Cary Hayward - Wellington Central

In 1993 I started working as a therapist in the Mental Health Unit at Masterton Hospital, where I provided individual and group therapy. I also worked in the Psychiatric Crisis Service, and became one of a few therapists in the country to qualify as a Duly Authorized Officer under the Mental Health Act. The crisis work frequently involved being called out in the middle of the night to attend to a client who was in distress, feeling suicidal or having some sort of psychological breakdown. I found I had an ability to establish relationships with people in acute distress, de-escalate tensions and provide support. Overall my time at the mental health unit gave me good experience working with clients who were dealing with a wide range of mental health issues.

From there I went into private practice as a psychotherapist doing a mix of couple counselling, sexual abuse counselling, and general practice work. I continued to work with clients with significant mental health issues.

Alongside my work at this time I began to explore transpersonal psychology and eastern meditation practices. Through participating in psychodrama and groupwork I had experienced some profound and life changing moments. In these moments I had experiences that included a deepening sense of connection with others, increasing insight into the relational nature of my own being, expanding awareness and a greater openness. In seeking to further explore, understand and integrate these experiences I became increasingly interested in the transpersonal psychology literature. This led into a comparative exploration of Western psychotherapeutic and Eastern meditation practices and psychologies. I started to visit the Buddhist Monastery at Stokes Valley, and developed a close friendship with Nyanaviro, the Deputy Abbot there. We were interested in exploring each other’s approaches and we immersed ourselves in many hours of conversation and meditation, often late into the night. I also developed relationships with a number of the other monks at the monastery over this time, some of who also became close friends. The work of transpersonal theorists like Ken Wilber, Stanislav Grof, Mark Epstein, Carl Jung and others provided useful western reference points for this encounter. Nyanaviro and I started to run workshops together. We co-founded a men’s group that attracted a unique mix of men who were ex-monks, mediation practitioners, psychotherapists and counsellors who were also interested in this encounter. This group has run for over 20 years and continues to meet twice a year. There are some photos of the group on my ‘Interests’ page.

Over this time I also contributed to the development of a new national Bachelor of Counselling programme being established at the Central Institute of Technology (CIT) in Wellington. I went on to become a full time lecturer for that programme, teaching mental health, groupwork, existential and practicum papers. I became the Team Leader for the programme in 2001 as CIT merged with Weltec. In this role I led the delivery of the Bachelor of Counselling programme in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, in close co-ordination with the Bachelor of Alcohol and Drug programme.

In 2003 I joined Relationship Services as the National Practice Manager. Relationships Services was New Zealand’s largest counselling organization (with 200 staff and seeing up to 30,000 clients nationally a year), and was New Zealand’s premier relationship counselling agency. Relationship Services was known for its expertise in couples work, and later became Relationships Aotearoa shifting to a broader focus to working with families and children. Personal highlights of this time include developing staff training in couple counselling, leading the development of family therapy services, working closely with Maori to support the development of services for Maori, implementing evidence based client outcome evaluation and bringing the evidence based couples therapy approach Emotionally Focused Therapy to New Zealand.