Wealth of knowledge

I am a Social Worker, Psychotherapist, Clinical Supervisor, Trainer, and subject matter expert who is passionate about providing and advocating for therapeutic, relationally centred care to vulnerable people and their support systems.

My professional background is as a Social Worker and Psychotherapist who started my journey as a practitioner eighteen years ago in Child Protection and Out of Home Care (foster, kinship, and residential/institutional care) practice. Since that time, I have grown my passion and interest in working with vulnerable people and their support systems through public and private Child and Adolescent Mental Health practice, Team Leadership, as well as Psychotherapy across the lifespan. As much as trauma bends and breaks bonds of connection and trust, I never cease to be inspired by the power of safe and real relational connection to heal. These days I work in private practice as a Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Trainer with a growing focus on working with children and young people in Out of Home Care, their families, and care systems.

I also have sixteen years of experience supervising practitioners of various disciplines, including Social Work, Psychology, Counselling and Teaching. I have been providing group supervision for the last eight years to teams within the mental health, disability, and child protection sectors. In addition to this, I have been providing training to practitioners across various sectors in various topics over the past nine years, including Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), sustaining practice in complex settings, trauma informed/responsive practice, and attachment based approaches, such as Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP). My passion extends to connecting with practitioners, providing support, and building communities of practice.

I have embraced a relationally and systems informed leadership role within the Clinical Social Work profession, Mental Health, and Out of Home Care practice settings. This leadership has developed into formal collective practice and advocacy with other relational practitioners to help reform a system that still too often does not understand and promote access to safe and healing relationships for its most vulnerable members. To this end, I am a founding member of two collectives, The Third Way Collective (a network of relationally informed therapeutic practitioners working in OOHC in which members of the collective are connected through an open and democratic network which emphasises the central role of relationships in therapeutic practice), and the Centre for Relational Care (CRC), which has as its central purpose the reform of the Out of Home Care Sector in Australia towards relationally informed policy and practice.

I am also an accredited Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP) Practitioner, and am currently undertaking consultant and trainer practicums in this model. When completed (by June 2025) I will be one of only a few local consultants and trainers in this leading trauma and attachment informed, relational model of therapeutic practice. DDP is a world leading, relational model developed by Dan Hughes to help heal deep trauma wounds in children, particularly those children experiencing Out of Home Care (foster, kinship, residential and other forms of care).

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