My Journey into Psychotherapy
A Lifelong Concern with Human Experience
My lifelong involvement in psychotherapy and personal development began in my teenage years—perhaps even earlier. My father often recalled being taken aback by the questions I would ask as a child about life, human nature, and existence.
Because of this naturally enquiring mind and a deep interest in people, I gradually became someone others turned to. Friends, family members, peers—and at times even strangers—felt able to open up to me, finding support, empathy, and, frequently, new perspectives. I took this role seriously. From early on, I felt a strong commitment to helping people face and navigate the challenges of existence.
Alongside this was an equally strong drive to understand: to explore people’s inner worlds, their relationship with life, what shaped them, what troubled them, and why—both individually and collectively. This concern with both the individual and the collective has remained central to my work. It is one of the reasons why my approach to psychotherapy has never been limited to the inner life of the individual alone, but has always involved the broader structures—relational, social, cultural, civilisational and existential—within which human experience takes shape.
At college, I developed a close relationship with my philosophy teacher, who was also a part-time psychotherapist. Around the age of 17, I began reading Freud and other foundational texts in psychology—a pursuit that has never ceased.
Academic Formation and Inclusive Investigation
Driven by an insatiable curiosity about human beings and the workings of human psychology, I embarked on an extensive academic journey, first in Paris, where I was born and raised, and later in Edinburgh.
In Paris, I completed an MPhil and undertook four years of doctoral research at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), a world-renowned institution dedicated to advanced research in the human sciences.
Throughout my studies, I deliberately avoided narrow specialisation. I have always believed that understanding human beings requires a broad, integrated perspective.
Over time, this became a more precise methodological conviction: human phenomena should not be divided in advance according to disciplinary boundaries, or reduced to one explanatory level. As such, I explored multiple disciplines—while maintaining a central focus on psychology, the social sciences, the history of ideas, and philosophy.
This was the beginning of what later became a more explicit methodological position. My work gradually moved toward an inclusive investigation of human experience: an inquiry in which no relevant dimension of human life is excluded in advance, and in which psychological, social, cultural, historical, bodily and personal phenomena are studied in relation to one another.
Early Counselling Work and the Limits of Client Narratives
Alongside my academic work, I began practising counselling part-time—initially as a volunteer, and later professionally from 2002.
At that time, my approach was somewhat unconventional: I worked with clients in their own homes.
This proved to be deeply informative.
Observing how people lived, in addition to hearing their experiences, offered valuable insights into both their subjective experience and the concrete circumstances of their lives.
This allowed me to tailor my therapeutic work with greater precision.
This early way of working was important for the development of my therapeutic approach, but not simply because it gave me additional information about clients’ lives. What it showed me, with striking clarity, was how removed from reality clients’ own narratives could be. Their accounts were often highly biased or distorted, as though they could not see aspects of their lives that were directly in front of them.
A significant part of my therapeutic work therefore involved helping clients learn to see their own lives more accurately: not only what they felt or thought about their situation, but what was actually taking place in their relationships, habits, choices, living environments, and ways of positioning themselves in relation to others and to life. It also involved helping them situate their lives within a larger picture of human life, since clients often lacked a realistic understanding not only of themselves, but also of other people’s psychology and of the broader conditions within which human beings live.
This experience confirmed something that has remained central to my work: therapy cannot rely solely on the client’s narrative as if it were already an adequate account of reality. The narrative must be listened to carefully, but it must also be investigated, clarified, revised where necessary, and brought into closer contact with the realities it attempts to describe.
Research on Socialisation and the Person–World Relation
After completing two undergraduate degrees, three master’s degrees, and two doctoral programmes, I undertook a four-year postdoctoral project in 2006, focusing on medical education and publishing research on human development and socialisation.
My research on socialisation played an important role in the development of my thinking. It showed me, first, that some of the most fundamental human psychological processes are already implicitly theorised within everyday conceptual language and discourse. Socialisation, for example, is not only a technical term used by social scientists. It also refers to a process that ordinary language already grasps in partial and often revealing ways.
Second, this research led me to understand socialisation as highlighting the original externality of the human person in relation to the world — that is, the fact that the person is not originally identical with, or absorbed into, the social world. By this, I do not mean that the person is originally formed by the world, or that their psychological life is reducible to social or collective psychology. I mean the opposite: the human person has a psychological life and personality of their own, which precede full worldly or societal participation.
Socialisation concerns the modification of the dynamics of the relationship between person and world.
It involves presence to the world — the extent to which the person exposes themselves to the world, allows it to become present to them psychologically, and becomes immersed in it — as well as acceptance or refusal of its authority, and practical involvement in the ways of living and being that the world offers.
Third, this meant that socialisation could not be adequately understood as a simple process of internalising social norms. More fundamentally, it concerns the structure and dynamics of the relationship between person and world: a relationship involving presence or absence, acceptance or refusal, subjection to authority or resistance, practical involvement or withdrawal. In this sense, my work on socialisation helped me see that one of the central questions of human psychology is the relation between the person and the world.
From Academia to Psychotherapy
At the end of this period, I made a decisive shift away from academia to pursue formal vocational training in psychotherapy. My aim was to bring together three strands:
* my academic work
* my practical experience in counselling
* rigorous clinical training
This move was not simply a career change. It reflected a deeper conviction: that the study of human beings must remain answerable to lived experience, and that psychotherapy offers a privileged setting in which psychological understanding can become both concrete and transformative.
I trained with Life Force in Colchester, a BACP-accredited institution known for the depth and breadth of its programme, which integrates the major psychotherapeutic traditions.
The Development of Grounded Psychology and GIP
Between 2013 and 2016, I worked with two counselling organisations: Havering and Brentwood Bereavement Service (HBBS) and Renew Counselling. I then established my private practice in Chelmsford in 2015.
I was advised that building a practice in a saturated field would be uncertain. However, my experience has been quite different. My practice quickly grew and continues to operate at full capacity.
I believe this reflects something specific in what I offer: not simply a variation within existing psychotherapy, but a different way of working. My primary reference is not a school of therapy, a learned model, or an inherited theoretical orientation. It is reality itself: the psychological phenomena as they are lived, expressed, observed, distorted, avoided, organised, and gradually clarified within the therapeutic process.
This does not mean that I ignore established theories. They can be useful, and I remain critically engaged with them. But they are not the primary source or authority of my work. I do not begin from them and then apply them to the client’s material. I begin from the facts of experience and from the psychological realities that organise them. Theory, when it is used, must remain answerable to those realities.
Over time, this work has led me to develop Grounded Psychology, the theoretical and methodological foundation of my practice, and Grounded Investigative Psychotherapy, its clinical application.
Grounded Psychology is my attempt to understand human experience as accurately as possible by starting from lived, observed, reported and expressed facts, rather than from inherited psychological categories or abstract theoretical systems.
Grounded Investigative Psychotherapy applies this orientation to therapy: it preserves the therapist’s active role in the exploration of the client’s psychological life, while making the reduction of interpretive bias a central methodological requirement.
In this sense, my therapeutic work is investigative without being doctrinal. I do not apply a fixed model to the client’s experience. I work from the client’s own material, while drawing, where relevant, on a framework developed through long-term empirical, theoretical, clinical and personal inquiry.
Personal Development as a Source of Understanding
While my academic training, research, and professional experience have all been essential, I consider my personal journey to be equally formative.
My life has included significant challenges: prolonged illness in childhood, experiences of bullying, parental conflict, feelings of inadequacy, social isolation, cultural displacement, existential and spiritual questioning, anxiety and depression—including periods in which I seriously contemplated suicide—as well as multiple experiences of loss.
I have also spent many years in therapy myself, working with a wide range of practitioners, while actively pursuing my personal development through sophrology, reflective practice, and other forms of inner work.
These experiences have not only shaped me; they have taken me into the depths of the human psyche.
My personal journey has been one of the decisive sources of my understanding of human beings, not because it gave me a merely subjective perspective, but because it opened access to dimensions of psychological life that academic research, by itself, could not have revealed.
Through this process, I came to discover not only who I am, but something more fundamental: what I am as a human being.
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This involved the discovery of being—of my own being, and through it of structures of human existence that cannot be adequately grasped from the outside alone.
This personal work has provided key elements that allowed me to make full sense of my academic research. In particular, it revealed to me the personal dimension of human psychology and its fundamental role. The personal is not a secondary addition to the physical or the social-cultural. It is so central that the other dimensions cannot be properly understood without it, because they are always lived, received, interpreted, accepted, refused, and transformed by a person.
For this reason, I consider deep personal development not simply as a component of the research process, but as one of its indispensable conditions. Without it, inquiry into human psychology risks remaining external, intellectualised, and incomplete.
This personal journey has provided something that no academic or professional training alone could offer: a lived understanding of suffering, change, becoming, and being. It is this foundation that enables me to relate deeply to my clients, to understand the complexity of their experiences, and to accompany them in a way that is both grounded and effective.
It has also been essential to my research. In my view, the therapist’s own person is one of the instruments through which psychological understanding is developed. This does not mean relying on subjectivity alone, nor does it mean treating personal experience as sufficient in itself. It means that serious inquiry into human psychology requires the transformation and refinement of the person who conducts the inquiry.
Personal development allows the therapist to recognise dimensions of human life that may otherwise remain invisible: the bodily, emotional, relational, existential and personal structures through which experience is actually lived. It also helps reduce the risk that the understanding of others will be distorted by unexamined assumptions, unresolved defences, inherited representations, or merely intellectual constructions.
The Integration of Research, Practice and Personal Development
My work has therefore developed through the integration of academic research, clinical practice, personal development, and the sustained effort to overcome the biases that affect our understanding of human beings. The result is a form of psychotherapy that aims not only to support clients emotionally, but to help them develop a deeper, more grounded and more operational understanding of themselves, others, and life.
Relevant qualifications
Napier University, Edinburgh
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PhD in Psychology
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MSc in Psychology
Life Force, Colchester (BACP-accredited)
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Diploma in Therapeutic Counselling
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Certificate in Counselling Skills
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Award in Counselling Concepts
University of Portsmouth
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PgDip in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris)
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PhD in Sociology and Philosophy (doctoral research undertaken)
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MPhil in Sociology and Philosophy (Distinction)
Nanterre University (Paris)
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MA in Philosophy
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BA in Philosophy
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BA in Social Anthropology and History
Professional Accreditation
I am a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and adhere to the BACP Ethical Framework for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
BACP accreditation is a recognised quality standard for experienced practitioners who can demonstrate independent, competent, and ethical practice. It involves a rigorous application and assessment process and is distinct from simple registration.
