Early Start

I started with avidly consuming psychology books in my teens, did a Human Sciences degree and learned Assertiveness in my non-academic time. It was a life transforming empowerment to learn clear, honest, direct and equal relating and I became so passionate about it I went on to do Assertiveness,  trainer training in my early 20s and taught Assertiveness and self-empowerment for a number of years.

 

In those early years I also learned both Focusing and Co-counselling - two different kinds of peer practices of swapping listening and support.

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Peer counselling with a radical edge

I came across Co-Counselling after I was troubled by the power imbalances in my first 2 sessions of psychoanalysis. I put up posters around town in an outraged cry for help - asking if anyone knew of more equitable approaches. Gloriously a wonderful, mature woman who had trained in co-counselling replied and offered to teach me. I got so much from it that I went on to embark on Co-counselling Teacher and Leadership Training. And over a period of 10 years I taught fundamental Co-Counselling skills and ran a number of support groups for Women, LGB, White Anti-Racists and Jews & Allies. They were a special mix of personal work and social activism - primarily aimed at understanding and liberating ourselves from divisiveness and internalised oppression.

 

Learning Focusing - my core practice

During this time a friend of mine at university introduced me to Gendlin's book 'Focusing' which explains how to internally sense and work with our inner knowing, the wisdom just under the surface of ordinary consciousness.

The friend and I started practicing together from the book.

 

What I loved about this (and still do) is that there is no expectation of what we'll find when we connect with our inner world - only a radical openness to whatever is there in its own terms. For me, having been subjected to so many punishing expectations of how I should be, this was profoundly refreshing and being particularly reactive to expert assumptions, it was SO freeing and affirming. It has become my lifelong core practice which I've ongoingly practiced solo and in partnerships and later trained in and was awarded an MA in Focusing and Experiential Psychotherapy.

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Anti-victimisation and 'Risking on Purpose'

One more empowering system I came across and trained in, in my earler years was an anti-vitimisation process called Protective Behavious.

 

I came across this while doing hostel work with homeless young women. It's based on the right to feel safe, on trusting our feelings and our inner bodily knowing of whether we feel safe enough with a person or in a situation. It teaches that we have a right to take action or seek help to regain our safety, even if that means being impolite or breaking the normal rules of behaviour.  Right up my street!

 

I particularly loved the aspect of 'Risking on Purpose' - taking empowered risks to grow and adventure in a safe way. I now see that was an early support for my direction of embracing adventure. I loved it and again underwent a trainer training and got myself a job with the Children's Society, and later freelance, teaching it to lots of professionals - police, social workers, teachers, youth workers, health visitors, creche workers etc to use for themselves in managing the risks in their work and to adapt it to teach to the people, age groups and settings they worked in.

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Facilitating Emergent Group Work

Having done so much teaching, I also attended and did trainings in several forms of more open group work. I was fascinated by more fluid, unstructured groupwork, and inspired by Scott Peck's books 'A Different Drum' and 'A World Waiting to be Born' and was thrilled to find an organisation carrying on his work in the UK. I did a weekend workshop, an ongoing monthly self-led group, then ultimately a Facilitator training and a deep dive into running 'Facilitating Ourselves' retreats. I loved the principles of 'speak when moved' and implicitly 'dont speak when not moved' and the deep self trust and emergent group intelligent that staying with the principles led to.

 

I was inspired by trusting in wider emergence, the intelligence of beyond our minds, that can organise the billions of cells in our body to be co-ordinated enough to be and integrated being.

 

I came across and trained in facilitating 'Open Space', a process developed by Harrison Owen, who when organising conferences found the best stuff happened during the mingling in the breaks - so developed a process to essentiall harness what happens in the breaks and make it the main event. I found the combined chaos, freedom and minimal but functional structure thrilling and such an invitation for us all to show up in our passion and take responsibility for our own involvement. I lead a number of small and large events in Open Space.

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Craving the intimacy of doing one-to-one work

Yet after 10 years of loving teaching and working with groups, I was finally starting to be ready for something new and I found myself craving the intimacy of working at depth, one-to-one, over a period of time.

 

It was the early days of personal-development coaching, but I did a basic course. Then, having a degree in independent study, I did a deep dive into the coaching literature and set myself the adventure of learning and refining the skills in a kind of self-apprenticeship with my early clients agreement to give close, detailed feedback on the sessions.  I found the process of leaning and practicing very enjoyable. Later the field started maturing and began offering university level courses, so I started an MSc in Coaching, Mentoring and Organisational Development at Sheffield Hallam.  But sadly, I found the course increasingly frustrating, as the skills being taught were not as deep as what I was craving.

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Working with people in emotional pain

Then after grappling with a series of tough life events, including the death of my dad and the devastating ending of my long-term life-partner relationship, I found myself wanting to work with people in their pain.

 

So I switched courses and started an MA in Focusing and Experiential Psychotherapy. This was both healing and very demanding, not least because, for the research part, I embarked on an 'autoethnography' - a phenomenological deep-dive methodical enquiry of my own experience of therapy and my solo focusing as I tried to heal my early trauma.

 

This was a guarangutan task. I not only recorded and transcribed my therapy sessions, but journaled my solo focusing sessions with special notitions of all the markers of physiological changes in my system. Although I achieved the MA, the year long trauma healing intention was less successful than I'd hoped. 

 

I now see that there was a lot I still needed to learn about the effects of traumatically insecure attachment, the power of emotional memory and how much I still lacked a therapeutic level of deep self-compassion.

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15 Years as a Therapist

Starting work as a therapist during the course, then continuing after was a wonderful, varied journey. I was a volunteer for the first 2 years in an LGBTQ organisation and loved being part of the team and having a wonderful manager. I gradually I built a private practice, and as I adventured in the work and I discovered new angles I wanted to learn so understood many futher trainings, the key ones being:

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• Somatic Trauma Therapy Training with Babette Rothschild

• Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy Training with ICEFT

• AEDP Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy with AEDP Institute

• Coherence Therapy with CTI

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All of these added to my core Focusing and Experiential approach and enhanced my capacity to be present with and facilitate client's capacity to navigate and heal in the face of powerful emotion.

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I've totally loved this work and it's been such a privilege to accompany all my clients as they grew and healed.

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And Now - Authenticity Adventurers

Throughout this last 15 years of being a therapist, I've often thought how Authenticity is my central passion. As my above account illustrates, I can't help myself collected tools, approaches, radical new perspectives, training in them, practicing them and integrating many more inspiring ideas, quotes, the work of inspiring authors and speakers.

 

I've been mulling for years how I could maybe bring it all together.

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And now finally I've mulled enough to be ready.

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Welcome to my new set of offerings - the culmination of all I've learned in the last 40 years.