Profile

I’ve been a clinical psychologist since 2005, and I’ve worked in the NHS and in private practice.  Before I trained as a clinical psychologist I completed a PhD in autism.  I live in Hove with my family and we’ve just come back from spending two years in France.

My work is really varied. I work as a therapist with people who have experienced trauma, and used evidence-based therapies to help them put their experiences in the past.  I also write books and articles about psychology, particularly about understanding mental health from a psychological rather than a medical perspective.  I work online, so each day I am at my computer but I connect with people from all over the country.

In addition to that, I am involved with several research projects about a therapy called EMDR, which is used for people who have had traumatic experiences. We want to find out how effective EMDR can be online, and also how it can be used with people on the autistic spectrum.

I work as a therapist seeing people who have experienced trauma.  When a traumatic event happens to someone, that event gets remembered in a different way to other memories.  It can continue to cause problems like flashbacks and intrusive thoughts.  I use trauma-focused therapies to help process those memories so they no longer cause problems.  It’s not an easy thing to do and sometimes people get upset, because they need to think of the things which upset them.

I write about education, mental health and psychology.   I write articles for journals and magazines, and am also working on two books.  I try to relate psychological theory to real life – like, we know from psychology that people learn best when they have choices about what they can do and when they are interested, so how can we make education better?

My research is mostly about a therapy called EMDR, which is used to process trauma memories.  We have meetings to discuss what we want to find out, set up our hypotheses and design studies to test them out.