My name is Darren, and I specialise in working with men who find themselves questioning things during midlife that perhaps seemed much more certain when they were younger.

My interest in this area isn't purely academic. I've experienced my own period of significant change in midlife and know something of what it's like when a life that appears perfectly functional from the outside stops making quite as much sense from within. I don't assume that my experience is the same as anybody else's, but it has undoubtedly influenced the therapist I've become and the questions I'm prepared to explore.

I hold a BSc (Hons) in Psychology & Counselling, accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS). My academic background gave me a grounding in psychological theory, but I've never believed that understanding people is simply a matter of applying a model to them. People are more complicated than that, and sometimes the very things we think we need to get rid of deserve to be understood before we decide what to do with them.

That is one of the reasons my approach has become increasingly influenced by depth psychology and Jungian ideas. I'm interested in what sits beneath the immediate problem: patterns that repeat, emotions that have been pushed aside, expectations we've absorbed without really questioning them, and aspects of ourselves that perhaps haven't had much room in the lives we've built.

You don't need any knowledge of Jung or psychology to work with me. I don't expect you to adopt my way of understanding things either. Therapy should leave room for your experience to challenge the theory, rather than forcing your experience to fit neatly inside it.

I also don't work from the assumption that every difficult period in midlife represents some profound psychological transformation. Sometimes work really is unbearable. Relationships do go wrong. Financial pressure is real. People become exhausted, anxious, angry or unhappy for perfectly understandable reasons. Part of the work is figuring out what belongs to the circumstances of your life and what might be asking for closer attention.

My role isn't to tell you who you should become or hand you a programme for getting there. I see therapy as somewhere we can slow things down enough to become curious about what is actually happening, including the things that are difficult to put into words. Sometimes understanding a problem changes it. Sometimes it raises better questions. Sometimes we discover that something you've been trying very hard to get rid of has been telling you something important.

That's much closer to how I understand the work.

I created Wolf Path Therapy because I wanted to offer men a place where difficult thoughts and feelings don't automatically become problems to fix. You don't need to arrive knowing what is wrong, what you want to change, or even what you want from therapy. We can start with what is happening now and work from there.

If you'd like to explore whether working together might be right for you, you're welcome to get in touch.