On this page I share some things about myself: my journey to philosophy; how, and why, I became a philosophical counsellor and existential therapist; my wider therapeutic experience; and the meaning of my work with individuals, who seek a to create meaningful life in this time and place in history.
I grew up in the Mallee - a rural childhood in a harsh but evocative landscape. I came from a family of people who dropped out of school early and did physical work. In the heat and the dust of that environment it was easy to sense the cruelty of life. But in the silence of that heat there was also a sense of something else. One of my strongest childhood memories is of staring often at the horizon, which shimmers in that place, and which seemed like an evocation, a promise and possibility. So too, the magnitude of the sky. Even the falling-down timber houses and rusting equipment pointed to more. There was a feeling of reality as containing depth. That was a depth of stories - a feeling for other lives, births, deaths and passions, buried in the material memory of place - but also a feeling for existence itself. Existence as a question. In that heat, light and silence, it was as though the landscape held up things, each in turn, in a kind of question: not only what it is, but also that it is. Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. Later in life I would spend my days helping people for whom philosophy began in suffering. Philosophy begins in both. The time in which we live - late modernity - is a flat-land when it comes to meaning; philosophy can show us something more, or simply articulate "that more" which we intuit.
I dropped out of high-school and left home quite early, setting out on my own. I moved alone to Melbourne where I made a living as a musician for a couple of years, however, existential and spiritual questions took a pressing hold of me. One day I entered a church in the CBD and took home a book on Christian mysticism. This led to me spending a year in a monastery in Italy, which focused on Orthodox (Greek, Russian) Christian mysticism. Afterwards I returned to Australia and worked in a factory for a while, during which time I happened to buy a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations - a book of Stoic philosophy. This encounter with ancient philosophy and Stoicism set me on a lifelong trajectory. I made my way into The University of Melbourne, where I studied and eventually taught philosophy.
In the twentieth century, philosophy became a mere profession, with all the damage that happens to a deeper vocation when it is reduced to such a status. Ancient philosophy, by contrast, was not primarily academic or scholarly. Rather, it was a way of approaching life, a guide to life, a way of living. It was a search for truth, beauty, justice, happiness, goodness, drawing on the myriad forms of the presence of these values within oneself and in life. The practice of philosophy was a way of transforming the head, the heart, and the hands, and hence all of life. Consider for example the two strands of philosophy which have gripped me for most of my adult life: Platonism, and Stoicism, in their many forms. These are forms of rational spirituality, deeply theistic in some versions, spiritual-but-not-religious in others, and almost atheistic in others. I did very well academically, and I loved teaching, especially the interactive tutorials, but an academic career in philosophy was not the the right fit. My passion for philosophy was a passion for the best possible ways of living, for personal transformation in terms of the highest values and forms of meaning, based upon the wide view of history and humanity which philosophy aims at, and it was a passion for helping others to do that too.
During my undergraduate years studying philosophy I saw a counsellor for a bout of depression and found it beneficial. My only complaint - not their fault - was my sense that what I really needed was a form of help which combined the insights of both psychotherapy and philosophy. That is, my depression was in some ways mechanically psychological, for example having to do with adolescent and childhood trauma, but it was in large part philosophical, an emotional expression of a collapse at that time in my sense of personal meaning and worth, and of life's meaning and worth in the context of certain losses. Even the trauma from my adolescence with an abusive step-father in that tiny dusty town was not purely psychological, rather it reflected a confrontation with what philosophers call evil: with being under the power of another's narcissism and cruelty, and what that does to one's sense of the meaning of oneself and the meaning of life and the world. Our therapies are often expressions of late modernity's scientific reduction of everything. Late modernism is an age like any other: full of ideologies and myths, seen as simple and obvious truths. The major myth of our age is the picture of ourselves and the world as objects, seen through the lens of reductive science. Objects lacking in any real meaning or value, for reductive science intentionally ignores meaning and value, which means that its therapy does likewise. For example, living with the stress of the demands of conscious is therapeutically treated by dismissing such concerns neurotic, or simply as not quite real - as purely relative expressions of culturally constructed preference. The greatest value here is function and comfort.
This ideology reduces everything to meaningless objects, and then concludes that when we look - which is to look through this lens - we find that there is nothing beyond meaningless objects. It is as though I put on a pair of glasses which make everything appear in black and white, and then assert that there is no such thing as colour. This is scientism, not science. I place a very high value on science and reason, alongside other forms of knowing such as intuition, imagination, and what the Greeks called nous. Meaning and value are complex and varied, and like anything else prone to fantasy, but in certain important respects they are very real aspects of our lives. Through this experience of depression and of therapy, I became aware of a general need for a form of counselling which combined the psychological and the philosophical, which helps us not only through a psychological lens and psychological and techniques, but by helping us us face our challenges through a transformation of our minds and hearts at the level of value and meaning. This is in large part the work of philosophy. At the time, however, this notion of a philosophical therapy seemed like a mere ideal, a kind of fantasy.
Fortunately, those years saw the rise of "applied philosophy." People were busy loving or hating Alain de Botton, philosophers were entering primary schools and prisons to teach, people were gathering at "philosophy cafes" to discuss love and death, and Stoicism was about to explode in popularity. The scholar Pierre Hadot had alerted us to the fact that ancient philosophy was not merely academic, but rather, as I described above, it was a guide to personal transformation. In this context I became aware of another new movement, Philosophical Counselling, and I realised I had found my vocation. However, other philosophers who were interested in this field either did the usual academic thing of simply theorising about the activity in books and conferences, while failing to actually practice it and so to discover what it is or could be (that knowledge requires practical experience), while others who did practice it, did a terrible job of the counselling, often by engaging in pop-psychoanalysis while justifying their practice through naive and dismissive attacks on mainstream psychology. Looking back at what has been published since, I see that there were others who were practicing this new approach well, spread out across the world, but at the time guidance was sparse. I decided that if I was to pursue this properly, I would have to study counselling properly, so as to practice it with adequate sophistication and depth. I decided to study counselling to masters level, and to spend some years counselling in organisations dealing with many issues and gaining mainstream competencies. The ultimate goal was to offer a purely philosophical counselling in private practice, which drew on this rich and sophisticated background knowledge. I am now on the other side of that long project.
Counselling qualifications are only the entry point; I was told - and can now attest - that it is in doing the work that you learn the most. Indeed, the first decade of counselling is merely an apprenticeship. I spent twelve years working in counselling organisations gaining generalist experience in counselling and psychotherapy. I worked with a suicide prevention service, focused both on crisis intervention (I spent a lot of time talking people back from bridges) as well as family therapy to minimise such risks; a men's counselling service, with a special focus on rural and isolated men; an Australian Defense Force and a Vietnam veteran's counselling service; a bereavement-after-suicide service; and workplace counselling (EAP), providing counselling to employees, and interpersonal and motivational coaching to managers. During these years I was also a voracious learner; I took deep dives into the many mainstream approaches to counselling and psychotherapy by doing further (informal) study and applying that in my work, and by entering such therapies as a client to experience them from the inside. In 2012 I began my private practice as a space to focus on Philosophical Counselling and Existential Therapy, which I did part-time while also working in the above organisations, and while teaching academic philosophy. For a long time I wrote and presented on philosophical perspectives on therapeutic issues at both conferences and on a popular blog, which led to offers of academic teaching in counselling, however I eventually gave up all teaching - philosophical and therapeutic - in 2014 in favour of pure counselling. These days I work purely in private practice.
The point of my work is to combine the best of counselling, philosophy, and psychotherapy. I find much in psychotherapy that is incredibly useful in my goals of helping people understand themselves and create happier lives. At the same time psychotherapy is often reductive, and so I treat it as a tool box to draw on, in the context of my core work and identity as a philosopher and counsellor. My work as a Philosophical Counsellor is fundamentally to help people grow within themselves, and in their sense of life's meaning. I want to help you become your own engine of strength, wisdom, goodness, and happiness; and to encounter the world in better ways, developing better lenses than the nihilistic forms on offer in our flat-land, technocratic culture that is late modernism.
That's enough about me. Some years ago I left the city and my city office and moved back to the country, buying a cottage by a forest in central Victoria, from where I see people by phone and video. I balance this career with working again as a musician.
I grew up in the Mallee - a rural childhood in a harsh but evocative landscape. I came from a family of people who dropped out of school early and did physical work. In the heat and the dust of that environment it was easy to sense the cruelty of life. But in the silence of that heat there was also a sense of something else. One of my strongest childhood memories is of staring often at the horizon, which shimmers in that place, and which seemed like an evocation, a promise and possibility. So too, the magnitude of the sky. Even the falling-down timber houses and rusting equipment pointed to more. There was a feeling of reality as containing depth. That was a depth of stories - a feeling for other lives, births, deaths and passions, buried in the material memory of place - but also a feeling for existence itself. Existence as a question. In that heat, light and silence, it was as though the landscape held up things, each in turn, in a kind of question: not only what it is, but also that it is. Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. Later in life I would spend my days helping people for whom philosophy began in suffering. Philosophy begins in both. The time in which we live - late modernity - is a flat-land when it comes to meaning; philosophy can show us something more, or simply articulate "that more" which we intuit.
I dropped out of high-school and left home quite early, setting out on my own. I moved alone to Melbourne where I made a living as a musician for a couple of years, however, existential and spiritual questions took a pressing hold of me. One day I entered a church in the CBD and took home a book on Christian mysticism. This led to me spending a year in a monastery in Italy, which focused on Orthodox (Greek, Russian) Christian mysticism. Afterwards I returned to Australia and worked in a factory for a while, during which time I happened to buy a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations - a book of Stoic philosophy. This encounter with ancient philosophy and Stoicism set me on a lifelong trajectory. I made my way into The University of Melbourne, where I studied and eventually taught philosophy.
In the twentieth century, philosophy became a mere profession, with all the damage that happens to a deeper vocation when it is reduced to such a status. Ancient philosophy, by contrast, was not primarily academic or scholarly. Rather, it was a way of approaching life, a guide to life, a way of living. It was a search for truth, beauty, justice, happiness, goodness, drawing on the myriad forms of the presence of these values within oneself and in life. The practice of philosophy was a way of transforming the head, the heart, and the hands, and hence all of life. Consider for example the two strands of philosophy which have gripped me for most of my adult life: Platonism, and Stoicism, in their many forms. These are forms of rational spirituality, deeply theistic in some versions, spiritual-but-not-religious in others, and almost atheistic in others. I did very well academically, and I loved teaching, especially the interactive tutorials, but an academic career in philosophy was not the the right fit. My passion for philosophy was a passion for the best possible ways of living, for personal transformation in terms of the highest values and forms of meaning, based upon the wide view of history and humanity which philosophy aims at, and it was a passion for helping others to do that too.
During my undergraduate years studying philosophy I saw a counsellor for a bout of depression and found it beneficial. My only complaint - not their fault - was my sense that what I really needed was a form of help which combined the insights of both psychotherapy and philosophy. That is, my depression was in some ways mechanically psychological, for example having to do with adolescent and childhood trauma, but it was in large part philosophical, an emotional expression of a collapse at that time in my sense of personal meaning and worth, and of life's meaning and worth in the context of certain losses. Even the trauma from my adolescence with an abusive step-father in that tiny dusty town was not purely psychological, rather it reflected a confrontation with what philosophers call evil: with being under the power of another's narcissism and cruelty, and what that does to one's sense of the meaning of oneself and the meaning of life and the world. Our therapies are often expressions of late modernity's scientific reduction of everything. Late modernism is an age like any other: full of ideologies and myths, seen as simple and obvious truths. The major myth of our age is the picture of ourselves and the world as objects, seen through the lens of reductive science. Objects lacking in any real meaning or value, for reductive science intentionally ignores meaning and value, which means that its therapy does likewise. For example, living with the stress of the demands of conscious is therapeutically treated by dismissing such concerns neurotic, or simply as not quite real - as purely relative expressions of culturally constructed preference. The greatest value here is function and comfort.
This ideology reduces everything to meaningless objects, and then concludes that when we look - which is to look through this lens - we find that there is nothing beyond meaningless objects. It is as though I put on a pair of glasses which make everything appear in black and white, and then assert that there is no such thing as colour. This is scientism, not science. I place a very high value on science and reason, alongside other forms of knowing such as intuition, imagination, and what the Greeks called nous. Meaning and value are complex and varied, and like anything else prone to fantasy, but in certain important respects they are very real aspects of our lives. Through this experience of depression and of therapy, I became aware of a general need for a form of counselling which combined the psychological and the philosophical, which helps us not only through a psychological lens and psychological and techniques, but by helping us us face our challenges through a transformation of our minds and hearts at the level of value and meaning. This is in large part the work of philosophy. At the time, however, this notion of a philosophical therapy seemed like a mere ideal, a kind of fantasy.
Fortunately, those years saw the rise of "applied philosophy." People were busy loving or hating Alain de Botton, philosophers were entering primary schools and prisons to teach, people were gathering at "philosophy cafes" to discuss love and death, and Stoicism was about to explode in popularity. The scholar Pierre Hadot had alerted us to the fact that ancient philosophy was not merely academic, but rather, as I described above, it was a guide to personal transformation. In this context I became aware of another new movement, Philosophical Counselling, and I realised I had found my vocation. However, other philosophers who were interested in this field either did the usual academic thing of simply theorising about the activity in books and conferences, while failing to actually practice it and so to discover what it is or could be (that knowledge requires practical experience), while others who did practice it, did a terrible job of the counselling, often by engaging in pop-psychoanalysis while justifying their practice through naive and dismissive attacks on mainstream psychology. Looking back at what has been published since, I see that there were others who were practicing this new approach well, spread out across the world, but at the time guidance was sparse. I decided that if I was to pursue this properly, I would have to study counselling properly, so as to practice it with adequate sophistication and depth. I decided to study counselling to masters level, and to spend some years counselling in organisations dealing with many issues and gaining mainstream competencies. The ultimate goal was to offer a purely philosophical counselling in private practice, which drew on this rich and sophisticated background knowledge. I am now on the other side of that long project.
Counselling qualifications are only the entry point; I was told - and can now attest - that it is in doing the work that you learn the most. Indeed, the first decade of counselling is merely an apprenticeship. I spent twelve years working in counselling organisations gaining generalist experience in counselling and psychotherapy. I worked with a suicide prevention service, focused both on crisis intervention (I spent a lot of time talking people back from bridges) as well as family therapy to minimise such risks; a men's counselling service, with a special focus on rural and isolated men; an Australian Defense Force and a Vietnam veteran's counselling service; a bereavement-after-suicide service; and workplace counselling (EAP), providing counselling to employees, and interpersonal and motivational coaching to managers. During these years I was also a voracious learner; I took deep dives into the many mainstream approaches to counselling and psychotherapy by doing further (informal) study and applying that in my work, and by entering such therapies as a client to experience them from the inside. In 2012 I began my private practice as a space to focus on Philosophical Counselling and Existential Therapy, which I did part-time while also working in the above organisations, and while teaching academic philosophy. For a long time I wrote and presented on philosophical perspectives on therapeutic issues at both conferences and on a popular blog, which led to offers of academic teaching in counselling, however I eventually gave up all teaching - philosophical and therapeutic - in 2014 in favour of pure counselling. These days I work purely in private practice.
The point of my work is to combine the best of counselling, philosophy, and psychotherapy. I find much in psychotherapy that is incredibly useful in my goals of helping people understand themselves and create happier lives. At the same time psychotherapy is often reductive, and so I treat it as a tool box to draw on, in the context of my core work and identity as a philosopher and counsellor. My work as a Philosophical Counsellor is fundamentally to help people grow within themselves, and in their sense of life's meaning. I want to help you become your own engine of strength, wisdom, goodness, and happiness; and to encounter the world in better ways, developing better lenses than the nihilistic forms on offer in our flat-land, technocratic culture that is late modernism.
That's enough about me. Some years ago I left the city and my city office and moved back to the country, buying a cottage by a forest in central Victoria, from where I see people by phone and video. I balance this career with working again as a musician.