01.
It is frightening to ask for help, particularly when you have tried so hard to sort things out yourself. Sometimes another person can help. I am trained in working out how you work, what isn't working and what is. Our aim together would be to discover and strengthen the parts of you that are thriving, bright, energetic and hopeful and to help understand and deal with the parts of you that bring in the much more negative voices. Therapy is very hard work. You have to be interested in yourself and be willing to tolerate pain and anxiety, as well as pleasure and hope in order to change.
02.
My supervision is integrative and since my ISTDP training is more focused on helping therapists really get to grips with the people they are working with in quite a detailed way.
I started supervising trainee psychotherapists quite soon after I qualified when I was taken onto the staff at Regent's College School of Psychotherapy and Counselling. Carol Grace and I also ran courses on supervision for therapists and I was on the UKCP supervision register until I resigned in 2017. I am now a member of the College of Psychoanalysts whose ethical code I subscribe to, as both a clinician and a supervisor.
03.
I run workshops in London and in Aston Abbotts Village Hall in Buckinghamshire. They are small, up to 10 people maximum. Sometimes they are for therapists, sometimes for parents and sometimes for people struggling with issues around their body and weight. I am also running workshops on self-care for therapists, as keeping in top-notch condition helps with being a good therapist.
04.
People often ask me 'What is equine assisted psychotherapy?' For me, it is simple, when people are bereaved or suffered from early trauma or PTSD sometimes words and another person simply don't work to enable change to take place. The core condition that has to be in place for therapy to work at all is a therapeutic alliance. This means that therapist and patient believe they are on the same side. This is a very tall order for many people whose experiences of other people, often those close to them has been far from satisfactory. To do this even a little bit a person has to feel safe. This can take years.
Imagine this instead. You go into a field with me alongside you for company. You see a herd of horses. You feel so many different things but you are drawn to one of the horses and they are drawn to you. You find each other. You feel safe. That is the start of the magic. There on in anything can happen. You might talk, you might not. I might talk, I might not.
05.
This experience I describe here may be familiar to you. Sometimes you find someone or somewhere that feels like home. This happened when I met Alexandra Pokorny as she then was at a conference and then Michael Pokorny spoke to me about with such passion and enthusiasm. I had long been an advocate of brief work from when I did assessments sessions at Willesden Day Hospital under the tutelage and excellent support and education of Jocelyn Richards and Manek Barucha. They taught me that even though you might only have two hour and a half sessions with someone, a good therapist's job was to give the person an experience of self-knowledge that could lead to change there and then.
I then did a three year training in Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy which helped become a much more effective therapist and supervisor. I only wish I had done it sooner.
My Services
