Braden Siemens

I am available on Sunday and Monday afternoons/evenings. Mondays are typically reserved for meetings in an outdoor context, while Sundays are in A Quiet Room by the Shore located in Leith. 

I believe that therapy is about developing a relationship that fosters trust, empathy, and collaborative meaning-making. My formal training as a qualified psychotherapist combines person-centred and psychodynamic frameworks. Facilitating an environment where a client can become curious about themselves, where they can test and probe language in order to give voice to their own unique experiences—this is the underlying spirit of the practice that I wish to engage with my clients. Therapy is relational, but this is not just a matter of relating to others, but of discovering in what ways one relates to themselves.

I have been deeply affected by my work with clients with complex traumas, who have experienced depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and bereavement. My time working with Venture Trust Outdoor Therapy, in particular, with war veterans having suffered from PTSD, was especially informative for me in my understanding that therapy is dynamic, a constantly moving, intuitive space where one can feel not only heard but supported in a myriad of ways, all dependent on the unique relationship established with each client. This means allowing time to unearth old understandings of the self, many of which have remained dormant since a traumatic event, hidden in habits and behaviours and within the body.

I will see almost any client who wants to work with me, with very few exceptions. That being said, I have some niches that might help clients decide whether I am the best fit for them. My post-graduate research interests have focused on exploring gender discourses around masculinities and, as such, I feel inclined to work with men who continuously have felt suffocated by limiting constructs around how they can express and experience themselves. Men increasingly feel that they have no space to share their emotions openly. I wish to create a space in which men can begin to feel reflexively and engage with these parts of themselves so often cordoned off by society and by those around them, as well as to collaboratively question some of the assumptions and roles that so often have inhibited men from experiencing themselves as complex, embodied, and feeling individuals.

My research background being in existential philosophy, I am eager to work with clients who feel a sense of isolation and loneliness from the collectives around them, who feel anxiety about death, who struggle with meaninglessness in their lives. I hope to work with clients in generating methods of softening what some call an existential “terror” of death and to help them to articulate their sense of self in a world that can often feel senseless. Anxieties such as these can occur in individuals who have suffered a loss of faith or who have been abused by a faith community. For many of these individuals, the world lies disenchanted, vacuous, and emptied of all meaning and life. Post-religious trauma is an increasingly common experience and is growing in awareness. Whether through engaging with memory through lyrics, poetry, stories, songs, drawings, or developing new rituals of meaning together, I aim to meet my clients wherever they are.

I offer one-to-one 50-minute sessions, once a week, at the same time and day. Our first session will be an opportunity to develop a sense of what has brought you to therapy and to get to know each other. If we both agree that working together is a good fit, I encourage clients to commit to six weeks to allow time to get a sense of what might be possible and also time to process what might arise in the initial sessions. I offer a limited amount of outdoor therapy sessions. If interested in an outdoor session, please state so in your email.