About
I came to psychotherapy the long way round.
I trained in medicine at Imperial College London and qualified in 2006, then spent ten years in general practice in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. General practice teaches you something no other kind of medicine does. You see the same people over years, and you come to know the ones whose difficulties never quite resolve. The pain that moves. The symptoms that keep returning with a normal result. The depression that outlasts every reasonable treatment. You refer, and sometimes it helps, and often it does not.
I trained as a psychotherapist because I wanted to be able to work with those patients, and because I had come to think their difficulties were not vague at all. They were precise, they were relational, and they had a history.
I now work as a medical psychotherapist with adults and adolescents, in person in Byron Bay and by video anywhere in Australia.
Training, teaching and research
I trained in the Conversational Model at the University of Sydney, where I now help coordinate where I trained, the Masters programme in trauma-informed therapy where I supervise trainee therapists in their clinical work.
I am a clinical member of the Australia and New Zealand Association of Psychotherapy, and contribute regularly to its ethics and education committees.
My research asks what actually happens between two people in a therapeutic conversation, and whether it can be measured. It develops a homeostatic and hierarchical account of the self in relational psychotherapy, drawing a line from Hughlings Jackson and Janet, through Meares and Hobson, to contemporary work on active inference and interpersonal synchrony. A parallel strand proposes the endocannabinoid system as the biology of intimacy.
I teach and present on trauma and psychotherapy to medical and psychotherapeutic audiences.