For the past dozen years I have been working as a psychotherapist in private practice in the City and North London, and I have also provided a counselling service in a GP surgery in Enfield. Until 2010 I was Head of the Foundation Year at the Minster Centre, an integrative training centre for counsellors and psychotherapists in north-west London.

I hold postgraduate diplomas in Gestalt Therapy and Integrative Therapy, and an MA in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology from Oxford University.

I am registered with the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP), which is the umbrella body overseeing the profession in the UK.

My core training has been in Gestalt therapy, an approach that focuses on current experience and the present relationship with the therapist. Equally important in my work is the vast body of knowledge about the workings of the mind accumulated by the psychoanalytic movement. The Minster Centre also teaches trainee therapists and counsellors about other traditions, such as Jungian, Reichian and person-centred approaches, so I draw on their insights too. And I have a particular interest in the rapidly expanding field of neuropsychoanalysis, which is working to integrate traditional psychotherapeutic knowledge with the discoveries of contemporary neuroscience.

All of this may sound complicated, and in a sense it is. But more important than any of the theoretical learning is the quality of the relationship that client and therapist - you and I - strike up. And there is really only one expert on the subject of you, and that is yourself.