- Rumi
Joshua Comyn
Psychotherapist
Dare Wisdom - Joshua Comyn, PhD
Melbourne, VIC 3000
Online Therapy Australia-wide
Philosophy & Vision
My work is grounded in three commitments: understanding your own experience with real clarity, working with what moves beneath conscious awareness, and loosening the grip of the stories we tell about who we are. I trained as an integrative psychotherapist and think about the mind through a psychodynamic, attachment-based lens, drawing on thinkers who root psychoanalytic theory in the neurobiology of relationship and affect regulation. I also bring a background in philosophy, and more recently an interest in theatre and drama as ways of working with presence, role, and the stories a person is living inside. I work with individuals and couples, often around anxiety, depression, relationship patterns, and the more entrenched, personality-level ways a person can get stuck. Good therapy, to me, isn't just symptom relief — it's the slow work of becoming more available to your own life.
Background
In addition to being a psychotherapist in private practice, I have also worked as a lecturer in counselling and psychotherapy. My own clinical training was built through direct supervision by senior clinicians — modelled, not just taught — and I'm a Certified Deliberate Practice Therapist. I also have a background in literature, philosophy and theatre. This experience gives me a broad view of the mind and how it works, and it influences how I understand the theory and practice of psychotherapy. Literature provides a window into other minds, and philosophy is a powerful way to organise one's own mind. Theatre has taught me how to connect with others and myself and make the body a vehicle for the soul's expression.
Services
I offer online therapy only.
Quality Provision
I adhere to the Australian Counselling (the ACA) Code of Ethics and Practice. I undertake regular supervision with appropriately qualified senior clinicians.
Areas of Interest
Accreditations
- Doctor of Philosophy - 2017 - University of Melbourne
- Bachelor of Integrative Psychotherapy - 2021 - Ikon Institute of Australia
Modalities
Attachment Theory - Buddhist Psychotherapy - CBT - Developmental - Emotionally Focused Therapy - Existential - Experiential - Gottman Method - Integrative - Internal Family Systems - Interpersonal - Marriage and Family - Meditation - Mindfulness - Narrative Therapy - PACT - Person Centred - Psychodynamic - Schema Therapy - Sensorimotor Psychotherapy - Somatic Psychotherapy - Systems Theory - Trauma-Informed
Therapy Approach
My approach is integrative, but not eclectic for its own sake — I draw primarily on psychodynamic and attachment-based thinking, informed also by existential and person-centred traditions. I begin by understanding your history and how it connects to what's happening now, since the same symptom can come from very different places in different people. From there, we work at the level of both insight and experience: understanding a pattern isn't usually enough on its own to change it, so we also work with what you're actually feeling and doing, in session and outside it. I check in with you regularly about how therapy itself is going — the quality of that relationship is one of the more reliable predictors of whether therapy actually helps.
Professional Associations
- Australian Counselling Association - Level 3
Appointments
I have current availability and can organise sessions with 24 hours notice. All sessions run for approximately 50 minutes.
Please note: I am currently only offering online therapy.
Fees & Insurance
$150 per session for individuals.
$170 per session for couples.
A sliding fee scale may be negotiated depending on the circumstances.
Languages
English
French
Payment Options
Electronic bank transfer.
Contact Joshua
Please contact me to make an appointment
A conversation with Joshua Comyn
-
I've always been fascinated by the human mind — first through theatre, then literature, then philosophy, each a different way of trying to understand what makes a person who they are. My own experience of personal therapy, undertaken as part of my training, changed how I understood that fascination: from something I'd approached intellectually to something I recognised in myself. That shift is what led me to become a psychotherapist.
-
Psychoanalytic and attachment-based thinking — particularly the lineage running from Freud through to contemporary work linking attachment, affect regulation, and the brain — sits at the centre of how I think about the mind. Existentialism and phenomenology shape how I understand meaning and lived experience alongside that. I also draw on systems theory for relational and family work, and I hold a long-standing interest in contemplative traditions, which inform how I think about the self more than they form a specific technique I apply.
-
My training has been strongly trauma-informed, and trauma remains genuinely fascinating to me — not just as pathology, but for what it reveals about how the mind ordinarily functions. That interest extends into the body: I'm drawn to the psychological underpinnings of autoimmune disease, and I hope to spend more time exploring the interconnections between an integrative approach to psychotherapy and the emerging research in psychoneuroimmunology.
-
My approach is integrative, but grounded rather than eclectic. I listen closely to understand not just what a client is struggling with, but how their mind organises experience in the first place — this is where mentalization and other metacognitive approaches, drawing on Peter Fonagy's work, shape my method most. Psychodynamic and attachment-based thinking sit alongside this, along with person-centred and existential traditions. Rather than applying one technique uniformly, I choose what a given moment calls for — sometimes staying with felt experience, sometimes working more directly with a pattern of thought or relationship.
-
Progress often starts quietly — before someone's outward situation changes, they usually notice they understand their own reactions a little better: catching a thought or an old pattern in the moment rather than only in hindsight. That shift, in my experience, tends to come before visible change in a relationship or symptom, not after.
-
It's taught me to catch myself sooner — to notice a familiar reaction forming before I'm fully inside it, rather than only understanding it afterward. That's a different kind of knowing than the intellectual understanding I had going in, and it's ongoing; I don't think of it as something therapy finished, so much as a capacity it built.
-
Watching someone come to trust their own mind a little more, because they've first trusted it to someone else.
-
Of course. And I will continue to have 'bad hair' days in the future. It's not a question of having perfect hair. It's a question of tipping the balance in favour of having more 'good hair' days than bad ones.
-
A retreat from depth — from genuinely slow thinking, felt emotion, and real sensing of experience. Call it immaturity, or just distraction; the effect is the same.
-
Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life — it reframed philosophy for me not as a set of ideas to hold, but as a practice you actually live, the way a discipline like meditation or theatre is a practice. That's stayed with me more than almost anything else I studied.