Rory Singer

Founder & Clinical Director, New Road Psychotherapy

I established New Road Psychotherapy over twenty years ago to create a centre rooted in psychological depth, ethical integrity, and relational trust.

As Clinical Director, I am responsible for upholding the organisation's clinical standards and intellectual culture. I support and mentor therapists, oversee the development of training and professional dialogue, and continue to practise mainly in a supervisory role.

My main focus now is on teaching, writing, and developing training programmes that integrate psychotherapeutic and contemplative approaches.

My leadership role extends beyond administration; it is fundamentally philosophical. I am focused on how psychotherapy is interpreted, applied, and maintained within a swiftly evolving cultural environment.

Professional Formation

I have been practising psychotherapy for more than thirty-five years.

In my early twenties, I spent five years as a monk within the Thai Forest tradition of Buddhism. That training was rigorous and demanding. It required examining desire, fear, identity, and pride closely. The discipline of sustained attention, ethical restraint, and humility continues to influence both my clinical work and my thinking. I am also a qualified Yoga Nidra teacher, and this practice remains an active part of how I work with the body, attention, and rest.

My clinical experience includes work in reproductive medicine at Hammersmith Hospital and specialised work with male survivors and perpetrators of sexual abuse at King's College Hospital. For many years, I have taught mindfulness-based programmes and facilitated ongoing contemplative groups.

I am a qualified Humanist funeral celebrant through Humanists UK, a role that extends my engagement with themes of loss, meaning, and mortality beyond the consulting room into ceremonies through which communities commemorate what matters most.

Clinical Orientation

My work draws on drive theory, which explores the deep motivational forces that organise behaviour, alongside attachment theory, which traces the relational patterns through which identity is formed, and trauma theory, which considers the imprint of overwhelming experiences on the body and expectations. I am also engaged with contemporary neuroscience, particularly predictive models of the mind and perception.

Across these frameworks, a consistent question arises: how do human beings shape their experience of reality? How do expectation, memory, and affect work together to create a lived world that feels solid and unquestionable?

Many symptoms are not faults but logical adaptations. Anxiety, depression, relational conflict, and defensive rigidity often serve as intelligent responses to earlier environments. The challenge occurs when these adaptive strategies become fixed assumptions about the present.

Therapy, in this sense, is not about correcting pathology but about gradually revising expectations through relationship and attention.

Teaching & Philosophical Work

Apart from my leadership at New Road, my main intellectual focus is on integrating Buddhist philosophy and psychotherapeutic theory. These are not competing systems; they are different ways of describing the same fundamental structure.

Both traditions focus on the mechanics of suffering. Buddhist thought explores how craving, aversion, and misperception lead to distress. Psychodynamic and neuroscientific models examine how drives, attachment patterns, and predictive processes shape experience. Trauma theory shows how threat alters the nervous system and limits possibilities.

I am also interested in the connection between individual psychology and communal life.

The forces that destabilise societies—greed, aggression, denial, and the rejection of limits—are intensified forms of the unchecked drives that operate within individuals. Likewise, the qualities that uphold civilisational continuity—restraint, generosity, wisdom, and relational accountability—must first be developed at the individual level.

I do not see psychotherapy as just a private service. I view it as part of a society’s ethical framework. Small changes in awareness are not insignificant. They influence how power is exercised, how difference is accepted, and how conflict is managed. In this way, the work of therapy is quiet but significant.

A Personal Note

Over the years, my interest has shifted from self-improvement to humility.

Human beings suffer when defensive structures become rigid into certainty. We suffer when we mistake our predictions for truth and our impulses for necessity.

My commitment at New Road is to prevent psychotherapy from becoming purely transactional or driven by the market. Psychological work demands time, humility, and seriousness. It calls for reflection rather than merely performance.

Healing does not demand perfection; it calls for the courage to see clearly.

That remains the foundation of my work.