Philosophy & Vision
The cornerstone of my practice is finding meaning and purpose with full regard for the challenges presented by work, politics and culture in the 21st century.
My greatest strengths lie in working with clients who are acutely aware of the world around them, but who struggle to know and stay centred and grounded in what is meaningful to them.
I respect the reciprocal balance between the significance of structuring environments for understanding the self, and how we must ultimately act on those structures to fully inhabit the self.
My role, as I see it, is to deepen and clarify your understanding of yourself, the ways you experience being in the world and the choices available to you at any given moment.
I welcome LGBTIQA+ and First Nations clients, sex workers, and clients from non-Anglo backgrounds and cultures.
Background
I have previously held waged and unwaged roles in retail and hospitality, publishing and the arts, the community sector, public sector and academia.
I have been a workplace organiser and group facilitator, and have studied widely across gender studies, medical anthropology, sociology and trauma studies.
I have a longstanding interest in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, as well as the social construction of health and illness as it intersects with race, gender, poverty, colonisation and other social processes.
In all this work, and in my new approach to counselling as a profession, I have been guided by my abiding interest in compassionately and empathically aiding others to know what is right for them.
Services
Areas of Special Interest
Accreditations
- Graduate Diploma of Counselling - 2025 - University of Canberra
- Master of Culture, Health & Medicine - 2018 - Australian National University
Modalities
Existential - Mindfulness - Person Centred
Therapy Approach
My training is in person-centred, non-directive, client-led counselling, and my approach may be of special use with:
- Issues in close and intimate relationships, such as communication breakdowns
- Undergoing change, such as in questions of gender, sexuality, new relationships and boundaries with friends or family
- Workplace issues, whether that be in cultural, industrial or professional matters
- Anxiety, depression, identity crisis and existential meaning and purpose.
Broadly, my work involves listening, reflecting, noticing and querying—simple tools which, in my experience, can be a key for radical insight and change.
I offer an open, curious and deeply nonjudgmental space in which to explore whatever brings you to counselling.
Professional Associations
- Australian Counselling Association
Practice Locations
Unit 7, 9 McKay St
North Canberra Counselling
Turner ACT 2612
Appointments
- Mondays (Online)
- Fridays (In-person or online)
- Evenings and weekends by appointment (Online)
Fees & Insurance
- Free 15-minute introductory consult (by phone)
- 50-minute session: $120 (In-person or online)
I will gladly discuss alternative fees and plans, especially where clients are low-waged, unwaged, unhoused, refugees and/or First Nations.
Payment Options
Payment of agreed fees may be made via PayID or direct bank transfer prior to or within 24 hours of appointments.
Contact Ashley
Please contact me to book a 15 minute free initial consult
A conversation with Ashley Thomson
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I spent many years repeating behaviour and re-experiencing painfully familiar depressions and anxieties until seeing a psychotherapist helped me change that. And after a while I found I wanted to understand how it worked. As someone who cares very much about progressive causes, I felt that I had found a missing piece in understanding what it takes to 'show up' with resilience and stability, first for oneself and then, if we want, for others and broader goals.
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I have a natural affinity with the 'person-centred' approach pioneered by Carl Rogers, who believed that people have an innate 'self-actualising' tendency. In his view the therapist's role is simply to be present, empathetic and show positive regard, thereby allowing the client's true self to emerge. I am also guided by classic psychoanalytic thinkers in the Freudian and object-relations schools. The significance they place on early experience, early attachments, repressions and resistances, and the good/bad objects we inherit from others and internalise, I find to be illuminating and healing.
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I have a background in medical anthropology, which focuses attention on the ways that social constructs like race, gender, ability, wealth and sexuality contribute to conceptions of health and illness. That health and illness are relational, dynamic and always being negotiated is core to my worldview. What this means for my therapeutic practice is that I will always seek to understand the individual in their environment.
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My primary method is conversational, and in conversation with clients I will pay attention not simply to what is said, but also what is not said, what the body may be saying, and how things are said, the better to befriend and understand whatever unconscious impulses may be present.
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I believe we should know from our first session with a therapist whether they are the right fit for us. I hope my clients will feel a sense of progress, even simply a new feeling of clarity, from the first session.
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The ways are too many to name, but in short, I know who I am now.
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I like that being a therapist allows me extend something in which I really believe out into the world.
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Of course! Most days, to be honest. But in learning to accept myself as I am, I've come to understand my potential and my value are in no way diminished on those days.
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I find this an incredibly difficult question to answer, and not because answers don't come to mind: genocide, imperial colonialism, global warming, the ongoing pandemic, resurgent Nazism, transphobia, failing public institutions, militarised police, and on and on. But at the level of the individual psyche, I may be most troubled by what must be a historically diminished sense of our capacity to organise, collectivise and force change.
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The music of Adrienne Lenker and Big Thief is a big source of comfort and inspiration.