Why I built Us Together.
A few days past Pamplona, I came over a rise and found two empty chairs and a little table, side by side, with snow on the mountains behind. I was on my own, and I felt it. And I realised that if I wanted company, I’d have to walk towards it. I spent the rest of the walk asking what I could offer other people. Us Together came out of those two chairs.
That’s how the work goes. Under pressure, most people retreat into the corner. Us Together provides the door, but stepping through it into open space is your choice. Together, we take the big questions and make them small enough to do something with in daily life. You try a small experiment, see how it fits, and adjust. You lead the session. I bring some structure, a second pair of eyes, and the patterns I spot in what you tell me. Over time, you carry what you’ve found into a room of your own, built to last.
Before all this, I spent six years teaching in Malaysia, China and Spain. It taught me that people understand things best when they’re shown another way to see them, not told what to think. I hold a BSc in Psychology (Liverpool, BPS accredited), an MRes in Neuroscience (Newcastle) and Level 3 counselling training, and I’ve tried everything in this method on my own thinking first.
Us Together is a structured psychological practice, not a clinical or medical service. If you’re living with a mental health condition, this work can sit alongside your care. It doesn’t replace it.
Most nights it went the same way. A question I thought I’d already answered would come back. Not quite the same, though. It’d be slightly different each time, enough to make me look at it again. Why’s this back? What am I missing? And underneath all of them, the one that never really went away: what’s the point of me?
From the outside, it looked like I was fine. I worked, I saw friends and family, and I helped where I could. If anyone asked, I said I was fine, because I didn’t want to be a burden. But inside, my thinking kept returning to the same empty place, and nothing I did seemed to touch it.
My world had been getting smaller for a while. Under pressure, I retreated into the corner of my own mind. From the corner, a situation feels safe because it’s familiar, but you can’t see a way forward. Then Covid came and took what was left. I ended up working early shifts in a supermarket, seeing hardly anyone, and building a set of rules against myself. Most of them started with “I must have messed up”. I had a psychology degree and a neuroscience master’s, and I still couldn’t take my own thoughts apart.
Reading Viktor Frankl was the first crack. He found meaning in about the worst circumstances you can imagine, and I thought: if he could do that, I can at least look for it in mine. So I read Camus, Kierkegaard, Sartre and the Stoics alongside the psychology I already knew. I wasn’t looking for a single magic answer. I wanted a practical method to tell which thoughts were worth my attention and which ones I could put down.
in January 2023, I packed a bag and started walking the Camino de Santiago. The first day over the Pyrenees in the snow nearly beat me. That night I decided I was getting the bus home. By the morning I’d worked out that whichever way I went, I still had to walk somewhere, so why go backwards? I picked the next short stage and said I’d see how I felt. Halfway there, I knew I’d finish.