Rebecca Abrahams

Rebecca Abrahams (Kāi Tahu) is a mother to two teenage daughters, a wife, current Registered Educational Psychologist and former Registered Primary School teacher. After teaching for a few years, Rebecca completed her Educational Psychology training in 2002 and worked in various educational and youth justice settings before moving into Private Practice. Here Rebecca worked on a variety of youth and post-injury behavioural contracts, and for Massey University in a post-graduate marking position and more recently at the University of Otago as a guest lecturer on the Postgraduate Programme in Pain and Pain Management. This is where she also studied and received a commendation from the Chancellor. Rebecca plans to resume post-graduate study when her daughters begin their undergraduate degrees soon. Rebecca now exclusively supports people living with pain in her private work. This work parallels Rebecca’s personal experience of living with pain. Rebecca’s background in the ecological model from her Educational Psychology training aligns with her highly contextual and idionomic approach to assessing and supporting individuals experiencing pain - all with a strong focus on collaborative care.

Whilst all areas of pain are of high interest to Rebecca, she particularly likes to support athletes/performers returning to their passionate endeavours and does so via the ACC pain contract – both in community and tertiary spaces.  Rebecca has been a member of NZPS since 2015, actively participating in all conferences and contributing two articles to Ngau Mamae, one of which was a book review written at the invitation of the author. Rebecca looks forward to supporting current Kaupapa, initiatives and to contributing in additional ways where needed.