About me
I am originally from New Zealand and came to the UK in 2000.
I began to be interested in
working therapeutically with people in the mid 1970’s when I began my family.
I was interested in being part
of a group of mothers who supported each other in the days when information on
child development and parenting was limited to what your mother taught you or
what was learnt by trial and error. This led me to be interested in training as
a group facilitator and adult educator.
I ran groups through the
community college and university night class systems in personal growth and life
skills. In the mid 1980’s I trained as a counsellor and co founded a community
house where a variety of therapeutic programmes such as counselling and group
work plus alcohol and drug rehabilitation support groups were facilitated.
My continuing professional
development took me into what was then called encounter groups or what we would
now call intense experiential group therapy. This led me to train as a gestalt
therapist and I qualified with distinction as a gestalt psychotherapist in 1992
with a diploma and post graduate diploma from The Gestalt Institute of New
Zealand.
This was one of the first
psychotherapy courses at that time that included a thorough knowledge of mental
health issues as a requirement to qualify and practice.
This allowed me to become
employed part time within a community mental health team as an individual and
group therapist. Alongside this employment I developed a private practice and
became part of a rape crisis collective and co founded a local branch within my
home area of Whakatane New Zealand.
I trained in trauma recovery
work and domestic violence and this enabled me to be accredited as a sexual
abuse counsellor with the sensitive claims department of a government body
called ACC (accident Compensation Corporation) I was also accredited as a
domestic violence group facilitator and ran groups for women who had been
traumatized within their relationships.
When I came to the UK I was able
to get employed as a trauma therapist at The Priory Ticehurst House complex PTSD
unit where I worked full time for five years. I eventually branched out into
private practice and now do this full time with private practices privileges
within two private mental Health specialist hospitals, The Priory and Capio
Nightingale.
How I work
My main therapeutic orientation
is Gestalt psychotherapy. This is what is referred to as a
phenomenological approach. This means noticing and acknowledging ‘what is’ in
the here and now.
‘What is’ is different to ‘what
was’ or ‘what might be’ in the future.
‘What is’ means what you notice
now, what is going on in front of you, what is under your nose, so to speak.
This allows both therapist and
client to explore what might be getting in the way of living fully in the
present.
When these interruptions are
identified as ‘figures’, or ‘in your face’ issues we can use many different
skills to deal with them.
These interruptions may present
as anxiety or depression or stuck patterns of behaviour that prevent the client
from moving into a more satisfying way of living.
The skills I employ are
cognitive and behavioural and may involve experiential and behavioural
experiments.
Cognitive behavioural skills
Cognition is how we think and
this is linked to feelings, moods and behaviour. How we interact and relate to
our environment is a focus of therapy. It is what gestalt therapists call the
‘here and now’. This is about the phenomenology of ‘what is’. Rather than what
was or what might be in the future. CBT skills help us make sense of some of our
beliefs or rules that drive us. Therapy helps to distinguish what beliefs are
useful and what are not useful of even harmful.
Experimental techniques
include:
Gestalt dream work.
Here our dreams give us clues as
to what may be important information to take into our conscious mind and learn
from.
Gestalt two chair or empty
chair work
This involves movement between
two chairs as the client identifies an inner conflict. This shows how these two
opposing aspects of the self are competing for attention. The client can regain
control of this dilemma. Empty chair work is where the client can bring another
person metaphorically into the room and deal with unfinished business.
EMDR (Eye movement
desensitisation and reprogramming)
This is a powerful method of
assisting the body to release stored up traumatic material. It is especially
useful for people who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or symptoms.
The bilateral stimulation evokes rapid information processing from the autonomic
or sensory nervous system to a cognitive or narrative understanding. A meaning
and a time/place orientation is established where previously the PTSD condition
kept the sufferer locked into feeling the trauma was being repeated on an
everyday basis.
As a trauma therapist I believe
from my experience that a wide range of therapeutic shills and modalities are
needed for a person suffering from PTSD.
Another therapeutic tool I use
is EFT (emotional freedom technique). This is very useful for trauma
trapped within the body.
Trauma trapped in the body is
now recognised by mainstream psychiatry as a freeze state where the autonomic
nervous system or the limbic system in the right side of the brain acts as if
the trauma is still happening.
EMDR and EFT help shift this
material into the cognition and this enables the trauma to be filed as a past
memory.
Contact Details:
The Natural Therapy Centre
The Upper Suite
30 High Street
Battle
East Sussex
TN33 0EN
There is no disabled access - (no lift)
075 15659082
www.heather-robyn-psychotherapy.org
heather@heather-robyn-psychotherapy.org
heather.robyn@robotsbtinternet.com
