I was a photographer first.
For years, I moved through the world with a camera, drawn to faces, to light, to the quiet moments between poses. I loved the work — but something kept nagging at me. I could see that the most powerful images weren’t happening because of good lighting or the right location. They were happening in brief, unplanned flashes — when someone forgot the camera was there, when they stopped trying, when something real surfaced.
I wanted to understand how to create those moments on purpose. That curiosity led me, in 2021, to enroll in a Primal therapy training program. Three years later, I was certified.
Primal therapy is a body-based approach that works with early emotional experience — the feelings, needs, and wounds we carry from childhood that continue to shape our lives as adults. The core idea is simple but profound: inside every adult lives a child. And that child, more often than we realise, is the one driving our lives.
This isn’t a metaphor. The inner child is the part of us that formed its deepest beliefs early on — about whether we are safe, loved, worthy, seen. When those needs weren’t met, the child adapted. It learned to hide, to perform, to shrink, to overfunction. And then we grew up — but the child stayed, running old strategies in new situations. We wonder why we freeze when someone looks at us too long, why we can’t receive a compliment, why being photographed feels unbearable. Often, it’s the child at the wheel.
The work of primal therapy isn’t to fix or silence this part of us. It’s to meet it. To offer what it always needed: to be seen, accepted, and loved — exactly as it is. When the child feels safe, something in the whole person settles. The adult becomes freer.
When I returned to photography with this understanding, everything shifted. I stopped trying to direct people and started learning how to receive them. How to make the space safe enough that the real person — not the performed version — could surface.
That is what I bring to every session. The camera is just the tool. The real work is in the room.
