Fifteen years in rooms most therapy never reaches.

I'm Simon Hitchcock, a British integrative psychotherapist based on a ridge in the mountains behind Málaga, where I live with my partner, three horses, two German Shepherds and an unreasonable number of cats.

For fifteen years I've worked in the rooms most therapy never reaches — addiction treatment centres, behaviour units, the justice system, and private practice with people whose lives look enviable from the outside and are unliveable from the inside. I currently serve as lead therapist at a private addiction and recovery centre on the Costa del Sol, and every week I discuss the psychology of everyday life on Good Morning Spain.

My training is integrative — Jungian, Gestalt, existential, psychodynamic — which is a technical way of saying I use what works and I'm not precious about schools of thought. The approach underneath it all is simpler: every symptom is a solution. The drinking solved something. The rage solved something. The performing, the pleasing, the disappearing — all of it made sense once. My job is to find that sense with you, and then to help you build something better than the solution you've been surviving on.

I specialise in addiction, complex trauma, burnout and men's work, including male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I also practise equine-assisted therapy — it turns out horses are better at reading nervous systems than most professionals I've met.

My first book, The Hidden Sense In Your Nonsense, is forthcoming. My video work lives on YouTube, where I publish weekly. And for those whose situation calls for more than an hour a week, I run The Ridge Intensive— a five-day residential programme here on the ridge.