A Portfolio of Academic, Therapeutic Practice and Research Work including an Investigation of the Bisexual Experiences of Intimate Partner Abuse.

The Portfolio consists of an accumulation of work spanning the three years of training on the Practitioner Doctorate course in Psychotherapeutic and Counselling Psychology at the University of Surrey. The Portfolio consists of three dossiers which pertain to academic, therapeutic practice and research work and as such, showcase my range of competencies and abilities developed throughout the training. The three essays within the Academic Dossier, aim to demonstrate my psychological understanding of child psychodynamic therapy, cognitive-behavioural therapy and models of human distress. The Therapeutic Practice Dossier focuses on my clinical experience and provides a description of my three clinical placements and consequently, outlines the range of therapeutic skills and experiences gained in each. My Final Clinical Paper demonstrates how I have made sense of theory in my professional and personal development over the three years. Finally, the Research Dossier is comprised of a literature review and two qualitative research reports, that all contributed to a progressive research process. The work represents three different types of methodological enquiry starting with a literature review in the first year, moving onto interpretative phenomenological analysis of interview data in the second year and finally, a grounded theory analysis of bisexual individuals’ experience of intimate partner abuse