Our Mission
T-Junction has a dual focus in the work it does with children and young people. On the one hand, we prioritise keeping children safe in all the ways that will enable them to become more resilient individuals, better able to learn themselves and construct their own identity as good human beings. On the other hand, we prioritise creating an environment which has the relaxed feel of a warm family home where children and young people may, for example, have a hug from their parental figures when they need it and can participate in some of the decision-making. To that end we …..
Have a lot of conversations with children about their safety
Are super-observant about any shifts in children’s moods, and what they might need from us.
Recognise our ongoing need to make ourselves emotionally available to children in our care.
Ensure we establish good lines of communication with school and ask our young people about how their day has been.
Invite them to reflect with us on their thoughts & feelings – & the behaviours that result.
Try to establish what matters to them and why it matters.
Hold our young people in mind, even when off shift, confident in the knowledge that our mindfulness is a strong protective factor.
Psychotherapist
In our quest to ensure that all team members are continuously developing the insights and therapeutic toolkit to meet the needs of T-Junction’s children and young people, we recruited a psychotherapist. She spent the first part of her career in teaching – working at universities, colleges, secondary schools and a young offenders’ institution. After twenty-eight years in the profession she left her post as an academic head of department and school counsellor and set up her own counselling practice. After four years she was invited to become the Director of Therapy and Training at a large fostering organisation and she did this for ten years before resigning to do more freelance work. She is a senior associate with Kate Cairns Associates, an organisation that delivers training to schools and local authorities on attachment and trauma and does both training and writing for them, as well as her own freelance work.
She is a graduate of Durham and Edinburgh Universities and has an MSc from London University in Counselling with a particular focus on psychodynamic work with adolescents. Her professional accreditation is with BACP; she is thus MBACP and also UKRCP. As well as her counselling qualifications she is an experienced dyadic developmental psychotherapist, having trained with Dan Hughes in USA over a four-year period and she holds the DDP advanced diploma.
She is married with two birth children and many more foster children, having fostered over a twenty-seven year period. She has both foster grandchildren and birth grandchildren.