Kindly Now was created by Dr Stephanie Knight to fill that gap she identified in the landscape of addiction treatment. There were people who did not need inpatient care, people who had completed it and needed more than weekly therapy could provide, and people for whom standard options felt out of touch, too rigid, or overly committed to a single way of doing things. She wanted to create something that filled that space. Something refreshing, yet rooted in clinical rigour and wisdom. Private care, delivered at a high standard, by someone with both lived experience of recovery and years of rigorous professional training in research and clinical practice. Deeply human in its approach, and genuinely attuned to what people are actually struggling with.
Steph has worked with clients across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, South America, and Africa. Again and again, she saw adults and young people without access to care that truly understood the complexity of what they were going through. Kindly Now was built to close that gap, with a commitment to delivering private care of genuine clinical quality that remains accessible.
Our Philosophy
Kindly Now understands recovery as a creative self-project: the work of shaping a life that feels worth living. Therapy and professional support can help a great deal, and ultimately each person becomes the main source of their own change. That means learning to make thoughtful use of what is available to them, including, and especially, their most difficult experiences, so that those experiences are not in vain.
Recovery is never about returning to how we were or how life used to be. It is about who we become in light of everything we have lived through, and what we choose to make of it all.
Existential therapy is the overarching approach, and Stephanie draws on other evidence-based therapeutic approaches within it. It reaches far beyond abstract questions of meaning and purpose, and is concerned, first and foremost, with how a person is actually living, with what they move towards and away from across every dimension of their life, and whether that reflects what they value. Ultimately, the work is about helping each person find a way of being in the world that makes sense to them, and cultivate a life they find satisfying and interesting.
When someone's care calls for additional expertise, she brings in specialists she knows and trusts, and decides together with the client who to involve and when, guided by her clinical assessment and by what they want for themselves.
Recovery is as much about undoing the old as it is about building the new. Both take time, and both require honesty, courage, patience and careful discernment.
About Kindly
Our Approach
At Kindly Now, our work is rooted in existential psychotherapy, with a particular influence from the British existential tradition. Alongside these foundations, our approach is continuously informed by current and evolving research into addiction and recovery, as well as by Dr Stephanie Knight's own doctoral research into how people cultivate and sustain long-term recovery.
Addiction, in whatever form it takes, has been described by the existential psychiatrist Medard Boss as "a desperate search, on a false and hopeless path, for the fulfilment of human freedom." This is where the work begins. Not with a fixed or narrow understanding of what addiction is, but with genuine curiosity about what it has been doing for the person living it, what it has meant, and what might be built in its place.
We believe that the narratives we construct about our lives, the choices we make, and the way we engage with ourselves, with others, and with what is available to us in the world are at the heart of what recovery requires. To do this honestly and radically, across all dimensions of life, is what lasting change demands.
Steph creates a clinical culture and environment that is warm, receptive, and non-judgmental, and in which each person is invited to engage honestly and courageously with their own life.
At Kindly Now, we understand that recovery is as much about undoing the old as it is about building the new. Both take time, and both require honesty, courage, patience, and careful discernment.
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Specialist areas
Addiction • Substance Misuse • Eating Disorders • Compulsive Behaviours •
Recovery Post-Rehab Support • Existential Crisis • Self-Loss • Existential Recovery
Dr. Steph Knight
I founded Kindly Now to create the kind of practice I would have wanted for myself many years ago. One that takes seriously the full complexity of addiction and recovery, and that sees rebuilding a life as something far richer and more personal than any single model can contain.
I am a Chartered Counselling Psychologist and Existential Psychotherapist. My training included the British existential tradition developed by Professor Emmy van Deurzen, and my clinical experience spans NHS services, specialist addiction treatment and private practice internationally. My doctoral research examined how people cultivate and sustain long-term recovery from addiction.
I have always been drawn to existential philosophy and its capacity to illuminate what it means to be human, and to help people engage more fully and honestly with their lives. This is what brought me to psychology, and it is what drives the work I do.
I bring to my practice years of rigorous clinical training, practice, and academic research, as well as my own experience of recovery, approached not through a prescribed programme but through the same existential inquiry that underpins all of my work. I know from the inside what it takes to examine old ways of being, to dismantle them, and to build something new in their place.
Alongside my clinical work, I bring over twenty years of experience in studying and teaching yoga and meditation internationally. This background continues to inform how I work therapeutically.
I work with clients across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, South America, and Africa.
I am registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and chartered with the British Psychological Society (BPS).
