Maureen Biggar

After working as a Samaritan volunteer for eight years I decided to build upon this valuable experience and started a diploma in counselling and psychotherapy, choosing a training which had as it’s core model the ‘person centred’ (Rogers) values of the Samaritans. Over the four years of my training I also studied transactional analysis (TA) and Gestalt therapy. During my 20 years in the NHS I was exposed to other models of therapy, such as Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to name a couple. However, I did not train in these methods. I worked with a wide variety of mental health problems which were termed from ‘moderate’ such as anxiety to ‘severe’ such as major clinical depression with suicidal intentions. I discovered that I particularly liked working with young mothers who were having difficulties with their parenting. I am a great believer in helping mothers and fathers to form secure and loving relationships with their infants and toddlers as soon as they start to experience difficulties. Sometimes this would be done through family work, but now that my practice is virtually all online I find that working with a parent on their own or two parents together via video can be beneficial. This kind of work is generally referred to as ‘attachment based’. I do, however, miss seeing some of the most troubled clients who are not able to afford private counselling. For this reason I keep a space in my diary to accommodate someone on a Pro bono basis. Another area of interest is working with people who believe they are on the autistic spectrum or have been diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum. I am not a diagnostician, but over the years have worked with clients who have found our therapeutic relationship beneficial. Being an older therapist has equipped me with many life experiences both positive and negative that I find extremely useful in my day-to-day work. Working online has given me a degree of freedom and flexibility that was not available in the NHS, which was labouring under constraints of time and money…