Welcome to Braynework, and our story (being husband-and-wife team Mark and Jutta Brayne) of trauma therapy and support, couples counselling, supervision and more.
Writing this in early 2025, you find us heading gently, and at times uncertainly (we’re now both in our mid-70s), towards retirement.
So if you’re looking for personal Brayne-style attachment-informed EMDR therapy, we’ll not ourselves be able to work with you, though are very happy to recommend our daughter Katharine, a superb EMDR therapist in her own right with a fast-developing practice of her own.
We also have a list of trusted colleagues and ways of reaching them through our EMDR Focus website. Feel free to use that facility if you feel it might help.
If you’ve found us here for non-therapy reasons (old friends perhaps from our days on the road…), we’re leaving the website up and running in memory also of our journey as therapists.
With its sprinkling of images of lighthouses and cycling, the website highlights the Braynework theme of Finding Direction, with the lighthouse at the top of our landing page photographed at Pouto Point at the entrance to Kaipara Harbour on New Zealand’s North Island as we cycled the 2000-mile/3000-km length of Aotearoa in 2016. (Much more about that, and our other cycling adventures, on our psychlotherapist blog…)
If you’re looking for our advanced training support for practitioners in EMDR, please do visit our sister website at EMDR Focus.
And to conclude this page, pictures of us that are now nearly 10 years out of date! Bit like the rest of this site…
We both (Mark and Jutta) have been EMDR Europe-Accredited Consultants, each originally trained as integrative, transpersonal psychotherapists at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy (CCPE) near Paddington in London. We were for many years registered as psychotherapists with the UKCP.
You’ve probably chanced across or intentionally landed on our website because of a recommendation or interest in EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, in which we both have specialised as an approach to healing not just recent trauma, but often old stuff buried deep in past experience.
Those stories can manifest as PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) in its most obvious form, but also more often simply as depression, anxiety, obsessive behaviour or, especially also, relationship difficulties. The link to childhood distress programmed into the system is all too often missed by the medical and even the psychotherapy professions.
Our background is a long, bumpy and growthful journey of personal and shared discovery that has taken us to live over the past 50 years in Russia and Germany, Central Europe and China, and to places of personal challenge (we were divorced for 13 years before remarrying in 2013) of which neither of us had any inkling when we met in Moscow in 1974.
As well as working with individuals, we are both qualified and experienced couples therapist (CCPE 2010 and 2015), trained in the same transpersonal approach to working with relationships. There’s more information about that here.
As a former BBC and Reuters foreign correspondent and editor, and founding Director from 2002-2008 of the Dart Centre Europe for Journalism and Trauma, Mark long supported journalists and news organisations in the reporting and personal impact of traumatic events.
For more information about EMDR, follow the click here for our own explanation of what this is, or take a look at the website of the European EMDR Association.
If you’d like to know more, do get in touch.