This page is about my journey and work as a counsellor.
I grew up in north-western Victoria in a family of tradesmen and farmers. My love as a teenager was jazz, and I dropped out of high-school at 17 and made a living as a musician in Melbourne for a few years. However a passion for understanding life gripped me, to point that I left everything at 20 and entered a monastery in Italy. A year later I returned to Australia and, after working in a factory by day and reading philosophy by night, I studied my way into The University of Melbourne where I majored in and eventually taught philosophy.
Philosophy for me is less an academic and more a practical passion: it is about facing hardship well; it is about finding meaning; it is about crafting a good life, it is about living more fully. For that reason I was drawn to philosophers like Plato, the stoics, and the existentialists. For that reason also, I decided to study a degree in counselling at the same time, so that I could combine the two disciplines. This has become my career. Today I am a master's qualified counsellor with decades of experience, and am registered at the most senior level with the Australian Counselling Association. I no longer teach philosophy, but work purely as a counsellor and psychotherapist.
During my first decade as a counsellor I worked within organisations with the aim of becoming broadly competent. I counselled within services as diverse as bereavement, men's counselling, suicide intervention, career and workplace/management coaching, and veteran's support. I took deep dives into the various mainstream approaches to therapy - humanistic, cognitive-behavioural, psychoanalytic. I pursued professional projects of passion, such as piloting the first nation-wide government-funded service in video counselling for rural men. Alongside all of this I created a successful private practice in Melbourne, offering a philosophical approach to counselling known as Existential Therapy.
These days I work purely in private practice. My expertise is "counselling for life challenges, well-being, and personal growth" and I make it very clear that this is different to a clinical mental health professional, such as you gain from a psychologist or psychiatrist. While they work with disorders, I work with life: with its challenges, its possibilities. I help people tap into their capacity for healing, growth, and strength, as well as their potential for wisdom, motivation, and happiness. My technique in therapy involves a feedback loop between solving the particular problems you bring to counselling, while helping you grow as a person. My work differs according to each client's personality; it is deeply contemplative with some clients (for example helping somebody develop their philosophical or spiritual sense of life's meaning) and very practical with others (for example helping a client develop confidence in dating or at work). There is a balance of differences in how I work - pragmatism and depth; the psychological and philosophical; reason and practicality versus emotion and intuition - the musician, the monk, the philosopher, from a very rural and practical background, is all deeply embedded in my who I am as a therapist.
While I have a deep capacity to listen to people's pain, I can do so precisely because I have a powerful sense of life's goodness and meaning. That is no accident: like many people I have suffered plenty, and had to struggle with my own despair, fear and the like, but I've worked hard at transforming myself inwardly and outwardly over the years, and I bring that substance to my professional work. I am a pluralist at heart, which means I respect people's different paths and orientations in life, but with my lifelong passion for spirituality, philosophy, and therapy, I have developed a capacity to help people think deeply, dig deeply, and create profound change in themselves and their lives.
That's enough about me. In 2018 I bought a cottage by a forest in central Victoria, where I do this work from home, while once again working as a musician on the side, and continuing my own lifelong path of personal growth and happiness.
I grew up in north-western Victoria in a family of tradesmen and farmers. My love as a teenager was jazz, and I dropped out of high-school at 17 and made a living as a musician in Melbourne for a few years. However a passion for understanding life gripped me, to point that I left everything at 20 and entered a monastery in Italy. A year later I returned to Australia and, after working in a factory by day and reading philosophy by night, I studied my way into The University of Melbourne where I majored in and eventually taught philosophy.
Philosophy for me is less an academic and more a practical passion: it is about facing hardship well; it is about finding meaning; it is about crafting a good life, it is about living more fully. For that reason I was drawn to philosophers like Plato, the stoics, and the existentialists. For that reason also, I decided to study a degree in counselling at the same time, so that I could combine the two disciplines. This has become my career. Today I am a master's qualified counsellor with decades of experience, and am registered at the most senior level with the Australian Counselling Association. I no longer teach philosophy, but work purely as a counsellor and psychotherapist.
During my first decade as a counsellor I worked within organisations with the aim of becoming broadly competent. I counselled within services as diverse as bereavement, men's counselling, suicide intervention, career and workplace/management coaching, and veteran's support. I took deep dives into the various mainstream approaches to therapy - humanistic, cognitive-behavioural, psychoanalytic. I pursued professional projects of passion, such as piloting the first nation-wide government-funded service in video counselling for rural men. Alongside all of this I created a successful private practice in Melbourne, offering a philosophical approach to counselling known as Existential Therapy.
These days I work purely in private practice. My expertise is "counselling for life challenges, well-being, and personal growth" and I make it very clear that this is different to a clinical mental health professional, such as you gain from a psychologist or psychiatrist. While they work with disorders, I work with life: with its challenges, its possibilities. I help people tap into their capacity for healing, growth, and strength, as well as their potential for wisdom, motivation, and happiness. My technique in therapy involves a feedback loop between solving the particular problems you bring to counselling, while helping you grow as a person. My work differs according to each client's personality; it is deeply contemplative with some clients (for example helping somebody develop their philosophical or spiritual sense of life's meaning) and very practical with others (for example helping a client develop confidence in dating or at work). There is a balance of differences in how I work - pragmatism and depth; the psychological and philosophical; reason and practicality versus emotion and intuition - the musician, the monk, the philosopher, from a very rural and practical background, is all deeply embedded in my who I am as a therapist.
While I have a deep capacity to listen to people's pain, I can do so precisely because I have a powerful sense of life's goodness and meaning. That is no accident: like many people I have suffered plenty, and had to struggle with my own despair, fear and the like, but I've worked hard at transforming myself inwardly and outwardly over the years, and I bring that substance to my professional work. I am a pluralist at heart, which means I respect people's different paths and orientations in life, but with my lifelong passion for spirituality, philosophy, and therapy, I have developed a capacity to help people think deeply, dig deeply, and create profound change in themselves and their lives.
That's enough about me. In 2018 I bought a cottage by a forest in central Victoria, where I do this work from home, while once again working as a musician on the side, and continuing my own lifelong path of personal growth and happiness.
