THE THERAPIST

I am a graduate of the psychotherapy training programme at Spectrum which is accredited by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy.  I am also a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

I had a previous career as a solicitor.

My orientation as a psychotherapist is humanistic and existential.

Humanistic psychotherapy has a vision of the human being as innately striving towards health.  It is a respectful style of therapy.  The therapist enters into a unique relationship with an equal, a unique adult person, not a 'patient' suffering symptoms of a 'condition' for which there is a prescribed 'cure'.  The therapist interacts with the client with a focus on what is actually happening in the here and now, and fosters a re-integration of body and mind, which are so often split off from each other.

Existential psychotherapy aims at enhancing self-knowledge in the client and allowing them to be the author of their own lives.

My training incorporates psychodrama, gestalt and other approaches.  I am particularly interested in integrating F.M. Alexander's "alexander technique" with Stanley Keleman's "formative psychology".  The common feature of these is that they offer us personal tools for effecting gradual, incremental changes in our body-mind.
You can't change and yet remain the same, though this is what most people want. (Patrick Macdonald)

If you're patient and wait for the clouds to disperse, you will see the brightness of the moon.  (Chinese saying)

Silence is so accurate.   (Mark Rothko)

The body feels real hunger, real thirst, real joy in the sun or the snow, real pleasure in the smell of roses or the look of a lilac bush; real anger, real sorrow, real tenderness, real warmth, real passion, real hate, real grief. All emotions belong to the body and are recognised by the mind. (D.H. Lawrence)

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.   (Oscar Wilde)

Two things make God laugh: when a healer says "I healed them!" or when bickering lovers say "We have nothing in common!"      (Ramakrishna)

I want to love you without clutching, appreciate you without judging, join you without invading, invite you without demanding, leave you without guilt, criticise you without blaming, and help you without insulting.    (Virginia Satir)

I sing the body electric.  I celebrate myself, and sing myself.  Do I contradict myself?  Very well then I contradict myself  -  I am large, I contain multitudes.    (Walt Whitman)

We never ask the meaning of life when we are in love.  (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)
A compulsion is the act of wrapping ourselves around an activity, a substance or a person, to survive, to tolerate and numb our experience of the moment.  Love is a state of connectedness, one that includes vulnerability, surrender, self-valuing, steadiness and a willingness to face, rather than run from, the worst of ourselves.  Compulsion is a state of isolation, one that includes self-absorption, invulnerability, low self-esteem, unpredictability and fear that, if we faced our pain, it would destroy us...  Love and compulsion cannot co-exist.       (Geneen Roth)
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