When you meet Shelley Heusser, his openness strikes you; it is steady, unforced and paired with a calmness that speaks of someone deeply grounded and reflective. In his receptive presence, you feel instantly seen. Yet, beneath the quiet is a mind and heart that are drawn to the most complicated, painful, and often overlooked parts of the human experience. He doesn’t shy away from people’s darkness; in fact, he leans towards it.
Shelley specialises in addiction, trauma, and the terrains of the human mind that most people, including some professionals, avoid. “I always gravitated toward the darker elements of the psyche,” he says. “It wasn’t because of my training. It’s something in me.”
That ‘something’ was shaped early. Raised in a complex world, both homophobic and in the grips of post-apartheid turmoil, Shelley was conditioned to become curious about others’ inner worlds out of necessity, not choice. “It ensured my survival,” he explains. “I had to read the emotional landscape around me. I became a very empathic child.” This survival instinct, which developed into what he now calls his ‘antennas’, gives him a near-intuitive attunement to his patients’ emotional truths, making them feel deeply understood and cared for.
Identifying as queer, Shelley is also passionate about deconstructing the complexities of and misconceptions about queer-affirmative therapy.
From South Africa to Switzerland
Half Swiss, half Lebanese, Shelley grew up in South Africa, though he spent some time in Switzerland as a teenager. On choosing his professional path, he says he was always drawn to the study of psychology, though at the time, he couldn’t explain why – just that it was a calling. His antennas weren’t wrong.
Shelley completed his psychoanalytic training in South Africa, becoming a registered psychologist and psychotherapist. Very quickly, he became known in professional circles as being someone open to taking on the most complex cases, seeing the people other therapists wouldn’t, including people with addiction, extreme personality disorders, and sexual behavioural problems. “I never could reconcile how someone who chose to be in this profession would bracket themselves off from these states of being,” he explained.
Shelley was happy in his work but struggled to accept the medical model of addiction treatment in South Africa, which, he says, “usually involved dual diagnosis, was heavy on psychiatric diagnoses, and placed therapy as secondary.”
In 2023, Shelley moved to Switzerland with his family because he felt South Africa had become too unstable a place to raise their child.
NEOVIVA: Bringing trauma to light
In Switzerland, Shelley sought a place to continue his psychotherapy work and was drawn to NEOVIVA because of its niche in addiction treatment. “What I love about NEOVIVA is how therapy and treating the whole person is the cornerstone.”
While he joined NEOVIVA because of its commitment to addiction treatment, it was the clinic’s willingness to evolve that kept him. He became involved in the team’s advancement of how they addressed trauma. “Trauma is everywhere,” he says. “It’s not a specialist’s domain. If you’re working with people, you’re working with trauma.”
“Most of our patients are not just addicted. They are wounded,” he says. “The substance is just the mask. Take it away, and what remains is often a deep, terrifying emptiness, a hole.
“Almost every person with an addiction comes with trauma. In treatment, we don’t just talk about the wound. We actively go in, and we start scraping up the debris.”
A holding presence
Through a psychoanalytic lens, Shelley sees addiction as being rooted in attachment and early developmental experiences. If a child does not experience being “held in the mind of someone else,” as he puts it, they are left to fall into a psychological hole. An internal hole is formed when early attachments fail. “Instead of falling into the arms of a caregiver, some people fall into a void,” he says. “That void becomes the architecture of their inner world.”
As a psychotherapist, Shelley aims to become a container for the patient, modelling what it feels like to be held and understood so that, eventually, the patient internalises this holding presence. “That containment is a long, painstaking process,” he notes. “But it’s the foundation for healing.”
“My belief is to make sure the patient understands that you know; that you are in on the trauma. You know there is deep pain. The patient might not know it yet, but they will have some awareness that they need to be caught somehow.”
Grief as a gateway
At the core of Shelley’s work is also the belief that true transformation begins with grief. Whether trauma is rooted in personal loss, systemic oppression, or invisible childhood wounds, grieving is the cathartic process through which patients begin to see their lives and their context differently.
“You can’t change the outside world,” he says. “But you can change how the person sees it. That change happens through a grieving process.” It is painstaking, he explains, and you have to be prepared to revisit the sources of the pain, possibly multiple times. The goal, he says, isn’t to erase pain but to acknowledge it and live differently in its aftermath.
A complex take on queer-affirmative psychotherapy
Shelley holds strong views on queer-affirmative therapy that resist easy categorisation. He says, “I’m always hesitant to identify as a queer therapist or an LGBT-friendly therapist.” While he identifies as queer and has written extensively about queer-affirmative psychotherapy, he is quick to critique the mainstream approach.
“Most queer-affirmative therapists offer a sanitised, overly safe space,” he explains. “A lot of queer-affirmative therapists feel like they have to keep the negative outside. They present themselves as creating accepting spaces that are free from judgement, but in doing so, they may unconsciously stifle the patient’s ability to process shame and internal conflict.” This, he says, is a missed opportunity. “Too much safety can be dangerous,” he warns.
Shelley reflects on his own experience in therapy: “In my very first personal psychotherapy, I chose to see a gay male therapist (like me), and while there were definite positives, I later realised there were also subtle negatives. The positive was that he could immediately identify with my experiences around shame, internalised oppression, and so forth. But because of that assumed mutuality, I didn’t always feel the need to ‘tell him’ about my shame. And therein lies the problem; something was foreclosed. The act of telling and retelling one’s story is itself therapeutic; with each telling, new layers are revealed. When a therapist seems to ‘already know’ your experience, the patient may unconsciously skip over the deeper, murkier material.”
This, he argues, is where many queer-affirmative spaces and therapists fall short. “By saying or implying, ‘I understand your trauma because I’m queer-affirmative,’ there’s an assumption of a universal queer experience. That can become a kind of demand on the patient to agree, and it risks shutting down the essential process of exploration. True queer-affirmative therapy doesn’t stop at identity alignment; it interrogates how queerness, and also race, gender, and class, keep intersecting with the world, often traumatically. And it recognises that the patient has absorbed some of that world into themselves. The trauma doesn’t just happen out there; it gets internalised.”
For Shelley, queer-affirmative therapy is not about creating a perfectly safe or politically correct space. It’s about making room to examine how the patient restricts or silences parts of themselves, often without being aware of it. “It’s not about fixing the outside world,” he says. “It’s about creating the internal space to see how and where you’ve internalised that world.”
He also challenges the idea that only queer therapists can treat queer clients effectively. “Maybe queer people are more attuned to specific cultural or sociopolitical contexts because they had to be. But any therapist, by virtue of their gender, ethnicity, race, or culture, is already attuned, even if they don’t know it or want to know it.
“You don’t have to be queer to be attuned,” he says. “What matters is whether the therapist is attuned to the effects of context on the psyche, which means they understand how systemic power, culture, and history have left marks on the individual.”
A therapist who doesn’t look away
Shelley Heusser’s therapeutic approach is not easy, and it’s not for everyone. It demands honesty from both the patient and the practitioner. It requires a willingness to enter the shadowed places of the mind and to stay there when things get uncomfortable. Shelley is quick to remind us of the therapist’s true role. “We’re not activists,” he says. “We’re not here to fix the world. We’re here to bear witness to what the world has done.”
And in bearing that witness, he offers something more than affirmation. Shelley offers recognition that is real, unsentimental, and deeply human. Not a mirror, but a container. Not a path, but the courage to find one. His antennas don’t blink. They stay attuned.
Because someone has to go there.
In a world increasingly obsessed with credentials, protocols, and fixed categories, Shelley is a potent reminder that psychotherapy, at its best, is a human-to-human encounter that is unfiltered, unsterilised, and profoundly transformative.
Outside the therapy room
In his spare time, Shelley finds grounding in food and culture. He loves cooking, especially making desserts, curries, and Lebanese meze dips. “My mother’s side is Lebanese, and since I don’t know Arabic, I must have unconsciously thought the cuisine would bring me closer to the culture.” These small rituals of care and creativity reflect the same ethos Shelley brings to his therapy practice: a deeply relational process of coming home to oneself.
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