About Clare

Kia Ora | Hello. I’m Clare Rousseau.

I am a psychodynamic therapist, counsellor, and inner development practitioner, working in private practice in Central Wellington.

I am passionate about helping people understand and heal from old patterns and ways of being. I also love working alongside people who are longing for a sense of greater depth or intimacy in themselves and in their relationships.

The experiences that people come to me for support with include: 

• feeling anxious, depressed, stressed, or numb;

• early childhood trauma or attachment issues;

• finding it hard to trust other people or trust life;

• processing inter-generational trauma;

• a desire to develop their own felt sense - to experience themselves, their bodies, and their relationships more deeply and intimately;

• a desire for more softness, stillness, peace, or presence;

• relationship and intimacy challenges;

• experiencing a loss of confidence in self, abilities, worthiness or sense of value. Sometimes this can be accompanied by shame that feels new and hard to pinpoint;

• a desire for a greater sense of purpose or meaning or a loss of purpose and meaning;

• considering getting an ADHD diagnosis, or have recently received an ADHD diagnosis, but curious about the impact of their formative years;

• symptomology and background consistent with a C-PTSD (complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) diagnosis;

• a desire for a greater sense of vitality, or sexual problems or questions around sexuality;

• questions of identity, and belonging;

• wanting to understand or integrate spiritual or trans-personal experiences;

• difficulties coping with grief and loss;

• existential questions, or coming to terms with one’s own mortality;

• assistance with integrating experiences with psychedelics and entheogens;

• peri-natal, (pre-natal, birth, or post-natal) trauma;

• a desire to work with and understand their dreams;

• difficulties sleeping;

• physical symptoms such as pain, that might be arising from emotional or spiritual distress.

I have training in a number of therapeutic approaches, but orient mostly from Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. I am also particularly influenced by psycho-dynamic, trauma-informed, somatic, system, and inter-generational approaches to healing and inner development. Together these lenses allow me to orient from a compassionate and holistic stance, looking at the ‘here-and-now’, the history that has shaped you, and the unfolding future that is emerging.

I know from personal experience that opening up to someone about certain parts of your mind or your life can be uncomfortable or embarrassing. Many of us have acquired beliefs from our families of origin and the culture at large that certain emotions, experiences, and behaviours are bad, wrong, or shameful. And while it is necessary to recognise the way we impact ourselves and one another, these kind of judgements can stop us, or make it hard for us, to seek support.

To me, this is such a shame. In both my theoretical understanding, my experience as a practitioner, and my own personal experience of healing and development, the kinds of things we find hard to talk about, make sense of, and to process on our own, have their roots in our early childhood development. This is a time where we are incredibly sensitive, impressionable, and dependent on the adults around us to hold, see, hear and validate our experiences. So while each of us must take responsibility for our own healing journey, we have - effectively - inherited our psyche from the generations before us. Ironically, it is often the areas where we feel some discomfort or shame, that are pivotal places for our maturation and transformation.

Healing work, therefore, requires a great deal of sensitivity and care. It should enable you to understand and process what’s happening inside of you, not only intellectually, but experientially, through your body. Being someone with a history of complex relational trauma myself, alongside my personal long-term psychotherapy journey, I have developed - and continue to develop - the felt sense, for how to be with these early, and sometimes deeply painful, parts of our experience.

I commit to doing my best to hold a non-judgemental, open and expansive space where you can be with all the parts of you - your thoughts, emotions, sensations, experiences, dreams, stories, beliefs, desires, essence, and the parts that might be hard to name. 

Outside of my private practice, I am passionate about empowering people and systems to heal themselves, and am in the process of exploring ways to open-source what I have had the privilege of learning, and unlearning, to make healing more accessible to a wider group of people. I enjoy hiking, swimming, cooking and exploring wine and food matches.