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Auður Zoëga | Psychotherapist

I'm a PACFA-registered integrative psychotherapist with a Bachelor of Counselling & Psychotherapy from the Ikon Institute. I work primarily with parents of young children and people preparing for parenthood. My work includes psychotherapy, parent coaching and parent–child classes.

My interest in children and parenting began while I was still early in my psychotherapy training. I came across RIE and found that this way of understanding and relating to babies and young children resonated deeply with me. From there, I kept reading, learning and immersing myself in ideas about child development, attachment and the parent–child relationship. It wasn't initially part of a plan for my professional work. I was simply deeply interested in it.

By the time I became a mother myself, much of this thinking had become part of how I understood children. It had changed what I noticed, what I worried about and what I understood as needing a response from me.

I also became increasingly aware of just how much parents were being asked to do, monitor and manage, while trying very hard to do the best for their children. I felt frustrated by the unnecessary pressure this placed on parents, and concerned about how some of these expectations and practices could affect children. I realised I wanted to share some of what I had found so valuable.

How I work

My work is integrative and relational. It is informed by attachment and developmental perspectives, as well as RIE, Pikler, the Neufeld Approach and Neuroprotective Developmental Care (NDC/Possums).

I'm less interested in giving parents a set of rules to follow than in developing understanding: of the particular child in front of them, of development and relationships, and of what may be happening for them as parents.

Understanding something differently can change what we notice and what we feel we need to do. It can create room to respond to the child and situation in front of us, rather than continually looking outside ourselves for the right response.

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What does Intentional Arc mean?


Intentional arc is a term used by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty to describe the way our past, our future, our relationships and social world, our physical circumstances and our values come together in how we experience and engage with the world.

In other words, we don't encounter the present in isolation. We are already situated within a history and a particular world, and these shape what we perceive, what has meaning for us and how we respond.