Why this exists, and who began it
Towards a Regulated World™ began with a question that would not leave me alone.
For more than twenty-five years I have worked with people who were struggling: in psychiatric hospitals, in addiction services, in therapy rooms, in training rooms and, more recently, in organisations and boardrooms. I have watched people do extraordinary work on themselves. And I have watched many of them return to homes, workplaces and systems that had not changed at all, and begin to struggle again.
That is not a failure of the person.
What was happening before the crisis arrived?
Why this matters to me
I did not come to this work from a distance.
In my twenties I reached a point where what I had been carrying could no longer be held. I came into contact with mental health services as a patient rather than as a professional. I received help, and then I was discharged with very little, because that is what the system is built to do: manage the crisis and wait for the next one.
I did not become a therapist despite that. I became one because of it.
It taught me something I have never been able to unlearn. What happens around a person matters as much as what happens inside them.
These are not extras. They shape what becomes possible.
What I have learned since
I am a UKCP-registered psychotherapist. I spent a decade at the Priory Hospital Roehampton, and I have worked across mental health, addiction, leadership, education, frontline services and organisational culture.
I created The Voyage®, a framework for understanding trauma, adaptation, regulation, relationship and repair, and founded The Voyage® Academy, which trains clinicians, professionals and leaders in the United Kingdom and the United States. I am a TEDx speaker.
None of that is why I think this matters. It is simply where the thinking came from.
Why a movement, and not only a method
The Voyage® is one practical answer to the question of how. Towards a Regulated World™ is the larger question of why, and it is bigger than anything I can deliver.
Helping one person at a time is good work. It is also slow, costly, and available to far too few people. If the conditions that overwhelm human beings are relational, organisational and systemic, then some of the response has to be too.
That is not a criticism of therapy. It is a recognition of its limits.
It began with me. It is not intended to belong to me.
We need you to get involved too, this is how we become a more regulated world.
You do not need to be a therapist.
You do not need to work in trauma.
You do not need to have healed everything in your own life.
Get in touch
For press, partnerships, speaking and collaboration, write to hello@towardsaregulatedworld.com and it will reach us.