The Lane Cove rooms are at 2 Austin Street, directly opposite the Lane Cove Library and a few metres from Longueville Road. If you are coming from the village it is a walk of two or three minutes, and the parking behind the library is the easiest option in the middle of the day.
Lane Cove sends a particular mix of problems through the door. There are the desk-and-commute necks and low backs from St Leonards and the city, the shoulders and elbows of a suburb that plays a lot of tennis, and the knees and Achilles tendons that come with living on a hillside — the stairs down to Tambourine Bay and the streets off Burns Bay Road are their own kind of training load. Lane Cove also has a lot of people in their thirties and forties carrying small children, which is its own demand on a back.
A first appointment is mostly questions and movement testing: where the pain is, what makes it worse, what it stops you doing, and how it has behaved over weeks rather than days. From there you should leave knowing what is proposed, roughly how long it is expected to take, and what would mean changing the plan.
Worth bringing: any imaging or specialist letters you already have, a list of medications, and the shoes you actually walk or train in. If the pain is new and severe, follows a significant fall, or comes with numbness, weakness, fever or any change in bladder or bowel control, see a doctor first — that is a medical assessment, not a treatment question.
The nearest alternative if Lane Cove does not suit you is the Freshwater side, about 14 kilometres away across the Spit.
A good therapeutic relationship is about more than the method used. Feeling heard and being able to give feedback matter, especially when pain is part of life.
When pain has been part of daily life for a long time, you may already have had many appointments where you felt rushed or not quite understood. That experience can make it harder to trust a new therapeutic relationship. Knowing what a useful conversation looks like can help you judge whether psychological support is working for you.
The name of a method tells you only part of the story. From a client's point of view, useful signs include feeling listened to, understanding what you are working on and why, and feeling able to say when something does not seem to be helping. You should not have to pretend things are going well to be polite.
Feedback during sessions is something Dr Christine Shen, Acupuncturist, actively invites, and her psychotherapy training regards it as useful information. You might share what you took away from the last conversation, what felt difficult and what you would like to spend more time on. If talking about pain feels repetitive, or you want to focus more on relationships or work, say so. Reviewing how the working relationship is going is part of treatment, not a complaint to save for the end.
Your priorities should guide where sessions go. Consider what you want to understand better, what feels hard to change and how you might notice progress on an ordinary day. Find out from Christine how often you will pause to take stock, and who you can reach if circumstances shift between appointments. Your GP remains an important part of managing the physical side of pain.
If something in a session at the Lane Cove clinic does not sit right, mentioning it sooner rather than later gives you both the chance to adjust while the work is still taking shape.
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