Psychotherapy
Trauma
Grief
Attachment
DID / plurality
Neurodiversity
LGBTQIA+
Amber Taylor
Psychotherapist
Hi. My name is Amber.
I am a psychotherapist based in Newcastle, Australia and am available for appointments through Zoom telehealth.
My primary focus is helping you live your best life, whatever that means to you. I, myself, am part of a number of minority sub-cultures. I’m trans, I’m queer, I’m neurodivergent among other things. I’ve seen a great deal, I’ve had to fight to be where I am today and I want to fight for you to fully embrace the best life you can imagine.
As cliché as it might sound, your best life is waiting and is within reach. It’s my job, as a seasoned tour guide, to help you discover what that best life looks like and to make it a reality day by day.
I have a particular speciality in working with people who have a history of abuse and trauma and those who have experienced intense childhood trauma that has split the mind and resulted in plurality (DID).
So no matter what you throw at me, I know that, together, with you as the expert of you and me as the tour guide, we can work to have you feeling empowered and at the steering wheel of your life again very soon.
I want to acknowledge that I am an anglo-Australian white person with a heritage that links back across the sea to Celtic pagan roots in Scotland, England and Europe. As a white person I do not have lived experience with what it means to be a person of colour.
My promise to you is that I am working each day to be the best ally I can be, to understand and stand against the systems of oppression that seek to pull my fellow humans down.
Culture
My goal in therapy is to support and welcome your unique connection to spirituality whether that be atheism, a religion or other spiritual practices. Therapy needs to be a safe space for you to bring all of you, and spirituality can be a big component of that for some people.
Spirituality
My therapy space is a sex-positive, kink and alternative lifestyle affirming space. My personal belief is that the exploration of kink is a sacred, honest, and vulnerably real journey to the core of who we are as a person. I honour this exploration of yours and welcome any discussion that involves your sense of self expression.
Kink / Alternative Lifestyles
Polyamory and
Ethical Non-Monogamy
I have decades of personal lived experience with the intricacies of polyamory and ethical non-monogamy. I welcome any and all discussions on non-monogamy as we both work to help you create your best life.
I have been coaching plural people for the past fifteen years. As a plural person myself, I have a unique insight into the complexities of plurality. My unique approach takes the stigma and pathology out of working with you as a multiple. My approach breaks up the healing journey into a number of mastery stages
Stage 1 - Building Community: A phase where we work to honour and understand each of the parts of you. The roles they have played in holding trauma, their goals, dreams, personality, skills, abilities and short-comings. This stage is about slowly building friendships between each part to eventually take down the walls between people and reduce somatic pain that can be experienced as the result of ‘switching’ between which identity is currently in control of the body.
Stage 2 - Teamwork: In this stage we explore the skills and abilities of different parts further to start to harness the special abilities plural people often have. Perhaps one part can see better in the dark, while another is an excellent car driver. Perhaps one part is really good at keeping things clean while another is good at going to the gym and keeping the body fit.
Stage 3 - Skill Sharing: In this stage we practise the art of ‘layering’, allowing two or more parts to be ‘out’ at the one time. Layering helps each part to learn from each other and start to share skillsets. This stage is designed to empower each of the parts to feel that they can move from coping with life to feeling deeply effective.
Plurality / DID
I excitedly welcome you to therapy regardless of your sexuality or gender identity.
Seraphim Healing is a safe and affirming space for you to be you.
I, personally and proudly, identify as Lesbian, Queer, Trans and Asexual.
I honour you as a fellow person of the rainbow.
I am so excited to meet you, work with you, support you to work through what you want to explore in therapy while also supporting the powerful, authentic expression of who you are.
And, if you are not feeling that you are 'there yet', whether you are exploring, or haven't found the social support to feel safe to live your authentic life fully - I see you. I and countless other queer people from around the globe and throughout the history of the human race are lining the walkways where you step each day, cheering you on.
LGBTQIA+
Neurodiversity is one of the most powerful aspects of who you are. The power of your mind has likely been largely untapped up until this point.
Inside a world that glorifies the “average” and labels brilliance as a “disorder”, you’ve likely been constantly exposed to the idea that your ADHD or Autistic (or both) brain is somehow “less than” the average person. Schooling, workplaces, social settings, shopping centres have all been created for the “average” neurotypical person. It makes complete sense that, as the swan you are, you’ve felt like an ugly ducking your entire life.
You’re not. You are incredible.
ADHD
Imagine, if you will, a tribe shivering in a cave many thousands of years ago. It’s the ice age, food is scarce and everyone is simply waiting, trying to conserve energy.
“We just can’t sit here!” a young adolescent man insists.
“You can’t venture outside the cave. There’s no food and it’s too dangerous.” the elder says quietly.
“Watch me,” the young man replies defiantly. “Hold my beer.”
And on the morning of the seventh day, appearing over the crest of the nearest hill here is this young man and his friends dragging a mammoth they slew on a sled. You bet you he had many kids to many women after that event! and THAT is why ADHD is so prevalent in the population, because for tens of thousands of years we havent lived in tiny boxes, working eight hour days at the same mundane thing every single day of the week. For hundreds of thousands of years people who get inspired and creative in the face of impossible odds were the saviours of society.
Society glorifies the 'worker' and you, my friend are not that. You are an ingenious, creative leader of society. You think outside of the box and its your exact brain that society needs more than anything, right now.
ADHD brains crave new experiences and thrive in the midst of boredom and adversity, constantly discovering new and amazing things. Your brain has the incredible ability to see solutions where other people only see obstacles, to think outside of the box. You are a literal genius, able to fixate on a new experience for weeks until you master it, only to become bored with that once it is no longer a challenge, to move onto the next thing.
The trick with working with an ADHD brain is to understand how your brain operates. You need challenge, but more than that - you're actually powered by adversity and boredom - something an ADHD brain will fight tooth and nail to avoid.
You see… boredom is where inspiration is born for a person with ADHD, but so often we live each day in a perpetuatual state of fighting adversity in order to get day-to-day tasks completed.
It's the constant striving to fit into a "neuro-beige" world that is where the struggle occurs. It’s the embracing of your brain as brilliant and perfect, just as it is, that releases the fullness of your power.
Many of the worlds best performers, athletes, explorers, pioneers all have neurodiverse ADHD brains.
Autism
The genius of the Autistic brain lies in it's delight in taking things very slowly. The Autistic mind milks every last speck of information out of a subject before it is ready to move on. Some of the greatest minds in history were Autistic - dedicating their lives to exploring one of the infinite facets of reality.
For this reason, Autistic people are typically not as interested in developing socially at the same compulsive level that non-autistic people seem to prioritise as one of the most important things in life. Autistic people may become social geniuses, dedicating a fraction of their lives to understanding the complexities of human interaction, but many of us have passions that lie in other areas.
For this reason many Autistic people are considered 'slow to develop' compared with the neurotypical population. This is often pathologised and seen as a "disorder" in some medical circles. In the Autistic community, however, we like to turn this pathologising on its head. You'll often hear us using terms such as "allistic" to laughingly pathologise non-autistic behaviours such as compulsive socialising and the inability to maintain attention on a subject for an extended period of time.
Some of the big challenges Autistic people face living in a society that refuses to acknowledge neurodiverse needs are:
Our emotions tend to be very finely tuned. Often we are highly empathetic. This means that its normal for us to enter fight/flight and shut down around allistic people blasting their emotions into the space
Autistic inertia is the snowballing effect we experience when we start focusing on a topic. Once we start, we NEED to keep going until we finish, with NO interruptions. It's something that is not understood by the allistic community who tend to see us focusing and immediately want to perpetually interrupt with conversation
These, any other challenges, leave many people with Autism in perpetual fight/flight trying to co-exist in a world that is not attuned to our needs in any way. The hack is to take the time to explore and understand our needs, then use the genius minds we have to curate the environments around us and empower us to clearly communicate our needs and desires.
I would be honoured to work to empower you to grasp a hold of the life you deserve and truly feel that you are living it each and every day.
Neurodiversity
Wholistic Integrated Therapeutic Approach
A body-focused approach that helps people feel safe in their body once more.
People who have suffered trauma or grief can often become disconnected from their body as the emotions held within are too painful to process. This withdrawal from painful emotions often leaves people with the feeling that they are in a constant battle each day, incapable of feeling safety and peace.
Somatic Experiencing empowers people to feel safe to their bodies once again, helping them process the emotions which are keeping them from experiencing peace.
Somatic Experiencing
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
CBT forms the core of many therapeutic approaches, helping us to understand how thoughts can create emotions which in turn create behaviour. CBT techniques are deeply practical and empowering ways to take charge of our thoughts before they can become emotions and take charge of our behaviours in order to feel in control once more.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT borrows from ancient mindfulness practices found in philosophies such as Buddhism and Stoicism and places them in a modern context as seen through the lens of CBT. ACT provides a way of learning to be comfortable noticing our thoughts and emotions. ACT focuses on placing our values at the centre of our lives so that we can act in alignment with them rather than reacting to the environment around us.
Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)
SFBT is a powerful modality of therapy that essentially bypasses exploring problems and instead focuses on what an ideal future might look like. By exploring your preferred future we might discover that the problems you came to therapy with weren’t really related to the solution you were looking for after all. This modality provides tools that help us to discover what you truly want without having to wade through all the pain and mistakes of your past. It’s uplifting, exciting, hopeful, and a very fast way of quickly discovering what it is that you want, what parts of that solution already exist in your life and what the next steps are to truly take hold of your preferred future.
Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)
IFS allows us to explore the various parts of yourself through different lenses. What does your inner child feel? What does your inner wisdom have to offer? I usually couple this work with Somatic Experiencing to enter a deeply safe place inside yourself where you can meet with your inner child and do the healing work there by finally being able to hear and connect with various parts of yourself. This way of working is also a beautiful way to connect with ancestors or other guides for those who prefer to work spiritually.
Way down in the depths of our unconscious we have internalised views about who we are. These invisible beliefs about ourselves often get written into our deep unconscious at an early age and taint the way we view every aspect of life. We may reject relationships because, deep down, we feel we are unlovable. We may not go for that job promotion because we know deep down that ‘we are a failure’.
“Of course I’m not TOTALLY unlovable!” we say to ourselves while deep don’t we don’t truly believe that statement. Schema therapy allows us to do the job of internal renovation, re-writing more helpful beliefs about ourself, about others and about the world that we can use to empower our choices.