experience
Since finishing a psycho-analytically based Social Work course at the University of Adelaide I have specialised as a psychotherapist using the Person Centered approach described in the awareness therapy pages. I found this approach the most ethical, effective and efficient. It is not intrusive and minimises the risks of burning out or making things worse for others,
I retain a Social Worker's bias of viewing people and problems in the context of family and community.
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Extensive experience in a range of different settings.
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In private practice in Adelaide, Australia as a psychotherapist from 2003
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psychotherapy with couples, families, children, young people and groups, particularly short-term at times of crisis and with complex problems..
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psychiatric social worker in community and emergency response, acute wards, and a therapeutic community.
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Children and young people - street work, foster care, adoptions, and early childhood services
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corrections
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medical
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aged care
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disability
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alcohol and other drug counselling
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vocational counselling
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advocacy for individuals and disadvantaged groups.
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education – primary, secondary and tertiary education, student-centered education and home education and supervising staff, volunteers and social work students in a variety of workplaces.
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consultation and supervision
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Community Development facilitating setting up community-based services including child care, schooling, food and housing cooperatives and legal services.
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extensive experience of organisational structures, processes, aims, policy, procedures, formal and informal complaint procedures and dispute resolution in community organisations.
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environment and human rights campaigns.
influences
As I write it is still fashionable to dismiss psychoanalytic theory and practice. Usually on hearsay without having read or tried it..Often angrily and emphatically. But this story requires mentioning psychoanalysis even though it might be controversial.
I worked in Psychoanalytic settings for a few years drawing on observations, introspections and healing experiences of supervisors, co-workers and many writers in the vaste and diverse psychoanalytic tradition. This has been invaluable to learn how to listen, understand what I am hearing and begin to understand who is listening. Also the discipline of observation of infant maturation and children at play. And the world of fantasy. And the exploration of basic functions like sex, eating and elimination as foundations of personality and behaviour. And how thoughts and feelings manifest themselves in the body and in physical illness.
Freud began by capturing the insights of hundreds of years of European philosophers into the nature of mind and society and developing them into ways of healing. As a natural historian his observations were detailed and his insights ground-breaking and inspiring.
I have more or less ignored the later popularised theories of Freud and Jung including their theories of personality as I find them unhelpful and too complex and ambiguous to test.
I have benefited from the support and ideas of countless therapists from different schools of thought, face to face and through their writings. I have taken the approach of asking someone who knows. Someone who is functioning well and gets results. Not necessarily those who are officially approved or famous, in fact I have learned to approach those sources with a bit more caution. I have been interested in what actually works rather than what is plausible, acceptable or profitable.
copyright (C) John Brasted 2008
updated 9. Feb. 2012
