Most mornings I am in the garden before I am anywhere else. Nothing much happens there. A pheasant crosses the lawn, the tomatoes in the polytunnel need water, and I notice how much of what matters arrives unbidden, in the spaces between things.
Therapy, when it goes well, has something of the same quality. It is less a procedure than a practice of attention.
I should say at the outset that I now see clients only occasionally. Having retired from my role at the University of Hull, most of my working life is given to writing, teaching and editing, including co-editing Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice. This page is written as much for curious colleagues as for anyone considering therapy with me.
My orientation is systemic and second-order, shaped above all by Gregory Bateson and by William Blake’s fourfold vision. Fourfold Vision, as I have come to understand and write about it, is not a ladder to be climbed but a set of sensibilities that rise and fall in all of us: the narrowed, literal seeing that Blake called single vision, and the widening capacities for relationship, imagination and what Bateson named sacred unity, the recognition that mind is not sealed inside the skull but distributed through our relationships, our histories and the living world.
In practice this means I do not treat distress as pathology. The difficulties people bring nearly always make sense as adaptations – responses to what has happened to them, to the workings of power in their lives, and to the meanings they have had to make in order to get by. The work is not to fix a fault but to understand those adaptations together, honour what they have protected, and notice where new patterns might become possible.
So a session is a conversation rather than a treatment. I make no promises of quick results or fancy techniques. What I offer is careful, unhurried attention to the whole field a person lives within: family, history, work, social conditions, and the more-than-human world that shapes us more than we usually admit. The room we sit in, the seasonal weather outside the window, the lives and losses carried in each chair are all part of what is present.
Colleagues wanting the fuller argument will find it in my published writing on Fourfold Vision (see the lower portion of the home page) and in work forthcoming in The Entangled Human. If you are considering therapy, you do not need to arrive with answers, or even with a clear account of the problem. A willingness to begin a conversation is enough.
Hugh Palmer 