I work with women who have arrived somewhere and are not entirely sure it is where they intended to go.
The women I work with are accomplished. They have built careers, led teams, navigated complex personal landscapes with intelligence and, usually, with some grace.
What they share — the thing that brings them to this conversation — is a very specific quality of awareness. The sense that something, at the level they are now operating, is not quite right. Not wrong enough to name easily. Not obvious enough to explain to anyone else.
Before the practice.
I spent several formative years working as personal assistant to Isabella Blow in London. Isabella was, by any reasonable account, one of the most extraordinary women of her generation — a creator, an instigator, a woman who lived entirely from her own vision.
What I observed, working closely with her, was something that I have spent the years since trying to articulate: the particular cost of being fully, unapologetically yourself in a world that finds that either inconvenient or consumable. The commitment to one’s own interior, even when the exterior is being dismantled.
It was an education that no institution offers.
The work before the work.
I have published three books: Isabella Blow (a Spiegel Bestseller, written from unique proximity as her personal assistant), People of Deutschland (a documentary portrait of contemporary Germany, covered extensively in national media), and Fashion Germany.
I mention this not as a credential list, but because context matters: the women I work with are at a level where they need someone who has operated in complex, high-visibility environments — and who has written, publicly and carefully, about what those environments cost.
The clinical partnership.
For clients in the Sober Muse Method who benefit from clinical support alongside our private work, I maintain a partnership with Dr. Ruta Nürnberger at the My Way Betty Ford Clinic.
Dr. Nürnberger works with high-functioning individuals for whom standard treatment frameworks are not appropriate. The partnership is discreet, high-calibre, and available when relevant — not mandatory, and not foregrounded.
I have always known what it is to inhabit a life that was not quite built around you.
I was born in Persia and adopted by German parents shortly after birth. I grew up in Germany and London, and attended boarding school — an education that, alongside the academic curriculum, offered a thorough introduction to what people use when the interior becomes too much.
I have lived, from the beginning, with a particular kind of question: who am I, underneath the circumstances I was placed in? It is a question that does not have a final answer, but which can be lived in a great deal more consciously than most of us manage.
My own re-examination of alcohol began not from a crisis but from a question. I was, by all external measures, doing well. I had a life, a body of published work, a set of relationships I valued, and a daily glass of wine that had quietly become a different thing from what it started as.
I did not need a programme. I needed a conversation — precise, private, conducted between equals. I did not find one that was right for me. So eventually, I built it. Six years later, I am still building it. For women who are, in one way or another, asking the same question I was.