Having spent much of my childhood travelling between Africa and the UK, I finally settled in the Uk as an adult. After trying various other lines of work, I trained as a teacher, and spent the next twenty years in Special schools and special needs departments in mainstream school, working a lot with disturbed teenagers and students with learning difficulties. This background in applied psychology led me to develop a greater interest in the subject which I then went on to study with the Open University, where my interest in cognitive and evolutionary psychology was first sparked.

I went on to teach various different aspects of psychology in further education, and trained in Integrative psychotherapy at the Iron Mill Institute. I also became involved in partnership work with local government some years ago, particularly about mental health disorders, and how they are treated in the public domain. I have continued all these interests, and I now teach counselling at degree level at Weston College.

More recently I have had the opportunity to follow up my main interest in Psychology, and studied a taught Masters course in Evolutionary Psychology at Brunel university, finishing with a dissertation investigating the relationship between empathy and self awareness, which is still ongoing. I am steadily integrating this and cross cultural psychology into my therapeutic work, and into my teaching on the counselling degree course.

I believe that including the aspect of evolution over time, in explaining how our minds work, adds a deeper level of understanding as it engages us with more difficult ultimate questions, such as why we, as a species, tend to be so prone to anxiety, depression and other common mental health disorders. It also helps to explain why we are so suggestible to cultural trends and norms, and how these develop into triggers that deeply affect our mental well being.

This aspect has also led me to be interested in Climate change Psychology, looking at how we can engage in making more long term decisions to change the way we live to be more sustainable over thousands of years rather than just the next few decades.

Other continuing lines of research that I am pursuing are:

The role of empathy and self-awareness in modulating social behaviour. My past research is on-going, and I use questionnaires as part of my therapy practice. Guilt, shame, pride and embarassment, the self conscious emotions and their role in regulating social interactions. The evolution of common mental health disorders, and the effectiveness of different treatment programs, particularly psychotherapy. There are several articles about this on this website.

Co-evolution of genetic predispositions and cultural factors to explain conformity to social norms and trends, and the role that societal organizations play in this, particularly corporations, governments and religion.

Cross-cultural psychology, particularly around modernisation, individualist and collectivist cultural differences and the origins and development of their differing value systems.

The huge influence that the Baby Boomer generation has played in developing the current political, social and financial difficulties we are experiencing.