Educational Backgroud

I completed the professional training in Clinical Psychology (Master of Arts in Clinical Pschology with distinction) at what was then the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) and is now the University of Johannesburg. I also obtained a BA Hons degree in Applied Psychology from that university and completed my undergraduate training with majors in Psychology and English at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1990.

My secondary education was at St Martin’s School in Rosettenville, Johannesburg

Professional History

After qualifying I spent a short stint at the Standard Bank of South Africa before entering the academic world via a post as a Junior Lecturer at what was then the East London campus of Rhodes University. (It’s now part of Fort Hare)

After 15 months there I moved back to Gauteng and took up a post at the University of Pretoria where I lectured to undergraduates in Abnormal Psychology, Developmental Psychology and Critical Thinking. I also assisted in the training and supervision of the MA (Clin Psych) professional students.

Throughout this period I maintained a part-time private practice and in 2001 I entered full time practice and moved to Cape Town.

Orientation to Psychotherapy

I view the therapeutic relationship as a privileged and sacred space characterised by warmth, deep understanding, openness and genuineness. My therapeutic stance is an attempt to engage in deep and non-threatening understanding of the other – my efforts are directed at creating with the client a space of open, non-judgemental communication where I work to listen with sensitivity, intuition and intelligence and to speak from a coherent, informed, compassionate and “useful” position.

I firmly believe that psychotherapy is both science and art. I believe that it’s practice must be grounded in solid theory and research and that it also requires creativity, intuition and inspiration. I endorse the family therapist, Lynn Hoffman’s position that the training of psychotherapists should draw on literature, drama and poetics as much as it does on academic theory and research.

Within this broad view of my role as a psychotherapist I draw on several theoretical and practical orientations to psychology.

Interpersonal psychotherapy and systemic thinking

My original training as a clinical psychologist was in the relationally focused systemic and interactional models of psychotherapy. This approach places great emphasis on relationship and understands our behaviour, our sense of self and our understanding of the world as being embedded in the patterning of our relationships, both in our early environments and in our current life circumstances.

From this perspective our experiences of distress, joy, pain, sadness, wonder and awe, our being in our worlds are outworkings of the relational processes of our lives.

Being in relationship as spouse, parent, child, friend, colleague, employer is a creative act that gives rise to the reality that we inhabit.

The therapeutic relationship becomes an arena for creative exploration and potentially for the re-patterning of our responses to both ourselves and others.

Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapy

I also employ Cognitive Behavioural techniques and ideas in my practice. This approach looks at our thought processes and how these inform our habitual interpretations of the world. Identifying automatic thoughts and the biases we routinely apply when making meaning out of life and practicing awareness of these can yield significant therapeutic gains.

Neurobiology and Evolutionary Psychology

I believe that the physical body is often neglected in psychotherapy and I believe that this gap is partially addressed by recent advances in neurobiology. A good understanding of the physiological and neurochemical underpinnings of emotion augments my work and I often find that if we can understand what is happening physically when we feel anxious for example, it can take the pressure off trying to “think” our way out of distress and allow us to attend to our physical beings first as a way to alleviate psychological distress.

A second and related approach stems from Evolutionary Psychology which looks at how our bodies and minds have been shaped by evolutionary demands placed on our species over millenia. It strikes me as a staggering insight that long before the cultural systems in which our lives are embedded, long before we invented agriculture let alone skyscrapers and offices and busses and the nuclear family, humans physiologically identical to us were living and loving and laughing and suffering. To ignore how our nervous systems might be adapted to the evolutionary context of pre-history seems foolish to me and so I use insights from this field to augment my understanding of my own life and the lives of my clients.

Mindfulness and breathing

In recent years psychology has adopted secularised meditation practices and researched the benefits of these practices on mental health. There exists a lot of evidence that a regular meditation practice develops and improves the nervous system’s ability to regulate emotional arousal. Mindfulness based meditation is a valuable adjunct to psychotherapy particularly when anxiety is a feature of the presenting issues. I often show clients the techniques of this practice and make recommendations for other resources in this regard.

Personal

I am interested in photography, reading and writing, compulsive collecting of classical music and I am a committed cyclist (cycologist!).