Hello, and welcome to my website.
I have some thoughts I would like to share, chiefly about the conflict that each one of us has to manage between two powerful biological systems, our fear system and our attachment system. This is a conflict between the way we can react to others as a threat, and our need to be close to others and feel we belong.
This individual struggle is paralleled within our society which has to manage the forces of fear that lead to “them and us” conflicts, and the desire to cooperate with others for the common good.
Central to my understanding is the idea that we are social animals and that our wellbeing is dependent on our social context. If we see wellbeing as an individual attribute, we will never attain it.
This website contains a new understanding of Depression as being an aspect of the body’s parasympathetic shutdown in the face of threat (Rethinking Depression), a summary of Dorothy Heard and Brian Lake’s theory of the attachment system as applied to adult life which Una McCluskey uses as the framework for her exploratory group-work (Exploring Wellbeing) and articles I have written explaining what complex trauma is and how to work with it therapeutically (Complex Trauma). You are welcome to download these articles if you find them useful.
In the section “Workshops for Therapists” I list all of my planned workshops and experiential groups, with flyers for each of the forthcoming ones. Do download the flyers if you are interested and pass them on to friends and colleagues