As a practitioner with 30 years experience of mental health including work in the community and secure hospitals, I am pretty unshockable but open to be surprised! I am averse to professional masks but for those who are interested I have an honours degree (BSc) in Psychology and Counselling Psychology and have undertaken further postgraduate training in Psychotherapy and Counselling (MA). I subscribe to a basic humanistic-existential philosophy and believe passionately in equality, self-acceptance, authenticity, independence and self-determination. I favour a permissive and facilitative approach to therapy in which the client is always the authority on themselves. I believe in action, not just talking and that many tools are better than one and so I have added some cutting edge creative methods to my toolkit including NLP, hypnotherapy and Emotional Freedom Technique.