About Rob Mawer – Psychotherapist
My journey to becoming a psychotherapist began when I was about twelve years old after a chance viewing of a movie called the Three Faces of Eve. The film was about a young woman who had a traumatic experience in her childhood that led to her experiencing multiple personalities in adult life and her journey to recovery. This experience lit a flame within me of deep interest in the human mind, the impact that traumatic experiences can have on it, and a sense of destiny around working with people affected by such experiences.
My early life was peppered with some difficult experiences of my own that I needed to work through so the next phase of my journey to becoming a therapist involved a wide variety of personal growth experiences. These experiences gave me contact with a number of highly skilled professionals and besides assisting with the issues that I wanted to resolve also reaffirmed my desire to offer the same assistance to others. My personal growth journey took several years before I felt personally able to take the next step. During this period, I worked for several Corporations, including Westpac, Shell and General Electric, mostly in the Finance Sector, where my developing human relations skills were invaluable.
We returned to Adelaide for family reasons in 2001 and I decided to formally commit to my career as a therapist. To that end, I Graduated from Adelaide University with a Science Degree majoring in Psychology and Mathematics in 2004, and in 2008 I completed my Post Graduate studies in Social Work from the University of South Australia.
Since then I have worked in Government and non-Government Agencies in the fields of Palliative Care, Child Protection, Family Support, and Family Relationship Counselling. This work included psychotherapy with individuals and couples and I did further training in mindfulness-based approaches, systemic family therapy, communication, and a variety of couple therapy counselling models. I have also done extensive training in somatic approaches including working with the body to resolve psychological trauma. My training has also included NLP, EMDR and RET for working with specific traumatic memories.
One of the many things that I have learned in my personal growth journey and in my work and training as a psychotherapist is there is a tendency for counsellors to find one way of working and approach all client’s difficulties from the same framework. This makes great sense because it is hard work learning and getting expertise in a psychotherapeutic model. However, the downside of this approach is that people are all individuals and that individuality needs to be honoured for any counselling approach to be helpful and satisfying for the client. In my work, I have had many training experiences and have a wide variety of approaches at my disposal. It is my ambition to make every therapeutic engagement as personalised to the people who consult with me as I possibly can.
Rob Mawer – Psychotherapist
‘the fittest may also be the gentlest, because survival often requires mutual help and cooperation’
Dobzhansky, T. (1962). Mankind evolving. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.