Introduction
I am available for those who want to be energetically present with their loved ones, whilst living a true and meaningful life. Who want to connect with their will and core motivations behind their actions. Who know their life is the one project they can have some control of. Who want to meet the project director at the back of their mind. Who have learnt, usually the hard way, how little influence they have on another adult’s life. Who want to exert agency in their own and become the change they want in their family.
Self is the common factor at the root of all experience. This is the one fact you can be sure of. Our self has no inherent physical attributes, no physicality except that expressed through the body. It has awareness and with that comes power, as energy will surely follow awareness.
The core self follows you everywhere, brings wonderment, magic and difficult ways with them. We are all at times that person who can’t stand being alone in our core, yet it is the part essential to our existence.
Self grows without intention, like grass or hair. It is housed, or if you like, attached to body, somewhat aware of itself, able to deny itself or accept itself as it is. Like a flickering candle finally extinguished, it will leave sometime after brain death. The physical body remains for a while but the self will have de-parted. It’s a palpable change at that moment of death. Amazing to witness. We leave behind all the love we have shared and the self is no more.
The Work Beneath the Work
For over fifty years, I’ve worked as a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma and relationships. But my understanding doesn’t come only from graduate training or clinical hours. I know trauma from the inside—as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who testified at public hearings of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. I understand what it means to carry wounds that shape everything: how you love, how you protect yourself, how you choose who gets close.
This lived experience informs everything I do. When I sit with couples navigating the aftermath of betrayal, or families trying to repair what addiction or abuse has fractured, I’m not observing from a clinical distance. I’m bringing my own archaeology of healing to the work.
Writing and Art as Excavation
I write under two names, both aspects of the same project of making visible what lives beneath the surface.
As Peter J Fox, I wrote Dream Life of Debris: A Journey of Trauma and Healing—a work of autobiographical fiction that follows Paul, a boy who witnesses something he doesn’t understand, who endures abuse at an elite school, and who eventually finds his way toward recovery. It’s a revenge novel, yes, but more essentially a story about triumph over adversity, about reclaiming authorship of your own life.
As Ziji PJ Fox, I wrote Excavating the Unconscious: The Ziji Art Method—a hybrid work that weaves poetry, visual art, and reflection on trauma and healing. It’s part memoir, part therapeutic exploration, part instruction manual for using art and poetry as tools for accessing what words alone cannot reach. The book has been called many things: phenomenology, auto-fiction, prayer, even “a loquacious suicide note.” One reviewer said it creates a labyrinth in the reader’s mind that installs my voice there. That feels right—therapy, like art, works by creating new pathways through old terrain.
My writing style is influenced by Haruki Murakami’s dreamlike attention to the surreal within the ordinary, and Roxanne Gay’s unflinching willingness to tell the truth without looking away.
Ziji: Being Completely Present
The name Ziji refers to the experience of being completely and powerfully in the present. Not lost in the story of what happened or what might happen, but here—with what is.
This is what I help people find: presence with themselves and each other. I help people understand their lives, connect with their lives, share their lives. I help differentiate story from experience—because we can become so trapped in narratives (our own, our family’s, our culture’s) that we mistake them for reality.
That’s how we make sense of life: by supporting new uses of story and experience, so we become authors of our lives rather than actors in someone else’s script.
How I Work
I believe behavior is the key. Unlike emotions or even thoughts, behavior is the one expression of self we can truly control. And relationships are built not on intentions or feelings alone, but on what we actually do—how we turn toward each other or away, how we respond when our partner reaches for us, how we repair when we’ve caused harm.
The work is a lifelong project that we direct, or not. Some people come to therapy because their relationships are in crisis. Others come because they want to understand the patterns they keep repeating. Still others come because they’re ready to excavate their unconscious—to understand how their family of origin, their early attachments, their unhealed wounds are shaping their present-day relationships.
Whatever brings you, the work is the same: making visible what’s been hidden, creating safety for vulnerability, learning new dances in relationship, and ultimately, reclaiming authorship of your life.
Who This Work Is For
You might resonate with what I do if:
– You find yourself repeating the same patterns in relationships and want to understand why
– You’re navigating the aftermath of trauma (yours or your partner’s) and need guidance
– You sense there are unconscious contracts operating in your relationship that you’d like to make conscious
– You’re drawn to depth work—not quick fixes, but genuine transformation
– You appreciate interdisciplinary thinking that weaves together psychology, systems theory, attachment, and lived experience
– You value a therapeutic relationship where the therapist brings their own hard-won understanding to the work
I work with couples and families in Mullumbimby. The work requires courage, honesty, and a willingness to look at what you’ve been avoiding. But on the other side of that looking is often something like freedom.
Peter Fox
Emotion-Focused Couple Therapist
Writer, Visual Artist, Retired Clinical Psychologist
Mullumbimby, NSW