Psychotherapy, Couple Counselling, Supervision and Executive Coaching in Cambridge.
Psychotherapy is a relationship. The relationship between psychotherapist and the people they work with is key, the affect they have on one another generates a valuable kind of intimacy. Whether it is couple counselling, executive coaching, supervision of therapeutic work, or psychotherapy, the challenge is for us to have new conversations that break us out of ourselves, out of our tired and familiar narratives, emotionality, personal drama and fear.
Psychotherapy and counselling provide a new way of seeing how to relate to ourselves and others, to life and to the world. How we see things often blinds us from seeing anything else.
I have been a practicing psychotherapist since 1999, I see people for short, medium, long and longer term psychotherapy.
Leonard Cohen
I work from home in a comfortable, light and spacious purpose built consulting room.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
I’ve been a psychotherapist for over twenty-five years, mostly in private practice. I offer couple counselling, supervision, training, group therapy, executive and leadership coaching, and organisational development consultancy. My professional experience includes:
- NHS Psychotherapist for 4 years working with outpatients with complex mental health issues
- Tutor for 4 years on the Certificate in Psychodynamic Counselling at the University of Cambridge
- Psychotherapist and executive coach for 8 years at The Grove Practice, Wimpole St, London W1
- Lead Tutor since 2011 for the Diploma in Integrative Supervision of Individuals and Groups at The Grove
- Supervisor for Asian and African clergy training as counsellors at the Institute of St Amselm, Clifton, Margate
- Training London Fire Brigade employees in Leadership Coaching
- Summer school counsellor and teacher in Crimea
- Consltant for Cambridge Crescent's buddying scheme for new converts to Islam
- Trauma counsellor at Transport for London
- Set up and led a Couples & Intimate Systems course in Cambridge
- Principle Tutor and founding member of the first Gestalt and Integrative Psychotherapy training in Budapest
- Trainer and supervisor of volunteers working with homeless people
- Student counsellor at Greenwich Maritime
- Visiting lecturer at Greenwich Maritime and Brighton Universities
TRAINING
- Foundation Year in Group Analysis at Cambridge Group Work (a constituent of The IGA)
- PG Dip. Organisational Development and Executive Coaching at The Grove Practice Ltd
- PG Cert. Supervision at Leeds Psychotherapy Training Institute
- PG Dip. Couples and Intimate Systems with Dr Joseph Zinker (Gestalt Institute of Cleveland)
- PG. Dip. Working with the Soul - Transpersonal Perspectives (The Whittington)
- PG Dip. Post-Qualifying Intensive in Gestalt & Object Relations (The Whittington)
- PG Dip. Integrative Psychotherapy at The Whittington Hospital NHS Trust, North London
Friedrich Nietzsche
WRITING
I often work with writers, artists and people interested in engaged in other types of creative process. Some people manage to lose themselves along the way, whilst others need a little help.
My writing is fictionalised, it is based on conversations I have had with myself and other people over the last twenty-plus years while becoming a psychotherapist. I've found writing helps me see what I think about life and psychotherapy.
These lines from Rainer Marie Rilke's poem Fictional Fact perfectly sums up how I approach writing::
'There is always a fiction in the fact
The fiction holds a lot of hidden facts
In the end, I found something which
might be the beginning of nothing
And now the paradox begins
with an open end'
My most recent blog is entitled:
Wanting doesn't get what you've already got
‘I am really angry with you.’
‘Why?’ I reply.
‘You’re not listening to me.’
‘What makes you think I’m not listening?’
Martha pauses apparently considering the question, ‘Okay, so you do listen but I don’t think you get me, I don’t feel seen and you don’t show empathy: it’s like you have no compassion.’
‘Ah,’ I reply, this is uncomfortable to hear, ‘I know how bad it feels not being seen,’ I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m trying to recover from an apparent lack of empathy, that would be defensive and besides, I partly agree with her.
Martha eyes me with what looks like suspicion and says, ‘I feel like I’m on my own right now.’ Although I want us to see each other, showing empathy and compassion would, for me at least, be self-abandonment.
Martha seems to want me to be with her in her pain, but in what way? And which pain? There is the pain of not being seen, of feeling alone, of being unmet, and then there is my apparent lack of empathy and compassion; and it could of course be something else entirely.
It struck me that although Martha had said I seem to lack empathy and compassion she had not said that this is what she wants, and if it is, what does she think they might give her?
Psychotherapy is not about client or therapist getting what they want, even if they knew what that is. Whilst psychotherapy is about wanting, it is also about love and things more important than love.
If Martha wants empathy and compassion she is not asking too much, she is perhaps asking too little.
Continue reading, 'Wanting doesn't get what you've already got'
I'm an accredited psychotherapist with United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. My practice as a clinical supervisor, couple counsellor, group therapist, trainer and executive coach accord with UKCP's Code of Ethics.
I practice individual psychotherapy, executive and leadership coaching, and couple counselling from home in Cambridge. I work remotely in the UK and across different time zones via Skype, FaceTime, Zoom and by telephone.