Christi Gadd Clinical & Neuropsychologist

Christi Gadd Clinical & Neuropsychologist Clinical Psychologist in Garsfontein/Faerie Glen, Pretoria East. I'm intrigued by the essence of hum

I am a clinical psychologist with a passion for human relationships. I enjoy working with individuals, couples and families in order to assist them in dealing with whichever challenge they are currently facing. The human brain and the manner in which it regulates our behaviour intrigues me. In this regard, I provide psychotherapy to assist a person and his/her family in adjusting to the impact of

a brain injury or illness. I am employed full-time at 1 Military Hospital, where I am responsible for the neuro-rehabilitation ward. I also run an after hours private practice in Faerie Glen, Pretoria-East.

Friendship in adulthood is paradoxical. The more you go out trying to make friends, the more strained the encounters can...
05/08/2026

Friendship in adulthood is paradoxical. The more you go out trying to make friends, the more strained the encounters can feel. Friendship doesn’t quite respond to being aimed at.

What does work, in my experience, is showing up where the things you actually love are happening. The music show. The art class. The running group. The gym. The book club. Show up because you wanted to be there anyway. The people who are also there will be the people who can become your tribe.

Test everything. Keep the bits that you love.

I see this lands repeatedly in my couples and individual work in Dubai too — community follows interests, rarely the other way round.

From the same conversation.

Where did your people find you?

https://www.christigaddpsychology.co.za/adjusting-to-expat-life-uae/

27/07/2026

So many of us default to more. It’s a quiet route to burnout, and it never feels like burnout at the time.

More clients, more books, more workshops, more hours. When we’re not sure we’re good enough at something, the instinct is to work harder at it.

But something happens when we stop. When we get away from all of it and let our minds run free, things start integrating on their own — an idea from a book read months ago, a formulation or a pattern that wouldn’t quite come clear.

None of that happened while I was working harder. It happened here, doing very little. Soaking up a last bit of sun and sea before heading back to Dubai.

I’ve still been reading. But for the fun of it, rather than to learn something. It’s the Yalom I’ve been underlining all week, and his point is that this isn’t work you finish. He was in his nineties and still at it.

Brooke McAlary:

“I used to believe that I could do everything and be everywhere. And I absolutely can do all these things. But not at the same time. Not on the same day. Realizing that was delightful freedom.”

I’m going home with a deeper sense of being human. I think that makes me a better therapist, more than another workshop would have. And I suspect it’s the same in most work, not just mine.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re not enough — have you tried doing less, to see what happens?

More holiday reading, and my heart keeps going: yes. That’s who I want to be as a therapist — someone who keeps examinin...
26/07/2026

More holiday reading, and my heart keeps going: yes. That’s who I want to be as a therapist — someone who keeps examining herself.

Knowing my own biases as honestly as I know my strengths is uncomfortable. It’s also what makes the work possible. What I haven’t looked at in myself, I’ll miss in someone else.

And it isn’t something you read once and have. It’s years of getting to know yourself, as a person and as a therapist, and it doesn’t finish. Yalom was in his nineties and still busy with it. It’s something we work towards, not something we ever achieve.

📖 Hour of the Heart — Irvin D. Yalom & Benjamin Yalom

Today’s holiday learning 🇸🇨There’s a monument here for the Moutya — drumming and song created by enslaved communities in...
25/07/2026

Today’s holiday learning 🇸🇨

There’s a monument here for the Moutya — drumming and song created by enslaved communities in the Seychelles. They’d gather at night because it was the only time and space they had to grieve, protest, and say what couldn’t be said in daylight. In 2021, UNESCO recognised it as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

What gets me is how old this idea actually is. Long before “narrative therapy” was a term, people already knew that rhythm and repetition could hold what words couldn’t.

I see a version of it in session all the time — couples circling something they don’t have language for yet, until they find a way to finally say it to each other.

Story, rhythm, movement — we’ve been using them to heal for a lot longer than therapy has existed. This monument is just proof someone thought to write it down.

Holiday reading 📖“Intimacy requires vulnerability: you can’t expect your friend, relative, or partner to be open to you ...
24/07/2026

Holiday reading 📖

“Intimacy requires vulnerability: you can’t expect your friend, relative, or partner to be open to you unless you are willing to be open to them.”

Most of us have felt this go wrong before — vulnerability met with something dreadful, so we build walls and stop opening up. But here’s the catch: if we never risk it again, we never get the connection we’re craving.

Sometimes the best therapy reading happens by the pool. 🌴

— From “Hour of the Heart” by Irvin D. Yalom & Benjamin Yalom

When you move abroad, you meet people constantly — coffees, welcome drinks, group chats that fill within a week. And sti...
22/07/2026

When you move abroad, you meet people constantly — coffees, welcome drinks, group chats that fill within a week. And still, months in, a lot of people in Dubai describe feeling oddly unmet.

Connection in an expat context is much less about meeting people than it is about staying. It is about who is still there after the novelty fades, after another friend’s contract ends, after you have both seen each other on a flat day.

Meeting is easy here. Staying is the slower work — and it is the part that actually holds.

What has helped you move from meeting people to staying with them?

— The Glamour and the Grief, a series on expat life

Read the full reflection on the blog: https://www.christigaddpsychology.co.za/becoming-an-expat-glamour-and-grief/

Withholding warmth, even when you feel it, is like buying a gift and never giving it.So much of what nourishes a relatio...
21/07/2026

Withholding warmth, even when you feel it, is like buying a gift and never giving it.

So much of what nourishes a relationship is the warmth we feel but never say out loud — the appreciation, the empathy, the quiet “I noticed.” Left unspoken, it can’t do its work.

What’s one thing you’ve been meaning to say to someone, and haven’t yet?

A note on silence, and what our quiet really says — on the blog (link in bio).

https://www.christigaddpsychology.co.za/silence-is-golden/

Esther Perel stel dit eenvoudig: die gehalte van jou lewe berus op die gehalte van jou verhoudings.En so baie van daardi...
21/07/2026

Esther Perel stel dit eenvoudig: die gehalte van jou lewe berus op die gehalte van jou verhoudings.

En so baie van daardie gehalte lê in hóé ons met mekaar praat — die woorde wat ons kies, en die woorde wat ons terughou. Warmte wat ongesê bly, kan nie haar werk doen nie.

Wat is een ding wat jy nog vir iemand wou sê, en nog nie het nie?

https://www.christigaddpsychology.co.za/dink-voor-jy-praat/

“I’ll change when they change.” It’s one of the most human sentences in couples work — and the quietest trap.Esther Pere...
20/07/2026

“I’ll change when they change.” It’s one of the most human sentences in couples work — and the quietest trap.

Esther Perel puts it like this:

It takes two people to create a pattern, but only one to change it.

That isn’t about taking the blame. A pattern is a dance: if one person truly changes their steps, the old dance becomes impossible. Not fixed — unfrozen. And that’s often how change actually begins in couples therapy, here in Dubai and anywhere.

Last Monday we looked at what keeping score costs. This is the hopeful counterpart: you don’t need permission to stop dancing the old steps.

Which step would you change first — the pursuing or the retreating?

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633 Windsor Avenue
Pretoria
0081

Opening Hours

Monday 12:00 - 19:00
Tuesday 12:00 - 19:00
Wednesday 12:00 - 19:00
Thursday 12:00 - 19:00
Friday 12:00 - 19:00

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