About me professionally.
I am a Jungian Analytical Psychotherapist
Prior to being a therapist I was a teacher then for 10 years a carpenter and joiner. I discovered psychotherapy for my own needs and after some years realised it was my vocation. I trained at the London Centre for Psychotherapy from 1979 - 1984 and found my home in the tradition following Carl Jung.
C.G.Jung
Carl Jung provided wonderful and paradoxical leadership. His assertion that he was the only Jungian confronts each of us using him with the challenges, joys and pitfalls of being and becoming one's own self. At the same time he knew that becoming real in the world could only emerge from relationship with someone else and with oneself at depth. Perhaps I love him most for his confidence that imaginal world is as real as matter. He held conversations with spiritual companions who were as real to him and you and me.
In this courageousness he engaged with the potential of quantum physics to offer theorisation of the comprehensive dynamism of psychological life. He anticipated later developments in psychoanalysis of relationality, inter-subjectivity and spirituality.
Listening
Since my training to be a psychotherapist my paths of learning, periods of further psychotherapy and supervision have been many. A wonderful aspect of psychotherapy is that theory and practice are constantly evolving, there is always more to learn. Over the years I have learned and benefited from relational psychoanalysis, energy psychology, psychoanalytic and Imago couples therapy, social dreaming, quantum field theory and Celtic Shamanism.
These have enriched my understanding of the primacy of listening over speaking, and I hope made me a more effective therapist. All these schools of theory and practice, including those of neuroscience, show understanding and maturing to arise from a process between client and therapist in which the client's innate wisdom becomes real and alive. One of Carl Jung's gifts to us was to understand suffering and illness as potentially meaningful, saying something that has not been heard, or cannot be said in any other way, intimating the person's need to make sense.
Professional Memberships
I have chaired the West Midlands Institute for Psychotherapy, the Confederation for Analytical Psychology, and the Training Standards and Membership Committee of the Council for Psychoanalysis and Jungian Analysis at the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. I served as the WMIP's representative to the UKCP.
In 1985 I moved from London to the Midlands. I had a private practice in Leamington Spa until 2022, when I moved to Headingley in Leeds.
In 1990 I, with my colleague and friend Shirley Wheeley, created the training in Jungian Analytical Psychotherapy at the West Midlands Institute for Psychotherapy in Birmingham. At the time it was innovative and the first Jungian training outside of London. We co-chaired it for six years, it continues to thrive.
I was a member of the UKCP for many years, I am currently a member of the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology and the International Association of Jungian Studies.