About

I am a psychotherapist, writer, researcher and consultant interested in what becomes visible when we take relationships seriously.

Much of my work begins with a fairly simple proposition: we do not encounter the world as isolated individuals. We become who we are through relationships — with other people, with institutions and communities, and with the histories and circumstances into which we find ourselves thrown. That idea runs through my writing on psychotherapy, workplace wellbeing and professional life.

Science, psychotherapy and philosophy

I began my academic career as a chemist, completing my PhD at the University of Sheffield under the supervision of Sir Fraser Stoddart, who went on to receive the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I subsequently undertook postdoctoral research at Oxford before developing my own research and teaching career in the physical sciences. I am now a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where my work has crossed the boundaries between science, psychotherapy and the human sciences.

That scientific background remains important to me. Science offers extraordinarily powerful ways of understanding the world, but human beings also present questions that cannot always be resolved through measurement, explanation or technique. My work increasingly brought me into conversation with philosophy - particularly phenomenology and hermeneutics - and with questions about relationship, meaning, interpretation and encounter.

I don't see these as opposing traditions. I am interested in what becomes possible when different ways of knowing are allowed to challenge one another.

Practice matters

Psychotherapy has been part of my professional life for more than two decades. I am a BACP Registered and Accredited psychotherapist and, in 2019, was awarded BACP Senior Accreditation in Group Supervision. I have worked clinically in NHS, third-sector and private-practice settings, and for many years taught counselling and psychotherapy at the University of the West of England.

Practice and scholarship have never felt like separate activities to me. Some of my earliest writing grew directly from clinical work — including work on counselling in clients’ homes and men and perinatal depression - and explored how therapeutic encounters are shaped by relationships, social context and the worlds in which people live. Those concerns gradually developed into the relational and philosophical questions that now run through my books and research.

My consultancy and reflective-practice work has extended that same conversation into organisations, including work connected with the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (2020-23) and the UK COVID-19 Inquiry (2023-present), supporting professionals whose roles expose them to complexity, uncertainty and sometimes profoundly difficult human experiences.

Across these different settings, practice keeps theory answerable to experience. Ideas about relationship, responsibility and care look rather different when they have to survive contact with other people.

Writing and research

I am the author of Workplace Wellbeing: A Relational Approach and Philosophical Foundations of Psychotherapy: Radical Relationality, and co-author with Niall Keane of Entwined Selves: Relational Encounter in Psychotherapy.

Across my books, research papers and essays, I have become increasingly interested in the limits of individual explanation. Human experience does not simply originate within separate selves and then pass between them. Meaning takes shape in relationships, institutions, histories and material circumstances — often in ways that exceed what any individual can fully know, control or explain.

That argument now takes me in several directions. In psychotherapy, I am interested in what becomes visible when we stop treating self-knowledge as the privileged route to understanding another person, and take seriously the uncertainty and asymmetry of encounter. In philosophy and psychiatry, I am exploring the difference between making a life intelligible and creating the relational conditions in which something might actually change. And in organisational life, I am interested in forms of responsibility that remain when influence, improvement and resolution cannot be guaranteed.

My current research into the lived experience of insomnia brings these concerns back to embodied experience: what happens when something we ordinarily imagine should be under individual control — sleep — refuses to submit to effort, technique or will?

Different projects, but increasingly parts of the same inquiry: what becomes visible when we stop treating the individual as the natural starting point for understanding human life?