People in the network

Rob Abbott

I have benefitted over the years from having my own psychotherapy that has allowed me to change and grow as a person. I have experienced my own depressions and know that it was both good therapists and the love of friends and family that enabled me to survive these experiences. And while I do not consider psychotherapy to be the answer to all the world’s ills, I do think it can help all of us both to understand our emotions and manage then sufficiently such that we might work, love and play.

I have always been a socialist, more Tony Benn than Tony Blair. I abhor the philosophy of “me first” individualism and believe that many of all generations reject such ideas. A society can be measured by how it treats those who are most disadvantaged. These with mental illness often fit this category: misunderstood, misrepresented and, by definition, lacking the personal resources make themselves better.   In Britain today there are simply not enough state funded resources available for those who are mentally ill but who do not have the money to pay for private psychotherapy/counselling. This is a political issue and I hope that politicians will one day have the courage and commitment to solve it. In the meantime, we can all do our bit to help: this is my contribution.

Paul Atkinson

I have been working in private practice in London, as a counsellor and a Jungian psychotherapist, for more than 30 years. I am a member of the College of Psychoanalysts-UK.

I was a political activist during my 20s, involved in community and trade union action, the men’s movement and sexual politics, and ‘radical’ group psychotherapy. In my 30s, I worked with school refusers in north London.

I have always seen psychotherapy as a social and, in a subtle way, political profession. At the heart of the work, for me, is the encouragement of people, including myself, to live more fully – with less fear and more love. I see people’s internal and external worlds as always intertwined, reflecting and affecting each other. A psychotherapy that wants to separate people’s psychological lives from their past and current social worlds does not make sense to me. Nor does a psychotherapy that is interested in individual change without social change.

Like most psychotherapists, I have always operated a sliding scale of fees, reflecting people’s capacity to pay. More recently, as my children have grown up, as NHS provision of decent long-term psychotherapy has declined, and as the government’s attacks on social security, living wages and the most vulnerable members of society have escalated, I have felt more urgent about working with people with little access to emotional support and limited space for psychological insight.

For me, involvement with the Free Psychotherapy Network is one response to this need in me to be socially engaged as a therapist. I see a growing number of clients for free, have started organising free psychotherapy on my local housing estates in Poplar, and am working with political activists around mental health and community support groups. I have recently become involved in a new wave of men’s therapy groups.

Contact me at paulwilliamatkinson@gmail.com

23/6/20: I have no spaces available for new clients at the moment, I’m afraid. (PA)

Sophie Atkinson

Sophie Atkinson MBACP

Chelmsford, Essex, CM2

07881 635524

sophie@sophie-atkinson.co.uk

www.sophie-atkinson.co.uk

About me

I am a private psychodynamic therapist working with adult individuals, young people, organisations, families and couples in a private and quiet consulting room within a counselling setting.

I work long and short term as well time limited and I am currently offering therapy both remotely and face to face. I have been practicing for over twelve years.

I work with clients who have experienced trauma, psychosexual problems, bereavement, loss, grief, life changes and challenges, relational issues, IVF and sudden infant loss. As well as ex-cult and high demand group members and coercive relationships.

Experience

I have worked for a local Chelmsford based counselling charity, for MIND and within a GP practice. I have also co-led a certificate in counselling skills course.

Training and qualifications

I have a Bsc (Hons) in Psychology and a Diploma in Psychodynamic Therapy and I have recently completed Dr Gillie Jenkinson’s Certificate in Post-Cult Counselling and Recovery.

I am currently working towards my British Association for Counsellors and Psychotherapist (BACP) accreditation.

Member of the BACP

Member of the PCSR

Member of the PCU

Professional Indemnity Insurance

GDPR compliant

ICO registered

How counselling works

Seeking counselling can feel very daunting, we may know why we need some additional support or we may be confused or uncertain as to why. Therapy provides a safe environment to explore the past and present including thinking about how we feel, our behaviours as well as our emotions and thoughts. I provide a non-judgemental supporting framework to learn about oneself and recognise the areas of hurt, confusion or upset.

An initial phone call or session helps to establish a working framework and guidance for working together.

Post-cult Counselling

I am trained in Dr Gillie Jenkinson’s Post-Cult Counselling Programme. This provides support and guidance to an ex-cult member through a specifically designed workbook to enable and develop an understanding of their cult experience and trauma. It includes psychoeducation, reflection, cognitive understanding and emotional healing. Additional counselling to provide additional support can also be provided following competion of the workbook.

Kris Black (uses they / their pronouns)

Kris Black is a UKCP Registered and MBACP RegIntegrative Arts Psychotherapist, Child and Adolescent Counsellor and a Clinical Supervisor trained by CSTD and part of the Independent Supervisors Network.

Kris set up Arc Therapy in 1991, and sees a range of clients in North and East London for counselling, psychotherapy and supervision. Kris also works as an Independent Trainer and Groupworker, is a Clinical Associate and Trainer working with Pink Therapy and BAATN (Black African and Asian Therapists Network), and is a graduate of Black Issues Masterclass.

Michael Caton

Growing up in an outlying south-east London housing estate, I witnessed the array of ways that friends, relatives and acquaintances coped with the challenges of poverty and social disenfranchisement. With few opportunities or the language to describe the emotional experience of such a place, casual violence, substance misuse, petty crime and imprisonment were common strategies for coping. A lived experience of physical and social poverty came with a poverty of emotions and mind. Without a language to describe very real impoverishment, ‘acting out’ rather than ‘talking out’ became the order of the day. Depression, anxiety and common mental health problems remained unnamed and hidden, and people struggled to thrive.

As a therapist, I believe that therapy could have helped many in my community. But it was not available. Therapy has remained essentially a privileged experience, afforded to those who have the ability to pay or who are able to advocate strongly enough for therapy rather than medication. I believe that therapy should not be a privilege but an essential right for those who are suffering – regardless their means.

I trained as a Group Analytic Therapist and believe that a person should be viewed within the context of their environment – and it has a strong political element and responsibility to it. Group Analysis often holds up a mirror, not only to the individual, but also to the social context that works on an individual from the start. I believe therapy should also illuminate the dynamics of class and power that influence the emotions, psyche and lives people live, perhaps challenging society to be a little better.

I have a long history of offering free at the point of contact therapy within the voluntary sector and the NHS. I currently offer low-fee therapeutic work with individuals and in groups in central and south-east London. I am a founder member of the East London Counselling Co-operative (a community interest company), which offers low-fee and free counselling and therapy throughout east London.

Yasmin Dewan

With my younger brother diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia 25 years ago, I have personal experience of the family sacrifices and struggles related to the pain and stigma of mental illness.

I am totally committed to my purpose and passion of enabling easy access to therapy for all, deploying a uniquely, holistic approach, dedicated to people’s development and growth the way nature would have intended. With support from organisations such as SANE and MIND, my own journey has allowed me to discover the true benefits of therapy first-hand.

With expertise in mental resilience and emotional fitness, I work in partnership with my clients, focusing on a treatment plan only when there is real commitment for personal change. This is agreed irrespective of income, concessional rates being negotiated for those who cannot afford to pay in full.

Personal therapy is proving invaluable for people to manage challenging situations in their lives, so they are able to transform problems into major opportunities for personal growth in areas such as:

• handling crises in relationships
• dealing with stress and other pressures
• resolving fears, panics and anxieties
• coping with continuing family problems
• working through difficult decisions
• breaking through physical pain, depression and sadness

………in order for them to………

• develop more fulfilling relationships
• bring out their creativity and self-expression
• learn to assert their own needs
• renew a sense of purpose in their lives
• find new paths to self-discovery
• feel well again, with no medication, and be happier in themselves

Therapy, for me, is as vital to one’s emotional wellbeing as fresh running water is to one’s survival – this physical instinct, and the need for our lives to have meaning and a connection with something spiritually greater, has led me to live my life by a very simple, yet powerfully effective mantra:

“Listen to your Body, Open your Heart, Make the Most of your Mind and Free your Spirit”

Check out www.inspirationalwinners.com or contact me direct at yasmin@inspirationalwinners.com

Kelly Anne Freeman

Fiona Goldman

I am a (relatively) recently qualified counsellor in Manchester, with lots of other relevant experience, having worked as a midwife and an alternative therapist. And having lived for a while. The theory is both interesting and important, but at the heart of counselling, lies the beating heart of a living relationship. I am fascinated by relationships and the way in which a good connection between people, can seem to create a life of its own.

I am deeply concerned that people’s mental health has been ignored for so long, that we are not able to afford what it will cost to catch up with the need for services. In many areas, charity providers of therapy have extensive waiting lists for short-term counselling, and CBT is all that is available on the NHS (and that too could be following a long wait). If CBT is what you need, that’s great, but many of us need a deeper exploration of our issues; the space to talk about things knowing that we are being properly listened to, properly heard. The space to be able to work out for ourselves how to proceed, in a way that suits our lives, not someone else’s schedule. And we need it now.

If that is the case for you, you may find that paying for private counselling is your only option. It appals me that so many of those in need of therapy will be excluded by their inability to pay for it. Again, the theory is both interesting and important, but it is the feeling; the deep knowledge that it is wrong, that I am left with. I am constantly looking for ways to earn enough to live myself, while providing accessible counselling to those who most need it. I volunteer at a men’s prison and would love to be able to offer free counselling to all, but that is impossible, so I do the next best thing; I offer a free initial session and a negotiable reduced rate for all on no or a low income.

 Isha Isidore

I have no vacancies currently 23/9/20

I have always been an activist working for various grassroots organisations within London global women’s strike, Women against Rape, RAMFEL,  always been passionate about making a difference.

My career has always been within the caring field I worked in refuges for women fleeing domestic violence, hostels for homelessness and substance misuse, safe houses for trafficked women, day centres for the elderly and homeless. Working with the most marginalised people in society that are often overlooked and ignored, as a black woman raised by immigrant parents I understood what it felt like to be marginalised. I saw how hard my parents had to work and all the racism they experienced. I think that made me more passionate to make a difference. I have always been outspoken and often been told by others I’m a rebel. Fighting for injustice is something I think its more vital now more than ever.

I’m still heavily involved in my activist work and with my counselling practice, it helps me be more attuned to the many circumstances that clients whether that be discrimination, poverty, addiction, depression, anxiety, bereavement.

Working person-centred but also integrating other modalities and techniques, allows the therapy to truly be client focussed and the therapeutic alliance to develop organically.

Getting my BA in Integrative Counselling and my MSc in Mental Health Cultural and Global Perspectives in Mental health Care which enhanced my clinical practice in awareness and treatment in working with diverse cultures and ethnicities particularly around their understanding of mental health and incorporating intercultural techniques to my own clinical practice.

I’m BACP Registered Member 376666

Also member of the Psychotherapy and Counselling Union

Also member of the GMB Union

You can contact me either by phone 07375314639 or by email isha.isidore@outlook.com

My practice is called Coffee and Sunflowers Therapy Service as they are two of my favourite things.

Ewa Kremplewska

I value respect and collaboration in my work with clients. I believe that problems with living, relationships, painful experiences, disturbing thoughts and emotions are common to all of us, regardless of age, gender, ability and social background and can come from many sources. Certain conditions, such has having a long term illness, disability or learning and cognitive problems can make things even harder to cope with.

I share with my clients many of the life challenges and I hope that I can approach each situation not only with professional understanding, skills and knowledge but also with true human compassion, integrity and caring.

In Psychotherapy and Counselling I not only use the different therapeutic approaches but I also rely on my training and experience in Psychology. I believe that combining psychology with psychotherapy makes it possible for me to work with clients who traditionally, due to their functional or psychological departures from the ‘norm’, might not be considered suitable for psychotherapy. I personally prefer to see all human functions on a continuum of a variety of developments rather than these being ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’. I also see these influenced by societal values and expectations. For far too long we have ‘scapegoated’ individuals for failures of economic and political systems which come and go but too frequently refuse to be accountable for human wellbeing on a global scale.

My combined training helps me to arrive at an idividual range of solutions for all my clients, which includes psychological interventions where necessary and allows me to adapt the psychotherapeutic approaches to your psychological needs.

I provide a flexible Psychology, Psychotherapy and Counselling Service for individuals, couples and families and I bring together a range of therapeutic approaches and techniques, depending on what is necessary in any given session. I believe that each problem presents a unique challenge and drawing on the different approaches will lead to best outcomes.

I also offer Professional Supervision and Consultation for qualified practitioners, students and care providers.

I am a Chartered member and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and BPS registered professional supervisor. I am also an accredited member of the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) having worked for 2Gether NHS Trust for many years before moving on to private practice.

My website address: ewapsychology.co.uk or just look me up by ‘googling’ Ewa Kremplewska

Deborah A Lee

I see being a psychotherapist/counsellor as being alongside the person in the other chair, rather than positioning myself as the ‘expert’ on other people’s lives. I see psychotherapy and counselling as about recognising and challenging the social structures in which we are all located, rather than individualising whatever material is brought to sessions and participating in social control. Being a psychotherapist/counsellor and engaging in psychotherapy/counselling (I am also a client) is, for me, political activism: when we take part in seeking to free ourselves, who knows where we will go.

I don’t make a list of ‘areas I work with’, as that seems to me to compartmentalise our experiences unhelpfully: we are all more complex than the one thing that might initially bring us to counselling/psychotherapy. My experience to date includes services for women experiencing what are often referred to as ‘complex needs’, such as domestic violence and use of alcohol and drugs as coping strategies, as well as more generalised services. You’re welcome to bring whatever you wish to sessions. I don’t operate with a detailed formal assessment at the beginning of our time together, instead preferring that you say whatever you choose to say when you choose to say it. I don’t believe psychotherapy/counselling needs to be therapist-led, you’ll know best what is arising for you each time we meet.

I am offering two free places for individuals for psychotherapy/counselling via the Free Psychotherapy Network from January 2021. Sessions will be via Zoom, so you may be located anywhere in the UK. Sessions will be available evenings and weekends. After a first session of 50-minutes, where we decide if we would like to work together, these two free places will be 6 weekly sessions of 50-minutes, after which time we will review how we feel about working together for a longer period.

I am also an academic at the University of Salford.
I have a waiting list in operation – please email me to be added.

I look forward to hearing from you if what you have read here appeals to you. Here is my email address: personcentredness@gmail.com

Maureen Macleod

Are you dealing with thoughts and feelings which are making your life difficult? We can work together to find solutions and contentment. Within the secure and accepting space my counselling offers you will have the opportunity to freely explore and gain a valuable understanding of your experiences.

I studied psychology for my undergraduate degree and also have a diploma in person centred counselling and psychotherapy. I offer a service which is unique to you, working at your pace together to bring more clarity, awareness and acceptance to your life.

Having socialist values at heart, I am painfully aware of the inequalities in our country and the wider world we live in today and I feel that by giving some support here on FPN it contributes to a bigger movement towards a fairer society.

I am a member of both BACP and COSCA also Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility. I am registered with the ICO.

I have been worked as a counsellor for 3 years, I have experience of working within the NHS, privately and for an addictions service local to me. I live in Lossiemouth in North East Scotland and I am seeing all my clients online just now, so geography is not a boundary currently.

I can offer a few spaces on zoom for weekly sessions.

Contact details to set up an initial appointment are:

Telephone 07806 775375

Email personalclaritycounselling@outlook.com

Ian Parker

I am involved in the FPN group in Manchester, where I work as a psychoanalyst. One of the aspects of FPN that is important for me is that it connects with and brings alive again the radical history of psychoanalysis that tends be obscured in psychology degrees and even in many psychotherapy trainings. Psychoanalysis is represented as an elite private practice approach, whereas in fact Freud and many of the early psychoanalysts in Vienna, Berlin and Budapest were active in the 1920s setting up free psychotherapy clinics. The other aspect that is important within FPN is that we bring together different modalities of therapy, and by working together to provide free psychotherapy we can begin to break down the boundaries between psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and counselling.

Joanna Roman

I personally believe that happiness is bigger when it’s shared. Giving our resources to others, especially selflessly, makes us more human. This idealistic view is my huge motivation to provide psychotherapy for everyone, regardless of their income.
We, people, have our own system of values, which acts as a compass of our life decisions. Psychotherapy is a space to rediscover what is really important to us. Additionally, sometimes we might get lost in some situations, sometimes we can be tangled in our own emotions and thoughts. When we start working on the automatic remote control we lose ourselves from the horizon. Then it’s worth stopping and looking at what just happened. Sometimes all we need to do is just observing and, with the forgiving acceptance, trying to be in a present moment. Then we can see patterns of behavior that lead us to unwanted results. This is just a brief description of the therapeutic adventure that we can experience together.
I am a member of ACBS (Association for Contextual and Behavioral Sciences), so I am familiar with the third-wave of CBT techniques, mostly ACT and DBT. I expand my knowledge and skills through supervision, as well as participation in international conferences. I am also registered in BPS (as a graduate member) and HCPC (as a visiting European professional). I am happy to work with teenagers or young adults who experience a difficult life situation, anxiety, loneliness, or any emotional dysregulation. I am particularly specialized in performance anxiety among musicians. I work outside the office, so we can meet “in the field” or online.
e-mail: actwithmusic@gmail.com
phone: 07931211538

Peter Ryan

I am a MBACP (Accred) counsellor/psychotherapist abiding by their ethical framework but more importantly I am a dad of two and granddad of two. I have over a decade of various practice experience cultivating an empathic way of being with clients struggling to resolve complex emotional, physical and/or sexual trauma. An empathic way of being dissolves alienation, promotes the relationship therapeutically & guards against any unintentional harm to clients or me. I find the interpersonal dynamics of an empathic way of being surpasses all forms of static theories, techniques & manual based protocols in engaging safely the darker dynamics underpinning denial processes. During a typical therapeutic counselling process, clients are surrounded by an atmosphere of unshakable acceptance, safety and deep hope. This is the basis on which all my therapeutic counselling encounters are rooted in, unfold and flourish. My modality is the person-centred approach to counseling and in particular its organismic aspects which is drawn from organismic psychology.

Having since practiced at an addiction agency (Aug’07-Aug’08), inner London secondary school (Sept’08- Dec’12)), mix gender pupil referral unit (Apr’13-May’14) and an all girl special needs school (May’14- Nov’14) it is evident my modality and me are up to the job. I have worked as a helpline operator at mental health (Jul’07- Jul’09) and male rape (Dec’10-Jul’11) charities.  In 2010 I set up my private practice Empathy Zone, in which I continue to offerhigh value therapylow cost counselling topeople on basic incomes.The economical squeeze, politics of pain, and other external blocks to change can be more readily overcome for individuals who are struggling with traumatic issues, when professionals are willing to support each other. The free psychotherapy network is one such platform that makes this possible.

I have a limited number of low-cost spaces available (my limited number of free spaces is running at full capacity) and can offer you a free assessment/introduction session.

Dr Bruce Scott

It is quite obvious that in the general economic sphere, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. This “gap” is also reflected in the types of talking therapies that are on offer for people from a less “rich” background.

As it stands today, the NHS provides free psychological therapies from the limited perspectives of time (e.g., 6-12 sessions) and modality (e.g., therapy based on the cognitive behavioural model or the currently endangered species/models of humanistic, psychoanalytic, and counselling type talking therapies). More alarming is the fact that talking therapies are now being dominated by the evidence based scientific discourse; that therapy, patient, and therapist are objects like any other, can be measured and predicted. Further, from the evidence based perspective, psychotherapy is based upon arbitrary reductive concepts defining mental health, based on the demands of a scientific/capitalistic discourse. However, even the concept of mental health can be challenged as it is a highly dubious concept.

As a result, the talking therapies, despite lip service given to the ethical and humanitarian values of them by state institutional rhetoric, have been and are continually being turned into commodities.

In the private sphere, the very same kind of people who offer time-limited and limited modality therapy on the NHS (e.g., CBT 6-12 sessions) can also offer highly exclusive and expensive therapy and dubious claims of effective therapy (e.g. cosmetic psychotherapeutic efficacy; improved well-being and life style, less psychopathology, life coaching etc). This situation obviously amounts to a discourse which rests upon “if you have enough money you can get more well-being, more therapy, happiness, mental health, and sanity etc.”

It is my belief that psychotherapy is a subversive activity that needs to take a critical stance on the “inner” and “outer” world and even the idea of “mental health”. By pathologising individuals (e.g. NHS approved clinical disorders, depression, OCD, anxiety etc) one is straight away one step removed from the whole picture, and engaged in politically infantilising individuals. Further, due to the availability of talking therapies founded on economic power (e.g. if you can pay high fees you can get therapy privately and for as long as you want), this maintains the status quo of the discourse of well-being and “mental health” based upon being “richer”.

From my nearly twenty years working with people in mental distress (I do not use the term mental health) in my various roles (i.e., volunteer, support worker, psychologist, and psychoanalyst) I feel it is imperative to combat market forces (whether ideological or economic-they are both the same). From my own experience, I feel grateful for being offered therapy which was affordable and free from the politically motivated market and ideological forces which strive to culture out certain people and their experiences. I therefore feel passionate about being able to offer an endangered “space” that may be accessed by all kinds of people, whatever their economic capabilities.

I am a member of and on the board of Governors of The College of Psychoanalysts-UK, and a member of both the Philadelphia Association in London, and Human Development Scotland. I am a writer, author, independent researcher, and psychoanalytically orientated therapist. I work in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders. I can be contacted on: brucescott@gmx.co.uk

Joe Suart

The most important thing for me is to be an enabling part of a process through which someone can explore and unearth a way of having a voice, their voice-way as it were, that is meaningful and that they can find invigorating. There are situations in which this can be very difficult and involve significant amounts of distress, and whilst there is no guarantee I have been very fortunate in therapeutically facilitating and participating with some people as they have successfully struggled to unravel the tangles that have often got in the way of them finding their voice-way. Sometimes this has been on the level of the very immediate and specific, and sometimes it can lead through to experiences that are fundamental and far reaching.

I am psychoanalytically trained, (UKCP registered) with a specific interest in post-Jungian thinking and practice. My work is underpinned by the premise that we are all subject to experiencing the influence on our lives of a dynamic and autonomous unconscious, personal and collective, and that that experience needs to be mediated and managed by our conscious awareness and intent.

My experience includes a significant amount of work with people who have suffered severe sexual, physical and emotional abuse and I have also worked with people experiencing problematic substance use and addictions as well as experiences of psychotic breakdown.

I have a part-time post with Cornwall Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) where the focus of my work is on assisting distressed parents in their struggles to relate to and take care of their very distressed children.

However, most of the time I work with people who are struggling with difficulties that many of us experience, which impact upon our lives in ways that are often hard to make sense of by ourselves. People tend to see me once a week, and often over a fairly long period of time.

I work from a hut down a track on a friend’s small holding just outside Camborne, Cornwall. The hut is off-grid (with a small windmill for electric, a wood-burner and compost loo) and surrounded by fields.

I have always seen a number of people for very low fees and now want to extend that to offering some free psychotherapy sessions.

Contact: Mobile: 07854095546

Email: Joseph@suart.com

Landline: 01736 850158

I began my working life as a teacher, most of which was with children with learning difficulties in mainstream comprehensive schools, and then I became a teacher-trainer, and then a teacher of Educational Psychology at a faculty of education at a university. Throughout that time, I lived for preference in the working class communities where I taught, and came to know well and to respect the economic and emotional struggles of the families and children I taught.

As I taught, I understood more and more acutely how what seemed to be ‘difficult’ parents and ‘problem’ children were the result of a more complex web of personal and social difficulties and that often people ended up in worse and worse situations as a result of the labelling and punitive systems that were put in operation. Many of the students I worked with were not so much young people with learning difficulties – although I wouldn’t deny those exist or that adults do have to take personal responsibilities for the harm they did their children sometimes – as young people who brought to their schooling the hurt, confusion and damage that impacted on them and their families through intergenerational effects of an unfair society. No wonder I thought that the mirroring oppressions of schooling had so little benevolent effect.

We started to ask the young people to tell us stories. We wrote these out and made them into books for them to read, as an educational practice. But we soon realised that these stories – whether fantasies or autobiographical – were what was really on our young students’ minds. And I very soon realised that I wanted to go on hearing and engaging with those stories and the real yearning desires and the terrible hurts and desperations they revealed.

So I became a psychotherapist with the specific determination that the psychotherapeutic process that had been profoundly healing for me should serve my radical politics and serve the people who are so often excluded from access to it. I found a training that was radical in that it was student led and which made decisions collectively. It was set up in direct defiance of the institutional and establishment traditions of psychoanalysis which excluded both potential clients (too poor) and potential therapists (too poor) and which rarely critically examined its own complacency and class assumptions. In addition, I hold that psychotherapy should not pathologise individuals further – to blame them for their own immiseration by society – but should have at its heart an emancipatory principle, as Freire and others had had for education.

My politics are revolutionary and impacted how and why I was a teacher; they impact now on how and why I am a psychotherapist. I have worked with student activists, and with individuals who have refugee or asylum seeker status. I have a special commitment to offering a therapeutic but politically aware process of healing for those who are suffering from the effects of their political activism or the effects of politics on their lives, as is the case with any asylum seeker. I spent what time I could at Occupy St Paul’s with other members of the Welfare team there, and was excited to find others who thought on similar lines and who offered a way to put my principles of accessing psychotherapy to everyone into practice.

I currently work for a college of higher education, at the refugee therapy centre and have a private practice.   I am trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist but my whole orientation has been against using theory to create yet another exclusivity to oppress clients further or to limit my own intuitive and empathic engagement with the people I meet. I am proud to be part of this network.