Name: Caitlin Buon
Address: Melrose, Scottish Borders, TD6, GB
Telephone: +447762709376
Price range: £60.00 - £80.00

About me

I provide therapy to adults of any age for up to 20 sessions. I work with individuals, couples, and relationships. Sessions are offered in person, online or by phone.

I value and respect difference and diversity and work with all people, beliefs, and ways of being - including gender, sexuality, and relationship diversity.

I offer a caring and confidential space to explore what is happening in any area of your life, how to bring meaning to a situation or find ways to go onward.

My approach is to work with each person’s unique experience and way of making meaning about their life. I work in a collaborative, co-creative and compassionate way that respects each person’s autonomy and wisdom to know or discover what they need. It is not my role to diagnose or pathologize a person’s experience. Rather it is to accompany the people I work alongside, with a focus on how the person experiences themselves, others and their lifeworld.

I am committed to what Johnella Bird (2003) has described as the 'development of processes where discovery is privileged' over and above a strict adherence to the 'structural boundaries produced by models'. I have evolved an approach that draws on ideas and practices that support this process and especially from narrative, psychodramatic and attachment-based therapies.

My approach is best described as phenomenological and dialogical, meaning that I stay as close as possible to what is happening for the person who is trying to give meaning to their experience and giving regard to the dialogue emerging within that person's struggle and between us in our conversations.

The other critical aspect of my way of being as a therapist is in giving space to knowing and naming how the use of power in a person's life has created or contributed to their happiness, situation or suffering. For me, a great deal of a person's suffering, my own included, is entirely understandable where power has been used to marginalize a person and 'other' them. Issues around social justice are therefore central to my understanding of the ongoing process in becoming a person and a therapist.

I am open to working with any aspect of a person’s life unless I have a reason to recommend that you work with another more suited therapist/facilitator which we will explore together. Please get in touch with any questions and to discuss availability.

Training, qualifications & experience

My practice as a psychotherapist began in Australia some 35 years ago, and Scotland has been my permanent home since 2001.

I come from a professional background in social justice, psychotherapy and human rights. My formal training in Australia was in community development and community counselling (addictions), Narrative Therapy and mediation. I worked within a wide range of contexts and social justice issues. My BSc in Stress Physiology led to further training in Somatic Trauma Therapy and Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy. I qualified as a Psychodrama Psychotherapist in 2015 and specialised in working with complex trauma and dissociation over the past twenty years.

More recently, I have moved away from offering long-term trauma therapy and now focus on offering short- to medium-term therapy that is grounded in my critical phenomenological approach.

In addition to working with individuals, couples and groups in my private psychotherapy practice, in 2001 I co-established a specialist consultancy to design and deliver facilitated processes for individuals and groups experiencing interpersonal conflict or affected by patterns of ineffective communication. The focus of this work is to develop ways of working that draw on ideas and methods related to complexity, spontaneity, diversity, and empowering cultural practices.