About
DPhil (Oxford) DCPsych CPsychol OBE
I am an existential psychotherapist and a chartered psychologist, and I work face-to-face and online with individuals and couples. I came to this work after a long first career and many years of study, and both shape the way I sit with people.
Oxford research & lifelong inquiry into lived experience
My first career was in the pharmaceutical industry and in management consultancy, where I spent many years running operations, advising organisations and mentoring people through change. It taught me a good deal about how people work under pressure, and about the gap between how organisations describe themselves and how they are actually lived.
Alongside that work, I returned to formal study. Over the following decade I completed a master's degree in the psychology of religion at the University of London, a master's and then a doctorate at the University of Oxford, and a further master's degree in psychology. My Oxford doctorate used phenomenological and hermeneutic methods, the same disciplined attention to lived experience that sits at the heart of existential therapy.
Studying the psychology of religion also left me with a lasting interest in how people find meaning, and in what they hold sacred, whether or not they are religious. That interest, and the method, led me to clinical training and to the work I do now.
I trained at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London, one of the principal centres for existential-phenomenological therapy, and was awarded my doctorate in counselling psychology and psychotherapy (DCPsych) through Middlesex University.
The training grounded my practice in the philosophers and therapists described on the How I Work page. It also asked me, as such training does, to examine my own assumptions and way of being with others, through supervised clinical work and personal therapy.
Supervised clinical grounding & existential presence
Doctoral Thesis & Qualitative Research
My doctoral thesis, The Relationship of Therapist Meditation Practice to Their Existential Therapeutic Work, asked a question close to my own practice: how does a therapist's long-term meditation practice relate to the way they work with clients?
Using a grounded theory method, I interviewed existential therapists who meditate regularly, looking at both focused and more open, receptive forms of meditation. The study explored what these practices mean for a therapist's presence and attention, for the relationship with the client, and for the work of therapy itself.
The therapists I interviewed described four qualities that their meditation practice cultivated, and that they carried into their work with clients.
Heightened awareness
A clearer, steadier attention to what is happening, in themselves and in the client.
Centred in being
A grounded sense of simply being present, rather than rushing to do or to fix.
Heightened presence
Being fully here with the client, in words and in silence.
Greater openness
Meeting whatever arises with openness and compassion.
Together, these came together in what I call radical therapeutic presence: a way of being with a client that deepens the therapeutic relationship and the I–Thou connection at its heart.
“Presence, in the existential sense, is not a technique, but it can be cultivated.”
The research continues to inform how I work. My own practice of meditation is part of how I try to bring steady, unhurried attention to each session.
I have worked with clients in charitable, NHS-funded and private settings, face-to-face and online.
Counselling and psychotherapy with NHS-referred and self-referring clients.
Online, time-limited counselling for NHS clients in the Croydon area.
Existential therapy, face-to-face and online.
Individual and couples therapy, face-to-face and online.
Face-to-face in London and online worldwide
I have written two books that bring existential ideas to everyday life.
Love, Authentically: The Existential Way looks at how love is sustained by choice and responsibility once the first certainty fades.
The Courage to Parent Differently: Existential Wisdom for Raising Authentic Children is for parents who want to choose how they raise their children, rather than repeat what was done to them.
Middlesex University and the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling
University of Derby
University of Oxford
University of Oxford
University of London
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