Kindly Now was created by Dr Stephanie Knight in response to a 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.
Having worked with clients across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, Steph became acutely aware that the gap she had identified was not unique to Britain. Again and again she witnessed adults and young people without access to care that adequately understood the complexity of their experience. Kindly Now was built in response to that absence, with a commitment to delivering private care of genuine clinical quality that remains accessible.
Our Philosophy
At Kindly Now, we believe that we are defined not by our limitations but by how we engage with them, and that our primary task is not to be discouraged by our challenges but to find ways to be inspired by them. Living well requires us to engage authentically and creatively with what is available to us in each moment.
Recovery, from this perspective, is ultimately a creative self-project: a process of broadening experience, reclaiming agency, and shaping a life that feels worth living. Philosophies, therapies, and professionals can offer valuable support, but can only take you so far. Ultimately, we must become the primary source of our own healing and growth, learning to make thoughtful use of what is available to us.
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 • Behavioural Addiction • Substance Misuse • Eating Disorders • Recovery Post-Rehab Support • Existential Crisis • Self-Loss
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. I hold a Doctorate in Counselling Psychology and Psychotherapy, and am trained within the British existential tradition as developed by Professor Emmy van Deurzen. My clinical experience spans NHS services, specialist addiction treatment units, and private practice. My doctoral research focused on how people cultivate and sustain long-term recovery from addiction, and my clinical specialisms are addiction and eating disorders.
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 seventeen years of experience teaching yoga and meditation internationally, including extensive training within the Jivamukti method with Sharon Gannon and David Life, periods of time spent in Buddhist monasteries, and specialist addiction training with Carolyn Cowan. 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).
