JULIAN TOMKINS

BA Hons (Cantab), PGCE, Dip Sc Psychotherapy, MBACP

Psychotherapist

ABOUT ME

 

I qualified as a Gestalt Psychotherapist in 2010. After 20 years in industry I was a schoolmaster for 15 years and my classroom experience has been invaluable in my clinical practice. I taught unhappy children and witnessed first-hand the struggles some children and teenagers face in the school environment and in their family lives. Consequently much of my work has focused on helping adolescents and young adults - an age group I am now so familiar with. This can be a challenging age and adolescent problems are often complex and lacking in obvious symptoms.

The young person is defining who they are and how they fit into the world as an adult and their relationships with friends, family and particularly parents will change dramatically. There is often distance and conflict in a family at this stage. Young people and their families can, however, benefit from professional support and guidance during this critical period of evolution.
As a therapist much of my work centres on working with the distinction between doing and being: stuckness so often emanates from too much doing and not enough being, or living. Gestalt therapy is founded on 3 core principles, or attitudes – an appreciation of actuality, of awareness, and of responsibility. Though 3 different attitudes in appearance, they are all facets of a single mode of being in the world. Responsibility needs to be understood as being response-able and entails being present, being here. Being truly present is being aware. With awareness comes the realisation that we have choices about how we wish to be, we become response-able.

One of the key lessons of working previously in industry was witnessing the pride and satisfaction that people got from doing often very repetitive and dull tasks, when responsibility for doing that job was pushed as far down the line as possible and individuals took ownership of that responsibility. As with teaching, watching people learning and growing, feeling empowered was both humbling and deeply moving. Teaching also taught me how to be with people: balancing a need to be challenging and at the same time being supportive and empathic. Training as a psychotherapist required a considerable amount of new learning. The reward has been to integrate it with a healthy dose of life experience, which I regard as being my therapeutic credentials.

​

LANGUAGES

​

Fluent in English and French.

​

HOW I WORK

 

Clients often think of the therapist as the expert who can fix them. Changing this perspective is the first task to be undertaken. If therapy is to be successful a vertical relationship, as between expert and client, needs to be made horizontal, as between two people meeting in relationship, meeting in their full humanity, where the course of therapy is determined together. It is about supporting, discovery and learning – by both parties.

How clients can become healthier is a matter to be worked out in each individual case. The client’s experience needs to understood and respected: events trump things; happenings, occurrences or events are their primary form of reality. My way of working is to meet the
other person where they are available for meeting, creatively adapting my approach to meet that person. Contemporary integrative Gestalt does not emphasise the person but the person in context. It places as much influence on the environment (or field) as it does the person coming for counselling.

Clients need to feel understood and safe. An empathic inclusion of the other is the natural
condition, central to my way of working and vital to the creation of a supportive, connected
relationship. Therapy is frequently painful and it is through the development of such a relationship that the chance of a successful outcome of therapy is increased. It is my belief that the therapists who deal with people with this understanding (of soul) can help them to understand and often to open the door to healing.

​

As well as face-to-face sessions I provide Skype Therapy and/or telephone sessions tailored to accommodate the needs of busy professionals or people from different time zones.