My name is Orshoya Frank, I am a psychologist and a philosopher; I work as a psychotherapist, EASC accredited supervisor, trainer, Transactional Analytic consultant and theoretician.
In my quality as a helping professional I operate in a primarily Transactional Analytic framework, but also rely heavily on the Rogerian humanistic approach, on Thomas Gordon’s model of non-violent communication, on evolutionary psychology, and generally work with a strong emphasis on the biological aspects of our psycho-social reality.
Over the past 22 years I have delivered some 8000 hours of therapy, consultancy and training in individual and group settings.
Training
I started my career at 18 as a journalist, then went on to study literature and philosophy of art, leading to graduate work at Budapest and Oxford Universities and to lecturing in Literature and Philosophy; earning my PhD in 1998.
My involvement with psychology began in 1995 around the birth of my first child and moved in quick and intense succession from a life-changing experience of personal therapy to qualifying as an instructor in Thomas Gordon’s school of non-violent communication, earning an MA in psychology, studying Transactional Analysis, evolutionary biology, building up my practice and, most latterly, going on to study supervision and qualifying with the EASC in 2020.
Achievements
Over the years my interests spanned out organically and I went on
- to develop a parent supervision practice supporting parents in creating healthy family systems around their children, often by first revisiting their own childhood and gleaning their first experience of good parenting from a self-reparenting experience;
- writing a multitude of articles to support the broadest possible range of individuals in healthy and sustainable energy management in all of their life roles;
- I developed an interest in education and the psychology of learning and supporting learning. I produced a system known as The seven principles of positive pedagogy which translates TA to a teacher training setting with the aim to support educators in facilitating personality growth, social skills and intellectual self-knowledge and self-esteem in their students. This has branched off into educational supervision and consultancy, and a growing involvement in teacher training;
- I developed a comprehensive standardised parent training methodology uniting the benefits of parent self-awareness, a positive communication skillset, information sharing on developmental psychology and an innovative and unique model for promoting healthy personality development in children.
Physis
As a theoretician and practitioner with an ever broader range of activity, I spent the last ten years elaborating the conceptual basis and testing the practice of physis theory – a multidisciplinary theory which views the individual in his/her holistic reality in all her roles and levels of existence, and places the individual in the multi-level systemic contexts of the family, the organisation, the community, the global community and the biological realities of this planet. This enables practitioners with a physis approach to devise interventions which simultaneously assure the sustainability of all of the levels involved. For the past 5 years I have lectured on physis theory in all of my professional fields to increasing acclaim.
Altogether my conviction is that “physis will find the way” – our job in any helping or leadership capacity is to accompany people with genuine sympathy, profound good intention and a thorough understanding of the factors that shape our psycho-social reality. We need to offer dedicated attention and deliver the smallest, most tactful interventions possible, so that people can gain a sense of their own strength and steer their energies in fruitful, well-regulated and sustainable directions. This way they can find their place in the harmony of the grand totality, become masters of their own development and contribute at one and the same time to the wellbeing of the individual, the community and the global totality.