Working together

What I work with, and what actually happens if you get in touch. Not knowing either of those stops more people than the fee does.

Who I work with

People roughly between twenty-five and forty-five. The years where a life is supposed to be settling and often is not: work that has stopped meaning what it did, a relationship that works on paper, parents who have started to age, and a version of yourself you agreed to be some time ago without noticing you were agreeing.

Anxiety, stress and burnout

The kind where you are still performing. You hit the deadlines and answer the messages, and somewhere in the last year the background hum turned into something you are managing full-time.

Relationships and family

The same argument in different clothes. A partner you have stopped being honest with. A parent you cannot talk to and cannot stop thinking about. In-laws, expectations, and the arithmetic of whose life bends.

Low mood

Often flatness rather than sadness. Things you used to want, you do not want, and you cannot locate when that changed.

Self-worth, and the absence of it

Not the performance of confidence. The quieter thing underneath, where you get to believe you are allowed to want something.

Patterns

The way a person keeps arriving at the same place by what looks like a different road each time. Naming that is usually where it starts to move.

What I don't do

I do not work with children or teenagers. If that is what you are looking for I will say so early and point you to someone who does it well.

I am not a psychiatrist and I cannot prescribe. If medication is worth considering I will say so and help you find someone who can.

The first conversation

Thirty minutes, free, over video. You talk and I ask questions. I will want to know what has brought you here now rather than six months ago. That question matters more than it sounds.

Towards the end we will talk about practicalities, and you can ask me anything, including whether I have worked with this before.

You do not need to prepare. Some people arrive with notes. That is also fine.

After that

Usually weekly, over video, at the same time each week where we can manage it. Some people move to fortnightly later on.

I will not tell you what to do. I am not going to diagnose you in the first ten minutes and I will not promise you a timeline. What I do is help you work out what is actually going on, which is usually not the thing you came in saying.

Ending

We will talk about it before it happens. Stopping is part of the work rather than a failure of it, and you can stop whenever you want without explaining yourself.

Some of the work

What people came in carrying.

Satlaj has worked with more than 140 people. These are some of the testimonials, anonymised. Read them properly →

A woman in her late thirties, after a divorce she described as the ground going out from under her.

What helped was not advice. It was someone steady through the weeks that were worst.

A man in his mid-thirties, who had stayed years in work that was emptying him out, too afraid to go.

What shifted was recognising the fear as noise rather than a signal. He left.

A man in his early thirties, watching a long relationship come apart and not understanding why.

It turned out not to be about love. It was about what the two of them were not saying.

A mother in her early fifties, after her son left to study abroad, in a house that had gone quiet.

The work was about who she had been before she was only somebody's mother.

A woman of twenty-nine, with everybody around her holding a view on whether she should marry.

What she wanted was to find out what she wanted.

A founder in his early forties, already running the company, unsure he had what the next part needed.

She did not tell him what to do. She reflected back what was already there.

A woman of forty-seven, who believed building something of her own belonged to people twenty years younger.

The belief was the obstacle, not the age.

A man of fifty-one, after twenty-five years of working for other people, wanting something that was his.

The work was separating the real risks from the imagined ones.