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, I’m co-Director with my partner Jutta Brayne of EMDR Focus, offering supervision and training in Attachment-Informed EMDR as well as psychotherapy as outlined on our sister website Braynework.

Specialising in trauma, from the journalistic of my earlier career to the everyday tragedy, disaster and often much more simple personal distress that can affect anyone, I 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, I find that the best therapeutic mouse-catcher by far is Eye-Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, or EMDR, in which I have been since 2011 an Accredited Consultant with the EMDR Association Europe.

Like Deng Xiaoping, and after many years reporting the former Communist world, I have (as you will discover if you choose to work with me) no great patience with rigid ideologies, whether political, religious or therapeutic, including especially in the practice of EMDR.

Trained in basic EMDR in 2004, I draw particular inspiration now from the work of Dr Laurel Parnell in the US and her Attachment-Focused approach. This has unleashed my own EMDR practice since I first encountered this way of working (thanks to Norfolk colleague Maeve Allison) in 2013.

As well as training in post-basic EMDR (incorporating also the very useful teachings of Jim Knipe in particular), I offer supervision of EMDR colleagues either just wanting to improve their practice or wishing to move towards accreditation with the EMDR Association UK and Ireland as either Practitioners or Consultants.

My professional accrediting body as a psychotherapist is the UKCP.