Training Supervisors

Sarah Benamer

I offer one to one supervision for therapists and counsellors and professionals in related fields. I am an approved UKCP supervisor.

My specific areas of interest are in trauma, disrupted attachments, the body, chronic illness and pain. The interface of mind and body are shaped by our early relationships and environment, and this in turn determines our sense of belonging and attachment; how we feel in the world, in our bodies, in relation to others. I write, speak publicly, and offer training and teaching around this subject area of attachment and the body in clinical practice.

As a supervisor and teacher I am theoretically informed by relational, attachment, developmental, trauma, psychoanalytic and feminist theory. This is interwoven with socio-cultural and real world perspectives from my time as a community worker and Masters degree in Applied Anthropology. As well as my original attachment training I also have a COSRT qualification that allows me to facilitate individuals and couples in working through psychosexual and relationship issues. I am currently undertaking a three year qualification in body based trauma resolution.

I seek to work collaboratively with my supervisees, affording a secure professional base from which they can fulfill their potential and explore aspects of their work and related theory that have particular significance and meaning for them and their clients. I am passionate about inclusion, and working with difference and power dynamics in an empowering way.

AS A SUPERVISOR MY AIMS ARE:

To provide a space that is non hierarchical and collaborative. To hold the tension between offering a containing and responsive secure base and challenge and critique when necessary, sitting alongside supervisees and collaborating in finding the most appropriate course of action with a given client at a given moment in time. Drawing upon theory but never losing sight of humanity and the relationship in the room.
To enable supervisees to develop their way of working according to values, and ethics that are internalised and commensurate with their own history and felt experience as well as in keeping with the professions governing bodies.
To empower supervisees practically and emotionally to offer clients a boundaried and loving therapeutic relationship.
To explore supervisees’ capabilities and limitations both in regard of clients material and logistically what they are able to offer (financially, time-wise and so on) so that they do not become depleted through giving from an undernourished place within themselves.
To integrate theory and practice.
To safely explore difference, social inequality, and how and expand spaces between people that become constricted.
To facilitate ‘breaking the silence’ that can feel characteristic of work with profound trauma and abuse.
To provide a secure environment that allows supervisees to see the continuum between their own material and that of the client. This can be of particular importance in the relational process; for example in understanding how their attachment patterns in intimate relating may emerge in the inevitable enactments with clients.
To enable supervisees to work effectively and confidently with their own emotional and physical countertransference; through understanding their personal body narratives and becoming au fait with the feelings within their body they may be more equipped to recognise bodily counter-transference and what is being communicated non verbally by a client.
Where appropriate to use the relational experience of supervision to explore parallel process.

If you would like to talk through your supervision needs please call 020 86720515 to make an appointment. Additional information about my practice is available on my website: www.theintimacyclinic.co.uk

Charles Brown

Charles Brown is a UKCP registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist and supervisor. He is also a specialist addictions therapist. He is an associate member of Arbours Association of Psychotherapists, AGIP Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training and The Bowlby Centre. He sits on the British Association of Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Supervision executive committee. Charles is a training therapist, tutor and lecturer. He has a particular interest in identity and trauma and meaning and has published papers in books and journals.

My approach to supervision takes into account the intersubjective nature of the mind and the psychoanalytic process as occurring between subjects rather than within the individual. In the supervisory situation meaning and understanding is co-constructed as each participant authorises the other to be affected by the other. The supervisor provides a space in which to reflect on the analytic relationship. The supervisor also serves as a secure base from which the supervisee can explore skills and competencies. Recognition of each other’s subjectivity is the basis for identity and a paradigm for adult relationships.

This process allows the supervisee to find her or his own ways of working, conceptualising cases and growth.

Orit Badouk Epstein

History: UKCP training therapist and supervisor. I trained at the Bowlby Centre and have 20 years of clinical experience, ten of which have been as a supervisor. I supervise clinicians and students from around the world from all sectors of mental health and from different schools of psychotherapy.

My approach: attachment based, seeing the supervisory space as a safe place and being able to explore the supervisees difficulties without fear of authority or feeling shamed by the power dynamics that are often played out in the supervisory dyad.

I specialise in working with clients with complex trauma and dissociative processes.

Other interests: writing, editing, reading philosophy and enjoying the arts.

Location: North London (386b Finchley Rd, NW2 2HP.)

Disabled access: Yes

Supervision on skype: Yes

Fees: To be discussed individually.

I have been a registered member of the Bowlby Centre since 1999 and have been supervising since 2004 and a training therapist since 2005. I was a member of the CTC and as chair of the referrals and ethics committee I was a member of the Bowlby Centre Executive committee for a number of years.

Mei-Fung Chung

Mei-Fung Chung is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, author, clinical supervisor,training psychotherapist and visiting lecturer at The John Bowlby School of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Originally trained in fine art, she worked as aCreative Director for ten years at Condé Nast, The Sunday Times and The Times.

She currently works in private practice and has a particular interest in working

clinically with dissociation, gender and sexuality. During her training at The Bowlby Centre she was awarded the Jafar Kareem bursary for her paper: The Marginal Man that explored how relational attachment-based psychotherapy can be used to support those experiencing isolation and mental health problems. She was also the consulting psychotherapist on Gang Life, a documentary for the BBC that was nominated for a BAFTA. Her debut novel: Who’s That Girl is due for publication with HarperCollins in February 2020.

Training Supervision with The Bowlby Centre

I have been a training supervisor with the Bowlby Centre since 2009. I work from an attachment-based psychoanalytic perspective. This means I am interested to think about a range of issues in regard to a person’s clinical work, including:

Understanding the impact of the client’s attachment experiences on their current ways of relating (internal working models, transferences and relational re-enactments);
Thinking about the psychotherapist’s emotional-relational experience of being with the client (countertransference and the impact of the psychotherapist’s relational history, parallel process).

Ethos

I am committed to the Bowlby Centre’s values of respect, equality of opportunity and anti-discriminatory practice. I believe that it is important in a supervision relationship, as with all attachment-based relationships, to establish and maintain a good enough form of security to enable authentic and clinically useful exploration.

Practicalities

I do not have current vacancies available for supervision. I review my practice every January and plan for the coming two years. I currently hold a waiting list for training supervision places. To support students at the Bowlby Centre I charge a lower fee (currently £45.00). At present I practice from the Bowlby Centre and in the evenings from the Clinic for Dissociative Studies (in Hornsey, North London).

Yvonne Forward

Having trained at the Bowlby Centre (then CAPP) in 2000 as an attachment based psychoanalytical psychotherapist, I am now also a Bowlby Centre training supervisor, teacher, poetry editor on the Attachment Journal and have worked for a number of years on the referrals service and the conference planning committee.

As a supervisor, I offer a safe, non-judgmental and confidential place to explore the work you are doing.

I would describe my style as relational. I encourage my supervisee’s to be able to bring all aspects of their work including their counter transference and feelings about each client. I like to develop a working alliance that enriches and develops and challenges the work that is going on in order to enhance and deepen the therapeutic alliance between my supervisee’s and their clients.

Over the last eighteen years I have built up extensive experience working with a wide range of individuals and couples seeking therapy for issues including depression, anxiety, PTSD, DID, suicidal thoughts, relationship and parenting difficulties, sexuality, childhood abuse, bereavement. All of which informs my work as a supervisor bringing a depth of understanding about the challenges and difficulties that the work can bring up.

As your Supervisor, I will encourage you to work confidently, safely, creatively and be able to reflect in a constructive way enabling a positivether apeutic experience for your clients I work strictly to the codes and ethics of the UKCP and the Bowlby Centre.

Graeme Galton

I am a registered member of the Bowlby Centre and have been a training supervisor since 2006. My own private practice includes working with clients who suffer from depression, anxiety, relationship and family issues, bereavement, post-traumatic stress and dissociation. In addition to my private practice, I worked for 16 years in the National Health Service as a psychotherapist and clinical supervisor.

I am currently a Consultant Psychotherapist at the Clinic for Dissociative Studies. My approach to supervision includes sometimes, but not always, asking supervisees to prepare verbatim accounts of the session so that we can look in detail at the flow of the conversation and explore the language and phrasing. I take a relational approach to supervision and believe that trainees do their best work when they are supported and encouraged by their training supervisor.

Richard Gill

I trained and worked initially at Hazelden in the USA in 1988/9 with people with various addictions. On returning to the UK I headed the clinical team at St Josephs hospital addiction unit in Haselmere, Surrey, going on to set up and run for five years the SHARP treatment centre in London.

In 1991 I trained at the Bowlby Centre where the view of difficulties in life are rooted in our early attachment histories. I have been working in private practice for the last twenty years as an Attachment Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in central London being registered with United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapists

Myriam Laplanche

I started training at The Bowlby Centre in 2003 and registered with the UKCP in 2008.

I work in a private practice, in French and in English, with a wide range of clients with a special interest in understanding depression and suicidality, eating disorders and the impact of childhood trauma.

I wish to create with supervisees a strong collaboration so that we can explore the parts of their clinical work that require the most attention without fear of judgement. I also wish to create a space where theory, and in particular Attachment theory, becomes alive and embedded in the clinical work. My own practice is informed by Attachment theory first and this is the lens through which I encourage supervisees to look at their clients’ inner worlds. I believe that mental distress has its origin in failed or inadequate attachment relationships in someone’s life and is therefore best treated in the context of a long-term human relationship.

For trainee therapists who are not yet seeing clients, I will discuss all practical and legal steps to put in place to ensure safe practice.

I am part of an Attachment Narrative Therapy Supervision Group led by Professor Rudi Dallos. The groups’ aim is to reflect on families or individuals using our understanding of Attachment theory in a systemic context.

Dr Liat Levy

DCPsych, MSc, BSc (Hons), UKCP Registered Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist

Liat is a senior experienced registered Adult Psychotherapist. She is qualified as a Psychoanalytic (Attachment-based) Psychotherapist as well as an Integrative Psychotherapist. Liat has double registration with the UK Council for Psychotherapy, and is qualified and registered as a Psychoanalytic Supervisor (UKCP). In addition, Liat is a registered Psychologist.

Liat has a dedicated private practice in the heart of the West End, W1, adjacent to the medical area of Harley Street. She has many years of clinical experience both helping patients and providing clinical supervision. In addition, she continues to work part-time as a Senior Adult Psychotherapist within the NHS South London and Maudsley Trust. Liat is also involved in the Bowlby Centre psychotherapist training programme where she is a Member of the Executive Board, Chair of the Education Committee, a training therapist and a supervisor.

Liat works from a psychoanalytic perspective with an attachment – based focus. Her work amalgamates together a focus on the client’s internal world alongside unconscious processes, which helps the client gain insight and understanding. As well as dedicated attention to the quality of the relationship between client and therapist. Such fusion acts as a helpful vehicle for meaningful change.

Supervision, in a similar vein to therapy, is a relational space, to help the supervisee develop their clinical understanding and therapeutic skills. It is a place to focus on the structure of the patient’s mind, the supervisee’s experience and any anxieties which might be evoked by the client, as well as the therapeutic relationship.

Mark Linington

I trained with the Bowlby Centre as an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist from 1996 to 2000 and am registered with the UKCP as a psychotherapist and a supervisor. I am also a training therapist and teacher with the Bowlby Centre.

I have been providing supervision since 2002, which has included clinically supervising psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors and psychiatrists. I have supervised as part of my work in the NHS, a range of voluntary sector organisations and as part of my private practice.

Training Supervision with The Bowlby Centre

Understanding the impact of the client’s attachment experiences on their current ways of relating (internal working models, transferences and relational re-enactments);
Thinking about the psychotherapist’s emotional-relational experience of being with the client (countertransference and the impact of the psychotherapist’s relational history, parallel process).

Ethos

Practicalities

Gregor MacAdam

I have over 20 years’ experience providing therapy to adults and young people within the NHS, non-statutory sector and privately and now work in full-time private practice. Previously I was Psychotherapy Clinical Lead of a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services of the NHS North East London Foundation Mental Health Trust (NELFT).

When in the NHS I clinically led many psychotherapy and counselling services including an NHS Young Peoples Psychotherapy Service, a borough wide Secondary Schools’ Counselling Service, Primary School Therapy Service and a Young People’s Substance Misuse Service. Earlier in my career I qualified as an Existential Humanistic Counsellor at City University and worked for five years within a residential therapeutic community supporting young people with alcohol and substance misuse difficulties and for three years I clinically supervised this service. I have also provided an Attachment Based Psychotherapy Service for adults with addiction problems and have had experience in providing psychotherapy for those with learning disabilities who have a history of sexual abuse and those with a history of sexually offending behaviour. I was in the 1994 intake at the JBC and registered in 2000. I am also registered as a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist with the UKCP and I hold certificates in Metallization Based Therapy (MBT), Cognitive Based Therapy (CBT) and Motivational Interviewing.

Clinical supervision of training cases is a central part of psychotherapy training, alongside personal therapy and theoretical learning. I regard it as important for the trainee therapist to experience a safe and containing supervision, but also a challenging one. I believe the trainee’s intensive personal therapy, alongside supervision is essential in supporting the trainee with the considerable anxieties in embarking on seeing first and second training cases. Among many other aspects I think it important for the trainee to be helped to understand the importance of being aware and sensitive to the impact that the patient has upon them and how they as therapist are inevitably pulled into conforming to certain relational patterns with their patient and how and when to verbalise and interpret this understanding . The supervisor is a “third” that introduces thinking into the dyadic relationship of therapist and patient which is vital for promoting difficult and painful understanding, mourning, separation, individuation, changes of relational patterns and growth. In time, the supervisor “third” is internalised by the therapist and the therapist finds their own unique internal supervisor just as they, in time, become a therapist in their own unique way. In my view, however, it is important, in undertaking the challenging analytic therapist task, to always have some external supervisory input in order to support and continually develop one’s own internal supervisor.

Nigel McBride

I now have a private practice and have a broad interest in the treatment of many issues and psychopathologies . I have a particular interest in addiction and working with self harm and personality difficulties.

I take seriously the insights of classical psychoanalysis but would happily identify with the relational school of psychotherapy in its understanding of psychic distress and its treatment.

I have a great love of literature and poetry in particular and I am currently beginning research for a paper on W H Auden and Psychoanalysis.

Jane Parkinson

I qualified with the Centre in 1992 and have held a private practice since then. I live and work in Kent but I am frequently at the Centre too.

I have been a member of the Clinical Training Committee (CTC) since 2011 and was Course Tutor for the 2013 intake. I am also a Training Supervisor.

I have a nursing, midwifery and health-visiting background. Most of my career in the NHS was spent managing and supervising Health Visitors in their child-protection work.

I led the Clinical Practice in the field of Domestic Violence for the NHS Children’s Trust in Brighton, producing working guidelines and providing training and supervision for staff working with Domestic Abuse.

After retiring from the NHS in 2012 I was invited to become a Trustee with the lead in clinical governance for RISE, the domestic abuse charity in Brighton.

Since 2005 I have had a growing interest in attachment and stress-related illness. Most of my practice is working from an attachment perspective with people who have chronic pain and medically-unexplained symptoms. I am a member of the Psychophysiological Disorders Association.

Jenny Riddell

Jenny Riddell psychoanalytic psychotherapist for individuals and couples. Accredited supervisor.

BPC (TR), UKCP (BC) BAPPS registered and accredited.

Patrick Ryan

Patrick trained at the Bowlby Centre and has an MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalysis from UCL. Patrick takes a relational approach to supervision alongside an exploration of core psychoanalytic tools such as transference, countertransference, projection and projective identification. Patrick regularly teaches the Object Relations module at the BC. He is especially interested in contemporary approaches to trauma and also works as an EMDR practitioner.

Gülcan Sutton Purser

Gülcan Sutton Purser is an Attachment- Based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, trained by The Bowlby Centre, and she is in private practice in Cambridge and part time in London. She is also a training therapist, training supervisor, teacher, trainer, and a writer as well as doing consultancy work to help psychotherapy students to move on with their career as professionals. Gülcan is also Book Reviews Editor for Attachment Journal.

Gülcan has been practicing for twenty years and experienced in working with trauma, somatic trauma, dissociation and relational issues. She is also an experienced couple therapist trained by Relate.

Gülcan Sutton Purser was born and raised in Turkey and she is fluent in both English and Turkish and offers psychotherapy and supervision services in both languages. Gülcan chaired clinical forums for The Bowlby Centre for five years. Correspondence: 11 Heath Road, Swaffham Bulbeck, Cambridge CB25 0LS. E mail: gulcanpurser@hotmail.com Tel: 01223 813762

Judy Yellin

I trained at the Bowlby Centre as an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist and I work as a supervisor from an attachment-based and relational approach. My own clinical work draws on a framework based in attachment and developmental theory (Bowlby, Ainsworth, Main, Hesse, Lyons-Ruth, Stern, Liotti etc.), relational psychoanalytic clinical theory and technique (Stephen Mitchell and developments post-Mitchell), intersubjectivity theory (in particular on Jessica Benjamin’s work on the capacity for mutual recognition as the basis of intersubjectivity) and contemporary trauma theory with its emphasis on dissociative structures and processes (van der Kolk, van der Hart et al., Bromberg, Howell etc.). I have also taught extensively on those topics on trainings at the Bowlby Centre, Minster Centre, and other psychotherapy training institutes.

I have been working as a supervisor for the last 13 years, supervising both trainees and more experienced therapists, covering a very wide range of clinical issues, and including many complex clients with histories of childhood trauma and abuse. I taught a variety of seminars at the Bowlby Centre between 2003 and 2012, and from 2012 to date I have been teaching Contemporary Theories of Psychotherapy on the M.A. in Integrative Psychotherapy at the Minster Centre, London. I am on the Steering Group of the Relational School, which brings together a community of therapists from a variety of modalities who all seek to practise from a Relational standpoint. I am also a Senior Associate at Pink Therapy, which offers training to therapists working with gender, sexual and relationship diversity.

My aim in supervision is to work alongside my supervisees in their approach whilst offering an opportunity additionally to reflect upon their work from an attachment-based, relational perspective. Most supervisees who come to me for supervision are specifically looking for a relational supervisor and are looking to explore and develop their clinical work from a viewpoint that acknowledges the influence of the therapist’s subjectivity on the co-created nature of the therapeutic relationship. I hope to provide a secure and creative professional relationship within which supervisees can explore their own subjectivity as expressed via their embodied countertransference, and can deepen their understanding of the relational dynamics between themselves and their clients. Such an approach emphasises the importance and centrality of the therapist’s countertransference, and the inevitability of enactment, dissociative processes and bi-directional influence within the therapeutic dyad. The hope is that supervisees will be facilitated to become more attuned to, and welcoming of, their own embodied affective processes as a crucial source of communication and information about client’s relational worlds, and will be enabled to use their own subjectivity both as a source of information and as a clinical tool in the service of the therapeutic process. The parallel processes within the transference/countertransference that may play out within the supervisory relationship are also recognised and explored, as these can often be extremely helpful and illuminating when they are noticed and can be discussed openly, and the insights gained then fed back into the clinical work. The ways in which the supervisee’s own attachment history and personal process are inevitably stimulated within the relationship with their clients are acknowledged and discussed.

The building of an open and trusting relationship with the supervisee is essential for working in this way, as the aim is to enable the supervisee to feel secure in bringing for exploration and discussion their more difficult feelings about, and interactions with, the client. It is thus important that the supervisee is as free as possible from the anxiety of judgement and shame, so they can be curious and non-censoring about their own responses and can begin to trust their own countertransference as a source of help rather than a hindrance. I try to offer a reflective supervisory relationship that contains this anxiety as securely as possible, to enable the supervisee to think with me about what their feelings and responses might mean, and how they might usefully illuminate the client’s relational and attachment dynamics, and may point to enactments that may be in train within the therapy dyad.

The supervisees in my practice have a very broad range of degrees of experience, from beginning therapists just starting out in practice, to highly experienced and senior therapists with many years of clinical work. I aim to meet each supervisee where they are, and work with them from there to deepen their work, and develop their confidence as effective, resourceful, resilient and creative therapists.

Debbie Zimmerman

I worked in the NHS for a number of years as an honorary psychoanalytic psychotherapist and as a mentalization based therapist working with a client base with psychiatric diagnoses. I have built up a full time private practice during the past ten years, and have developed, written and taught a two year diploma course in attachment based counselling at the Wimbledon Guild. I teach the clinical seminar at TBC , am a course tutor and currently vice chair of the CTC. I have experience of supervising trainee psychotherapists and am passionate about helping young professionals develop and reach their potential as clinicians.

Attachment theory is the bedrock of my practice, and I’m also informed by psychoanalytic thinking, particularly relational psychoanalysis, and contemporary theories of trauma and dissociation. I have completed level 1 in Sensorimotor psychotherapy, and level 1 in EMDR.

Paramount is the safety and wellbeing of the client, and the wellbeign of the therapist, and to those ends, I see supervision as a secure base from which as a supervisee, you can feel safe to explore and reflect, develop your skills, and grow in confidence in your own thinking and in finding your unique way of being as a clinician. In my experience supervision at its best is a collaboration, a relationship in which we can think together, explore alternative perspectives and approaches, increase awareness of unconscious processes/communications, and attachment dynamics.

I work from a relational perspective – the Bowlby Centre’s values of offering psychotherapy with warmth, respect, readiness to relate, free from discrimination, and without pathologising survival strategies are dear to me, and also reflect my values in offering supervision.