Josephine Brain
How I work
I’m a fully qualified Psychotherapist with experience of working with a broad range of emotional and relational issues. I offer warmth, sensitivity and deep acceptance to help clients manage distress, explore areas of inner struggle, and find their path to growth. I recognise that therapy can feel daunting, risky, or like a leap of faith. I hold the quality of contact with my clients at the centre of my practice. For me, building a safe therapeutic relationship involves a deeply respectful collaborative approach; careful attunement to how the therapy itself is impacting the client; creating space for all aspects of the client; and a willingness on the part of the therapist to meet with authenticity and humility.
I base my work in the three Humanistic modalities of my core training: Gestalt, Transactional Analysis and Person-Centred therapy, along with subsequent training in contemporary trauma practice and other relational psychotherapies. I use talking therapies and more practical and imaginative methods to facilitate awareness, explore stuckness, and work towards integration and greater fulfilment. I believe that the adaptations or patterns of responding to self, others, and situations, that may be causing us difficulty in the present, were our best ways of surviving an earlier environment, so I also work to facilitate awareness of these links with the past as a way of contextualising the present and fostering self-compassion.
About me
In my previous career I worked as an academic, specialising first in Modern History, then in Gender. The common thread is an abiding interest in the dynamics that structure human relationships, and how these shape our sense of self. My doctoral research, at LSE’s Gender Institute, explored how contemporary psychological and popular preconceptions about ‘anorexia’ delimit our understanding of (and hence our capacity to heal) this particular expression of distress.
I have a particular interest in trauma and what therapists call chronic or toxic shame: an enduring sense of worthlessness, badness, or non-belonging that is the legacy of unresolved early wounds and/or the experience of being part of a social group that has been disadvantaged, denigrated or persecuted. Such unresolved wounds are held ‘implicitly’ in the very musculature and neurochemistry of our bodies, and shape our everyday perceptions of self, other and the world, so I agree with much contemporary trauma theory that therapy is most effective when it attends to what is being held in the body.
Therapy Qualifications
Postgraduate (Clinical) Diploma in Humanistic Psychotherapy (Metanoia Institute)
MSc in Humanistic Psychotherapy (Metanoia Institute)
Diploma in Humanistic Psychotherapeutic Counselling (Metanoia Institute)
Post-Graduate Diploma in Contemporary Trauma Practice (Relational Change)
Professional Regulatory Bodies
I am a Registered Member of the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and a Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (MBACP) and I adhere to their ethical standards in my practice.
Contact me
josephine.brain@thepractice.org.uk
07960 978753
