Dr Ursula Lau, MA

I am registered as both a clinical and research psychologist, and I see myself as a practitioner who brings together a depth and range of experience across different settings. These have included community and university contexts, counselling and hospital settings, student counselling centres and consulting rooms, both in South Africa and internationally. What I have come to appreciate through working across these diverse settings is the importance of listening to the ways in which we make sense of our lives through words and through the meanings we put together. Some of the experiences that have been most profound and inspiring for me have been those encounters with people whose lives have become interrupted, whether through crisis, trauma, grief, loss or struggles in relationships. There are also those less easily defined moments when life is no longer quite what it seemed to be. Questions of identity, of who we are, where we belong and where we fit in, may come to the fore and invite a different way of thinking about ourselves and our place in the world. My interest in working with adults lies in the complexity and richness of adult life experience. The ways in which we have lived through our experiences shape how we speak about ourselves. Our familiar or go-to ways of speaking do not arise from nowhere; they have been formed through layers of experience and through the meanings that have gathered over time. I find it significant that the very place in which we put meaning together, through words, can also become the place where those meanings begin to unravel and take on a different form. This may change how we relate to ourselves emotionally, but also how we connect with our capacity to take up space in the world in a bodily and sensory way. Our individual histories, relationships to culture, intergenerational meanings, communities and, where it is important to us, our spiritual sense, all offer a context through which we have come to place ourselves in the world. When we work together, we learn to listen to the particularity of how you have come to make meaning of your life. We attend to what is unique in how you speak, feel and experience yourself, and to what becomes difficult to express. Within the places of struggle or suffering, we begin to explore how meanings might be reworked, making room for new ways of expressing yourself and being in the world.