he would live and come through a terrible accident. When she gets very wobbly, it has given her the strength to go on. I think she’s found Christianity. I’m not sure what she’s found: a sort of a pillar of belief, a connection with a being or something larger than herself, in an accepting way, a positive way. With each big decision she’s needed that support. I think we always need something that will give us that feeling of lifting out of ourselves, because we have such introspection, and so many questions. I think we’re very introspective in England actually. Having survived as a small island by going out to countries and what we call ‘colonizing’: in other words, taking away and benefitting from them at a distance. We could afford to have largesse. And now we’re getting overwhelmed with people who come in.

You mention the ferocious God, do you see him as a symbol or do you think he exists? I'm just thinking philosophically.

Oh yes, I know. The Jewish God can be quite ferocious, if you read some bits of the Bible. But it's really to remind everybody that 'You're not God yourself,' I feel, I don't know about you. The prayers are just a reminder, rather than a telling. There is a bit of telling, but it's more like repeating the story, and the feelings. And I believe that I'm allowed space. So God... I like to find God in my own way. At times of extreme stress, when something really difficult is going on, I may address God directly. A bit of me is saying, 'Is this all right?' and a bit of me is saying 'Yes, it feels all right.' But I have to be under quite a lot of duress to do that. I am tinged, still, with the Christian God, who is merciful, rather than, 'God is angry.' So I have a mixture there. But as Christianity is descended from Judaism I don't worry too much about it.

Once I went to Arthur Miller's play, “A View from the Bridge”, which depicts this man who is ill in bed. His behaviour is one of denial about being Jewish and wanting to join the non-Jewish people, being embarrassed about himself. And I thought a lot about that, because I too was embarrassed. It was like an outer and an inner world going on: seeing yourself out in the world with other people, not allowing yourself to be yourself, while your inner world gets starved. It gets thinner. And seeing that play was very, very important and a milestone for me.

I think my relations with God went along with my search for Judaism. Because, I suppose you don't have much experience of the Church of England, but the preacher leads the singing, leads the prayers, takes the prayers, reads the sermon, reads the Bible, and gives the sermon, all while standing high up on the pulpit to keep you awake. Well, you used to have old pews, which were like boxes, all the way around, and your seat was below so you could hustle up and keep warm, and people fell asleep. But I didn't feel like God was getting much of a chance in there somehow. There was a lot of being told. And I realized this when I was going to Quaker meetings with my husband. There nobody was told anything. It was quite a relief actually.

'God is love, God is good, do this, do that.' That's how I felt about it. It’s like 'I am now going to do good.' But to do good for its own sake feels a bit like the Salvation Army to me. It has good things in it, but I don't think you can just decide. I think you have to dig deep around and search, and if you dig deeply enough and search often enough, it comes up more easily.

I went to several meetings with a Buddhist named Thich Nhat Hahn, who escaped from Vietnam and now lives in France, I think. And he taught all sorts of things: How to manage this and how to manage that, meditation, mindfulness. You eat mindfully, you walk mindfully. And it was quite reassuring. We walked around and were meditating, and we sat. Then suddenly one day I was there I saw the picture of Thich Nhat Hahn, and something in me stirred, because basically it was like a graven image, and I didn’t want a graven image. I mean, I didn’t want to have a meeting where I was reminded of him by his face, you know. His words and his feelings were enough. I felt it was like idolatry.

And so, I began to think, well, I don’t know. This doesn’t feel right either. A bit like Goldilocks and the three bears, I suppose, sitting in all the wrong chairs. I started going to London for a course on Judaism. But at that time I had a very bad knee, and it was so painful that it became very difficult for me to make it to class. So gradually I stopped, although I did go for a year. It was very helpful, in fact, though I didn’t quite feel I belonged. I was terribly shy and didn’t understand where or what was going on or a lot of what was going on. Well, I mean, they explained it, but I didn’t have the actual background. I had the background of the Church: prayers, songs, hymns, carols, which I knew better than anything in Hebrew. And it began to make me feel uncomfortable, though I didn’t actually say it. I felt foreign. And then I began to come to terms with this and, while I was in therapy with a very helpful therapist, I realized that it did make a difference to me that that he couldn’t tell me about Judaism.

And so I went to see three Jewish therapists. One of whom I decided was not on my wavelength and the other of whom was a brilliant therapist, but a very frightening sort of man. At that time, I’d had quite a lot of ill health and just had an operation, and his clinic was miles away from the centre of Oxford, up on a big hill. I’d gone there by taxi and arranged for the taxi to pick me up at a certain time. At the end of our meeting, which finished on the dot, it was early so I told him I would take the bus. It was pouring with rain outside and he said, ‘Well, do go out.’ He didn’t even give me a chance to hang around for a bit, he just told me to leave in the rain! I had nowhere to go and nowhere to stand!

About five years ago I began to think, ‘where did this dislike of Jews come from’? So, I did a mixture of psychotherapy and searching, and I found a book about medieval Judaism. There was a woman in the flat above me who was American and Jewish, and she used to be a medievalist before she came here. So, some of it is supposed to be due to the fact that, at one stage in the history of Christianity, there were hermits who lived in the desert. They were supposed to be very holy, and they didn’t touch money. The Jews were the ‘Others’, and in psychotherapeutic terms, the significant Other: 'Not us, Them.' They were given the job of touching money, as something they could do. But, according to the Christian view of it, it was dirty, and so they were dirty too. Moreover, they were living in ghettoes in medieval times, they were enclosed - and quite a lot of cities and towns have ghettoes still.

So they set up banks and became incredibly rich. And then of course they were the ‘Other’; 'How dare they get rich?' It goes on for centuries; on and on, and on. I have a very interesting international cookery book, written by a woman called Claudia Roden. She was brought up in Egypt. She follows, in each country, before she puts the recipes down, the history of the Jews: whether they stayed, whether they were thrown out, where they came from, where they went to. It's a fascinating mixture, the Jewish culture. And that it stays. It picks itself up and manages, despite all sorts of terrible pogroms and pressures, to create, to continue to be creative.

There's a total cloud over my background, but that's another thing - this not knowing, just a sort of dark nothing. I have some idea of the tree from one side of the family, but not the other bit of the tree. We seem to have masses of rabbis in my family; about eight. There's one still around in Israel, I think. They survived. It's only recently our family has decided to do this research. For years they just accepted the dark. I think they were all too busy surviving, making a place for themselves. They didn't have the mental or the physical energy to seriously inquire into it, working night and day. And I do think there's some memory in genes, gene memory.

My sister in Newfoundland - I mean nothing could be less Jewish than Newfoundland - whose eldest son is tall, looks exactly like my father's oldest brother. He has two or three sports-clothes stores and I think they're his. The first time I saw him, I nearly fell through the floor. I stopped and looked and there was my uncle Dan. Doing exactly what my uncle Dan did. Behaving just like my uncle Dan did. It was extraordinary. Two generations. Wow. There he was. So who knows what...?

Throughout the years I was at the BBC, before my accident, the sort of work I was in would be a mixture of something further out than us. It would often be about policy in the Middle East, because I was in current affairs. We would try and figure out what Syria or Iran might be doing next, and if we should bring in the prime minister of Lebanon via satellite. In fact, there was quite a lot of philosophy involved if you think about it. You had to consider the real underlying problems and what might be happening next, Israel's view of other countries, where faith clashed with politics, and who was the significant other, which is a sort of psychotherapeutic way of looking at it. You had to think like that, round things. It was interesting, but it was on one level only. Later, when I was working in public relations, it was different; it was more people-centred. And when I was studying psychotherapy it was much more people and emotion-centred work. And in fact now I sort of have a mixture of all three, because I've never lost the journalistic side.

I did journalism for so long that part of me looks at problems like that, while part of me can pull out the psychotherapeutic side and see the human involvement. I found that there were some very interesting people I met. There was a Cardinal who'd been shut up in the embassy in Hungary because the Pope didn't quite get on with his ideas about the politics of Hungary during the war and how the Hungarians were being sacrificed to the Germans because the Pope didn't want to say anything. He hid in the embassy for a long time, and I managed to get hold of him. He'd just been released and he was on his way from South America. We interviewed him in London Airport, and he was like one of those little Daleks on wheels; small, long red robe, and no feet, just moved like that. It was a fascinating interview with this man. It was religion versus politics versus humanity.

It gave me an awareness of how Church and state really sometimes merge when it suits them. I was horrified by it. But I could see that he probably got in the way of what the Church, that particular Church, needed to do; which was to keep a balance. He was upsetting it by being too political. So in fact a country of human beings was being sacrificed. The Church didn't want to anger the German politicians, or any politicians for that matter. But he spoke out. It was a very interesting, but rather sad lesson. He was still very angry.

At that point, work was my life. It had to be my life. I was living in a small town; a very sweet, old town, in the south of Oxford, called Wallingford. It was sort of like a womb, really. It held you. If you were on your own, it held you, and if you had a family, it did the same thing. And it was that near-brush with death - I had a car that drove into me – when I was hit sideways on from right across the road, that made me stop. I stopped, had to recover, and my whole life changed. I thought: there's something else here that I'm supposed to be doing, not just this. Somebody who wanted to marry me a long time ago asked me again and I finally said yes. And the man who lived next door to me said, 'Why don't you try psychotherapy,'? And I thought, 'Why don't I try psychotherapy?'

I went for a three-day module, and liked it very much. So I struggled on for a bit longer before I went and did a three-year-course in psychotherapy in London. I was fortunate that I chose that course because it was 'experiential,' which meant it wasn't all theory - and I'm better at theory than I would have been at experiential work. So I was pushed into a situation where I had to allow my emotions to come up. This was very interesting for me, and produced all sorts of responses and reactions.

In the experiential groups people are just used to saying what they felt about things. And I just sat and looked at them at first, because I wasn't used to people talking about their feelings like that. I was shot on to a different level altogether. In fact, they nearly decided after the first year not to keep me because I was too logical. That was a very large change; I began working on being in the moment more, rather than being purely focused ahead. Also it helped, well, enabled me to understand people in a different way, from a different angle altogether.

I mean, I was used to looking at other people's feelings, because I'd been a journalist, but I wasn't good at allowing mine out. I had to see whether things fitted into what the programme needed. And I was always aware of the time - not that I was unaware later - but very aware of the time and getting the right quote we needed out for the programme. I was removed, in a way. Because, if you see people in various difficult situations, although you may be emotionally disturbed by it, you have to have a balance all the time to ensure that you get the right shots and the right interviews out of people. I can remember looking at a whole lot of film of The Biafran war, which was horrible. They were slicing each other up. And I was thinking, “Cut, use this, do this, do that, do the other.” And you had to do that. Whereas with the work I was going into - I was learning in a particular way, which is person-centred - the idea is that the person is allowed to develop themselves and go along and say what they want. It's not directive at all. So it was quite the opposite; you see the difference.

During my psychotherapy course, my practical side was working in a special residential school for very emotionally distressed primary-age children. That taught me an enormous amount about how adults can get stuck as children. The emotional side, the pain, of a child can remain inside an adult or an adolescent for years. I was using the work I did as a support, in a way, for getting my private relationships more balanced. Because as you get older, you bring with you your own baggage, and each of you has this problem to unload and manage. That kind of work was something that helped me enormously. I don't think that I would have had a good marriage without it.

My fears used to be about not being good enough, not being able to perform well enough, about pushing myself. Those have diminished, and I think the particular form of psychotherapy I chose suited me; accidentally, but it suited me. It's all right not to be good enough. It's OK to be you. I still have a bit of a battle. The old bit comes out saying, 'No, you didn't do that right.' But I feel grounded enough to manage now. If I'm not, you know, ‘all right,’ then I've got to try and see how I can accept that. If I have a part of me that's not particularly good at this, or better at that, it's acceptance that’s important really.

It's a constant delight to see people finding themselves, that bit of themselves; finding that they have choice. It's like watching a lotus flower unfold. It's fantastic. Of course there are difficult times. There are people who don't want to unfold, who get angry or defensive. But it's an amazing privilege to share these things with people. Sometimes they won't get what they want, because they're not sure what they want. And sometimes there's an amazing response; quite an extraordinary response. I feel my way through it. I support them, as much as I can. And they find it within themselves. 'You can do it, come on,' I say – not out loud, of course. 'You can do it!' And quite often they can.