About me
Having worked in the development of community-led projects in St Paul’s (Bristol) and Islington (London), I trained as a psychotherapist at The Bowlby Centre in the 1990s. I am an approved training supervisor at The Bowlby Centre and subscribe to The Bowlby Centre’s Code of Ethics and Practice.
I founded Confer in 1999 and worked as its director until 2022, curating or overseeing its programme of psychotherapy talks, seminars and conferences. Confer was created to bridge gaps between different schools of thought in the psychotherapy field and to increase constructive communication across mental health disciplines. Over the years, it developed into a platform for exceptional theoretical and clinical work by contemporary practitioners, often positioning the work of psychotherapy in the context of a challenging external world. By offering a welcoming, non-partisan space for the exploration of ideas, its events attracted thousands of practitioners who attended for continuing education, dialogue and a professional community. Confer expanded its work across a wide range of themes, from psychoneurobiology to intergenerational trauma, from narcissistic personality disorder to psychosomatic illness, from autism to sexuality, from neurobiology to climate anxiety and many other areas of clinical expertise. In 2021 we extended the work into publishing under the imprint Confer Books.
In this role I had an amazing opportunity to learn from colleagues and to develop my own thoughts. Today, I am particularly interested in what creates an effective psychotherapy relationship, especially the unconscious dynamics between the two participants and the activation of the intersubjective field; what goes wrong in the therapy is just as fascinating as what goes well. I am interested in how a sense of attachment security can develop through the intimacy of the work and the reparative experience of being heard, understood and accepted. I subscribe to a process model of therapy in which the story, relationship and therapeutic benefits develop over time, rather than a diagnostic model where treatment is offered for a specific condition.
My principal theoretical influences include Freud, Bowlby, Winnicott, Fairbairn, Bromberg, Schore, and many contributors to the Relational School.
I continue to curate talks for Confer, and most recently completed the MA in Creative Non-Fiction Writing at the University of East Anglia.
I am Patron of The Yellow Heart Trust and live in Suffolk.