Email Practitioner

Tel: 07973 747825

Services

Psychodynamic Counselling

£40 per hour

£35 concession

Transpersonal Psychology was my first influence during a 4 year Bachelor of Chinese Medicine degree. In 1991 I studied for a B.Phil, my research focusing on the lay health beliefs of a deprived community receiving free weekly acupuncture. I founded The Whole Works in the same year and was involved with ‘Process Oriented Psychotherapy UK’ followed by training in Gestalt counselling with The Gestalt Trust in 1995. A Psycho-Hypnotherapy diploma was completed in 1997 and I have since studied at The Scottish Institute of Human Relations in Edinburgh and accepted there for ‘Analytical Psychotherapy’ training in 1999. I completed a Masters in Psychoanalytical Studies in 2004 at Sheffield University.

Inevitably, I identify my style of work as ‘eclectic’, though always Psychodynamically informed, always prioritising the imagination and founded firmly on what the client already ‘knows’; though has possibly not been thought and far less talked out. Gestalt training has reminded me never to stray too far from what the body is signalling that may be different from what we actually say.

Theories are helpful but granted some quality time and attention, something within the client’s psyche seems to know their whole story already, including the solutions to the problems, though this ‘knowledge’ often feel barely thinkable.

In the Native American traditions if a brother or sister of the tribe was affected in their 'spirit' in some way, the Elder of the tribe would sit down and listen for some considerable time with complete attention until something became clearer that had been lost. The Elder would refrain from any judgement, both trusting that some clarifying image would emerge, often from within a dream or from some signifying event in the environment- a bird or animals appearance, a rock fall, a sudden weather change.

I don’t think things have changed so much over that time: In the therapeutic relationship, it seems to me, this journey through what is difficult to bear about being ourselves is still enabled by two people’s willingness to sit down together, pay close attention to what is being said together and with a willingness to allow their imaginations be open to what emerges from the unconscious.

The therapist doesn’t ‘know better’ than the client, yet something essential is usually arrived at in therapy that may not otherwise have been found alone.

Rob has made a particular study of the experience we might describe as being ‘too much’ for ourselves, and conversely, those empty, depressed or fragile states of self we can also encounter; states where the boundaries of our self seem to have dissolved altogether, culminating in panic, heightened anxiety, depression or even despair.

Because words are occasionally insufficient, or simply fail to capture what we know within, Rob tries to incorporate a space for other ways of expressing ourselves –whether through the body, via dreams, through story writing or through image representations of whatever kind, as a means to engage these ‘lost’ or not quite realized aspects of ourselves.