I began my career working in homeless hostels with young people in the North West going on to become a community worker and social worker in Liverpool city centre for many years. I worked for pilot leaving care teams, inclusion projects, substance misuse services and youth justice teams and then went on to troubleshoot the setting up of teams within social services. This took me to completing my MA in social work.  Following this I set up and ran Southwark judgement services for young people and also set up and ran the Gypsy and traveller Housing Support service for Shelter.

A combination of all these influences gave me a great grounding in working with different clients in a wide variety of settings and taught me that connection and courage were the pathways to client safety. It also taught me a lot about difference and exclusion and the need for connection and understanding in these situations.

I came to therapy via watching one of my clients make amazing changes as a result of having psychodynamic therapy.  Having witnessed this first hand I decided that I wanted to be a part of the change not an observer, so I retrained doing a Post Graduate Psychodynamic therapy diploma at Birmingham university and also completing Brief Focal Therapy training there.

I initially worked as a therapist for the adult psychology service in Cannock.  During this time, I became a BACP accredited Psychotherapist and following this I became a private practitioner doing some self-referral but also contracting in to different services.  I was a therapist for the police affiliate network, originally providing CBT and then EMDR for police officers.  I worked for the Psychosexual and Sexual Health counselling Service for the NHS for many years.  Here I specialised in working with sexual identity, gender identity and sexual abuse using Psychodynamic and CBT techniques.  Understanding the levels of trauma that clients experienced within this service prompted my fascination and subsequent training and accreditation in EMDR. EMDR is now a central part of my private practice and subsequent training in Attachment informed EMDR has allowed me to provide a wide variety of services to clients to address trauma in its different guises.

I became a supervisor as a result of some fantastic experiences of supervision myself which had allowed me to develop my own style of therapy and feel grounded as a practitioner.  I completed a level 7 training in cross modality psychodynamic and psychoanalytic supervision and began to develop this as a strand of private practice.  This training gave me membership and approval as a supervisor from the British Association for Psychodynamic and Psychoanalytic Supervision (BAPPS). The experience of watching my supervisees grow in confidence and ability and create things in the world they could only imagine at the beginning is inspiring to me and spurred me on to complete my EMDR consultancy accreditation so that I could work towards accreditation with EMDR supervisees as well, rather than having to let them go after developing strong supervisory alliances. I am an accredited EMDR Consultant with EMDR UK, EMDR Europe, EMDRIA and an approved attachment focused/ informed consultant with EMDR Focus.

My journey through EMDR took me towards Internal Family Systems.  Having worked with parts in psychodynamic therapy and EMDR, IFS felt like a natural progression and I am currently embarking on level 2 training whilst working towards IFS accreditation.  In the future I intend to become an IFS consultant so that I can also supervise this strand of work.”