Dr Bruce Bradfield

Dr Bruce Bradfield My belief is that the goal of therapy is not to feel better but to feel more. I’d like to tell you a bit about myself.

I am qualified as a clinical psychologist in South Africa, where I completed my Masters and doctoral studies. I have worked in this field for over twelve years, & I love the work that I do. I’m fascinated by people and am constantly amazed by how people grow and evolve in the face of difficult and painful realities.

What If You Didn’t Have to Do It Alone?The quiet strength of open, interpersonal group therapySometimes, healing begins ...
17/07/2025

What If You Didn’t Have to Do It Alone?
The quiet strength of open, interpersonal group therapy

Sometimes, healing begins in the presence of others — not because they offer advice, but because they stay present, curious, and human.

Open interpersonal group therapy is a space for people who want to explore themselves through real, honest connection with others. This isn’t a structured program. There’s no fixed “goal,” no workbook, no pressure to perform. The group unfolds slowly, over time. People come as they are — and that’s enough.

Each session lasts 80 minutes and includes 6 to 9 people. That size allows space for real relationships to form: close enough to feel safe, broad enough to hold many different perspectives. Over time, group members begin to notice how they relate, connect, hold back, or reach out — and what those patterns mean in their lives outside the group.

There’s quiet power in being seen and accepted as you are. In speaking freely. In discovering you’re not alone — and maybe never were.

If this speaks to you, or you’re simply curious, get in touch:
📧 [email protected]
No pressure — just a conversation.

How does They see me?As a therapist, I try to meet every client with openness, presence, and respect. I do my best to cr...
08/07/2025

How does They see me?

As a therapist, I try to meet every client with openness, presence, and respect. I do my best to create a space where people can be fully themselves. But I also know that when a genderqueer person walks into my office for the first time, they might be carrying a weight that I can’t see right away. It makes me wonder, how do they see me? Who do they expect me to be? How do they expect me to see them? Are they looking for clues in my body language, my choice of words, my intake form? Are they bracing for assumptions? Bracing for that moment when I misgender them, or ask something that makes them feel like a curiosity instead of a person? I think about how many times they might’ve had to explain themselves in spaces that weren’t built with them in mind. How often they’ve had to educate, correct, and smile through it. And I wonder if they’re already wondering about me. Do I seem like someone who gets it? Am I another therapist who’s going to ask “What does genderqueer mean?” in a way that puts the weight of explanation on them, again? Will they leave the session feeling seen, or just tolerated?

Even when my intentions are good, whatever that means, I have to ask myself: How might I be experienced? I might think of my curiosity as warm, human, even essential to the therapeutic relationship. But what if it lands as something else? What if it feels, to them, like being examined or interpreted — like having to hand over the tools for their own visibility? What if they’re sitting across from me, already tired of being interesting?

These are things I can’t know unless I’m paying very close attention — not just to their words, but to what’s not being said. To the subtle shifts. To see how quickly they respond to certain questions. Whether they seem to relax into the space, or hold themselves just slightly apart. And it’s not about performing perfect allyship or having all the right language. It’s about being attuned. Being honest. Being willing to hold space for the discomfort that might already be in the room — even if I didn’t put it there. I don’t need my clients to teach me how to be a better therapist. That’s my work. But I do want to be someone they don’t have to brace against. So when a genderqueer person walks through my door, I try to remember: I might be the first therapist who really sees them, or just the next in a long line of people who said they did.

Coming home to Cape Town After three enriching years living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark, I’m excited to return to...
23/06/2025

Coming home to Cape Town

After three enriching years living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark, I’m excited to return to my home city of Cape Town and reopen my psychology practice from 1 August.

During my time in Denmark, I had the privilege of working in a diverse, international context, supporting individuals from all over the world who had made Denmark their temporary or permanent home. This experience deepened my understanding of the emotional complexities that come with transition, belonging, identity, and adaptation.

Now, I look forward to bringing this experience home—back to the vibrant, resilient South African community that shaped me. I’m passionate about reconnecting with the people, the place, and the stories that make Cape Town so unique.

If you’re looking for psychological support or are curious about how therapy might be helpful in your life, I’d love to connect.

The sense of shameShame is one of the most common forms of suffering. In my work over the past decade, I have been touch...
13/12/2022

The sense of shame
Shame is one of the most common forms of suffering. In my work over the past decade, I have been touched and saddened by how deeply and chronically people live with the experience of shame. It becomes a part of the texture of our lives. Something we go hurtling back to with every life stressor. Certainly, we all struggle in different ways, as we experience our shame differently, dependent on our emotional context. But shame is endemic, and we have to struggle with it. We have to think deeply about our personal shame and learn from it, because, without a doubt, some of our shame is helpful. It lets us know the parameters of our consciences.

Read more: https://www.brucebradfield.dk/the-sense-of-shame/

Book review - The course of love: Alain de BottonI read this book recently following the recommendation of my own therap...
09/12/2022

Book review - The course of love: Alain de Botton

I read this book recently following the recommendation of my own therapist, who found it beautiful, and very useful in her thinking about partnerships. The book is written as a novel, which is unusual for Alain de Botton, whose writings are typically not fictional. It tells the story of Rabih and Kirsten, a married couple journeying through their shared life, and engaging with the blessings and battles that accompany them as their relationship matures, breaks down, and matures again in cycles over time. As the two face the realities of life, at times alongside one another, and at times in a more estranged and secretive manner, their relationship is confronted with the ordinary challenges involved in learning how to withstand the relentless realities we face in our lives as human beings.

Read More here: https://www.brucebradfield.dk/book-review-course-love/

Optimism or positive thinking: Thoughts about living with hope.I’ve always struggled a bit to wrap my head around the id...
25/11/2022

Optimism or positive thinking: Thoughts about living with hope.
I’ve always struggled a bit to wrap my head around the idea of positive thinking, Popular psychology stresses that we think positively about those areas of our lives which cause us strain and sadness. The idea that we are often taught is that we should resist dwelling in our despair and that we fight to hold on to a belief that everything will turn out for the best. The lesson that we are often taught goes something along the following lines: Negative thoughts attract negative outcomes. Positive thoughts attract positive outcomes. Somewhere in this lesson is the belief that we as human beings have the power to improve our lives through holding tight onto imagined outcomes which amount to us feeling good, safe and healthy, and abandoning thoughts relating to the feared outcome that our lives will not turn out as we hope they will. Take for example the experience of depression.

Read More: https://www.brucebradfield.dk/optimism-positive-thinking-thoughts-living-hope/

Psychotherapy for the family: Many hands make light work.I absolutely love working with families. This is a new aspect o...
21/11/2022

Psychotherapy for the family: Many hands make light work.
I absolutely love working with families. This is a new aspect of my work as a therapist, and I have been working with families for about 2 years now. I value working with individuals as a thoroughgoing and intensive therapeutic approach. Sometimes, however, the best way to address a struggle is to acknowledge that it exists at the level of the family. When all the key players are in the room, as seems obvious, the difficulties which people experience in relation their families can emerge strongly in the moment, as opposed to in individual therapy, where these difficulties are spoken about outside of the time of their occurrence. At times, especially in the beginning of family therapy, there is a strong feeling of nervousness, because, often for the first time, families are sitting together with the purpose of talking in a real way about their shared struggles. Most often the families I work with have reached a time in their life cycle in which the children are either in their mid-teens or older. I wouldn’t generally conduct family with young children, as it would be over-inclusive and potentially overwhelming for young children.

Read More: https://www.brucebradfield.dk/psychotherapy-family-many-hands-make-light-work/

Psychotherapy for people who have survived interpersonal trauma - part 2Part 2 – The intergenerational transmission of t...
11/11/2022

Psychotherapy for people who have survived interpersonal trauma - part 2

Part 2 – The intergenerational transmission of trauma

This subject is particularly close to my heart. I have researched the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and have spent a lot of time with victims and their adult children. My aim has been to try and understand how it is that the children of parents who have survived interpersonal trauma come to repeat in their own lives some of their parents’ struggles and come to feel many of the feelings which are associated with their parent's trauma. I have spent time talking with mothers, and have had separate conversations with their adult children, in my efforts to understand the reasons why the “second generation”, the children of survivors, might come to identify with their mother’s depression, anxiety, patterns of behaviour, and particular forms of psychological defence. A couple of themes came up, which I am going to try and explain here. I think that this is such an important topic, and I often work with people along the lines of this subject. I hope that this post will shed some light on this very real difficulty.

Read More: https://www.brucebradfield.dk/psychotherapy-for-people-who-have-survived-interpersonal-trauma-part-2/

Psychotherapy for people who have survived interpersonal trauma.Part 1 - Early attachment trauma:One of the central aspe...
08/11/2022

Psychotherapy for people who have survived interpersonal trauma.

Part 1 - Early attachment trauma:

One of the central aspects of my work as a psychotherapist relates to working with people who have survived interpersonal trauma. By interpersonal trauma, I mean the various types of experiences that people may have, in which they are treated by others in any way that leads to their being psychologically overwhelmed. The feeling of psychological overwhelm resulting from interpersonal trauma is one in which a feeling of fear, anxiety, panic, or intolerable pain results from the actions of one person against another. By this definition, it is clear that very many types of human experiences can be traumatic. Trauma, as such, is defined in terms of the subjective experience of the person who has been traumatized. One person’s hell may be experienced very differently if the same experience were to happen to another person. Mostly we think of trauma in terms of catastrophic events which occur either in isolation or over time. For example, the sexual abuse of a child is a catastrophic event which takes place, either once or many times over an extended period of time.

Read More: https://www.brucebradfield.dk/psychotherapy-people-survived-interpersonal-trauma/

The importance of dreams and the process of psychotherapyThe role of dreams, and the importance of the analysis of dream...
04/11/2022

The importance of dreams and the process of psychotherapy

The role of dreams, and the importance of the analysis of dreams, is given greater or lesser attention in any given psychotherapy process, depending on the school, or schools, of thought, that influence how a particular psychotherapist works. Added to this, it is not everyone’s natural inclination to bring dreams into the therapy session, and there can be a feeling of resistance or a defensive lack of interest in dreams. Whether dreams play a central role in anyone’s therapy process or not, it can’t be denied that they are a crucial part of living. Dreams are what and how we think when we are asleep.

Read More: https://www.brucebradfield.dk/importance-dreams-process-psychotherapy/

What works for you?: A general description of the psychoanalytic approach to psychotherapy.One of the strengths of a pra...
01/11/2022

What works for you?: A general description of the psychoanalytic approach to psychotherapy.

One of the strengths of a practice such as this one is that it consists of six psychotherapists who each have a unique way of thinking about and approaching the work that we do. Psychotherapeutic practice has many many faces, even though there are certain grounding principles which unite the efforts of psychotherapists. But the fact is that even though we all call ourselves psychotherapists, the actual work that we do can be vastly different, and so what happens in each separate space is not only a matter of individual creativity but also of a choice made by each psychotherapist to follow a particular path based on what we believe to be therapeutically useful. Of course, this is directly affected by each person who enters the room, and so the nature and quality of the work done are, at the end of the day, affected by a mutual and reciprocal relationship which develops between therapist and patient. Aside from what happens in the therapist-patient relationship, there is nonetheless the question of "What kind of psychotherapist are you and does that work for me?" that needs to be thought and talked about when a therapy process begins. With this in mind, and with a view to taking some ownership of the therapy process, I would always encourage people to do a bit of research before entering a process, to explore the forms of therapy that they feel would work for them, and to search for a therapist who engages with these forms of therapy.

Read More: https://www.brucebradfield.dk/works-general-description-psychoanalytic-approach-psychotherapy/

29/10/2022

From Sanam Pejuhesh 💕
•
One of the most important things we can do for our children is let them know we believe them.
*I believe what you're feeling
*I believe you experienced it that way
*I believe that was hard for you
*I believe you're going through this
Children who are believed grow into adults who don't doubt themselves, who know they are trustworthy, who are less impressionable to gaslighting.
We don't always love the behavior but we can believe that their experience is valid and worthy of being seen ❤️

♡ If you would like to be kept in the loop on everything Synergetic Play Therapy or get resources to support you on your therapist journey, submit your details here: https://linktr.ee/synergeticplaytherapy ♡

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1 Cambridge Road, Observatory
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Thursday 09:00 - 17:00
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