About Us
A small, rigorous training institute where Transactional Analysis meets depth psychology, art-based methods, and embodied practice. Book an Open EveningApply for TrainingOur mission
Facilities
Meet the team
Our Location
Our Beliefs
Our Residential Option
Our Mission & Vision
Our Mission and Vision are to train psychotherapists able to meet the unseen with rigour and creativity.
Our aim is to develop Depth Transactional Analysis training from within—reintroducing the unconscious, creative imagination, and embodied knowing as essential components of therapeutic work. Through our integration of art therapy and dance movement psychotherapy with TA and analytical psychology, we offer an education that honours complexity and lived experience.
We envision a psychotherapy training institute that prioritise depth over growth.
Mission & Purpose
Our mission is to establish a UKATA-accredited Transactional Analysis (TA) training institute that integrates TA with depth psychology, transpersonal thinking, and embodied creative therapies. We offer an original training pathway that foregrounds the unconscious, symbolic expression, and the healing power of art, image, and movement.
Through a synthesis of Transactional Analysis, analytical psychology, art therapy, and dance movement psychotherapy, our students learn to work beyond words—attuning to what is unspoken, enacted, or felt. Our pedagogical approach values rigour and imagination equally, cultivating practitioners who can meet clients with presence, depth, and flexibility.
We are committed to training psychotherapists who can truly put themselves aside in the service of another—not through detachment, but through connection. The institute is located close to Gatwick Airport, allowing for accessibility to students from diverse regions.
Through TA, analytical psychology, art, and movement, we guide psychotherapists toward a deeper curiosity, one that listens beyond words and meets the mystery with care.
Open your-Self to the unseen.
Our Beliefs & Values
Our belief is that psychotherapy is a practice of encounter, not merely explanation. We value rigour without reduction, integrating Transactional Analysis with depth psychology and embodied, creative ways of knowing. We train in small cohorts with ethical accountability and cultural humility, attending to what is symbolic, unspoken, and felt as central to the work.
Uncertainty
We embrace not-knowing as a central stance in psychotherapy. Only a well-grounded foundation allows psychotherapists to meet the unknown with presence, flexibility, and humility.
Curiosity
Therapeutic presence begins with genuine interest in the other. Curiosity is not a technique—it is an ethical and relational orientation.
Reflection
No one can be fully with others unless they have cultivated the capacity to be with themselves. Reflection is the root of therapeutic depth.
Integrity
Doing the right thing is not dependent on external oversight. Ethical action emerges from inner alignment and authenticity.
Transpersonality
As human beings, we are spiritual, interconnected, and part of something greater. Psychotherapy honours this dimension through attentiveness to what is unseen, symbolic, and transcendent.
“I entered the unknown,
and there I remained unknowing,
all knowledge transcended.
Where I entered I knew not,
but seeing myself there,
not knowing where,
great things then made themselves known.
What I sensed I cannot say,
for I remained unknowing,
all knowledge transcended.“
– St. John the Cross
Who We Are
Our Team & Leadership
We are a small team by design, so the institute can remain close to what matters: relationship, presence, and careful attention. Leadership is held in a spirit of collaboration and shared responsibility, shaped through dialogue, reflective practice, and a commitment to learning. In this scale, no one is anonymous. Students are known over time, held to rigour, and supported to grow into the work with depth, integrity, and steadiness.
Gill Dawson
Founder | Integrative Psychotherapist, Adv. PG, Dip. Couns. | Operations & Business Director
Gill came to psychotherapy after a 30-year career in management and organisational leadership, bringing with her a deep understanding of how people function within systems. Trained in Transactional Analysis, her work naturally expanded into neuroscience, creativity, and Jungian depth psychology. Creative expression has been central to both her personal and professional development, and art-based methods are a distinctive feature of her therapeutic and teaching approach.
As co-founder of The Metis Institute, Gill leads experiential, creativity-led workshops that help students engage deeply with their learning and develop a meaningful personal portfolio. She also supports the delivery of training weekends and draws on her extensive business experience to ensure the institute runs with integrity, care, and clarity.
Giovanni Felice Pace
Founder | Psychotherapist, CPsychol, HCPC, UKCP, PTSTA | Academic Director
Giovanni’s path into psychotherapy began early, shaped by a lifelong fascination with the symbolic and unconscious life of the psyche. Formally trained in Transactional Analysis, his roots in depth psychology were established in adolescence through Jungian dream work. His clinical and teaching work has spanned a wide range of modalities and settings, often at the edges of psychological experience where depth, presence, and imagination are essential.
Giovanni is the originator of Depth Transactional Analysis, an approach that brings the clarity of TA into dialogue with archetypal, symbolic, and mythic dimensions of human experience. As Academic Director of The Metis Institute, he holds the vision of a training that develops not only skilled practitioners, but reflective, imaginative therapists for whom psychotherapy is a vocation as well as a profession.
Sabine Tendas
Embodiment Tutor
Sabine is a psychologist, psychotherapist, and dance movement therapist with a deep passion for the body’s unspoken language. She believes that the therapeutic use of movement allows one to experience oneself differently, getting in touch with resilience, body’s wisdom, and new possibilities. What words cannot carry will be spoken through gestures—and released through movement.
Jo Simmons
Community Voice
Jo Simmons is a psychotherapeutic counsellor, author, and communications professional with a background in journalism and storytelling. Jo brings warmth, creativity, and psychological depth to her role as the Institute’s voice across social media, outreach, and engagement, sharing its distinctive vision with the wider world.
Sam Carbon
Visiting Tutor
Sam is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist and clinical supervisor, PTSTA, with a deep commitment to what unfolds in relationship.
She believes therapy offers a steady space to listen to anxiety, loss, and repeating patterns, and to discover what they are trying to say.
What feels tangled can be gently understood, and what has been held inside can be spoken, met, and transformed.
Location
The Spencer Centre, Worth School Paddockhurst Road, Turners Hill, RH10 4SD
Worth school is well connected with good transport links, we are close to:
- Gatwick Airport – 8 miles / 12 kms
- Three Bridges Mainline Railway Station – 4 miles / 6 kms
- M23 – 5 miles / 4 kms Junction 10a
The Metis Institute runs all its courses within the prestigious venue of Worth School, an independent, co-educational Catholic Boarding School. It is situated in the heart of rural Sussex countryside yet close to main line railways stations and a major UK airport (Gatwick). The campus is based within 500 acres of landscaped grounds surrounded by woods and fields with southward views over rolling countryside towards the South Downs. Worth School’s historic origins date back to 1606, and a Benedictine community based in France that accommodated exiled English and Welsh monks following severe penal laws in England against Catholics.
Worth School offers “Education with Heart and Soul” which very much mirrors our philosophy. Whilst the Metis Institute has no specific religious philosophy, nor do we encompass any religious rituals or training we do accept trainees with all faith, heritage and beliefs.
Residential
Being a boarding school, Worth School offers a residential option. The rooms are small and institutional but fully functioning including a bed, a wardrobe and a desk with shared shower and toilet facilities. The accommodation is comfortable, clean, warm and contained and within walking distance of both the refectory and the tutor rooms. This makes us inviting for international students who can simply arrive on site and immerse their selves in the training with no need to travel to / from offsite accommodation or find food over the weekend. Everything is provided within the campus.
Facilities
Being a boarding school, Worth School has a beautiful refectory which serves a 2-course lunch for all our trainee’s (the cost for this is included within our fees). For trainee’s that decide to board for the weekend the refectory offer a wonderful breakfast and a 2-course evening meal. The refectory is located within the main manor house of the school building.
Parking is free and onsite with a short walk to our tutor rooms.