Boys Born Anxious: Dr Tessabella Lovemore in conversation with Nika Jelendorf

Описание: Join us at Autumn 2025’s British Gestalt Journal Seminar Day, led by Dr Tessabella Lovemore

Offering valuable CPD and continuing our focus on themes around masculinity this year, Dr Tessabella Lovemore will explore how boys’ lives start at a disadvantage for right brain development, for finding a confident sense of self, and for emotional literacy. She will examine the consequences of their early suffering and mishandling and how this is lived out later by way of the huge injustices, extreme politics, wars and damaged lives that we all witness. Dr Lovemore holds that any normative complacency is unacceptable, that it is not right that more males are in prison, more males commit suicide, more males are addicted, and more die prematurely.

Dr Lovemore has a background in studying and researching behaviour and in teaching Anthroposophical Psychotherapy, her thinking being informed by neurobiology and neuroendocrinology. During the Seminar Day, she will challenge us to reconsider our assumptions around masculinity and men and to consider the consequences of her approach for living with and working with males across the caring professions and beyond.

About Tessabella Lovemore

Dr. Tessabella Lovemore spent 20 years working in schools, teaching children of all abilities and ages. Having undertaken counselling training, she then completed a master’s degree in behaviour in schools and coordinated a behaviour-related research project. Subsequently, she trained in Anthroposophical Psychotherapy and attained a PhD for her study of teachers’ behaviour in relation to what they say about teaching morality. During this time, she also developed a private practice counselling teachers and parents, and learning and teaching Anthroposophical Psychotherapy.

Dr. Lovemore describes school teaching as fundamental to the forming of her future activity, noting that the contact she had with the lives of the children proved some of the most moving experiences of her life. She recognises that her life and work comprise a long journey toward understanding the relevance of how boys are brought up, and she acknowledges a debt of gratitude to Allan Schore, who brought All Our Sons: Boys at Risk to her attention.

It was when Dr. Lovemore was invited to run a course on relationships that she started to realise her personal experience of love—of both receiving and giving it—was largely absent, and that a practical form of love was needed: one with an enormous capacity for compassion and forgiveness, embracing love for anyone. She feels that she benefitted from the exercises she developed through numerous courses and that there may be a fitting irony in how her married name, Lovemore, now sits better than it once did.

As part of a busy life teaching and researching, Dr. Lovemore has run courses called How to Love and Learning to Love, which involve exercises that become a personal journey of discovery and change for participants. Following from her love of education and children, Dr. Lovemore has taught a course on How Children Learn and has developed courses on post-pandemic phenomena, including working with anxiety, with a focus on exercises for listening and decision-making.

Dr. Lovemore has now retired from therapeutic practice and is focused on giving periodic mental-health-related master classes online.

Seminar Day, Saturday 1 November 2025, 11am - 4.30pm, via Zoom

The event is priced at £65. Please pay the full fee if you can. We also offer a ‘Pay What You Can’ option for those who need it.

Book via Eventbrite or britishgestaltjournal.com
http://eventbrite.co.uk/e/boys-born-a...