WMIP and Community Outreach
Alongside my private practice, I serve as Co-Chair of the West Midlands Institute of Psychotherapy (WMIP). WMIP has a proud history of bringing psychoanalytic thinking into the wider community, from its roots in the Northfield Experiments during the Second World War to its ongoing work in training and public engagement.
My involvement with Black Country Radio grows out of this same vision: opening up therapeutic ideas to those who may never set foot in a consulting room, and showing how the insights of psychotherapy can speak directly to the challenges faced in our families, neighbourhoods, and workplaces.
Psychotherapy in the Community
Through the series Black Country Matters: Psychotherapy in the Community, I work with colleagues and local voices to explore themes at the heart of everyday life in the Black Country, such as: how our pasts shape us, why we struggle to talk about feelings, and what it means to live with loss, hope, and resilience.
Listen Again
Below you can listen to recordings from previous Black Country Matters: Psychotherapy in the Community programmes.
Across the series, we explore a range of themes connected with psychotherapy and everyday emotional life, including the unconscious, early relationships, loss, defences, masculinity and dreams.
New recordings will be added as programmes become available.
What is Psychotherapy?
What is the Unconscious?
Babies and Their Parents
When we Can’t Let Go of he Past
The Defences We Use (Without Knowing it)
Why Blokes Don’t Talk?
Dreams
Shadow
Why Radio?
For me, radio offers a valuable way of taking psychotherapy beyond the consulting room and into the wider community. It creates an opportunity to talk about emotional life, relationships and psychological difficulties in an accessible and down to earth way.
This work also reflects the wider aims of the West Midlands Institute of Psychotherapy (WMIP), particularly our wish to make psychotherapy more visible, understandable and relevant within the communities we serve.
Through Black Country Matters: Psychotherapy in the Community, I hope to help open up conversations about subjects that are often difficult to talk about, while showing that psychotherapy is not something remote or mysterious, but something connected to ordinary life and everyday experience.