Alan Archibald

I provide high quality warm and containing supervision.  I have 24 years experience in acute mental health and psychodynamic psychotherapy.  I also have had 4 years experience of psychoanalytic experience at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust.  

I work by inviting supervisees to bring there clinical cases and we explore together the unconcious communications between your patient and yourself.  We look in detail at the session and I help to uncover what might be going on by facilitating your existing skills and hoping to add to them.  

It can sometimes feel persecutory in supervision but I try to provide a space that you feel safe to explore your feelings in the counter transference and try to help you make sense of whats going on.  

I use a mixture of models but primarily klienian and freudian, I have been known to also add some Winnicott and Bion dependant on what comes up in the material.

I have a special interest in trauma cases and due to my acute experience I work well in risk management advise and recommendations. I can and do offer safeguarding advise and support.

I'm keen to help my supervisees not only with there cases but also more practical elements of there practice.

I work online at the moment so why not contact me today and see what spaces I have?

We can use the space as you want in the first session.  I find it helpful for you to talk a little about your practice, background and some cases from your patient list.  We can then discuss a case or discuss a risk, practice management, a patient session, cpd or development issue.  

I am working online at the moment and have a variety of times and days avaiable.  These are on a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday afternoon and evening.  Just ask and I can see what I can do. 

The therapy I offer is called psycho-dynamic psychotherapy.  It centers on early life experiences and how they affect your relationships, behaviors and feelings now. My approach allows for a space to be able to think together about these things and what impacts on them and makes them more challenging. We can work together to find patterns and life experiences, in the moment, that will give us answers as to why. The therapy I give allows you to find clarity in the confusion and provide a space for us to face this challenge together.

Wether the pain was caused through biological illness or through trauma I knew I had a passion to help people work through what they had been given and get the best life they could. I saw that the friends I grew up with didn't have the opportunities I did and became interested in what made the difference, what could be changed and what could be overcome.

I have a particular interest in treating trauma and this comes I think from my experiences growing up and the people I had the fortune to meet along the way. The ones that make the biggest difference in my life tended to be the ones that inspired hope that change can occur and things can get better.

I have a passion for the use of psychodynamic psychotherapy which focuses on relationships past and present. I am flexible, I think, and one of my strengths is the ability to know when to be flexible and when to stick to the therapy and have faith it will make a difference. I am human and although the therapy experience can feel a little one sided I can assure you that I have you in mind and hold what you bring with the respect, dignity and seriousness it deserves.

Although I do not bring a lot of myself in the sessions and I believe the sessions are about your needs not mine, I do allow some of my personality to come through and hope that you will feel safe and secure when we work together towards the future you want not nessessarily the one you might feel you have been given.

I have a particular interest in infant loss and have completed training around this with the infant loss foundation including rainbow baby training.

I work online currently.  I hope to offer a warm and open approach to what you bring and hope that we can work together to find some answers to how you are feeling, why and how might that change.

I offer an initial consultation in the first instance.  This allows me to get to know a little more about you and what you are bringing to the therapy.  It will also allow you some space to explore what you are bringing and to see if this form of therapy is helpful to you.  I hope that you find the sessions helpful and insightful.  I like to think of the therapy as a journey we make together with many twists and turns that can lead to all sorts of interesting and helpful places, even at the time it might not feel that way.  The most important thing to remember is that your not alone on this journey and I will be there with you.