Psychotherapy, Couple Counselling, Supervision and Executive Coaching in Cambridge and Angel Islington, London.
Psychotherapeutic work is relational, it requires genuine personal engagement. 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 always about having new conversations that break us out of ourselves, our stresses, 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.
The relationship is a key to good therapy.
The psychotherapist's task is to sit with people in such a way that they do not feel alone.
Donald Winnicott
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
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, The double betrayal at the heart of becoming a psychotherapist
This blog is about the implicit betrayal of traditional psychotherapy training, and how it lays the ground for a further necessary and explicit betrayal on the part of the nascent psychotherapist.
The traditional route to becoming a psychotherapist involves several years – usually five – spent in training, hundreds of supervised practice hours, years of personal therapy, all culminating in an ongoing accreditation process.
Though training is an important part of the process, when someone does eventually become a psychotherapist they do so in spite of their training, not because of it. This says nothing against trainings per se, though we might wonder how else a person could become a psychotherapist. Nor is it a comment about the relative quality of any given training, though there are better and worse trainings.
The betrayal is in the delivery, and what is delivered. Any traditional training includes, amongst many other things, teaching theory, instruction of skills, assessment protocol, ethical values and guidelines, and an inculturation to the norms of practice, and of the profession.
Trainees want, expect and pay for this and more, and yet they are likely unaware of the implicit betrayal they buy into...
Continue reading, The double betrayal at the heart of becoming a psychotherapist
