About

My route into psychotherapy has been anything but direct.

I began my working life as a microbiologist, fascinated by living processes at a microscopic level. From there I moved towards the body, first training and practising in shiatsu and then in Five Element acupuncture, before eventually training as a humanistic and integrative psychotherapist.

I am a UKCP registered psychotherapist and an Accredited Practitioner with the Association for Humanistic Psychology Practitioners (AHPP).

I don't experience these as disconnected chapters. Something has travelled through them: a curiosity about how living systems organise themselves, what interrupts their movement, and what allows connection and flow to return.

Over time my attention has widened again — from the individual body and psyche towards relationship, community, land and the wider ecological systems in which our lives are embedded.

Life experience

My professional training is only part of what I bring to this work. I have also been shaped by the particular life I have lived.

I grew up in Northern Ireland as the Troubles were beginning. My father died when I was twelve, and my family life included both strong religiosity and domestic violence. These experiences brought me into contact early with loss, conflict, belonging and the ways that what happens around us enters deeply into our inner lives.

I have been a husband and am a father. A long marriage, its eventual ending and the years that followed have taught me things about intimacy, love, failure, separation and change that no professional training could have taught me.

My own psychotherapy and inner work have continued throughout my adult life.. Dreams have been particularly important companions, alongside body practices and an exploration of different spiritual traditions. I have learned to leave some experiences unexplained — to remain curious about what we don't know as well as what we do.

And throughout much of my life there has been the land. Living closely with the natural world, witnessing ecological degradation, and later creating community through Common Ground in Northern Ireland have profoundly shaped how I understand relationship and belonging — not only between people, but between ourselves and the places and other lives with which we share the world.

Still becoming

I don't want to present myself as a finished product. My life is unfinished, and I remain an ongoing living process myself.

Nor do I see myself as a font of wisdom or the expert who knows where your life should go. I bring experience, training and perspective, but I expect our work to change and surprise both of us. I am willing to question what I think I know.

I won't be the right therapist for everyone. But where there is a good fit, I hope to offer a relationship in which we can be curious together — serious when seriousness is called for, able to laugh when it isn't, and willing to stay with uncertainty long enough for something we could not have planned to become possible.