Psychotherapist · Author · AI Coach
Understanding behaviour — yours, other people’s, and your AI’s.
Forty years of professional life: thirty in commerce, twenty in coaching, teaching emotional education and psychotherapy, with the last ten of those in the therapist’s chair. Now I’ve turned the lens on AI — and I train, coach and educate the leaders who carry its consequences.
How I work with organisations
Up to 30 people · in person, UK and worldwide · fee on request after a 20-minute call.
“An unusual combination of warmth and directness, which he uses to help people either uncover what is really going on or confront issues they may be unaware of, or have been avoiding.”A managing director
Books and research
Three books. Find the one you came for.
Mind the GapAI and human behaviour
The Pebble That Talks BackInside your AI
The Last GapGrief, in fifteen lettersResearch papers
There's Always a Gap: Turing, Sedol, and the War for the Weights
Alan Turing built a ruler to measure the distance to the human — and the ruler-building became an industry. From Lee Sedol’s Move 78, to a superhuman Go engine beaten by amateurs, to a twenty-minute pause in a sandwich-shop queue, one law holds: the gap between machine and human doesn’t close. It relocates.
The Leverage Inversion: when AI use becomes AI direction
An autoethnographic single-case study in which the author is the subject: 2,286 threads, 47,442 turns, 986,823 subject-typed words and 6,865,588 AI prose words across ChatGPT, claude.ai and Claude Code, from 31 December 2022 to 10 July 2026. From it, a datable regime change — the leverage inversion, the shift from using AI as an answer engine to directing it as a workforce. The AI-to-human word ratio collapses not because the human asks for less, but because the human’s own output explodes. The intuitive indicator — a shift from questions to commands — is falsified outright. The real leading indicator is declarative steering: supplying context, judging output, correcting course.
Consense & SHaDS: Where AI Defends Its Gaps
A machine can now be read where it was once a black box. Anthropic's Jacobian lens surfaces the hidden middle of an AI's processing — the thoughts it is poised to say but hasn't. I have named that layer Consense: the place where a mind makes sense of things before it speaks. This paper goes one step further. Drawing on twenty years of coaching and psychotherapy, I argue that SHaDS — the five ways an AI defends a gap in its knowledge (Smoothing, Hallucination, Affectation, Drift, Sycophancy) — are not five faults but one pattern: the psychological defences of the Consense layer, mirroring the mechanisms Anna Freud first catalogued in humans. The machine defends like us because it was built from our words. And because the layer is now readable, those defences may be caught forming — before a single word appears.
The Defended Gap: How Humans and AI Hide
Ask a mind a question whose ground it doesn't reliably hold — human or machine — and it tends not to say 'I don't know.' Instead it defends the gap. This paper proposes that under coherence pressure, people and large language models reach for the same five directional defences — SHaDS: Smoothing, Hallucination, Affectation, Drift, Sycophancy — routing around honest contact with what occupies the gap. The pattern is read as a clinical-behavioural extension of Anna Freud's 1936 catalogue of defence mechanisms, set against Karpowicz's (2025) impossibility theorem, which proves hallucination-free inference is mathematically unreachable. Drawing on twenty years of coaching and psychotherapy and a fourteen-year photographic record, the paper stakes one falsifiable prediction: that naming each defence, rather than performing it, measurably reduces it. Offered as hypothesis for research review, not as settled finding.
Instruments
Tool
SHaDS™ AI Hallucination Checker
Paste in a conversation with your own AI and see the five ways it may have covered for not knowing.
Interactive map
The Layer Map
A clickable walk down through everything between typing a question and an AI's answer.
Research record
The Ostracon
The open record of how Mind the Gap was written with named AI workers: every draft, decision and conversation.
Calibration
APC™ — Adaptive Pressure Calibration
Why sales people cannot say ‘I don’t know’, and what they become when the number is due. Hunters, farmers, and the drift between them. Free ten-minute calibration.
Latest on AI
Is Your AI Shadding? Or Just Hallucinating?
SHaDS: For thirty years I watched people defend a gap they couldn't fill, when they didn’t know how to say they didn’t know something or were not…
Consense: Naming an Unseen Part of Mind
In July 2026, Anthropic built the Jacobian lens (J-lens): an instrument that reads the hidden middle of a machine's mind — the thoughts it is poised…
AI Hallucination: A 1985 Stock Recount
In the 1980s a two per cent stock-record error meant a recount and a root-cause hunt. The AI we now walk into boardrooms runs at twenty-five to…
Still in the therapy room
I still see clients for trauma, grief, anger and relationships. Sessions are two hours, face to face in Oxhill, South Warwickshire. For clients further afield, one hour by phone or video.