About

In private practice, I currently provide clinical supervision to professional helpers, counsellors and therapists working in a wide range of modalities and orientations, working in both organisations and private practice with adults, children, young people and families. In the past I also supervised a network for coaches in a Whitehall government department.

I have completed BPS Approved Training in Clinical Supervision, which meets the training standards required to confer eligibility to the British Psychological Society’s Register of Applied Psychology Practice Supervisors (RAPPS) and have obtained SDS accreditation: CSAccred (ACC).

Currently, I provide group clinical supervision for level 7 trainee psychotherapists and counsellors on UEL’s P.DIp/MA programme, supporting trainees as they take their first steps in practicum, process reporting and clinical training placements and apply hard-won skills and learning for the first time – and beyond – to qualification, establishing their own practice and for those that stay on – starting academic research in the field of applied and professional psychology and psychotherapy. You can find my research interests here:

• Working with the unconscious and non-verbal in integrative therapy:
  • Relationally, through the integration of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic perspectives and techniques – whilst making it accessible, transparent and brief enough to be viable for clients
  • Figuratively, with adults and children through using e.g. music and sound, drama, art, the body, sand tray and symbolic play.
• Frameworks for identifying and locating continuums of praxis in pluralistic therapy as a new approach to integration, which balance flexibility and spontaneity with clarity, stability, accountability and transparency.
• Approaches to trauma-informed systemic formulation to improve clinical and client-satisfaction outcomes in care settings, including development of metrics and systematic multi-disciplinary therapeutic planning.
• Approaches to trauma recovery, integrating traditional talking therapies with somatic and experiential approaches to working with trauma, (e.g. EMDR, Breathwork, animal-assisted therapy, neurofeedback, mind-body practices including Yoga, and TRE and Feldenkrais Method), and other trauma approaches like Internal Family Systems and parts work.
• Enabling practitioners to understand and work with their ‘helping agenda’ across the helping professions in the health and social care sector.
• Fostering the conditions for compassionate care across the Health and Social care sector. For example, building on the recommendations of the inquiries into Mid-Staffs NHS Trust, (the Francis Inquiry) and Winterbourne View care home, i.e. that practitioners across the helping professions must be supported by positive organisational cultures in order to enable the delivery of high-quality care. And more specifically, building evidence-based arguments for the extension of pro-actively managed self-care, self-compassion and supportive supervision across the helping professions, in order to enable healthy helping behaviours and mitigate burnout.

My direct teaching with trainees includes:

• Evidence-based approaches to the treatment of incident vs complex and developmental trauma
• Working with mental health diagnoses in psychotherapeutic practice, eg depression, anxiety, PTSD, CPTSD, Addiction, Personality disorders, Dissociative disorders
• Triage processes, case formulation, clinical assessment and measuring clinical outcomes
• Relational skills in helping relationships
• Burnout and compassion fatigue, the shadow of helping (drama triage, projective identification, role relationship re-enactment, wounded helper, attachment in psychotherapy)
• Psychodynamic practice
• Research methods in psychotherapy
• Approaches to working in multidisciplinary teams (eg AMBIT)
• The social context of applied psychotherapeutic practice, ie, identity and epistemology, bias and power, philosophy and social justice in psychotherapy
• Approaches to clinical supervision
• ‘Resistant clients’ and the ‘hard to reach’ in psychotherapy

I currently provide therapeutic and reflective practice consultation and debriefing to supervising social workers, foster carers and other fostering agency specialists and case management and peer supervision to a team of specialist psychotherapists working with looked-after children with complex developmental trauma in Medway. Over the past five years I have developed and led a service-improvement programme which has delivered significant benefits to therapeutic outcomes from children and young people, improved placement stability and longevity and increased staff retention and engagement.

For example this program has included an overhaul of the organisation’s protocols and practice around in triage, formulation and clinical planning whilst supporting the team’s capacity to accurately and effectively mentalise the person referred, their key relationships, and the wider network’s dynamics. Engaging with complexity, confusion, the unknown, and the contested, together with mental health and safeguarding concerns, requires that clinicians be both decisive and measured in the midst of uncertainty, anxiety and conflicting pressures.

Partial or inaccurate information is common when receiving multi-agency referrals, and where a person’s chronology is spread across a number of different authorities. Clinical work needs to be formulated in a timely way whilst involving the network and the service user with the process, in an empathic, respectful and sensitive manner, extrapolating information and predicting risk, mindful of trauma and systemic factors.

Good clinical assessment involves making complicated real-world difficult decisions using pattern recognition, then proceeding based on judgement, experience and context. There is rarely a simple ‘off the shelf’ solution but with the new approach to mentalizing in teams, together with collaborative triage, assessment and formulation effective and efficient bespoke interventions are able to be delivered with consistency, high levels of engagement and positive clinical outcomes.

Good clinical supervision supports practitioners to apply the reflective capability to “think outside of the box” and recognise the personal emotional impact of the work in managing high level risk in order to protect the quality of clinical judgment and duly balanced decision making. When practitioners become overwhelmed and struggle to maintain their ability to apply sound clinical judgment, over-reliance on assessment tools and policy often follows and can make triage a ‘blunt instrument’ and possibly heighten risk, pathologization and stigma. Good clinical supervision has a vital role to play in maintaining the conditions for practitioners to be able to think clearly holding these sources and forces in balance.

In turn, robust, collaborative, systemic and trauma informed triaging processes involving, and through involvement growing, capable, confident and reflective practitioners, can improve access to and engagement with therapeutic services and planning and delivery of clinical outcomes and service user satisfaction.. An additional advantage is to instil confidence and resilience into to the wider network.

In addition, I have developed an innovative training programme for foster carers in supporting children and young people with complex developmental trauma, child development, the brain, attachment strategies, relationships, mental health, resilience, therapeutic childcare.