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The Reformulation '16 plus one' Interview

Hepple, J., 2011. The Reformulation '16 plus one' Interview. Reformulation, Summer, p.55.

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Jason Hepple puts the questions to the most recent past-chair of ACAT, Mark Westacott.

Mark says: I hail from the beaches of the Gower peninsular where I was born and raised. Water is still a passion for me as is psychology and psychotherapy. My career has taken me on many journeys and to many locations and I have now settled with my partner and our two Labradors on an ancient windmill site in the Cambridgeshire countryside.

1. Welcome to the interview - how are you doing? It’s a beautiful sunny morning, so very well
2. In another life I would have been a… ? Freud, Jung or Pavlov? It would have to be Jung. All that stuff about how his career was decided when the kitchen table suddenly split in two (a message from beyond that he should jettison a career in surgery) just gets your spine tingling.
3. Desert island luxury? It would have to be my iphone (with Solariphone solar charger of course). I’d like to be able to say something like “the complete works of Tolstoy” or “Wagner’s Ring cycle” but I’ve got an iphone and I’m addicted; it’s hopeless.
4. Bach, Mahler or Radiohead? It’s the spine thing again, so it’s got to be Mahler. I like Bach but there’s not enough passion, not really. Mahler runs the whole gamut of human emotions and more. It’s transcendental stuff. The dogs prefer Radiohead though, always wagging their tails to it. Mahler sends them running.
5. Greatest hero / heroine? I think it would be Tolstoy. In many ways he paid a huge personal price for sticking to his own values and beliefs and in so doing won the admiration of a whole nation. He also attempted the ultimate integration – of all the world’s spiritual belief systems.
6. Cat, dog or Nintendo? Woof woof
7. Dream meal? There’s a little place I know in Wales called Fairy Hill that does a mean Lava Bread on toast.
8. Who are you in the ‘CAT Village’? I feel like I’m in transition and that my identity is shifting; from Chair to Previous-Chair / Trustee. It’s like a move from the hussle and bussle of the town centre to a rather tranquil and attractive square where I can sit chatting and watch the world pass by.
9. Why did you become a psychotherapist? Did you see those old Hitchock movies? Just the atmosphere of them; the crazy psychopath, the smooth and suave analyst, the long psychotic dream sequences and always the build up to the final denoument got me hooked.
10. Who has been the biggest influence on the way you work? It would have to be Chess Denman. A supervision session with her is very much like a Hitchcock movie.
11. Recommended reading? War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tells you everything you need to know about being human. Also the novels of Richard Yates – tells you everything you need to avoid.
12. What do you hope to achieve with clients? Greater richness and equanimity in life and more internal spaciousness.
13. How do you try to achieve this? I think you have to be prepared to jump in the river with people and swim hard until you are both out. I’ve certainly noticed that when a therapy is successful something in me changes as well as in the client. I guess it’s the dialogue - the intersubjective space that shifts.
14. What is your number one CAT concept? It has to be the reciprocal role. Once people grasp this then so much more opens up for them. It’s like someone opening the net curtains for the first time in window; everything becomes so much clearer.
15. What do you see as a challenge for CAT in the future? There is a Darwinian landscape out there at the moment in the psychotherapy field. Therapies are defining and branding themselves. CBT particularly is integrating more and more into itself (imagery work, compassion, mindfulness, relating). CAT has a unique and very powerful model and we have to promote this. To do so means we have to be clearer about what we do in therapy. The brand has to be easily identifiable and distinguishable from other approaches.

Follow/Up: What question do you wish we had asked? You could have asked me about the single, most important event that completely changed the direction of my life as a therapist. Maybe next time 

Thank you and Goodbye!

Full Reference

Hepple, J., 2011. The Reformulation '16 plus one' Interview. Reformulation, Summer, p.55.

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