“Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” Stephen R. Covey
How does LION Therapy work?
LION Therapy offers up to three years of weekly psychotherapy to care-experienced people at a fee they can afford. LION clients fill out a short questionnaire by email having been referred by a professional or via self-referral. The client is offered an extended assessment with a LION therapist who will contract to work with them for up to 3 years if both parties feel they wish to proceed after the assessment period. LION therapists treat clients in complete confidentiality and will not be in contact with Social Services even if the client’s child/children are on Child in Need or Child Protection Plans. LION Therapy is purely voluntary - Social Services cannot mandate someone to enter into psychotherapy with LION. Clients who are under 18 years of age do not have to pay any fee for their LION Therapy but once they turn 18, they will negotiate a suitable weekly fee to pay their LION therapist.
Breaking the Trauma Bond
LION Therapy gives a care-experienced person the chance to understand why they may be drawn to make high-conflict relationships and to change their relating patterns to healthier ones on a permanent basis.
“The tactic of intermittent reinforcement - to ignore, then pay attention to, then ignore again - lowers the bar for what constitutes affection, so the victim perceives themselves as diminishingly worthy of love. According to attachment theory, inconsistent and tantalising connection creates an intense anxious attachment to the abuser. Feeling unsafe and confused, all attention is focused on the manipulative attachment figure, rather than on one’s own experiencing self. This is trauma bonding.” (Narratives of Attachment, Danger and Survival, Karnac, 2026, p. 53)
LION clients who are trauma-bonded take time to learn to trust their psychotherapist and only once a bond of trust has formed are they willing to delve into their painful pasts to understand how these patterns of attachment formed and then to engage in the difficult work of changing their relationship patterns into healthier ones. This is why LION clients need up to three years of psychotherapy. To make the lasting changes required means this work cannot be done in a rush. But once this work is done, the client’s risk of losing any child to the care system, to ending up in prison or in psychiatric treatment will massively reduce because they will no longer make trauma-bonded relationships.
Where do LION clients come from?
LION clients can be referred through the Care Leavers’ Association, via Personal Advisors working for Social Services, through NHS primary and secondary care services (Complex Needs, AMHT, GPs), via Probation, or indeed via self-referral through the LION Therapy website.
How do clients contract with LION?
Clients will sign a contract with their therapist laying out what they can expect from their LION therapist and what their LION therapist will expect from them.
LION clients must make a financial contribution for every session, according to their means, counting towards the £50 the LION therapist receives. This is likely to be in the £5-£15 range. If, after 36 months, the client and therapist wish to continue the work together, they can do so independently of LION Therapy CIC who will no longer fund the therapy. Hopefully by this point the client will be successfully earning and can pay for their own therapy if they wish to continue in treatment.
Therapy sessions last 50 minutes, ideally in person, but clients can be seen online if they cannot get to every session.
Only psychotherapists who are 5+ years qualified will be funded by LION Therapy CIC. All LION therapists are responsible for abiding by the Ethics of their Member Institutions and must be full members of either the British Psychoanalytic Council or the BACP.
All LION Therapists are offered group supervision on a monthly basis by LION’s experienced supervisors, Dr. Gwen Adshead and Dr. Carine Minne, both of whom are senior consultants at Broadmoor Hospital, UK.
How is efficacy assessed?
To judge whether or not LION Therapy is effective, clients fill out the Reflective Functioning Questionnaire when they start and when they end, and complete an Assessment Questionnaire on a monthly basis, so LION Therapy CIC can track changes in their mental health over the 36 months of treatment.
The Reflective Functioning Questionnaire is designed to demonstrate shifts in self-esteem. Self-esteem is a quality derived from two independent variables: 1) self-efficacy and 2) quality of relationships. Both these factors have a profound effect on whether someone can manage their emotions well (or whether they can’t and turn to unhealthy support mechanisms, eg. substance abuse, threatening behaviour or actual violence). These variables also determine how well they cope with challenges in their personal and working life eg. can they productively resolve differences with a boss/partner/child, thereby keeping themselves employed, in a relationship and parenting effectively.
A thorough evaluation of LION’s efficacy will be undertaken every 12 months of operation and the findings will be published on the website.
LION Therapy CIC will undertake follow-up interviews for all clients (2 years +, 5 years + and 10 years + after ending their 36 months of LION therapy) in order to build a dataset to evaluate LION Therapy CIC’s efficacy over the longer term.
For an example of a client who made just such a shift in their psychological functioning, please read our Client Story.