Cathie Long
Cathie Long is a multi-award-winning independent social worker and a psychotherapist in advanced clinical training. She has an MA in Autism. In her late fifties, Cathie discovered that she is Autistic with ADHD. Many of Cathie’s Autistic clients have experienced oppression and discrimination because of their previous BPD/EUPD misdiagnosis, with professionals (including Family Court judges) preferring to accept the original misdiagnosis thus denying and discounting their lived experiences, often adding to the Autistic client’s perception “I’m Not-OK, You Are-OK” Therefore, the essence of Cathie’s therapeutic work is to support self-acceptance and the client to start believing “We are ALL-OK”.
Neil Keenan
Neil Keenan (PTSTA(P)) has specialised in working with neurodivergent clients for a number of years, and the majority of his clinical work is with people in this population. He has adapted both his therapeutic relational style and TA theories to make them useful to the clients he meets. Over this period, Neil has encountered and supported people who have specialist skills and thinking by virtue of their different way of thinking. Many of these people are high achievers in their professional life, working in leadership positions. He supports clients who face a combined challenge of having a different relational style to the majority, as well as occupying senior organisational roles that further isolate them.
Neil is also the training director of The Wyvern Institute of Psychotherapy and Counselling, which is a UKATA Registered Training Establishment based just north of Bristol. He is passionate about training new psychotherapists. The Wyvern Institute training programme emphasises the significance influence that awareness of neurodivergence (or, as Neil prefers, ‘neurovariance’) must have on the way therapists think and work with this client group. In his teaching at The Wyvern Institute, Neil incorporates the essential therapeutic accommodations, and adaptations of TA theories, that therapists need to make to meet the needs of neurodivergent clients.