Calling Ourselves Into Presence is Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell’s existential approach to the moments when life wounds or depletes us, through trauma, grief, loss (including invisible loss) and mental health disruption. Rather than treating distress as something faulty to be fixed, it helps people turn back towards themselves (body, feeling, relationships and meaning) and recover their own capacity to heal.
Why presence
When life wounds us, we rarely fall apart all at once. More often, we scatter. We go into busy mode. We hold everything for everyone. We keep functioning, and somewhere in all the doing, we stop being present to ourselves.
I think of this as a muted dissociation: a quiet loss of our relationship with ourselves. It is a loss in its own right, and it often sits underneath the grief, the trauma or the exhaustion that brings us to look for help.
We are not broken. We are fragmented. And what is fragmented can be gathered back.
What it means to call yourself into presence
To call yourself into presence is to turn towards your own experience instead of away from it. It is not positive thinking, and it is not “moving on”. It is the slow, compassionate work of coming back into relationship with:
- Your body, where grief, trauma and exhaustion are held.
- Your feelings, named, felt and allowed, without judgement.
- Your relationships: being witnessed by others, and witnessing them.
- Your meaning: what matters to you now, and who you are becoming.
This is whole-person healing: the whole being, not the whole doing. Suffering is not something to be pathologised. Grief is personal, and there is no blanket approach. Healing asks for care on every front: physically, emotionally, socially, personally and spiritually. Over time, we can recover, heal and return to ourselves, authentically, and anchored in meaning, purpose and connection.
Who it is for
- People living with bereavement and grief, including traumatic grief.
- People living with the aftermath of trauma and traumatic loss.
- People carrying invisible losses no one names: divorce, illness, infertility and childlessness, estrangement, redundancy, the loss of identity.
- People facing the mental health disruption that can follow: burnout, anxiety, low mood, or feeling lost and “not myself”.
Where the approach comes from
Calling Ourselves Into Presence draws on 25 years of practice as a Chartered Counselling Psychologist, on existential therapy, and on Dr Chloe’s published work on traumatic bereavement and post-traumatic growth (Routledge; PCCS Books). It runs through The Loss Prescription (HarperCollins, 2024), a roadmap through every kind of loss, and into her next book, The Stranger Within, on the loss of our relationship with ourselves.
Call yourself into presence: a one-minute practice
Arrive. Feet on the floor, a hand on your chest, three slow breaths.
Feel. What am I feeling, and what do I need?
Choose one thing that is yours. Water, rest, a walk, a no, a candle.
Once a day. Notice what begins to return.
Ways in
- Therapy at The Grief Clinic, one-to-one, online and from London.
- Grief Circles, monthly in West London.
- Free guides and The Anchored Letter, every Wednesday.
- Talks and workshops for organisations and professionals.
By Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell, Chartered Counselling Psychologist (DCPsych, CPsychol, AFBPsS), founder of The Grief Clinic London and author of The Loss Prescription (HarperCollins).