Wolf Path Therapy is a therapeutic practice focused on men's mental health and the particular challenges that can emerge during midlife.

Most men don't suddenly wake up one morning and decide they need therapy. Usually something has been wrong for a while. You may still be working, looking after your family, paying the bills and doing everything that needs to be done. From the outside, very little may appear to have changed.

But you know something has.

Perhaps you're more anxious or irritable than you used to be. Work has become something to endure rather than something that gives you any real satisfaction. You might feel increasingly disconnected from your partner or family, or simply from yourself. Sometimes it's harder to describe than that. Life hasn't necessarily fallen apart. It just doesn't feel right anymore.

Midlife has a habit of bringing questions like these to the surface. We often call it a midlife crisis, but I'm not convinced that calling it a crisis tells us very much. Sometimes the problem isn't that your life has gone badly wrong. It may be that the ways you've learned to cope, succeed and understand yourself are no longer enough for the person you're becoming.

Many men spend years dealing with difficulty by getting on with things. Work harder. Keep busy. Solve the problem. Don't dwell on it. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that, and those ways of coping may have served you extremely well. The difficulty comes when they stop working and you don't know what to replace them with.

That's often where therapy begins.

The work at Wolf Path isn't based on the assumption that you're broken or need to be turned into a better version of yourself. I'm much more interested in understanding what is actually happening. That may involve looking at the roles you've taken on, the expectations you've lived by, the emotions you've learned not to show, or patterns that seem to keep repeating despite your best efforts to change them.

My approach is influenced by depth psychology and Jungian ideas, particularly the view that there can be more happening beneath our conscious thoughts and behaviour than we immediately recognise. You don't need to know anything about Jung or psychology for us to work together. These ideas inform how I think about therapy; they aren't something you need to learn.

Sessions are deliberately unhurried. There isn't a programme to complete or a predetermined version of you that we're working towards. Some things become clearer quite quickly. Others take time. Part of the work is simply creating enough room to notice what has been pushed aside while you've been busy getting on with life.

Wolf Path takes its name from the wolf as a symbol of instinct, awareness and direction. I'm not interested in turning the wolf into a grand metaphor for how men ought to live. For me, it's simply a reminder that there are parts of ourselves we can lose contact with without ever completely losing them.

You don't need to understand exactly what's happening before reaching out. In fact, not knowing may be part of the reason you're here.

Sometimes the first useful step is simply being able to say, honestly, something isn't right, and having somewhere to begin working out what that means.