About & How I Work

About

​I did a MA in Art Psychotherapy at Hatfield, University of Hertfordshire, and qualified in June 2004. I am also trained in EMDR.

Much of my work as a therapist has been in schools with children and young people, particularly teenagers. For many years I was working in the London Borough of Westminster with children and young people from a wide variety of backgrounds including those from areas of conflict. I have also worked with adults and continue to do so in my private practice.

I enjoy helping people along their healing path. Work in the therapy can bring up difficult feelings, but it can also be very playful and this is often a beneficial aspect of our lives that becomes lost.

There are many layers to what I learned about myself in my own therapy, some of which I have come to understand more fully later on. As a creative person, I like to visualise a sort of pattern with many interconnecting parts that represent our own unique set of experiences, relationships and circumstances that form the changing pattern of our lives.

Alongside the therapy it is important for me to keep up my own practice as an artist and I enjoy being in nature.

Approaches & How I Work

Person centred/humanistic, art therapy, psychodynamic, EMDR

I have a holistic approach and incorporate different modalities into my work, including some mindfulness exercises. The aim of therapy is to meet specific needs of the client and I tailor my approach based on the client’s personal experiences.

The focus is on finding the best way forward to bring about a favourable change in an individual’s life and the client is given space to present things from their own point of view, working at their own pace.

When working creatively, artwork can be a means of communicating difficulties, rather than solely the difficulties themselves, thus facilitating this form of self-expression and communication. Sometimes these sessions are based mainly around artwork and other times dialogue. Most often the therapy involves both dialogue and art. The images are not judged for their artistic merit but are seen as possessing potential meanings, such as thoughts, dreams, memories and feelings etc. Dreams can be explored together with clients in the therapy and the art-making can be a helpful part of this exploration.

As an art therapist, I use a psychodynamic model, working with the 'transference' (of feelings) and 'countertransference' dynamics of the therapeutic relationship. The word 'psychodynamic' describes the unconscious (psyche) and that it affects how we function (dynamic).

I completed a Jungian Foundation course at the Society for Analytical Psychology and I offer sandplay in the therapy, based on the work of Dora Kalff. This is founded on the principles of Jungian psychology.

Bottom-Up Approach

Both art therapy and EMDR are known as bottom-up therapy treatments. This is because they target the limbic system, which is the part of the brain where emotions are stored and which is responsible for emotional regulation. The limbic system develops before the cortex part of the brain, which is responsible for attention, perception, awareness, thought, memory, language, judgment, and consciousness.

Trauma affects the limbic part of the brain so trying to use rational thinking and logic via the cortex might not have an impact on relieving the trauma. Talking therapies provide a top-down approach that focuses on changing a person’s thoughts, perceptions and cognitive experiences. These approaches can help to treat the impact of trauma but the bottom-up approaches can better target the limbic part of the brain and therefore be more effective. There is, of course, the opportunity to use dialogue in all types of therapy.

When working with children and young people, the following is a list of the kind of difficulties that might be helped through the therapy:
​
• Emotional and behavioural difficulties
• Family problems
• Bereavement issues
• Social and communication problems
• Underachievement at school
• Difficulties arising from caregiver drug, alcohol or mental health problems
• Abuse, bullying or trauma
• Those at risk of exclusion
• LAC

It is expected that a course of therapy will last a minimum of twelve sessions, with six forming a period of assessment.