My Approach

Ms Joanne Jackson is a Systemic Family Therapist with over 30 years of experience. She specialises in working with children and families where there are serious and complex risks, emotional, behavioural and social functioning. Ms Jackson works with individuals, couples and whole family systems in a way that enables family members to interact with their own dominant ideologies or discourses about what their life should be like. The focus of this work is enabling understanding to emerge through the process of making sense of behaviour as a relational communication pattern that gets played out in the relationships that people have around them. Her area of expertise is Parent-Infant work, Attachment, Narrative Therapy, Mentalisation, working with parents with High Conflict, Parental Alienation and Contact and Residence Disputes. Ms Jackson is also an academic tutor where she teaches students and professionals in the field of mental health. Joanne is warm, empathic, and engaging. She has a natural flair for finding strengths in people, particularly when they don’t see it in themselves. She has a belief that everyone has the ability to change and enabling people the opportunity to discover that is her mantra for work.

About Me

I have worked within Child and Adolescent Services (CAMHS) since 2000, predominantly undertaking mainstream CAMHS work. From September 2006 to July 2013, I was employed in the capacity of Honorary Tutor at Kings College London University at the Institute of Psychiatry where I taught on the MSc/Graduate Certificate in Family Therapy course for 7 years. I was involved in delivering weekly seminar sessions, tutorial with students and marking student assignments. In 2009 I undertook further studies, an MSc in Psychoanalytic Developmental Psychology. After completing this course, my organisation supported me, together with a colleague, in setting up and running a parent-infant therapeutic group where we coupled the concepts of systemic and psychoanalytic ideas in running the group. The group was very much an attachment based group where the focus was building the bond between the mother and infant. Within my remit as Systemic Psychotherapist I also set up and offered live supervision within the context of a systemic clinic, which I ran in the very traditional sense with pre and post session and live team behind the screen.

I am currently employed as a Family Therapist/Social Worker, at the Anna Freud Centre. My current position has different strands to it, including court assessment work, therapeutic systemic family therapy with children and families and specialist parent-infant work. I also work a few sessions on the CYP-IAPT training, where I teach and supervise Functional Family Therapy through systemic lenses. I am also working on a project with Building Blocks Children Centre in Luton where I am developing an attachment based parent-infant group.

I work with

• Children and young people
• Couples
• Families
• Groups
• Individuals
• Private healthcare referrals

Special Interests

Like all UKCP registered psychotherapists and psychotherapeutic counsellors I can work with a wide range of issues, but here are some areas in which I have a special interest or additional experience.

Types of Therapies Offered

• Family and Systemic Psychotherapist
• Family Therapist
• Systemic Family and Couple Psychotherapist
• Systemic Psychotherapist

What I can help with

• Abuse
• Age-related Issues
• Anxiety
• Bullying
• Couple Issues
• Cultural Issues
• Depression
• Divorce
• Employment Difficulties
• Family
• Identity Problems
• Online Counselling
• Parents
• Phobias
• Physical Abuse
• Post-Traumatic Stress
• Race Issues
• Relationships
• Separation
• Sexual Abuse
• Spirituality
• Step Families
• Stress
• Supervision
• Telephone Counselling
• Training
• Trauma
• Workplace Counselling