About me

Life and career

I’ve been an author, journalist and broadcaster in the UK and abroad. I’ve spent a number of years promoting sexual awareness through the arts and media.

Continuing Professional Development

The research I did as part of my Masters in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of East London has now been published in a peer reviewed journal: Sexual and Relationship Therapy, part of Taylor & Francis. How can therapists and other healthcare practitioners best support and validate their queer menopausal clients?

I have regularly attended Pink Therapy’s ‘Advanced Clinical Discussions: Kink’ since 2013. In 2017-18 I attended a six-month long cycle of group supervision sessions focused on Out Of Control Sexual Behaviour, run by Dominic Davies and Doug Braun-Harvey.

In 2014 I started The London Gender, Sex and Relationship Diversity Practice. Six of us offer counselling, psychotherapy, mentoring and consultancy with a GSRD focus. We also offer training on a wide range of topics to media, charities and training organisations.

To keep my practice up to date, I read books and journals and attend conferences and seminars. Here is a selection of CPD from the last two years:

Confer: Valerie Sinason – the truth about trauma and dissociation Part Two
British Menopause Society 30th Annual Conference
Confer: The Relational Montage of Eating Disorders – Professor Jean Petrucelli
Confer: Deb Dana – The Polyvagal Guide to Relational Safety
Aromantic Competent Care
Confer: Valerie Sinason – the truth about trauma and dissociation Part One
Confer: the Race Conversation
Pink Therapy: Freedom to be Queer in UK – at what cost?
Pink Therapy: How do therapists and clients manage their self-care in GSRD hostile environments?
Feminist Studies Association: Feminist Perspectives on Neurodiversity and Neuronormativity
Confer: Working with Toxic Shame
Pink Therapy November 2020: Four seminars on Non-Monogamy
BME Voices: Black Trauma in the Therapy Room
TASHRA training: The Psychobiology of Kink
Confer online conference module: Post-Slavery Syndrome
Radical Therapists Network: Resting in grief and creatively processing shame
TASHRA training: Clinical Training Workshop: Kink-claiming the Trauma: From Sexual Assault to Sexual Empowerment
Pink Therapy – Kink on Pink – Living and Working in Kink Communities
Pink Therapy – Kink on Pink – Understanding Adult Baby And Diaper Lovers
CICS – Working with Domestic Violence and Abuse
Carolyn Spring – Working with Dissociative Disorders in Clinical Practice
Carolyn Spring – Dissociation and DID – The Fundamentals
Pink Therapy: Queer Desire
Confer: A Couple State of Mind: Insights into Couple Relating and Therapeutic Work with Couples
Confer: Queering Psychotherapy
Pink Therapy: Intersecting Identities
Confer: The Use of Psychedelics in Psychotherapy

Training given/Events/Facilitation

‘How do menopausal queers experience healthcare services?’ at the British Psychological Society’s POWES (Psychology of Women and Equalities Section) conference.
‘Menopause – Agent of Queerness?’ at AltSex NYC.
When the Kinks Won’t Sync – Working with Mismatched Desires in Kink Relationships – part of Pink Therapy’s Kink on Pink season.
Queer Menopause – Where Gender, Sexuality and Age Collide (talk) at the Pink Therapy Queer Desire Conference.
‘Menopause, Sex and Hormones’ (talk) at Transitional States at Birkbeck in May 2018. (In 2018 I was on the advisory board of Pharmacosexuality: The Past, Present and Future of Sex on Drugs, a new research project funded by a Wellcome Trust Seed Award in Humanities and Social Sciences.)
I have trained other therapists about gender/sexual diversity in the therapy room.
‘The Sex Escalator’ (talk) at Hackney Attic.
I have solo facilitated, and held space for other teachers, at a number of experiential workshops and festivals.

Previous employment

Honorary Psychotherapist, Bexley Psychotherapy Service, Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust (2012-14). Two years clinical placement at a highly respected NHS Trust.
Counsellor, The Centre for Better Health, Hackney (2012-13). A year providing counselling for established community organisation that is also a social enterprise and community hub.