Our Values
I believe we are all connected — to each other, to place, to the living earth. I believe there are many ways of being, experiencing, and expressing — none more right than another. I believe what looks like difficulty often makes sense when we see the wider context. And I believe care should meet people where they are, not ask them to become something else.
These values shape the work.
You don't need to share them to be here.
At the heart of Rain & Me. Children’s Therapy are values that shape how care, relationship, and therapeutic work are approached.
These values describe the orientation I bring to practice, not a belief system clients are expected to adopt. Clients are never asked to share my worldview. Therapy centres consent, choice, cultural safety, and each person’s own meaning-making, pace, and way of understanding their experience.
What follows are principles that guide how I listen, respond, and hold therapeutic space.
Non-Dual Orientation
My work is informed by non-dual perspectives that attend to interconnectedness and wholeness, rather than separation or fragmentation.
In practice, this means moving beyond rigid binaries such as right and wrong, good and bad, or functional and dysfunctional — not by denying difficulty, but by allowing complex and sometimes conflicting experiences to be held with care. Emotions, reactions, and stories are approached as meaningful aspects of lived experience, rather than problems to eliminate.
Decolonised and Earth-Attuned Perspectives
This practice is shaped by an ongoing commitment to decolonised and earth-attuned ways of understanding care, relationship, and wellbeing.
Rather than positioning Western psychological models as universal or complete, I remain attentive to ecological context, place, lineage, and knowledge systems that understand wellbeing as relational and situated. This includes an awareness that decolonisation is not an endpoint, but an ongoing process of learning, unlearning, and reflexivity.
Clients are not required to engage with these perspectives directly. They inform how space is held, how power is attended to, and how relationship and environment are understood within the work.
Neuro-affirmative Practice
A neuro-affirmative approach recognises that there are many valid ways of thinking, sensing, relating, and experiencing the world.
Rather than framing neurological differences as deficits to be corrected, this practice honours neurodiversity as part of human variation. Support is oriented toward understanding, accommodation, and respect, rather than normalisation or optimisation.
Strengths-Oriented Approach
This work is grounded in an orientation that notices and supports existing capacities, resources, and ways of coping.
Rather than locating change solely in what is missing or broken, attention is given to what is already present — including creativity, resilience, relationship, and meaning. This does not deny struggle, but seeks to hold difficulty alongside capability.
De-centering Individualised Mental Health
Rather than locating distress solely within the individual, this practice attends to the broader contexts that shape experience — including family systems, cultural expectations, social structures, and environments.
From this perspective, distress is understood as arising in relationship to conditions, not as evidence of personal failure. Therapeutic work is oriented toward reducing harm, increasing understanding, and supporting connection, rather than fixing or correcting the individual.