My name is Mike and I am a Psychosexual and Relationship Therapist, working with CONTROLLING CHEMSEX as part of my own personal journey supporting and safeguarding our community. As a young gay man arriving in London in the 1980’s I was faced with the enormous challenge of the AIDS epidemic. I lost friends as we all did, and I faced the same daily fears that we all did, all of us in the Gay Community and our Allies too. Those fears threatened to crush us as a community just as we were gaining Pride in ourselves and the potential our lives started to offer. But what was so remarkable about those times was that the community took so much control into their own hands, they got the facts, and they found ways of tackling something which at the time seemed impossible to live with and survive. Since the 80’s our community has thrived, but with a new age we face a new challenge, chemsex. That’s why it’s such a privilege to be a part of the CONTROLLING CHEMSEX family, who are so committed to gaining the fullest information and understanding of how chemsex comes into our lives, arming those of us who have encountered this challenge with ways and means of tackling it, and demonstrating that this challenge can be won.

My training over the past five years has led me to offer one to one Bereavement Counselling (accredited by BACP) with the charity CRUSE for some time now, as well as leading group sessions online. I completed my Foundation Course in Psychoanalysis at Regents University in London, and I am currently studying with the Contemporary Institute of Clinical Sexology to qualify, through the COSRT professional body, as a Sexology and Couples Therapist, training me to work in a number of psychosexual therapeutic modalities, as the individual client and circumstances require. I am also half way through my Masters in Psychology with Sunderland University.

I hope that through working with CONTROLLING CHEMSEX we can all skill up, because this challenge of chemsex can be beaten. I look forward to working together.