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Identity & Sense of Self
Some people arrive in therapy with a clear problem to solve. Others arrive with something harder to articulate: a sense of not quite knowing who they are, of performing a version of themselves that doesn't feel entirely true, or of feeling different depending on who they're with, as though there's no stable centre underneath.
At KYND Psychology, therapy for identity concerns doesn't assume there's a single, authentic self waiting to be uncovered. Instead, it starts from a more honest question: how did this particular way of experiencing yourself come to form, and what has it been protecting or making possible? Identity is shaped early, often in relation to the people who first reflected us back to ourselves, long before we had any say in the matter.
Working from a psychoanalytic foundation, and drawing on evidence-based approaches where they serve the person in front of me, I offer a space to explore these questions without rushing toward a fixed answer. This isn't about arriving at a neat definition of who you are. It's slower, more attentive work, always in service of the person, never the protocol.
Why We Come to See Ourselves Through Others
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested that our sense of self is never built alone. It forms through the eyes of others, through the ways we were seen, named, and responded to long before we could evaluate any of it for ourselves. This is often why identity can feel so unstable under certain relationships or environments: the ground it stands on was never entirely our own to begin with. Understanding whose voice a person is still answering to, often without realising it, is frequently where this work begins.
What Sessions Look Like
Early sessions focus on understanding how a person's sense of self shifts across different relationships and contexts, and where that instability first took shape. From there, therapy moves at a pace shaped by what emerges, not by a fixed program or a predetermined idea of who you should become.
Sessions are available for adults and young adults at our practice in Kew. Many clients travel from Hawthorn, Camberwell, Balwyn, and Richmond for a therapeutic approach that treats them as a whole person rather than a diagnosis. Clinical psychology offers structure and grounding, psychoanalytic thinking offers depth and meaning, and my training in both allows sessions to move between practical support for the present and a slower exploration of where these patterns began.