Hello
I’m Mark Webster - retired psychotherapist, systems developer, innovator and avid white-water kayaker. Over the last 25 years I have discovered a new way to help people that is now called 'Change Skills Training'.
My Journey
Love of white-water kayaking has in many ways been the foundation for this project. Paddling provides both mental stillness as I experience natural wild life on the river, and the thrill as I am swept along at the mercy of the rapids. Kayaking has allowed me to explore the depths of my inner self and ultimately maintain sanity.
Like most people my life has been a tangle of human experience with both highs and lows, and everything in-between. Looking back I can trace my pathway out of the confusion on a journey which has five distinct strands.
The first is my personal recovery from trauma, which is the laboratory for testing everything. Second is training and clinical practice in psychotherapy. Third is my focus on working with behaviour. Fourth is the development of an alternative self-help model for addiction. Fifth is my systems background.
Along the way white-water kayaking has provided a metaphorical foundation that brings these strands together into a systematic and evidence-based framework. It’s taken me a long time to get there, and there have been many 'swims' along the way.
Personal Recovery
To the outside world my childhood was very conventional and middle-class, but on the inside my family operated in a dysfunctional way which would have a major impact on my adult life. Like many people I took to drink and drugs as a way to function whilst making my way into the world. Despite this, I was fortunate to be able to develop a career in IT and enjoy some success. Eventually though, the alcohol got to me and life self-destructed.
So began this journey in 1990. My personal recovery has been about working through trauma in the main, and this equipped me with a private space for testing out ideas for the new model. Combined with the kayaking framework it has been the basic reference for all the developments, knowing that if it could work for me then it would work for most people.
Psychotherapy
From 1993, I trained for seven years in Addiction Counselling, Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT), Family Therapy and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT). I qualified in 1999 and practised until retirement in 2018. My main clinical work was at a specialist clinic in the NHS for personality disorders.
The NHS clients were very testing and so I had to quickly work out what did and did not work. It was like being trained by the clients on a crash course. From the outset I found that the diagrammatic approaches from CAT were most effective. Over time the format of these evolved becoming simpler, easier to communicate and made my work much more effective. Diagrammatic tools laid the foundation of what was to come.
Behavioural Foundations
In 1999 I received an early copy of the first Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) book. ACT took therapy on to the next generation by focusing on acceptance instead of symptom reduction. It is a different view of clinical problems, seeing them as part of a process basic to human nature. With a new understanding of what health is, I saw that skills training was vital in helping people to change and navigate life better. My ‘aha' moment was to see that in ACT was a set of 'navigation' skills that could be trained. This married really well with how I was learning to kayak, and so 'navigating the river of life' became a root metaphor.
ACT was a perfect fit for me but the founders were based in the US. So from 2002 I organised for training to take place in the UK. Then I started delivering training myself and developing ACT's presence across Europe. This enthusiasm led me to train more broadly in behavioural work over a seven year period, and I became fluent across this body of knowledge. By 2007, I was able to co-invent a simpler way to do therapy – the ACT Matrix. It is a diagrammatic version of ACT that is much easier to deliver, and more learnable. The main book was published in 2016, and the Matrix is now widely used around the globe available in four languages.
Self-Help Meetings
From 2000 onwards, I started working with peer self-help groups in the addiction recovery sector. This developed over 12 years in the Portsmouth area. The ACT Matrix turbocharged development, and by 2013 there were over 30 local self help meetings per week. These were run both by staff and peers across every imaginable location in the community. Experience from hundreds of meetings established a very robust format that has stood up to time.
Funding came to an abrupt end in 2013. We continued meeting, however, and developed a new format called ACT Peer Recovery. This was in a traditional self help format, like AA, but focused on developing 'change' skills instead. It worked really well and was taken up on national policy in 2015 by Public Health England. By the end of 2019 over 35 areas in England had established ACT Peer Recovery self help meetings using the established formats. It was taking off, or so I thought.
Online systems
In 2020, at a stroke, Covid wiped everything out. Fortunately, using the Change Skills format, I was able create an online version which worked well from day one and continues to run today. It is accessed via web referral, and delivered using WhatsApp with learning support from trained peers. The model basically stayed the same, and seems to work across all settings.
The format has now been crystallised into a multi-level change skills model, which is being run both in person in a traditional setting as well as online. It fits really well with the kayaking analogy of experiential learning, and is being adapted across multiple problem spaces. Since 2022, I have been building the online infrastructure for this new way of delivering help, and looking to expand into other areas of change.
Products
The Change Skills approach is delivered through products that are customised to each problem space. Anxiety is different to Chronic Pain which is different to Alcohol problems which is different to Depression etc. It is all based on a practical framework that is derived from the way I learned to kayak. Skills are learned within a multi-level system. The new model is based on learning by doing, just as on the river, and finding out how to apply the right skills at the right time through practice. There is a fair bit of trial and error. Navigating the river and navigating life have a lot in common it turns out.