Consultant-level psychotherapy for lasting change

Christopher Spanton is a highly experienced psychotherapist with over 20 years in the NHS and well over a decade specialising in psychological therapies. He holds the highest level of EMDR clinical accreditation — EMDR Europe Accredited Consultant — a status that reflects both exceptional clinical expertise and the capacity to supervise, train, and consult with other EMDR practitioners.

Christopher Spanton has held senior clinical leadership roles across the NHS throughout his career, including serving as Clinical Lead for one of the largest providers of NHS Talking Therapies in the country — clinically leading over 500 therapists and overseeing the delivery of high standards of clinical care at scale. He acts as a subject matter expert to NHS providers, consulting on the design, delivery, and evaluation of psychological therapy services.

His research and publications span national and international peer-reviewed journals, covering group therapies, COVID-19 system responses, culturally adaptive therapy, long COVID, and PTSD. He has served as a trial therapist within clinical research studies, including avatar therapy trials and EMDR research, contributing to the evidence base for these approaches. He is a visiting lecturer on CBT on a postgraduate psychotherapy programme, having delivered lectures at universities across the UK.

Over his career Chris has supervised and trained over 100 therapists in CBT and EMDR, and currently provides consultant-level supervision to several NHS Talking Therapies services and private organisations nationally. He has trained with world-leading experts in persistent physical symptoms and medically unexplained symptoms, and receives ongoing supervision from a renowned professor who is an internationally recognised EMDR expert.

Alongside the Alvee Practice, Chris works as a Highly Specialised Psychotherapist at a national NHS specialist hospital service, with a dedicated clinical focus on persistent physical symptoms and medically unexplained symptoms — including fibromyalgia, long COVID, chronic fatigue (CFS/ME), IBS, and functional neurological disorder.