LOCATION: Palmeira Square
AVAILABILITY: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday daytime & evenings
PRICE: £60 per session (£55 for trainee therapists, £120 for families - two hour session)
SPECIALISMS:
Relational & Attachment Trauma
Children, Young People & Families
Food & Mood Disorders
Clinical Supervision
Abuse
ADHD
Anxiety
Autism
Bereavement
Cancer
Depression
Domestic Violence
Eating Disorders
Low Self-Esteem and confidence
Women's Health
OCD
Stress
Self-Harm
Work-Related Stress

Training

Lisa started her training in an Arts Therapies degree in 1998 and completed six years training as a creative Psychotherapist specialising in childhood trauma and youth offending at Roehampton in London.

The training highlighted the autonomy of the individual in therapy to govern their own experience in order to recognise and shift barriers that restrict living more fully.

Lisa has worked as a creative psychotherapist and clinical lead specialising in addictions, eating and mood disorders working in a variety of settings from rehabilitation centres, schools, foster care teams, youth services, prisons and women refuges. Lisa is registered with the Health Professions Council and receives regular clinical supervision. Lisa has 20 years experience of working therapeutically with children and adults. Lisa completed a Masters in 2009 and is a senior psychotherapist, consulting therapist and will qualify as a Clinical Supervisor June 2022. Lisa completed Dyadic Developmental Practice training Level 1 and 2 that offers a framework for therapy and parenting developmentally traumatised children with the emphasis developing secure relationships to support trauma.

Approach

How therapy with Lisa might help me?

• Develop a symbolic language

• It is an intended safe form of reality where we can begin to explore your concerns and rehearse change

• Experience unacknowledged feelings

• Interact with and integrate those feelings creatively into your personality

• Therapeutic change to take place

• Help to express difficulties in a non- threatening environment

• Be listened to carefully and take your difficulties seriously

• Help you discover how therapy can empower and provide a new way of experiencing the world

• Help make sense of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences

• Strengthening a sense of self

Initial consultation

During our first meeting, we will assess together whether a more creative way of working can be useful for you. You do not need to have previous experience of therapy. I am trained to enable you to find the most suitable medium for you to engage to address and resolve or make troubling issues more bearable.

Relational & Attachment Trauma

Therapy is often about talking our problems through. Lisa's practice can offer, if helpful and right for you, more creative techniques inviting the chance to explore challenging feelings that may be holding us back in our lives and relationships, in creative and dynamic ways. Lisa has experience of working in this way with any age from the age of five.

Lisa's practice for relational and attachment trauma is an approach that can help individuals recognize the role relationships play in the shaping of daily experiences, attempts to help people understand patterns appearing in the thoughts and feelings they have toward themselves and others.

The therapy focus is on relationships with others being an essential aspect of emotional well-being. People who find it difficult to maintain supportive and healthy relationships may experience a sense of disconnection in addition to feelings of diminished self-worth and general distress, and their sense of emotional well-being may negatively affected.

Stress and emotional upheaval are often the result of past relational experiences, and these concerns may inhibit the present self from full expression. Lisa aims to provide an atmosphere of empathy and attentiveness in order to elicit full disclosure of the experiences and events, as well as the effects they have had both relationally and socially.

The emphasis is working together to forge a strong, collaborative, and secure relationship that can serve as a model for future relationships the person wishes to develop. Other relationships can be measured against this supportive one to determine if they are constructive or destructive.

Based on the idea that strong and fulfilling relationships with other individuals can help people maintain emotional well-being, this model may be beneficial to people seeking therapy for any number of reasons, but in particular to address long-term emotional distress, especially when distress occurs as a result of relational concerns. If it's useful you may look at strategies for disconnection or the styles of interpersonal interaction that are used to push others away. Transformation begins to occur when the therapist and individual build new relational images using the therapist-person in therapy relationship as a model for a secure and healthy relationship.

Lisa has run her own a private practice in East and West Sussex with children and adults for the past 15 years and has developed a lifetime of knowledge, understanding and compassion for relational and attachment trauma that hugely impact our lives. Through her gentle yet resilient approach change is possible.

Children, Young People & Families

Lisa has worked as a therapist and Life Story consultant in fostering teams and schools for over six years using DDP principles (a framework for therapy and parenting developmentally traumatised children) and creative psychotherapy to support children, parents, guardians and carers with children’s emotional attachment and developmental trauma through relational-based psychotherapy.

The family sessions with the caregivers aim to improve a child’s ability to relate, develop secure attachments and respond to challenges in life led by the main attachment figure:

• Receive non-judgemental and accepting responses to the understanding of the child and the emotional impact the child is having upon them

• Increase parental sensitivity through PACE

• Learn to increase reciprocal interactions and intersubjective communication with their child

• Help to make sense of behaviors and emotional responses

• Make emotional connections with their child before setting behavioral limits

Addiction & Mood Disorders

Lisa has for many years managed therapeutic teams within addiction family services in West Sussex providing therapy for children and their families living with substance abuse. Lisa worked for many years as a Primary Counsellor and creative psychotherapist for individuals and groups in rehabilitation centers in London and Brighton supporting people experiencing mood and eating disorders and substance misuse.

Lisa is experienced in working with clients to maximise health and work towards a pathway of well-being through identifying trauma, working with underlying mental health presentations and supporting clients to feel empowered in their health.

Lisa in her private practice work with individuals to support and address long term addictions and the impact it has on people's lives. Through relational creative psychotherapy Lisa aims to support life changing strategies and ways of living.

Other information

Lisa is also a supervisor combining process and developmental theories of supervision with models adapted from creative arts therapies, attachment theory and neuroscience which is applicable to those working with children, adolescents and adults. She works with qualified therapists and counsellors from different modalities, as well as trainees using a range of experiential methods and creative techniques.  She can also provide reflective practice sessions and consultations to other professionals, such as social workers and school staff, to support and enhance their work with complex cases and prevent burn out which is an area of specialist interest.

Lisa supervises individuals and groups of up to three people using a combination of reflective and creative practice.

Lisa’s articles in expertise and resources