Home | Callistherapy Foundation | Charles Callis
Charles Callis grew up in a village just outside Wellingborough and went to school in the town. He found the world to be harsh and retreated into his books at an early age, studying ancient civilisations, as far away from the present reality as he could get. This took him to Cambridge which he chose simply because he preferred light blue to dark blue. There he studied more recent history, followed by economics and politics, in an effort to get himself back to the present day.
When he got there he didn’t like too much what he found and wandered about trying his hand at all sorts of things without much success. Eventually he thought he’d better settle down and play the game everyone was telling him to play so, after some more failed attempts to escape, he got a ‘proper’ job and a sort of career, and then managed to marry into a ready-made family after his future wife employed him in a fit of curiosity.
Teaching did not suit him at that time because he had little self-confidence and was much better at listening than he was at talking. So he trained as a counsellor, initially in a psychodynamic school where he obtained a University of Leicester diploma with distinction. This type of counselling was wonderfully abstruse but not very practical, so he set about learning as many other effective methods of helping people with low confidence and other psychological problems as he could.
He had already found he had a voice suited to hypnotherapy and trained with an advanced school, the Atkinson Ball College. Fascinated by hearing the remarkable life story of Edward Bach, he also trained in the use of the Bach Flower Remedies. When he took up a position as a counsellor in a GP surgery in 1995, he set about persuading the doctors to let him use the remedies as part of his work by mounting a couple of research studies with patients. He found in both studies, three quarters of patients felt they had had a significant benefit from using the remedies and half had benefited very much. So he set up a Bach Flower Remedy practice alongside his counselling in two surgeries and referred patients to their local chemist to have the remedy made up – some three thousand remedies in a six-year period.
It was while sitting in a doctor’s chair that he realised he was doing the nearest thing to fulfilling his mothers’ dream of his becoming a doctor, something he had never entertained because he couldn’t stand the thought of cutting flesh. But in 2004 his surgery closed down their counselling service in response to government directives so Charles came to work at the Callistherapy Healing Centre full time, taking up the role of Centre manager alongside his own therapy practice which by now included a variety of brief therapy approaches and such techniques as EMDR, EFT and, of course, NMT!
Four years later he was only too glad to pass on the day-to-day management of the Centre: this has set him free to concentrate on development work, such as this website, and his own practice.
