What you have learned about yourself was taught by people who were imperfect teachers.
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Jackson
Clinical Psychologist · Miami Gold CoastI played semi-professional football into my early twenties and, years later, trained as a fashion designer. I say this not as preamble but because both shaped how I pay attention in a room. The first taught me what it costs to perform under pressure, and what it costs when you are not allowed to stop. The second taught me that surface is always communicating something about depth: that the way something is presented is itself a form of meaning. I understand those experiences from the inside, and I carry them into this work.
What drew me to relational psychodynamic work was a conviction about where change actually happens. The relational experiences that occur between two people working carefully together are not illustrations of something happening elsewhere: they are the something. When there is genuine contact in the room, with real attention, real honesty, and real hope, something accumulates.
A new now. And every now, lived and metabolised, becomes a yesterday. A piece of actual relational history that is now part of who you are. A past you did not have before you arrived.That is what changes things. Not insight alone, though insight matters. The lived experience of something genuinely different, repeated across time, slowly rewrites what you expect from people and from yourself: the patterns that formed before you had any say in them. You become capable of something you were not capable of before, because your history now contains something it did not contain before. You are no longer fully married to the story you arrived with.
What can happen between two people in a room when they are willing to stay in contact with what is difficult, and hold genuine hope for what is possible, is not a technique. It is a relationship. And it is, I think, one of the most significant things two human beings can do together.
I am also a person outside of this room. I am a parent. I have a deep interest in aesthetics and the way designed things carry meaning. That sensibility runs through everything from how I think about this practice to what I notice in a session. I say this because I think it matters that the person sitting across from you is actually living.
See how this shapes the work in practice →
Sessions here are often slower and more honest than people expect.
I notice things in the room: the shift in tone before the words change, the thing that is almost said and then isn’t, the moment someone moves away from something important without naming it yet. I name those things. Not to confront, but because what goes unnamed between two people tends to shape everything else.
People often arrive feeling they have explained themselves many times without feeling deeply understood. That tends to be where we begin.
You are not expected to perform insight here. You are not expected to arrive with a coherent account of yourself. Therapy does not begin with certainty. It begins with contact.
A deliberately broad start.
A deliberate narrowing.
I completed a Master of Psychology (Clinical) at Griffith University in 2018. My experience spans probation and parole, Veterans’ Affairs multidisciplinary care, the Gold Coast Academy of Sport as Senior Psychologist, high-intensity trauma programs, brain injury rehabilitation units, and acute inpatient and outpatient facilities. For five years I also lectured and tutored into postgraduate and undergraduate programs in clinical psychology and medicine at Griffith and Bond Universities.
The role of different types of perfectionism in elite athletes and high-functioning adults: its impact on capacity for self-compassion and the differential use of self-attack.
Over the last several years I have narrowed deliberately. The work I am most drawn to, and where I believe the deepest change is possible, is with people whose difficulties are not located in a symptom or a diagnosis but in how they exist: in their relationships, in their sense of themselves, and in the patterns that run through everything regardless of what they understand about them. The chair across from me has held an extraordinary range of lives. Each one has shaped how I understand the next. On the approach →
In addition to my private practice, I am the Queensland Clinical Lead for Hemisphere Group, supporting psychological risk and wellbeing for Australia’s live events and touring industry. I also provide pre-surgical psychological assessments through Cosmetic Psychology Australia.
I believe a therapist can only take a patient as far as they have been willing to go themselves.
That is not a principle I hold abstractly: it is something I have had to reckon with personally. I have my own history, my own patterns, my own places where the work has been uncomfortable and necessary. I do not think that disqualifies me from this role. I think it is precisely what equips me for it.
To work at this level: with character, with the relational field, with what lives beneath the surface of what is said, requires knowing the difference between what belongs to me and what belongs to you. That distinction does not maintain itself. It requires ongoing attention, ongoing honesty, and a willingness to keep looking at yourself even when the looking is difficult.
I work weekly with a small group of leading Australian psychodynamic clinicians and analysts. I am in the room not just as a practitioner but as someone who continues to do their own work: who has not stopped being curious about their own interior life, and who has not mistaken years of experience for the absence of blind spots.
The people who sit across from me deserve that.
Welcoming referrals from GPs, psychiatrists, paediatricians, and allied health practitioners.
Jackson works with adults and holds particular expertise in personality disorder presentations, complex trauma, relational character pathology, and high-functioning distress across elite and professional populations.
Referrals can be made directly. No formal referral letter is required, though a brief clinical summary is appreciated. Patients with a Mental Health Care Plan are welcome. Jackson works with both Medicare-rebatable and full-fee arrangements.
If something on this page has felt relevant, that is worth paying attention to.
A first session is a commitment to one conversation. Nothing more.
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