Deborah is an Emotional Health Specialist who is passionate about helping children, young people, and adults maintain and recover their psychosocial well-being. Deborah actively promotes safeguarding practices, and she is most interested in best-practice responses to acute and chronic mental ill-health across the lifespan: infant, child, and adult traumatology. Deborah receives regular supervision-on-supervision for complex matters and her training in clinical supervision has included supervising teams of practitioners in family and relationship services, supervising teams working in family mediation (face-to-face & online services) and community and forensic mental health practitioners working in the mental health sector.

Deborah is also a trained child consultant with experience in post-separation children’s counselling. Her therapeutic approaches might range from interpersonal psychodynamic therapy, to play therapy and art-based therapy, to narrative therapy (e.g., my dream place) including child-parent psychotherapy. Deborah has worked as a family mediator (FDR) registered for 10 years with the Federal Attorney-General’s Department and now specializes in mentalisation-based therapy (MBT). As such, she has published in the American Psychology Association on the topic of child psychotherapy, childhood trauma, and recovery. Deborah has also published in the Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia (PACJA) on treatment for rumination disorder and women’s friendships.

In addition to advanced mental health counselling skills, child and adult psychotherapeutic intervention, including psychodynamic case formulation, one of Deborah’s key strengths is networking with various stakeholders—parents and primary caregivers, engaging with housing and tenancy agencies, mental health services, primary health services, school communities, child safety officers, domestic violence agencies including court, family law, and forensic and criminal justice personnel.