Relationship and Marriage Counselling

I start with the personal information because it’s me-as-human you might be working with, not my credentials. I describe those later, or you can jump to them here.

Although I’m English, I actually started counselling around thirty years ago in the United States of America.

I had gone to Boston, Massachusetts, to help start up a software company.

This action brought to a head a crisis that ended my marriage. So I’d only been in Boston about six weeks when I decided I needed some help to learn about relationships.

My work as a relationship counsellor began on the receiving end.

I am immensely grateful that my introduction to counselling was as a client very close to despair.

I had no thought of adopting a new career.

I just wanted to end the pain and confusion that dominated me. And I didn’t know how to do it on my own.  

I experienced counselling as such a powerful and enabling force that my spouse and I have made use of it many times since.

She and I have now been together for 25 years, and married for 22 of those, so I think our investment in the process has been a valuable one.

Our use of counselling has changed over the years. We’re both fairly strong-willed so in the early days we sought a safe place to reveal and explore our passions and to negotiate mutually beneficial ways forward.

In later years, we’ve used the services of a counsellor to provide clarity when a highly charged emotional situation has arisen that threatened to undermine our rational thought processes.

These explorations change the outcome by stimulating creative thinking. They also accelerate and ease a difficult decision-making process.

I value this benefit highly because I’m a great believer in making human processing more efficent so as to free up time to live a good life.

Over the last eighteen years we’ve split our time between the USA and the UK where we’re now settled.

Professional overview

I am:

• A professional member of the International Association for Marriage and Family Counseling (IAMFC)
• An accredited independent counsellor on the BACP-administered United Kingdom Register of Counsellors (UKRC)
• A registered psychotherapist and group-psychotherapist with the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP)
• A professional member of the American Counseling Association (ACA)

I trained as a relationship counsellor in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was a substantial and specific part of a long training (14 years) to become a psychotherapist, couples counsellor, group psychotherapist, and clinical supervisor.

The training was heavily focused on experiential learning so I spent hundreds of hours both in therapy and in couples counselling. I know how it feels to be in the client’s seat.

I returned to the UK in 1992, becoming accredited by the UKAHPP, one of the founding organizations of the UKCP. I took an executive role in managing that organisation, at different times performing the duties of UKCP delegate, Ethics Officer and for seven years as General Secretary.

Perhaps because of my North American introduction to the profession, I have always favoured a practical approach to counselling and therapy.

Accordingly, I have taken courses in life coaching with ILCT and have developed my own form of depth life coaching.

I do not espouse a particular theory in my work and those familiar with the therapy world will find influences from family systems, psychodynamic, gestalt, person-centered, existential and psychoanalytic thinking. Object relations is perhaps especially useful in understanding the flow of emotions within a relationship.

Although these theories can all be useful at different times, relationship counselling takes place in the real present, not in an intellectual vacuum.

So all of this theory is subservient to your needs as the client. I do not interpret and tell you what’s going on. I work with you so you can tell your partner and me what’s going on – and perhaps understand it more completely yourself.

Test before you invest: Interview me without charge

While a summary of experience and qualifications can be useful, it gives no indication as to the quality of a practitioner nor of the level of rapport you might strike up with them.

The only way to discover these things is to meet a potential counsellor and explore your thoughts and ideas on counselling before you start working with them.

I fully endorse this approach because it protects everyone concerned from making a false start. Accordingly I offer a no-charge, no-obligation, fifty minute interview for you to use in your evaluation process.

If you would like to take advantage of this offer, please call to set up an appointment. It’s toll-free 0800-949-6030 from the UK or 1-866-761-1392 from North America. Or you can send me an email using the contact form.

I hope to hear from you.