What I work with
You do not need the right word for it.
No diagnosis is required to start, no referral, and no tidy account of what is wrong. Arriving without the vocabulary is ordinary.
The things people bring
Most people arrive with several of these tangled together, which is normal and is usually the actual problem.
A watercolour head with colour spilling upward out of it. Supplied by the client.
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Portrait 4:5 · supplied · CHECK LICENCE BEFORE LAUNCH
- Trauma and post-traumatic stress
- Intrusive memories, nightmares, numbness, constant scanning, and the sense that it has not finished happening — whether it was one event or many.
- War, displacement and resettlement
- What leaving costs, what arriving costs, and the guilt of having got out when others did not.
- Grief, including the kind with no funeral
- People who died far away or whose funerals you could not attend. People still missing. A country, a language, a profession, a body.
- Disability, chronic illness and progressive conditions
- Diagnosis and what it does to a life. Deterioration. Pain and fatigue as constant negotiating partners.
- Anxiety, panic and hypervigilance
- An alarm system that learned to stay switched on for excellent reasons and has not been informed that the reasons have changed.
- Depression, and the flatness that arrives afterwards
- Including the version that arrives only once you are finally safe, which catches people off guard and makes complete sense.
- Sleep and nightmares
- Often the first thing to break and one of the best places to start.
- Anger
- Including anger that is entirely justified and is still ruining things.
- Identity, faith and belonging
- Being two people in two languages. Raising children who will not remember what you remember.
- The strain on families
- What it does to be the one holding everyone together — and to be one of the people being held.
How the work goes
Slower than you think, and more under your control
You are not required to tell the story
A common fear is that the first session means describing the worst thing in detail. It does not. Trauma work that goes straight at the memory before there is any stability in place tends to do harm, and it is not how this starts.
Stability first, always
Sleep, breathing, what to do when the panic arrives, how to get through a Tuesday. Unglamorous, and it is what makes everything after it survivable.
You set the pace, and you can stop
“Not today” is a complete sentence and it is always available. Control over what happens next is not a courtesy in trauma work — it is part of the treatment, because the absence of it was part of the injury.
To be confirmed before launch
The specific therapeutic approaches Ali is trained in. This is the section where a counsellor names their modalities — and it has been left empty rather than filled with a plausible-sounding list, because claiming a training you do not hold is a serious matter and clients rely on it when choosing.
What belongs here: each approach he is actually trained in, with a one-sentence plain explanation of what it involves for the client. Candidates commonly held by trauma counsellors include EMDR, Cognitive Processing Therapy, Prolonged Exposure, Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems, Narrative Therapy, CBT, ACT and DBT skills. Only the real ones go on the page.
Language
In Arabic, if that is the language it happened in
Sessions are available in Arabic and in English. This is not a small convenience. Trauma is stored in the language it was laid down in, and translating yourself into a second language in order to describe it costs something — often precisely the detail that mattered.
It also means you do not have to bring a family member to interpret — one of the quieter reasons people never start.
You can switch languages mid-sentence. Most bilingual people do it anyway, and in this room it is not a lapse — it is often the most accurate thing available.
What this is not
- Not emergency care. Crisis lines are here.
- Not medication. A counsellor cannot prescribe. If medication is part of what helps, that is a doctor or a psychiatrist, and the two work well together.
- Not a specialist team. Active psychosis, an eating disorder at a dangerous weight, or medically unsafe withdrawal need more than counselling can provide. Being told so quickly, and pointed somewhere better, is the useful outcome.
- Not a legal or immigration service. No letters, reports or assessments are written for claims, courts or benefits applications.
- Not a promise. No outcome is guaranteed here, by anyone. Counselling helps a great many people and it does not help everyone, and a website that claims otherwise is selling something.