Anne Hamlyn

I am a qualified psychotherapeutic counsellor with a background in the arts and academia. I have researched on Art History, literature and film. My research area was trauma and the way it informs modern experience.

I taught visual art history and theory at Goldsmiths and UEA for several years. I have an ongoing interest in issues of identity, gender, sexuality, our experience of passing time and how we express that in images and in our self-image.

I have worked helping individuals develop self-worth and reinvent their   personal image. In particular people who have struggled with their confidence and feelings of loss of identity, sometimes after relationship breakdown or abuse. I have helped them to express more of who they feel they are on the inside, but were too afraid to show on the outside.

For the last five years I have been involved in supporting individuals in crisis, particularly those who no longer feel that their life is worth living. I have helped to provide a compassionate, unjudgemental space for them to tell their stories and to explore what living might mean, often in the face of extremely difficult circumstances.

Through all this varied work I have developed an interest in presence: how an individual resonates in an embodied way, how they move, look, speak, dress   as they make contact with their world and others in it.

My study of Buddhist philosophy and somatic based mindfulness practice has added a transpersonal dimension to the way I work with my clients. Some of them have forgotten what it feels like to breathe, both literally and metaphorically.

I aim to help my clients live more authentically and embrace the world with bravery, creativity and compassion.