From engineering to the therapy room
Guy's route into therapy was not a straight line. He left school in 1983 to become a BT engineer, the pragmatic path, following his father. A car accident changed the direction of his life: the long months of recovery gave him time to read, and what he read about the human mind would not let him go. On his thirtieth birthday he went back into education to train as a therapist.
In the decades since, his therapeutic grounding has grown to span NLP, CBT, EMDR, hypnotherapy, and timeline therapy. Drawing on that background, he now works as a trainer and coach with organisations across finance, law, technology, infrastructure, health, and education, helping people perform under pressure. That side of his work, including his People Code framework, is described in full on his main website.
Why he wrote the book
The book grew out of a change Guy watched happen from inside the therapy room. In the 1990s, roughly one client in twenty-five was under 25. Today it is closer to six in ten. The clients got younger, the problems grew more acute, and the system fell further behind; yet the standard response remained the same: treat each young person as an isolated case.
Rebuilding the Village is his answer to that mismatch. It argues that we are applying individual solutions to a collective problem, and that the collective solution already exists in the oldest social technology we have: the village. The book sets out the ASPIRE framework, six pillars through which families, schools, workplaces, and healthcare can act as one coordinated community around a young person, and explains why the youth mental health crisis is structural rather than a failure of individual resilience.
This site and guyjacobs.com
The two websites do different jobs. This site is the home of the book: its argument and structure, the ASPIRE framework, the citation list, press information, and the free chapter offer for registered readers. guyjacobs.com covers Guy's wider work as a trainer, coach, and speaker, including his services for organisations and private clients and his media page, where articles and podcast conversations connected to the book will appear.
For interview requests and speaking enquiries about the book, see the press page or write to help@rebuildingthevillagebook.com.