About me
Hi. My name’s Daniel, and I’m a Hawke’s Bay based counselling psychologist, registered with the New Zealand Psychologists Board. Simply put, I’m a therapist passionate about helping people understand, untangle and unravel the things that keep them stuck and trapped, and helping them move forwards, finding freedom, life and thriving. A great psychotherapist called Irvin Yalom tried summarised what it is to be a therapist in the simple phrase, “being a fellow traveller”.
I was raised in Norway, though I’m also half British. After leaving school, I lived a few years in California. After working with a couples therapist there, I discovered that I would like to become a therapist myself. So, I moved to London and completed a BSc in Counselling & Psychology, before going on to do a Doctorate in Counselling Psychology. My family and I moved to Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, in 2019.
As a clinician, I’ve practiced in the UK, Norway and now in New Zealand, working for the national health services in all three countries, as well as for NGOs. I currently run my own practice in Havelock North, and do some public speaking on mental health and well-being.
Counselling Psychology
Psychology is a broad field, with many different specialities. Counselling psychology is the speciality area of psychology that explores how we get stuck in patterns of behaviour, relationships and dynamics that are unhelpful, dysfunctional or painful, and vitally, how we can get unstuck and change. Counselling psychology focuses on the use of different forms of psychotherapy and counselling in helping people get unstuck.
My approach to psychotherapy
There are many, many different models of psychotherapy. That means different theories concerning how we develop as people, where psychological stress and suffering comes from, and how we grow and get better. These models in turn determine what therapy looks like in practice.
Despite the vast number of approaches, most of these broadly build on one of three foundational models, or a mixture of the three. These three are: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Humanistic Therapy, and Psychodynamic Therapy. I primarily draw on Humanistic and Psychodynamic models in my work, specifically Object Relations, Ego Psychology, Attachment Theory, and Person-Centred Therapy.
Central to my approach to psychotherapy is the belief that our past experiences in relationships have an impact on our lives today. This is because our brains are built to constantly create blueprints of the world, so as to better predict what to expect in the future. In relationships, this means that our experiences early on in life create blueprints for what to expect form relationships in the future. From research we know that these “blueprints” are hard to change and often effect how we relate to others for the rest of our lives. For example, if I have experienced related rejection in my life, then that would likely be part of my blueprint of what to expect in relationships. Thus, even if the rejection happen when I was a child, I would likely enter into adult relationships believing that the other person will ventrally reject me. I might then hold back from investing in the relationship, thus minimising the pain with rejection comes, or I might try to reject the other person first. These blueprints can be largely unconscious, which means you might see yourself behave in a certain way, or feel a certain way, and have no idea why. People often come to therapy because they feel stuck in relationship patterns that they wish they could change, but can’t seem to get out of or fix.
How do we change?
My way of working is built on the foundation that it is the quality of relationship between my clients and myself that brings change and healing. Relationships break us, and relationship heal us. This belief is strongly rooted in decades of research and evidence.
My approaches to psychotherapy are all evidence-based, meaning that there has been a significant amount of research evidencing their effectiveness.