Qualifications

Accredited for practice by, and past trustee of, the British Association for Sexual and Relationship Therapy and registered for practice by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy.

Areas of Specialised Research:

• The Psychotherapeutic Treatment of Addictive Compulsive Patterns of Sexual Behaviour
• The Nature and Function of Addiction
• The Impact of Addiction on Marriage and Relationships
• The Relationship between Sexual and Religious Behaviour in Faith Communities
• Qualitative Methodology and Trauma in Researching Sensitive and Distressing Subjects

Background

Before doing my training as a relationship therapist, psychotherapist and psychosexual therapist, I studied theology and worked in pastoral ministry. I left that work in order to develop my clinical and research interests in psychotherapy.

Pastoral work involved exposure to a whole range of human circumstances: childbirth, children, adolescence, marriage, marital problems and divorce, redundancy, sickness, bereavement and death. It was in this pastoral process that I became interested in marriage and relationships. I also became interested in the problems of ‘repeat behaviours’ and thus into the area of addiction and compulsivity. This interest took me into specialised academic and experiential programmes of enquiry.

All great world traditions concern themselves with, among other things, identity, meaning and purpose, respect for diversity, as well as how human beings can accept or change behaviours, attitudes and feelings. Psychotherapy, drawing on historic experience as well as insights into brain function and psychological research, is the clinical application of psychological therapies to make individually tailored contributions towards the same ends.

Issues of gender, orientation, sexual functioning and our relationships are central to our sense of personal identity and are crucial to our understanding of ourselves, individually and in relationship. Many of these issues and problems lie outside of our day-to-day awareness. The function of psychotherapy is to help people see ‘what is going on behind what is going on’ and to facilitate understanding, decision making and the possibility of acceptance and change.

Marriage and relationship problems, and sexual problems especially, often cover people with so much shame that they are sometimes unable or afraid to access provisions of help and insight. The consultancy has been set up out of a commitment to help men and women resolve the problems that cause this kind of, sometimes extreme, distress.

Sexual and relationship problems stand at the core of our identity and profoundly determine how we operate in the world and broadly colour the quality of our experience of life. It is thus a proper place for the intersection of traditions of pastoral care and the reflective application of psychological therapies.