Personal profile

I’m 57 years old and live in an apartment with my partner Rangimoana Taylor and our cat on the city side of Mount Victoria, Wellington, New Zealand.

 

I have been active in counselling and related fields since 1982 and as a professional celebrant since 1990, and I have taught workshops for counsellors on “complicated grief”—a nonsense really because all grief is complicated—suicide, and sexuality issues.

 

I am interested in the work of Lev Vygotsky, the Russian Marxist psychologist, who focuses on the interacting development of language, consciousness, behaviour and social organisation, and emphasises the importance of words as psychic tools. This approach fits well with the emphasis that narrative therapy has on stories as psychic tools. I have done many workshops in narrative therapy in Australia and New Zealand. 

 

My therapeutic and counselling work is in a very different domain from my work with ceremony, but they are also connected. Therapy and counselling involve re-authoring your story so it fits better. Ceremony is a way of performing a new development in your story and getting social support for it.

 

I have a BA (Hons) in Political Science and Asian Studies (VUW), and a Diploma in Counselling (Applied) (CIT), and I am a Member of the New Zealand Association of Counsellors. I am registered with ACC as a sexual abuse counsellor and with Victim Support as a homicide counsellor.

 

I was a founding member of the National Association of Loss and Grief, and of the Celebrants Association of New Zealand, and have served on the national bodies of all these organisations, and was the chair of the Steering Committee that established the Celebrants Association. I was a founding trustee of the New Zealand Aids Foundation, and am now a life member. I am also a founding member of the Wellington Gay Welfare Group, and have served on the Gay Switchboard it operates since 1982. 

 

 

Publications include: