The Principal

Joy Hildegard is a psychotherapist, supervisor, clinical director, trainer, pedagogist, and systemic consultant with over 14 years of professional steward-leadership across the human psychological landscape. Prior to her clinical career, she held a background within the British Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) and pastoral care.

Her practice is refined and anchored in the embodied synthesis of strategic attuned navigation, compassionate mastery of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) application, forensic Therapeutic Community (TC) wisdom, systemic psychodynamics, and intersectional attunement. Her lifelong engagement with creative processes also grounds her practice and leadership in human suffering and flourishment with nuanced resonance.

A defining voice in right-brain-focused psychotherapy for early relational trauma pioneered by her landmark 2015 professional publication, she subsequently completed a five-year tenure over 2016-2021 on the editorial board for the Elsevier ScienceDirect international peer-reviewed journal The Arts in Psychotherapy, representing her defining transdisciplinary specialty and authority, and forensic psychotherapy practice. Her career spans rigorous clinical practice and leadership across diverse sectors—including the UK Ministry of Justice, the NHS, prisons, EAPs, and NGOs—serving human beings across the socio-economic spectrum and intersectional margins.

A seasoned clinical leader with a quiet confidence, she possesses a native gift for compassionate non-naive systemic practice and enlivening flourishment in those entrusted to her care and leadership. She has led attachment sensitive, trauma-informed, service-wide strategy and implementation—hosting formal placements accredited by the UKCP, BACP, and HCPC—designing and delivering bespoke transmodality training with her defining pedagogy—structured to orient toward enlivening practitioners’ capacity for relational somatic depth, optimising containment, mitigating enmeshment, discerning experiential ethics with contextual nuance, and enhancing interpersonal sovereignty.

This breadth and depth of practice has culminated in the formalisation of Granarium. As the Principal of the MetaFramework and Academy, she dedicates her professional stewardship to cultivating human beings and systems towards flourishment.

The MetaFramework is formalised to honour, preserve, and further cultivate—the transformative wisdom of the humble giants across disciplines and cultures that have enlivened her own individuation and steward-leadership.

Joy Hildegard Chong

Accred. Full Clinical Member, UKCP (UK Council for Psychotherapy)

SCoPEd Framework: Column C (Senior Clinical Tier)

UK Partnership of Counselling & Psychotherapy Bodies

UKCP No. 2011170439

“ The MetaFramework is formalised to honour, preserve, and further cultivate—the transformative wisdom of the humble giants across disciplines and cultures that have enlivened the individuation and steward-leadership of my own, and those I have been entrusted with the privilege to cultivate.”

— Joy Hildegard, Principal.