A midwife, not an engineer

People arrive when something has come loose. A role has ended, or a marriage has changed shape, or a long-held certainty has quietly stopped being true. They usually apologise for not being able to explain it clearly. They almost never need to.

My own route into this was not a straight one, which is part of why I trust the crooked ones. I have spent a long time in rooms where somebody was in the middle of something and everyone present, including them, wanted it to be over. What I learned in those rooms is that the wanting-it-over is usually the loudest thing in the room, and rarely the most useful.

So the work is not advice, and it is not a method I apply to you. It is closer to accompaniment: paying enough attention to notice what is already moving, and staying steady enough that it does not have to move in secret.

Problem-solving starts by deciding what is wrong. That decision is made early, usually within minutes, and everything afterward serves it. It is a fast and powerful instrument, and it is the wrong one here.

Recognition works the other way around. It waits. It notices what is actually present — including the parts that don't fit the story either of us would prefer — and then responds to that, rather than to the diagnosis. It is slower. It is also the only thing I have found that does not flatten the very thing it is trying to help.

In practice this means I will ask you fewer questions than you expect, and I will not be in a hurry to interpret. If you want somebody to tell you what your situation means and what to do about it, I would genuinely rather you found that person — they exist, and they are useful. This is a different service.