At our recent graduation event, our Chair of the Board of Trustees, Lindsay Shrubsole, sent this message to our recent graduates.

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Dear graduates,

It is an honour to have this opportunity to congratulate you, on behalf of the Board of Trustees for HDS, on your achievement.  I’m sure that for all of you this has been a demanding and challenging journey which should make your completion of the course all the more rewarding.

I also want to thank you for choosing to study with HDS.  We know that for each and every student the decision to enter into a course of intense study is a decision that will never be taken lightly.  You will have made a commitment to invest a significant amount of time and finance, in addition to the personal  demands and challenges involved in such a training.  In order to do this you have placed a high level of trust in us as an organisation to care for and support you through your journey.  I hope you feel we have been worthy of that trust.  Over the period of any professional training there will always be some obstacles or unforeseeable difficulties on either side.  During your training we had to transition from lockdown to more normal methods of training and inevitably there have occasionally been problems with that process for us and for some of you.  I want to thank you for your forbearance with this process which at times required all of us to tolerate some uncomfortable or somewhat challenging situations.  That process may have tested your trust of us at times and I hope you feel that, in the end, we were worthy of your trust.  As an organisation we will only continue to survive and develop if people like you continue to place your trust in us.

As you know HDS exists to promote psychodynamic therapies and thinking. We are a small, not for profit organisation, operating in the charitable sector of public service provision. The fact that you are graduating means that you are joining a community of like-minded thinkers and therapists. In your post qualifying world of work, you will be an ambassador for this community. Every graduate of HDS has something unique to offer but what we all have in common is an opportunity to influence others who are not part of this community. My earnest plea to you is that you recognise and grasp this opportunity. At some point in your career someone will have influenced you and inspired your interest in psychodynamic thinking. You now have an opportunity to be someone else’s inspiration.  

I want to conclude by reiterating my heartfelt congratulations. I sincerely hope that your experience with HDS has been a positive one and that you will continue a connection with us after you have graduated, perhaps by joining our alumni community.    

Whatever the future holds for you I wish you all the very best. 

Lindsay Shrubsole 

Chair of the Board of Trustees

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