Christine Dunkley DClinP is a Consultant Psychotherapist, author and international speaker on Dialectrical Behaviour Therapy, Mindfulness and Emotional pain.  She is a consultant trainer with the British Isles DBT training team .In 2012 she retired from the NHS after 30 years of clinical work and is the Clinical Director of the mental health training company Grayrock www.grayrock.co.uk  e:mail christine.dunkley@grayrock.co.uk 

Christine completed a 4 year degree to qualify as medical social worker in 1982, first working with patients with terminal conditions and their families, then moving into physical trauma. She found her niche in the emergency department working with clients who had self-harmed, which led her to undertake further qualifications in counselling and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. She gained her doctorate in the University of Southampton school of health sciences on the communication of emotional pain in suicidal clients. She worked for 20 years in the Psychological Therapy Service in Winchester, delivering DBT and Counselling to patients with severe mental health problems. She also supervised in Primary care, developing a placement service for trainee counselors.

In 2006 Christine was invited to join the national DBT training team and began to train and supervise new DBT teams and therapists across the UK and Ireland.  She completed training as an adherence coder with staff from the University of Washington and the Linehan Institute. Her specialist subjects are teh regulation of painful emotion, and mindfulness.

She has over 30 publications including ‘Regulating Emotion the DBT Way’ ‘Teaching Clients to Use Mindfulness Skills’, and ‘Using Mindfulness Skills in Everyday Life,’ . She also co-produced the ‘Core Components of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy’ DVD series with Michaela Swales. She has provided numerous book chapters and articles for British, American and European Journals (see below)

Christine is Vice President of the Society for DBT and was the first chair. She was awarded a fellowship of the Society in 2016. She has also received a NICE ‘shared contributor award’ for work relating to developing counselling services in Primary Care. She sat on the national Personality Disorders reference group in University College London, and is an honorary lecturer for Bangor University. She assisted in the treatment development for Radical Openness in the large multi-site NHS RCT.

She has lectured to mental health professionals in the UK, Channel Islands, Ireland, France, Poland, Belgium, Lithuania, America and New Zealand.

Grayrock is a training company providing CPD for mental health professionals – Psychologists, Counsellors, Social Workers, Nurses, Occupational Therapists, Psychiatrists, Coaches and other allied occupations. As clinical director my job is to ensure that training events are practical, relevant and of top quality. Drawing on 30 years of clinical work with clients who have severe mental health problems I spend time seeking out the best presenters and the most useful topics so that you don’t have to. If you come to one of our events, you know that it will deliver. Check out our events page and if there is someone on your training wish list then let me know. Below is some more information about me.

christine.dunkley@grayrock.co.uk

Publications