Dr Geraldine Lee-Treweek (PhD) is a trained counselling psychotherapist who has also been qualified in hypnotherapy for 20 years. She is also a professor in higher education and set up the first generic Abuse Studies undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in 2008. She has been involved in community development and supporting diverse groups of people across three decades in youth and community, learning disability support and volunteering. Across her life she has worked extensively helping people who have experienced abusive and harmful relationships and situations, from childhood abuse to domestic violence, workplace bullying, racism and discrimination, and crime victimisation.

Dr Lee-Treweek’s PhD research was on nursing and residential care for older people, and she examined how care can ‘go wrong’ and mistreatment/abuse can arise in these settings. She continues as an active researcher and undertakes projects around diverse issues such as mental health and wellbeing, hate and abuse and educational development, and she teaches in higher education.

These experiences and skills are useful for the Change and Achieve Programmes, which are carefully designed using knowledge from Counselling and Psychotherapy, Psychology, Sociology, Gender Studies, Hypnotherapy, Mindfulness and Criminology, to provide a firm base for course content and personal development training.