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Location
I work in Ealing, West London, easily accessible by road from the M4/A4, or via London Underground, South Ealing station on the Picadilly line, 5 minutes walk. I also work in Brussels.
Fees, conditions and availability
I charge £60 an hour and pro rata for longer sessions (for the first meeting I recommend one and a half hours, i.e. £90) Frequency of meetings is something to be mutually agreed depending on the intensity of your concerns and the state of your purse. Subject to exceptional circumstances, and 72 hours notice, I am prepared to vary dates, and cancel or postpone meetings. Otherwise I expect to be paid for booked sessions.
I am often out of the country which means that regular weekly meetings are not usually feasible, most of the people I see find that what works well are fortnightly meetings. I also don't tend to specify how long a working alliance should be in place, a number of people have worked with me intensively for long periods, disappeared for long periods and then returned to continue with new agendas. When I am out of the country I make a point of being available by phone and/or email/Skype.
Contact
I prefer initial contacts to be via email, if you would prefer to phone, email me a phone number
Practitioner style
I work in an engaged way that is open to feeling, thought, intuition and action. You will be invited to reach in a variety of directions for resources or notions drawing on the psychological, political or spiritual, as we develop an inquiry into the agenda you bring. Along with sustained support there may be challenge around what happens in the sessions. The economics and effectiveness of this kind of inquiry are greatly enhanced by 'homework' activities undertaken between meetings —and I strongly encourage this.
In a world that sometimes seems overly obsessed with 'standards', the core standard I expect to contribute to our work together would be 'living from love', defined as seeking the flourishing of the Other, along with its essential accompaniment, the absence of force, coercion, or manipulation.
Practitioner development
After around ten years exposure to intensive spiritual practices, I was introduced to the cocounselling tradition of mutual personal development in the early 1980's. Soon afterwards I trained as a group facilitator with the Institute for the Development of Human Potential [IDHP], qualifying as a Humanistic Psychologist. I extended the personal development aspect of groupwork into one-to-one therapeutic practice in 1985, by which time I calculated that I had done 2000 hours training of one sort or another, about the same as an airline pilot.
In later years, running two two-year IDHP facilitator training courses at the University of Surrey, plus over ten years in personal therapy, deepened and consolidated my capacity to work with a wide range of psychological, political and transpersonal issues.
Practitioner competence
I believe I am competent to work with anyone who has what Richard Mowbray has called SAAFA Sufficient Accessible Adult Functional Autonomy, which is a fancy way of describing an ability to make and keep appointments, travel to and from meetings and however intermittently, participate in a conversation. With the above caveat, I expect to be competent to work with victims of trauma and abuse including sexual abuse, plus the infinite varieties of compromised early learning and attachment. I tend to direct people with major substance abuse to Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous and I don't work with young children.
Perhaps because of my developing role as an elder, I often find myself helping clients through re-parenting and family issues around ageing, and I have long experience of working with couples. I am reluctant to declare a specialty but if there was one, it would be helping people open up their creativity. Due to my personal and practitioner experience, a number of people with group process and corporate consultancy work find a supervision arrangement with me helpful.
I see myself as very capable of helping people 'settle into themselves' with compassion and courage, and through this finding or becoming a 'voice', fully inhabiting whatever level of 'presence' they dare connect with.
Life experience
After perhaps the best educations in creativity available anywhere at the time - eight years in art schools, including 3 years full time post graduate study at the Royal College of Art - I became a documentary film maker, working first for the BBC, and later as a freelance for the BBC and ITV. Threaded through this has been 45 years living in relationship (three) with two sons and three grandchildren. I founded and was a partner for a decade or more in a film production company business. I have traveled extensively in the US and Europe, living for around half the last twenty years in Belgium and France. Despite this traveling and intensive French language study I only work in English.
In recent years I have reconnected with my early graphic design education and this has found a welcome home in several web-sites that I design edit and maintain. Writing, playing and recording music, especially jazz, continues to be a key feature of my daily life and more recently I have reconnected with movie-making.
Accreditation
Several processes of self and peer accreditation, as a humanistic psychology practitioner and later a teacher of cocounselling, and facilitation, led to my being a founder participant in the Independent Practitioners Network [IPN] where for the past twenty years I have been a member of the 'Leonard Piper' full member group. Accreditation through IPN requires that the other (6) members of the group know me and my work well enough to be able to say that they 'stand by' it. In addition, this process of 'standing by' is overseen by the members of two other IPN groups. The names of the other members of my IPN group appear below, under referees:
Dispute resolution
It is my expectation and preference that any dispute that arises through us working together is resolved through discussion, explanation and if necessary, apology. If this for any reason seems impractical, then the next line of contact is the members of the IPN 'Leonard Piper group' who will arrange for an IPN 'process watcher' to monitor progress of the dispute if it is unresolved.
Referees
Names of the participants in the 'Leonard Piper IPN group' who stand by my work. (Awaiting address confirmation )
Tony Donaghy antonmacd@googlemail.com
Guy Gladstone groupwork@bodyspace.co.uk
Richard House r.house@roehampton.ac.uk
Jennifer Maidman jennifermaidman@ntlworld.com
Lucy Scurfield lucyscurfield@freeuk.com
Maggie Taraz maggietaraz@hotmail.com
Confidentiality
With the exception of threats of self harm or harm to others, I undertake to keep all transactions between us confidential. Any notes that I make are aides to memory rather than comprehensive accounts of the meetings. I may raise specific concerns in supervision.
Endorsements
Subject to discussion, and if it seems relevant, I would be willing to supply contact details of some past or current clients.
Occupational activities
I have been in ongoing supervision since I began to practise and this continues alongside my participation in the Independent Practitioners Network [IPN] and the 'Leonard Piper' IPN full-member group.
Apart from the forty or so films I made prior to 1985, I have published five books and one CDROM, in half a dozen language editions, on personal and professional development and related topics. For the last 15 years I have edited, written and maintained a series of web-sites devoted to 'psychopractice' issues. The books and sites are listed below.
Books:
Therapy Futures: Obstacles and opportunities - introducing the psyCommons Lulu.com 2012
Regulating the Psychological Therapies - from Taxonomy to Taxidermy, PCCS Books 2007
Letting the Heart Sing, 2003 CDROM WLR/PCCS Books
The Mind Gymnasium, 1989 Gaia Books
Catastrophe Theory, 1982 Fontana
Fabric of the Universe, 1975 Macmillan
Videos:
The psyCommons - Ordinary Wisdom and Shared Power.
The psyCommons and its Enclosures - Professionalized Wisdom and the Abuse of Power.
Web sites:
psyCommons blog
eIpnosis, a journal for the Independent Practitioners Network
Living From Love - Experiential Inquiry - Love of Power, Power of Love
Independent Practitioners Network
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