
With a background in journalism (30 years with Reuters and the BBC, and Cold War postings in Moscow, Berlin, Vienna and Beijing) and in all-too-often bad news, Mark is co-Director with partner Jutta Brayne and their daughter Katharine of EMDR Focus, offering supervision and training in attachment-informed EMDR.
Specialising in trauma, from the journalistic of his earlier career to the everyday tragedy, disaster and often much more simple personal distress that can affect anyone, Mark was trained (CCPE, London, 1995-2000) in an integrative and transpersonal model, drawing inspiration from many approaches, from Cognitive Behavioural and Person-Centred to Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, art and psychodynamic therapies.
Proceeding however from the wise dictum of China’s late reformist leader Deng Xiaoping that, in his view of the economy, it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice, Mark find that the best therapeutic mouse-catcher by far is Eye-Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, or EMDR, in which he was since 2011 an Accredited Consultant with the EMDR Association Europe.
Like Deng Xiaoping, and after many years reporting the former Communist world, Mark has no great patience with rigid ideologies, whether political, religious or therapeutic, including especially in the practice of EMDR.
Trained in basic EMDR in 2004, he has drawn particular inspiration from the work of Dr Laurel Parnell in the US and her Attachment-Focused approach.