Street Therapy wasn't born in a clinic or a boardroom. It was born on a pavement in Cornwall, one slow step at a time. This is how it started.
It was about eighteen months into my recovery. I was walking — I was always walking by then — and I started to notice something. The conversations I was having on those walks were different from any conversation I'd had in a therapy room.
Something about being side by side rather than face to face. Something about the movement. Something about the fact that neither person was performing — we were both just moving through the world, and the words came differently.
I started walking with other men who were struggling. Not formally. Not as a programme. Just: come for a walk with me. Let's move. Let's talk if we want to. Let's be quiet if we don't.
What I noticed, again and again, was that men who couldn't open up in a room — who had spent years behind the wall of 'I'm fine' — would start talking after about twenty minutes of walking. Something in the rhythm of movement, the absence of eye contact, the physical sensation of being in a body moving through space — it unlocked something.
This isn't just anecdotal. The research on walk-and-talk therapy is growing. The combination of rhythmic movement, nature exposure, and reduced social pressure creates conditions where the nervous system feels safe enough to process. Where the guard comes down. Where the real conversation can begin.
Street Therapy is built on three pillars: movement, nature, and honest conversation. Not therapy in the clinical sense — I'm not a therapist. But therapeutic in the truest sense: creating conditions for healing.
The name came from a conversation with a friend who asked what I was doing with these walks. I said: 'I don't know. Therapy, I suppose. But on the street.' He said: 'Street Therapy.' And that was it.
Since then, Street Therapy has grown into something I couldn't have imagined on that first walk. Corporate programmes. Keynote speaking. One-to-one work. A BBC feature. A community of people who are choosing to move through their pain rather than sit still inside it.
But it still starts the same way it always did. Two people. A path. One foot in front of the other. And the willingness to say the thing that's been waiting to be said.