About Abigail

I've always had a fascination with being human. With our beautiful contradictions, our peculiar behaviours, our capacity for love and imagination, and the remarkable ways we come to experience ourselves and the world. I love a good question. The kind that opens another question, takes you somewhere unexpected, or leaves you reconsidering something you've believed for most of your life. Why do we desire what we desire? How do we come to know ourselves? What shapes our perception of reality? Why can two people experience the same moment so differently? And how much of what we understand ourselves to be is a story we've come to inhabit? These are the kinds of things that occupy my mind, often quite happily for hours.

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My interests have taken me through psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, consciousness, sexuality, mythology and the many fascinating territories where these subjects meet. I'm particularly drawn to the relationship between identity and perception, the nature of eros, and the ways our understanding of ourselves influences our experience of life. And yet, for all my love of thinking, I'm equally interested in the pleasure of experiencing.

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The woman behind the questions

I'm a mother of two adult children, share my life with cats, and have a rather romantic relationship with the world. I love to sing intuitively but never in front of a crowd. I adore Argentine tango, with its music, intimacy, improvisation and extraordinary capacity to communicate something through the body that language can barely approach. I love beauty, sensuality, art, poetry, interesting people, and conversations that meander through everything from the profoundly philosophical to the gloriously ridiculous. I have a particular affection for romance and the erotic imagination, which has found another expression in my creative project, Love Letters to Tango, where I explore longing, desire and the feminine voice through the music and poetry of tango.

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I've also spent a decade exploring the more mysterious dimensions of human experience through plant medicines, ceremony, womb keeping and embodied traditions. These encounters have become part of my continuing enquiry into consciousness, the relationship between mind and body, and the different ways we come to experience meaning, connection and ourselves. I value the sacred as much as the ordinary, and I have an appreciation for life's absurdities. I enjoy intellectual depth; emotional honesty, irreverence and the pleasure of changing my mind when I encounter an interesting new perspective. I suppose I've always wanted to understand life while being thoroughly involved in living it.

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A professional life devoted to understanding people

My professional journey spans nearly two decades of psychotherapy, psychosexual and psychological consultancy, media and education.  I hold a BSc in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy and have undertaken postgraduate study in Media Psychology. My experience encompasses private practice, community mental health, digital healthcare, psychological assessment and support within television production, alongside broadcasting, guest lecturing, writing and public speaking. I've spent thousands of hours in conversation with people, encountering the intricacies of their inner worlds, relationships, desires, beliefs, uncertainties and the meanings they make of their experiences.

 

My work has drawn upon psychotherapy, coaching, psychosexual therapy, psychological enquiry and embodied approaches. Over the years, I've developed an interdisciplinary perspective that brings psychological knowledge into conversation with philosophy, culture, consciousness and the wider dimensions of being human. Holding space for another person, recognising their individuality and meeting them in the fullness of their experience has always been important to me. There is something deeply meaningful about an encounter in which someone feels genuinely seen, with room for their complexity, contradictions, vulnerability, intelligence and desires.

 

I'm also the creator of the MIRROR Model, a six-stage psychological framework exploring how interpretation, identity and expectation influence our experience of ourselves, our relationships and the possibilities for change.

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Eros, identity and the art of becoming

One of my enduring passions is women's becoming. I'm fascinated by the relationship between identity, agency, desire and the ways we come to inhabit ourselves as women. How we encounter our own authority, what we allow ourselves to want, the expectations we absorb, and the possibilities that emerge as our understanding of ourselves evolves. Eros occupies a particularly important place in my thinking. I experience it as a much wider principle than sexuality alone, one concerned with desire, vitality, imagination, pleasure and the creative movement of life itself.

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I'm interested in what happens when we begin to relate to ourselves through possibility, authorship and an appreciation of our own aliveness. My wider enquiry encompasses consciousness, culture, psychological narratives, intimacy, beauty and the assumptions that shape our understanding of human experience. I enjoy questioning familiar ideas, bringing seemingly unrelated subjects into conversation and discovering fresh perspectives along the way. Some of these enquiries become essays. Others find expression through speaking, creative projects, psychological frameworks or conversations. Many simply become the beginning of another fascinating question.

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Where it all comes together

Today, my work moves between writing, speaking, psychological consultancy and private conversations. Through my writing, I explore the subjects that fascinate me, drawing upon psychology, philosophy, culture, personal observation and the experience of being alive. Through Private Conversations, I continue my work with women, bringing together psychological depth, intellectual curiosity and a particular interest in identity, eros, agency and becoming. These encounters offer room to be seen, to explore what matters and to engage with the complexities and possibilities of one's own experience.

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I also welcome opportunities for speaking, media, education, psychological consultancy and interdisciplinary collaboration.

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And somewhere amidst all of this, there are children, cats, music, dancing, laughter, books, unexpected discoveries and the wonderful, occasionally bewildering experience of everyday life. I imagine I'll always be curious. I'll always have more questions, more ideas to explore, more things to learn and more reasons to be enchanted by this extraordinary business of being human.

 

And I rather like it that way.

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