Tailored psychological recovery and optimisation sessions for individuals, couples, families, and teams faced with the challenges of life and change.
Tailored psychological recovery and optimisation sessions for individuals, couples, families, and teams faced with the challenges of life and change.
The THRIVE team are all registered and experienced psychologists, and allied health professionals. Providing tailored psychological recovery and optimisation sessions for individuals, couples, families, and teams faced with the challenges of life, the THRIVE team will bring their wisdom to yours. While safety-critical, high-performance environments are our speciality, anyone motivated to live a rich and meaningful life will be at home working with the THRIVE team.
We have a national network of practitioners who work with clients right across Australia. Contact our centralised national intake support and booking team to book a session.
The THRIVE Institute works with individuals who work in safety-critical and high-performance industries including:
When working in a regulated environment it’s important to understand the difference between anxiety and other forms of distress that are natural for us to experience in a range of situations. Everyone feels discomfort in the face of difficult circumstances and we often see that anxiety is over diagnosed. Despite the discomfort, worry is often a perfectly natural response to difficult circumstances. From time to time though, this distress can escalate such that every day activities can become almost impossible. Knowing the difference between anxiety and other forms of distress is critically important when we work in regulated environments and while the discomfort of anxiety can be a debilitating there is really good news for those who struggle with it. By understanding how our brain and body are trying to protect us, and learning the skills and strategies to shape our automatic responses, we can claim our life back and achieve the things that are important to us.
Grief is the physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual response to the actual or threatened loss of a person, thing or place with which we are emotionally attached. Just as grief can be triggered by a wide range of events, grief responses also involves a wide range of feelings, thoughts and behaviours. There is no right or wrong way to grieve, but with the right support, you can find the best way for you to honour and cope with your unique grief experience.
Pain is something all of us experience and we generally accept it as a result of an injury and even a helpful reminder of what dangerous things to avoid. Chronic pain on the other hand is something entirely different. Fundamental to the management of pain is truly understanding the system of biological, physiological, neurological, psychological and even immunological mechanisms that influence the experience of pain. Armed with this knowledge we can help transform it.
Even the most robust and loving relationships endure difficulties that can arise from time-to-time. The science of psychology has been busy learning the keys to improving relationships and the good news is there are many practical strategies to effectively approach conflict, dissatisfaction, and emotive hurdles. With this knowledge, we can build loving and positive relationships that are sustainable through the challenges and celebrations that life has to offer.
Stress is often described as feeling overloaded, wound-up, tense and worried, and occurs when we face a situation we feel we can’t cope with. Some stress can be helpful, motivating us to get a task finished, or spurring us to perform well. However, if stress is ongoing or the stress response continues over a long period, the effects of stress can impact negatively on our physical and mental health. THRIVE can help you respond to and use stress in a positive way.
Trauma can be an emotional, cognitive, and physiological response to a terrible event like an accident, assault or natural disaster. Psychologists can assist with strategies to return a sense of calm, to work through understanding the complexities of the impact of the event, and support making new meanings that create rich and powerful steps forward. Once they are on the road to change, people often describe finding freedom that allows them to be much more like the person they want to be.
The responsibility for the life and safety of others is a significant stressor on our dedicated emergency services and military personnel. With good education and best practice approaches, both depression and post-traumatic stress are very treatable or even avoidable. THRIVE's many years of experience working directly within the emergency service context allows our team to understand the organisational context and appreciates the nature of your important work.
Specialising in safety-critical and high-performance industries, our strategies and approaches have been developed through decades of industry experience, evidence-informed insights, and neuropsychological science. These industries include emergency services, aviation, aerospace, maritime, transport, mining, construction, power supply, medical, and high-performance sporting environments. While safety-critical, high-performance environments are our speciality, anyone motivated to live a rich and meaningful life will be at home working with the THRIVE team.
We have a national network of practitioners who work with clients right across Australia. Contact our centralised national intake support and booking team to book a session.
James Douglas
With 20 years of experience in a variety of organisational and counselling psychology roles James has a wealth of knowledge and practical experience. In the last 15 years, James has been specifically working with police and emergency service workers and caring for individuals and groups with complex trauma histories, as well as grief and loss. Of course, trauma and stress has the potential to impact significantly on relationships both at home and in the work environment, and for this reason James also works with people in leadership roles, and supports individuals with workplace or relationship conflict issues.
Having spent several years working with police in training, James has also developed a keen interest in sports and performance psychology and has also worked with a number of athletes to achieve improved performance and to address a range of lifestyle challenges. Together with his use of strategies embedded in Acceptance & Commitment Therapy and Cognitive Behaviour Therapies that are backed by science, James’ counselling success, is his deep respect for his clients and their ability to discover the strengths within that help them to achieve their goals.
Leanne Hinsch
Leanne has followed her passion for working closely with organisations, teams, families, adults and children to build the focus of neuroscientifically-supported elements of compassion, kindness, resilience, belonging, care, mindfulness, emotional regulation, secure attachment, trust, growth, creativity, innovation, curiosity, and peak human performance into the cultural foundations of psychological recovery, wellbeing, and optimisation. For over almost 30 years she has worked in pioneering ways to care for professionals and people within high-performance safety-critical industries, particularly in medical, aviation, military, child safety, and humanitarian, disaster response, and emergency services, to build, review, reform and finesse thriving wellbeing, critical incident, and peer support systems, training programs, and psychological support sessions designed to change culture and improve personal capability as the primary catalyst for people to change their lives. She has an intimate working knowledge of the design, governance, management, research, safety, skills and supports required for the sustainability and longevity of these systems, organisations, and the thriving of people.
Along with supporting THRIVE's team of experienced health professionals, Leanne continues to provide therapeutic psychological sessions and coaching with individuals, workgroups and families, and has special interests in the functions of post traumatic growth, complex trauma, dissociation, anxiety, high impact event response, flourishing, improving cognitive acuity, psychological flexibility and peak performance. She has expertise in the use of EMDR, trauma-informed CBT, clinical hypnosis, tapping (EFT), Schema-Focussed Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, Emotion-Focussed Therapy, Heart-Brain Coherence and Neurofeedback, group work, meditative practice and mindfulness, and professional supervision. This individual work reminds her of how important it is to build culture-focussed systems for collective prosperity that have the capacity and momentum to result in real change for people, organisations, and communities synergistically. In her personal and work life Leanne strives to bring compassionate and coherent connections and healing within the professional and conscious communities.