I am a retired Psychotherapist with 30 years experience as a therapist. Following my four years initial training I worked for WPF Counselling North in Leeds, The Tuke Centre in York, and The Oakdale Centre in Harrogate.
I estabished my own private practice in 1997 and from 2000 also worked within NHS Psychological Therapies Department as Practice Counsellor for the Tadcaster Medical Practice and the Jorvik Medical Practice in York. In 2004 I was appointed Head of Counselling within NHS Psychological Therapies with responsibility for the recruitment and management of counsellors working within GP practices in the York and Selby areas. In 2007 I also took on the management of the local Primary Care Mental Health Team.
I retired from the NHS in 2011 and worked part-time in private practice until March 2023.
Between 2004 and 2015 my clinical supervisor was Dr Una McCluskey who introduced me to the work of Dorothy Heard and Brian Lake who developed John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory to apply to the whole of adult life rather than just the mother-child relationship. Una McCluskey developed a therapeutic method based on Heard and Lake’s work and on her own research into the therapeutic dynamic and I trained with her in this approach for many years.
One of the most useful ideas I gathered from the above approach was the concept of the human fear system (which Heard and Lake incorporated from the work of Joseph LeDoux). As I integrated the fear system and the attachment systems into my work it became clear to me that an idea of the fear system, which was conceptualised purely as the sympathetic nervous system “fight-flight-freeze” responses did not adequately support my work with complex trauma. I then came across Peter Levine’s work on the fear system incorporating parasympathetic collapse which further introduced me to the work of Stephen Porges on Polyvagal Theory.
I have spent a lot of time over the past decade thinking about the human fear system – presenting on this subject at Una McCluskey’s conferences in Northern Ireland in 2015 and 2017, online in 2021 and at York in 2025 – incorporating parasympathetic collapse into the theory of the fear system used in the adult attachment model and proposing that parasympathetic collapse was the biological mechanism underlying depression.
I worked on these ideas for several years with Dzmitry Karpuk who set up the Complex Trauma Institute and I have contributed articles on Complex Trauma for the Institute’s Journal and provide two workshops on the fear system as part of the Institute’s training programme (“Fear and the Therapist”, and “Fear and Attachment”).
While I no longer see clients or supervisees, I am continuing to offer workshops for therapists on the fear system, and have just finished writing a book for therapists entitled “Fear in the Therapy Room: a survival guide for working with complex trauma”, which is due to be published by Hammersmith Books in June 2026. I am hoping to move on to writing a book for the general public on fear and love – powerful biological systems which I see as the two “forces” which dominate human life – the balance between them determining whether we live with misery or wellbeing.
Qualifications and training
Diploma in Psychodynamic Counselling (WPF) 1995
Advanced Diploma in Psychodynamic Counselling (WPF) 1997
EMDR Level II training (EMDR Institute Inc) 2001
Diploma in Psychodynamic and Psychoanalytical Supervision 2003
Training in Exploratory Goal Corrected Psychotherapy (EGCP) © with Dr Una McCluskey, 2008-2021
Also
Introduction to CBT (2006)
Foundation training in Systems Centered Therapy with Yvonne Agrarian (2005-2007)
Introduction to Focusing-Oriented Therapy (2016).