About
My practice:
"Give them a fish, they'll starve in a week...teach them how to fish and they'll thrive forever."
Thank you for visiting my website. I am here to offer you access to a wealth of experience and training in coaching and psychotherapy.
My journey in psychotherapy started 20 years ago when I felt drawn to a course in integrative counselling. However, on that course, I couldn't help but feel that something was missing. The techniques being taught weren't really effective nor founded in theory that anyone, therapist or client, could understand,
Now, though, the Human Givens Approach has revolutionized psychotherapy, building on half a century of positive psychology. For the first time in human history, there is a framework for understanding mental health that encompasses all of human culture and psychological understanding under one organizing idea. The models that I use commit to therapeutic outcomes and empirically provable benefits, unlike all other previous forms of psychotherapy.
Understanding what we need in order to thrive and what resources we have available to us that get those vital needs met is the foundation to progressing our lives in order to move forward out of mental illness, or to move forward to thrive. So what are these new approaches to mental health that I use?
The Human Givens needs and resources model of mental health
All living things come into being with a set of needs. If those needs are met, then the organism thrives. Human beings are the most complex organisms, and it follows that we have the most complex set of needs. For mental health, we have a set of emotional needs. When these needs are met, we cannot be mentally unwell. By focusing on how you can get these emotional needs met, we can utilise the innate resources we are all born with and apply them to your unique life in order to enable you to thrive.
The emotional needs are:
Security, Control, Attention, Community, Status, Emotional Connection, Privacy, Achievement and Meaning and Purpose.
Typically I see my clients for six sessions, although sometimes there are more complex issues at work that require longer-term support. A typical session will involve us checking how well your emotional needs are being met and exploring what can be done to improve them. I will always send you an e-mail summary of our session, including agreed insights and tasks to perform in-between our meeting. In this way, we maximize the work we do together so that you can freely move forward without my help as soon as you are comfortable doing so.
About me
Throughout my life, the potential of the
individual has fascinated me.
I grew up in a family that fostered over 50 children in 30 years, and I have lived experience of all aspects of mental ill health, with some tragic examples of needs not being met. I became a parent from the tender age of 20 to now two extraordinary young men. My large extended family steeped me in the arts, religion and philosophy, as well as from a tradition of performing Shakespeare in my childhood, a career I later pursued.
Throughout my life, I have fostered much interest in psychotherapy, closely following new breakthroughs that could enable people to develop more healthily and to be mentally healthy. This understanding aligned with the psychological trajectory of my career in the theatre.
A critical aspect of my theatrical training and endeavour celebrates the potential of the individual while exploring the obstacles and difficulties that inhibit the fulfilment of that potential. Performers themselves are an exponent of the wonder of humanity, sharpening their physical, creative and mental acuity in order to deliver a performance. The performance itself is exemplary of what can be achieved when we work together in open, fearless connectedness, what can be achieved when we engage our innate gifts, physical and abstract, in complicit combination with others. This is quite aside from the power of the content and the stories that are told, and it is the power of stories that is a key component of the therapeutic approach that I now use in my everyday practice.
