Why Between?
On Naming a practice and the territory in points to
People sometimes ask me about the name - between. Between what? they want to know. It's a reasonable question. Many practices take the name of their founders, or something aspirational — clarity, flourish, anchor. Between doesn't promise anything. It doesn't resolve into a reassuring image.
That's partly why I chose it.
The name points toward a territory rather than a destination. It describes a place in experience that I have come to know well - not because it is comfortable, but because it is honest. And because it is, I think, where the most significant work actually happens.
A Philosopher's Narrow Ridge
The name comes, in part, from Martin Buber - a philosopher whose thinking on relationship and encounter was foundational to Gestalt therapy. Buber spent his life trying to articulate what happens in the space between people when genuine meeting occurs. His most well-known distinction is between two modes of relating: treating another person as an object (‘it’) to be managed or categorised, or meeting that person as a full subject (‘thou’) who is present, irreducible, alive.
What I return to frequently is a less-quoted passage. About dialogue, Buber wrote:
On the far side of the subjective, on this side of the objective, on the narrow ridge, where I and Thou meet, there is the realm of 'between.' (Buber, 1965, p.246)
The narrow ridge. I find this image quietly arresting. Not the sealed world of one's own interior. Not the supposed safety of analysis from a distance. But the ridge between both of these place - uncertain, exposed ground, where contact becomes possible precisely because neither person has retreated.
This is not a comfortable place to inhabit. It requires a willingness to be genuinely affected - to let what the other person brings actually land, rather than processing it from behind glass. In Gestalt therapy, we call this contact - the live meeting point between ourself and another. It is where change becomes possible. And it is where the most real conversations happen. I know this not only from working with clients, but from being a client myself. Knowing what it is like to be on the ridge, when I would have preferred the safety of familiar retreat to the far bank. I have experienced what it is to be met in the exposed place.
The Pause That Contains Everything
The second influence on my choice of the name between is Viktor Frankl - psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor - who understood from within the most extreme human conditions imaginable that something could remain free even when everything external had been stripped away. A passage widely attributed to him, though the precise wording is debated, captures something essential:
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
What strikes me is not only its philosophical hopefulness but the precision of where freedom is located. Not in better circumstances. Not in the resolution of difficulty. But in the gap itself. The pause between – between what happens to us and what we do next.
In embodied relational psychotherapy, we are often working in exactly this space. The moment between sensation and reaction. The moment in which, if we can slow down enough to notice it, something different becomes possible - not a better performance of ourselves, but a more honest one. I work with this with clients. And I work with it in myself, in the room, when I feel the pull to fill a silence or reach for something useful. That pause, which can feel like failure, is often where the real thing is trying to emerge.
The Swamp, the Threshold, the Unnamed Place
When I think about the clients who find their way to me, there is often a quality of in-between-ness to the moment of their arrival. Not crisis exactly, though sometimes that too. More often something quieter and harder to name -the sense that one chapter has ended but the next has not yet begun. That something in the previous arrangement of life no longer fits, but nothing has yet arrived to replace it.
The transitions vary enormously. Grief, in its many forms - the loss of a person, a relationship, a version of oneself. Perimenopause, that profound reorganisation of body and identity that our culture so consistently underestimates. Redundancy or retirement, which can strip away not just income or routine but the entire architecture of how a person understood themselves to matter. The ending of a relationship or family estrangement. The burnout that comes as the accumulated cost of long-term disconnection from one's own limits and needs. The quiet, persistent feeling that life looks right from the outside but feels hollow from the inside.
What these transitions share is not their content but their texture. They are places of genuine not-knowing. The old map no longer describes the terrain. The new one hasn't been drawn yet. And in the gap between them, people often find themselves in what one client memorably described as a disorienting, imprisoning swamp. Hard to get out of. Unsure whether to push forward or turn back.
I recognise that place. I have been in my own swamp. And what I know from both sides is that the instinct to escape it - to hurry toward resolution, to find the insight that would release me - is usually the thing that keeps us stuck. The swamp has its own intelligence, if you can bear to stay in it long enough to find out what it knows. Sometimes, we need support to bear it.
What It Means to Accompany
The word I return to as I recall my time in the swamp is accompaniment. Not direction, not problem-solving, not insight delivered from a position of greater knowing. Accompaniment - the willingness of another to be present when someone is in such a place.
As a Gestalt therapist and coach, my training asks something specific of me here. It asks me to slow down rather than speed up. To become curious about what is already present - in the room, in the body, in the quality of contact between us, as a somatic resonance - rather than reaching for what should be present, or what might come next. In practice, this means that sessions are less about arriving at answers and more about creating conditions in which something new can emerge. Not directed. Not performed.
I will admit that this does not always come easily to me. There is an older pattern I carry - a default toward fixing, toward making things better, toward doing something useful - that I have to consciously work against in the room. When a client sits in real distress, the pull to reach for something, to offer the reassurance or the reframe that might ease the difficulty, is strong. Learning to stay with what is rather than moving toward what could be has been, and continues to be, its own practice. I name this not to make my own process the subject, but because I think it matters that the person accompanying you in the swamp has their own relationship with discomfort. Has learned, imperfectly and is still learning, not to run from it.
Authentic Expression, Courageous Presence, Grace
When I sat with the values that would anchor Between, three things kept returning. The first is authentic expression - not self-disclosure as an end in itself, but the process of learning to honour what is actually true and finding ways to bring it into language and contact, with awareness and care. I hold this value because I know what it costs when it's absent. I have sat in rooms, personal and professional, and not found the words for what I actually meant. I have said the adequate thing when the true thing felt too risky. The work of authentic expression is not a destination I have arrived at. It is something I return to, regularly, as a practice.
Courageous presence is the value I find most alive in the between-spaces. To stay with what is real, even when it feels uncertain or unfinished, even when every instinct is pulling toward resolution. This is not passivity. It is a particular kind of active engagement. And I am not immune to the doubt that sometimes settles in that stillness. There are sessions where I am sitting with a client in genuine not-knowing, and something in me quietly wonders whether I should be doing more, offering more, steering us somewhere more legible. That whisper is not unique to me. But learning to recognise it, and to stay anyway, is part of what makes the presence courageous rather than merely comfortable.
Grace, the third value, I understand as the capacity to make room for complexity, for the unfolding nature of things, for acceptance - not as resignation, but as the willingness to receive what is before deciding what to do with it. This is the value that most requires me to attend to my own pace. I move quickly by default. I make connections fast, reach conclusions, want to understand. Grace asks me to slow down enough to let things arrive in their own time, at their own weight. It is, I think, the value I have much to learn from.
A Space to Come Home to Yourself
I chose the name Between because it is honest about where the work happens. Not at the destination. Not once things have been resolved and life has resumed its familiar shape. But here - in the uncomfortable, generative, sometimes swampy territory where what was no longer holds, and what is coming has not yet arrived.
It is also a description of what genuine relationship offers. The meeting Buber described doesn't dissolve the distinctness of either person. It happens in the space between two people who are willing to be present without retreating into management or performance. That space, when it exists, is unusual. It is where people most often find their way back to something that feels like themselves.
The tagline I settled on is simple: a space to come home to yourself. Not to a better self, not to a fixed self, not to a self that no longer carries difficulty. Home, in this sense, is not a destination you reach. It is a quality of contact with your own experience - the sense, however fleeting, of being present to what is actually happening in you, rather than managing it from a safe distance.
Between is where that becomes possible. On the narrow ridge, where I and Thou meet.
If something in this resonates you can read more about how I work, or get in touch to arrange an initial conversation.
