About Christian
Christian is a Mental Health Social Worker and Psychotherapist with over 20 years of experience in therapy and counselling roles. He has completed a Master of Clinical Family Therapy at Bouverie Centre. Christian accepts referrals across the whole age range including children, adolescents, and adults. Christian provides counselling and psychotherapy from a systemic family and relationship perspective to individuals, couples, and families. Christian is extremely passionate about working with couples and families in joining with relationships and supporting them to develop their own strengths, resources, and growth through challenging times.
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It is in relationships that we have our biggest learnings in life, they provide us with the largest range of emotions from the greatest joys to the deepest suffering. Our most pivotal relationships occur in our families. Through accessing the power of relationships, we can enter the emotional landscape of ourselves and our repetitive relationship patterns with others. Curious exploration of this becomes the road map of the therapeutic process. When applied to exploring the presenting challenge our collective aim is to work towards growth and healing. Relationship exploration includes the relationship we have with oneself, partners, children, family of origin, wider community and even connection to nature. Other family members and significant others can be invited into the space either in person or explored through curious reflection.
The process is helpful to explore stuckness in family interrelationship patterns and dynamics, relationship breakdown and conflict, repetitive destructive relationship patterns, loss and grief, relational trauma, underlying mental health diagnoses (e.g. depression, anxiety), substance use / addiction, sudden life changes, life transitions and anything that impacts upon the human experience.
Extended Biography
As part of my therapeutic orientation the self of the therapist is very important and has a significant influence on the therapeutic process. As such, I have provided an extended biography on who I am and how I have developed my approach to decide if working together will be a good fit.
Over the past 20 years I have worked in the community sector in various counselling and psychotherapy roles. A few years ago, I moved to Margaret River and commenced working in private practice. Prior to this, I lived and worked in various communities. These included various communities throughout Western Australia, Victoria, United Kingdom and Japan. My intention was to grow through exposure to different perspectives and experiences. My variety of roles include tertiary community mental health teams (children, youth, and adult), drug and alcohol counselling (for individuals and families), child protection, forensic counselling programs, youth work and the education sector.
I initially completed a Bachelor of Science (Double major in Psychology) and then went on to complete a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychology. Both had a particular focus on developmental psychology. This was extremely useful for me to develop a theoretical understanding of the human experience, with my particular interest across all life stages. Earlier in my career I had a pivotal learning experience when working at CREATE Foundation (a support and advocacy for Children and Young People involved with the child protection system). Working with these children and young people I learnt the extremely valuable lessons of their bravery and resilience. I also discovered the necessity of listening to the voice of the child to improve wider systems. Here I made a significant theoretical shift from previous beliefs of protecting children to respecting and learning from them. I learnt that listening to their voice and supporting conditions for growth allowed their own strengths and resources to grow. This experience has significantly shaped my therapeutic orientation today and how I try to support all people I work with.
With this orientation, I then worked in statutory Child Protection roles (both Victoria and then WA) to further support vulnerable families. Whilst challenging, I found it extremely rewarding to widen the lens to access strengths and resources of the wider family system and community. The aim was to join with families through their complex challenges towards joint led relationship healing. These experiences shifted me from an individual focus traditionally found in psychology to the wider biopsychosocial systems approach of social work and then eventually family therapy. After these roles, I continued exploring family therapy and incorporated learnings into more therapy specific roles including drug and alcohol counselling for both individuals and families. I then started my Master of Clinical Family Therapy at Bouverie Centre and worked in a variety of community mental health teams during and after my training. Teams included adult, youth and then child and adolescent mental health teams. In these roles I supported the team with incorporating a family therapy focus.
Bouverie provided me a rich learning environment of family therapy theories, principles and skills. I describe this as giving me the practical solid foundation (or head) of family therapy. I have been extremely fortunate to then develop the emotional experiential learning (or heart) of family therapy through supervision with Maurizio Andolfi and then furthermore with Aldo Gurgone. Of course, my biggest experiential learning teachers are the families, couples, and individuals whom I am fortunate to work with.
On a personal level, I have been fortunate to travel and live in different communities and to connect with people of different backgrounds. I have been fortunate to travel to numerous countries (often vastly different to my own cultural background) and these experiences have taught me so much with regards to my personal understanding of the shared human experience. A companion on these travels has been my long-term partner, Sophie and our shared love of surfing and other adventures. This has led us to put our roots down in the beautiful Southwest of WA. All of these combined has supported us into the biggest adventure of all which is parenthood and our joined family experience.
Qualifications:
Master of Clinical Family Therapy – Bouverie Centre at Latrobe University
Master of Social Work (Qualifying) – Monash University
Postgraduate Diploma of Psychology – Monash University
Bachelor of Science (Double degree in Psychology) – University of Western Australia