A deeper understanding
of addiction and its roots

A trusted and experienced specialist in addiction and compulsive disorders

I am a psychologist and psychotherapist with many years of experience working with individuals struggling with alcohol, drugs, addictions and compulsive behaviours.

John brings to his work a deep warmth, sensitivity and an unusual capacity to listen beyond what is immediately presented. Addiction may be the place where suffering has become visible, but it is rarely the whole story.

Behind alcohol, drugs or compulsive behaviour there is often a person who has been trying, sometimes for many years, to find refuge from an inner life that has become too painful, too lonely or too difficult to carry. John’s work begins there.

Rather than treating suffering simply as something to be eliminated, he listens for the life within it — for what has been wounded, neglected, silenced or lost, and for what may still be seeking expression. In this sense, recovery becomes more than abstinence or the management of symptoms. It becomes a care of the whole person, including the life of the soul.

There are times when a person can no longer return to the life they inhabited before. The old ways of surviving have ceased to sustain them, while the shape of what comes next cannot yet be seen. Such times can feel frightening and profoundly disorientating, but they can also become thresholds.

John accompanies people through these places with patience and compassion, helping them listen more deeply to their own experience and gradually discover a way of living that is no longer organised around escaping pain.

Real recovery can then become something larger: not simply freedom from addiction, but a movement towards meaning, relationship, belonging and the possibility of feeling fully alive again.