Why I started Loving To Love
(what contributed to it's diving unfolding)
I don’t really know where to start, honestly.
It’s hard to find that one punchy answer when it feels like it’s a million things at once, but I would start by saying that, since I was young, I’ve always had this weird obsession with love.
But love is so annoyingly abstract and ineffable that trying to put my conceptualisation into words will always reduce its essence. So instead, I’ll just share some experiences that have weighed heavily on my heart and that I’m continuously working through, and I hope through that, you’ll get a feeling for what I mean when I speak of love.​
My family is quite unconventional, I have to say. We’re all strong characters, full of opinions, and I love that about us. But we’ve also gone through a lot. Like many families, we’ve carried unspoken burdens. We’ve known what it’s like to watch and support a family member struggle with mental health challenges and face ableist and sanist remarks every day. We’ve known the frustrations of generational wounds and how they manifest and rub against each other. We’ve also experienced what it’s like to be failed by a broken system, like the violent robbery we went through in 2015.
captured by Edwin Maina
As the parentified child it took me a while to realize the cost of that role. I always felt like the “lucky one,” the one who fit into spaces more easily, who was seen as doing okay. In many ways, I was socially privileged and shielded from some of what others went through. But that came with its own weight; the expectation to be the strong one, carrying the guilt of protection, of feeling like nothing ever really happened to me, while watching those around me suffer and feeling responsible for holding them up.
Through all of it, I kept wondering: Why do we do bad things? Why do we hurt each other? What is love, love as an energy of life... of being?
While pondering, I started to see that people don’t do things because they’re bad, they do them because there’s an area within them they’re struggling to love.
​
I've come to understand that it always points back to LOVE. For me, love is ownership, the courage to embody not only the parts of ourselves we cherish, but also the ones we resist. Love is both relational and individual; it’s in the act of recognising that everything within us, even the parts that seem contradictory or maladaptive, is working for us. And just as our inner worlds are complementary, so are we to one another, each of us part of a greater, interconnected whole.
​
This realization, along with growing up around horses, paved the way to my career in psychology.
Horses are deeply intuitive beings, you can’t lie around them. If you try to build trust with a horse while ignoring what you truly feel, they’ll know. They don’t need your emotions to disappear; they just need you to acknowledge them. Horses understand that honesty is the foundation of trust, both internally and relationally.
And when you’re working with horses on a deeper level you know that they don’t hurt people or other horses because they’re naughty, they do so because of unmet needs or a lack of skill. And people are the same!
Horses taught me that acceptance isn’t a means to an end.
It’s not about “accepting so we can move on”. Acceptance itself is the art - an end goal. Accepting where we’re at in every walk of life. Accepting our “construction zones,” our strengths, our hardships. Not because it’s convenient, but because they deserve to be accepted.
That experience ignited my passion for the affective sciences; understanding how we feel, integrate, and make meaning of our emotional experiences.
But as I continued my journey in psychology, I grew more and more frustrated. It became impossible to ignore how broken and disempowering many of our systems are, and how passive we’ve become, as psych scholars, in acknowledging that.​
It became impossible to ignore that psychology sits almost entirely on Western philosophies, pedagogies, and epistemes, and that we often feel the need to justify this because of its supposed universality and “neutrality”.
​
It became impossible to ignore the insistence that mental health is an individual responsibility. A matter of “resilience”. Or how psychology has been co-opted by the culture of self-optimization, of “becoming your best self”.
Sometimes, I can’t help but hear the echoes of Western exceptionalism, classism, and sanism pulsing through those narratives.
Am I too radical? Maybe. (But maybe not enough)
​
There’s so much glamorizing, and so little accountability.
Our understanding of community, healing, and even normality has been shaped by colonial and hegemonic ideas. And once you start seeing that, you can’t unsee it.
This expansion of awareness opened up another journey for me; decoloniality. I remember coming across Mumbi Macharia’s Instagram post outlining the difference between decolonisation and decoloniality: decolonisation meaning the colonisers have left, but decoloniality being the process of undoing; ofcleaning up the tangible and intangible remnants of colonisation.
Learning about this difference helped me put words to what I’d been feeling; why I felt called to come back to Kenya after studying, even though I’ve never struggled this much financially in my life. In as confusing and uncertain this period of my life has been, deep down in my heart it feels so right, and I’m trusting that.
Anyhow, I became deeply intrigued by how decoloniality and psychology intersect, especially here in Kenya, where I grew up. That curiosity led me to explore Africentric epistemologies in psychology; frameworks that have been strongly overlooked, dismissed as “indigenous,” and therefore “invalid.”
I grieved for psychology, for all the wisdom it’s missing out on. I imagined what could happen if we truly embraced pluriversalism instead of performing it — if we stopped treating non-Western knowledge systems as mere “additions” to hegemonic psychology. I wondered what would happen. And that wondering continues.
So, how does this connect to Loving To Love?
I wanted to create a space where we can really come as we are; where we can talk about the unglamourised shit. The mess. The imperfections of our human experience.
A space where we can feel safe enough to speak about how we hurt and are hurt by others.
I wanted a space for ownership, because awareness is powerful, but it’s only the beginning.
And ownership, to me, is not identification with our experiences — it’s responsibility. Not in the Eurocentric sense that confuses responsibility with blame, but in the sense of caretaking.
Loving To Love is radical. Radical acceptance. Radical responsibility. Radical integration.
​
Whether it’s bridging the messy gap between awareness and embodiment with my one-on-one & group clients, or helping small companies in Kenya get real about wellbeing in their workspaces, I love holding space for the complications, the confusion, and the things we’d rather brush over or polish.
It’s about owning your inner guides, befriending them, and seeing the wisdom they carry.
In my work, I’ll never promise you outcomes, but I will promise you an open, accommodating, and safe space to discover your; wild truth, and to be witnessed as you own it.
And I think that’s far more valuable than any checkbox of “met goals".​
​
I offer a number of coaching packages for people navigating different seasons and hardships in life. If you are interested please schedule a FREE Discovery Call HERE, and we connect further!
And if anything else tugs at your heart, please don't hesitate to reach out, I’d really love to hear from you!
