Psychotherapy, Couple Counselling, Supervision and Executive Coaching in Cambridge and Angel Islington, London.
Psychotherapeutic work is relational, it requires genuine personal engagement. The relationship is a key to good therapy. Whether I'm working with you as part of a couple for couple counselling, coaching you to become a better leader, supervising your work, or working with you as your psychotherapist, the challenge is about having new conversations that break us out of ourselves, our tired and familiar narratives, heightened emotionality, personal drama and fear.
Psychotherapy and counselling provide a new way of seeing how to relate to ourselves and others, to life and to the world. How we see things often blinds us from seeing anything else.
Brian Sutton-Smith
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
I’ve been a psychotherapist for over twenty years, mostly in private practice. I offer couple counselling, supervision, training, group therapy, executive and leadership coaching, and organisational development consultancy. My professional experience includes:
- Lead Tutor (2011-2022) for the Diploma in Integrative Supervision of Individuals and Groups at The Grove Practice, London
- Tutor for four years on the Certificate in Psychodynamic Counselling at the University of Cambridge
- Psychotherapist at the Whittington Hospital NHS Trust for four years
- Trauma counsellor at Transport for London
- Principle Tutor and founding member of the first Gestalt and Integrative Psychotherapy training in Budapest
- Summer school teacher and counsellor in Crimea
- Set up and led a Couples & Intimate Systems course in Cambridge
- Providing executive coaching to leaders in business, science and tech, government, religious organisations, academia and the arts
Donald Winnicott
WRITING
I often work with writers, artists and people more generally engaged in creative process. Some of whom have managed to got lost along the way, whilst others need a little help in getting there.
I've found writing helps me see what I think about life and psychotherapy.
These lines from Rainer Marie Rilke's poem Fictional Fact perfectly sums up how I approach writing::
The fiction holds a lot of hidden facts
In the end, I found something which
might be the beginning of nothing
And now the paradox begins
with an open end'
My most recent blog is entitled:
I would not recommend forgiveness as a form of revenge as there are better ways to achieve many of the aims of revenge and forgiveness without resorting to either.
Forgiveness as revenge is a neglected topic, and yet for anyone considering it this aspect is best not overlooked or underestimated. In many ways forgiveness commends itself as a type of revenge: it is legal, does not require violence and is generally applauded, nonetheless as revenge it is unpredictable and unlikely to satisfy.
Unlike the possible violent, direct or equivalent nature of ‘an eye for an eye’, where the debt is measurable and often paid back immediately, forgiveness is immeasurable. The beauty of forgiveness is that it can cause the injurer potentially endless suffering and/or relief.
Although bloody and violent revenge stories are very popular they represent the least common type of revenge. The most common begin with, ‘I’ll show them…’
The saying ‘The best revenge is to live a good life’ has a similar logic to the revenge of forgiveness and both have the benefit of masking their revenge. However this can become problematic if the forgiver has masked it from themselves, and if they have their good (now aimless) life might feel like compensation.
‘The best revenge’ according to Marcus Aurelius, ‘is to be unlike him who performed the injury.’ This piece of Roman wisdom, ‘I’ll show them…’ and the revenge of living a good life are all present in forgiveness.
Those fortunate enough to live a good life, or willfully say ‘I’ll show them…’ or else manage not to become like their injurer can permit themselves the little white lie of saying, ‘I don’t do revenge’.
For the pacifist, the meek, those with no stomach for violence, or those incapable of living a good life and can only dream of becoming like their injurer, for them forgiveness might be the last resort: their only means of revenge.
In the remainder of this blog I will focus on the covert element of revenge in forgiveness, the allure of forgiveness for talking therapists, and its subterranean psychology and power dynamics.
