Dominic Regan

I work privately on Thursdays and Fridays.

I can offer Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy online or face-to-face (Redbridge or Walthamstow).

I am registered with the Association of Child Psychotherapists (ACP) which is the gold standard organisation for child psychotherapy and one of the few core disciplines and recognised registering bodies for the NHS.

I also offer Psychodynamic Counselling to adults and am registered with the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists (Â鶹ԭ´´).

Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy + Psychodynamic Counselling with Adults

I am a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and a psychodynamic counsellor of adults. I have worked in mental health settings, with adults and children, for over 28 years - twenty-one of these within the NHS. I am a Consultant, leading the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy discipline in a UK County (across nine CAMHS clinics); and have been the Manager and Lead of a Children Looked After Team for several years in a London borough.

My specialisms include trauma, fostered and adopted children, anxiety, depression, attachment issues etc. I have extensive experience supporting parents, foster carers, residential workers, schools and social workers - offering consultation, supervision and training. I am psychoanalytically/ psychodynamically trained to doctoral level; and have an MSc in Psychodynamic Counselling with adults.

In psychotherapy a key goal is to help people process past losses and hurts and come to better understand and honour their true selves. For many children past losses and traumas remain unresolved, inside them, but find expression via challenging behaviour rather than through words. Helping adults to understand these communications from children is a passion of mine and an area I described in an article in early 2019 in the Journal of Social Work Practice: How the challenging behaviour of a traumatised child tells their trauma story and is part of their recovery. 

I offer 1:1 psychoanalytic psychotherapy to children, young people and their parents or carers; and psychodynamic counselling to adults; I also work with parents and children together at times.

I have full professional indemnity insurance.

My private practices are based in South Woodford (Lily House), London; and in Walthamstow. I also offer online and telephone treatments.

I trained for 3 years on the MSc in Psychodynamic Counselling for adults (Birkbeck); and for 5 years on the Doctoral level Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy training at the British Association of Psychotherapists (BAP - now IPCAPA > BPF).

Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy can be helpful for the following kinds of issues:

Depression

Trauma

Abuse

Self-harm

Anxiety

OCD

Self-awareness; confidence, self-esteem

Issues with friendship, sibling conflict, loss, bereavement 

Clinical experience has taught me that when children present with emotional difficulties they are often manifesting a reaction to challenges and issues that began life outside them or before, even, they were born. In my assessment work, I co-create with families a space where we can investigate problems together, share ideas and formulations – even painful ones. It is important to consider not only what are the problems in the here and now, but what the child’s developmental history was, what the home environment is like including what stressors the family currently face, and also what the childhoods of parents were like. It is important that parents feel heard and not judged.

I find it particularly important to put into words the unconscious meaning behind children’s behavior and the emotion it stirs up. I find when adults are helped to understand children's communications, then change and improvement become so much more possible. It is, in a sense, a process of translation: behavior into words.

Sometimes, following assessment, we may decide that the best treatment is to work with the parent and child together. Parent/ child Psychotherapy is particularly suited to younger children (less so adolescents). If this interests you please see the next page.

When 1:1 Psychotherapy is indicated as suitable by the assessment a child will then be seen 1:1 either weekly or fortnightly.

I start with a brief discussion over the phone - at no cost - to hear from parents about their concerns and describe how I work. If we agree to proceed, we then begin an assessment consisting of  meetings with parents; and then meeting the child, and finally, a review meeting with parents to consider the assessment findings and decide whether regular Psychotherapy is indicated.

In child psychotherapy I ensure the child feels safe, listened to and understood. It is a confidential space, though regular reviews with parents can give an overview of themes in the work. Much of the work of therapy is achieved through play as well as reflection on the relationship that the child strikes up with the therapist. Children express and communicate their preoccupations via these two areas and it becomes possible to gently raise the child’s awareness of their deep inner feelings and, ultimately, to help them to talk about and process them. Children in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy often develop greater self-understanding, and a capacity for using words rather than actions to communicate their feelings.

Ideally parents will be seen periodically for work that supports the child’s therapy. Reviews of the work and the progress are also important. All of this can be discussed at the initial stage.

For psychodynamic counselling with adults, again, I would start with a telephone call, at no charge, to discuss what the patient is seeking. Ideally, we start with an assessment that considers childhood, development, adolescence and the journey of the patient since those times. I endeavour to create a safe, curious space that allows patients to reflect on their past and present life, relationships and challenges - and for us to consider together what may be going on for them on unconscious levels. We examine patterns of thinking and behaviour and consider, too, secondary gains in the symptoms. This work can be transformational and help patients become the person they were always meant to be.

I am available to deliver trainings on Thursdays and Fridays and, by arrangement, Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. 

Trauma Story Training

Why Choose this training?

To help children recover from trauma; to skill-up professionals in caring roles; to avoid/reduce placement breakdown; to reduce staff burnout; to reduce challenging behaviour; to understand what a child's behaviour is telling us; to meet the requirements of inspection in respect of attunement to children's emotional needs.

Trauma Story Training

Rationale of the training:

Trauma story training is able to help professionals to make sense of children’s challenging behaviour and understand how it links to the original trauma. Children’s behaviour unconsciously communicates to us the trauma that they endured. Until adults understand these links and make sense of the trauma story, children will find it difficult to overcome and process that trauma. In a sense they need us to join the dots (between the original trauma experience and their behaviour in the present) and bear witness to their pain. If we fail to do this and, for example, simply try to modify challenging behaviour, the trauma stays with them and they are often driven to increase the challenging behaviour - a bit like shouting louder!

Trauma Story Training gives professionals like Social Workers, teachers, foster carers and residential keyworkers et al strategies and tools for making sense of the challenging behaviour of children – and offers ways to respond to it. The real challenge of challenging behaviour is for us adults to hear, feel and understand a child’s emotional pain and by putting words to it, in the context of a consistent and safe relationship, to help them to recover from the trauma.

Core Trauma Story Training skills:

Learning how to acknowledge the emotion that is elicited in us by the challenging behaviour of children. We need to harness this communication and make sure we can survive the feelings, not act them out, and learn to understand and use them.

Learning to see the symbolic quality of much of the challenging behaviour of traumatised children and how it represents and communicates their original trauma experience. Using help, guidance, strategies and tools - adults can become more confident about how to begin to put words to the child's communications. 

Learning how to speak to a child in a way that shows we understand their trauma story; and learning how to de-escalate.

Trauma story training - Learning outcomes:

Trauma story training aims to deliver key skills that develop in adults a greater capacity for reflecting on the behaviour of traumatised children and the emotional fallout they experience as they do this. The skills include empathy, an understanding of the symbolic quality of children's behaviour i.e what it communicates, reflection on our feelings and how they can inform us of what children have suffered in the past; and help with how to contain and manage children when their emotions are in full spate.

It is striking how helpful keyworkers, social workers, teachers and foster carers et al have found these concepts. They have told me it has helped them to separate from those powerful feelings within them and become more reflective, more curious and more analytical. This approach allows the adults to re-centre and ground themselves; they can better understand the feelings that are being lodged inside them by the child and instead of acting on those feelings, in ways that can be uncontained or destructive or just unhelpful, they usually find themselves feeling greater concern and empathy for the child – as well as a deeper, more felt understanding of what the child suffered in the past. I sum this as the adults ‘getting’ the child’s trauma story.

When the Trauma story approach is applied by adults who are in caring roles, children can be greatly moved by having their trauma story understood and named. Their behaviour and feelings, which hitherto may have seemed chaotic and ‘naughty’ to them, become coherent and understandable – rational even. Children who have experienced this stage of the work can be freed from a cycle of seeing themselves as negative, destructive and ‘bad’ and start to see themselves in a more compassionate way – and their trauma begins to heal.

Who is this training for?

Social Workers, residential workers, teachers, mentors, foster carers, parents, mental health professionals.

Bespoke training packages:

The core of the training is the Trauma Story approach with its focus on the emotional affect on staff/ adults and the symbolic meaning of children's challenging behaviour. However, training can be delivered in a modular way and include additional aspects of mental health teaching/training that are relevant to the needs of any group or organization. It can include:

1. Understanding the Trauma Story Approach

2. Using the Trauma Story Approach - when a child is in a 'hot' state and will not listen; when a child is 'cooler' and can hear some reflections - getting into the detail of how we respond including what are our default approaches.

3. When a child has not developed the emotional capacity for using relationship and words to understand and manage their feelings, professionals will need to understand what emotional capacities need to be fostered in the child and how to achieve and measure these. I use an 'Emotional Scaffolding Grid’ to describe, for example:

The importance of early assessment - how to gauge where a child is developmentally and what their emotional capacities are. How to tailor the attunement of a placement/ school to the child’s needs, particularly in respect of hearing their trauma story.Examples of activities staff can do that foster the required emotional skills in children.

How to evidence development of these skills in children.

How to foster in a child a capacity to use relationship.

How to attune to a traumatised child.

Embedding these principles within the whole organization - the central place of supervision whether 1:1, group or peer; supervision for management.

I work in private practice on Thursdays and Fridays. I currently supervise online, though can arrange f2f if this is preferred.

I have extensive experience of supervising a range of therapists working in the NHS. I have supervised ACP registered Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists (at bands 8b, 8a and 7) and also offered Service Supervision to Child Psychotherapy trainees; as well as training-Psychiatrists for a year; also, several clinical psychologists; integrative psychotherapists and Primary Mental Health Workers; and offered consultation to Senior Social workers and therapists in both Local Authorities and Private Fostering Agencies. 

I have also offered therapeutic supervisions to Social Workers where aspects of a case are unhelpfully mixing with their personal, past experiences. I have offered group supervisions to teams of Social Workers for over nine years.

My NHS supervisees have had roles based in schools, Pupil Referral Units, and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services at tiers 3# and 2#. The C&A Psychotherapists I have supervised have trained at the Tavistock and also at the Independent school - IPCAPA (BPF).

Additional Training:

My supervisory practice was bolstered in 2014 by completing the nine month Tavistock training ‘CPD 49 The task of supervision for Child Psychotherapists’.

I have also undertaken Safeguarding Children supervision training at an NHS Trust.

How I work:

I encourage my supervisees to feel safe and respected, able to bring their experiences, questions, successes and challenges/ disappointments for us to consider in a relaxed way. Together we create a space where it is possible to reflect on the complex processes involved in therapy in an open, curious way. I encourage free association, a focus on the counter-transference that supervisees' experience in their patient work and also focuses on the task they face and the wider organisational context, as well as on our learning.

Good supervision, in my experience, has at its heart a deep respect and curiosity about human processes, especially the unconscious ones; as well as humility. I also bring to the task resoluteness in order that learning that is necessary is considered and not avoided.

I am comfortable working with Kleinian, Freudian and Independent theoretical traditions. My approach to supervision bridges these traditions bringing together, for example, containment, play and focuses on projective processes, developmental processes, the environment and task at hand.

A first session would be used to explore what a supervisee is looking for in supervision; to talk about the role(s) that the supervisee has; answer any of their questions about my experience and approach to supervision; and to contract as to how we agree to work and what the frame would be, including timings and costs etc.