About Me...

My journey into counselling has been a long one with many twists and turns. Some turns I have felt in control of, but often, it has felt as though life was throwing one curve ball after another. Recently, I have learnt to take control and make decisions for myself that plan my way forward, achieve a life balance that suits me and is much more colourful and fulfilling.

Achievement always drove me, and unless I achieved well I felt like a failure in most aspects of life. Yet, at the same time, I was scared to step out into unchartered territory and to really follow my passions. In fact, looking back, I think I found it hard to really identify what I was passionate about. It often just felt as though I was on automatic pilot, being buffeted around by circumstance and other peoples opinions. Although I wouldn't say I was particularly unhappy then, it all just felt a bit colourless and dull. Like something was missing.

For me, it all came to a head when, due to ill health I lost my job, independence, mobility, security and many of my relationships began to suffer. It took this rather dramatic situation to force me to reassess my life.

Through my own counselling journey, I began to work out what I was passionate about, who I really was and how I felt about the things around me. I realised during this journey just how little I really knew about myself, how disconnected I was from how I genuinely felt about anything, what mattered to me and just as importantly, what was hindering me living more fully. I began to realise that it wasn't solely my circumstances that were getting in the way but that sometimes I was sabotaging my own quality of life.

I can now, hand on heart, say that I know what I want from my life and I feel much more equipped to achieve it.

I know each of us are unique individuals and my story won't be the same as yours, but hopefully you can see that I have been through my own challenges and come through the other side. I would love the opportunity to walk alongside you and help you to reconnect with yourself, get to know and love yourself, and help you to take the first steps to achieving your hopes and dreams and to living in glorious technicolour.

In addition

From my own experience of ill health, and having shared the journey with my loved ones, I feel passionately about the difference that having someone walk alongside you can make. The combination of this, and numerous years spent working within the NHS, resulted in me choosing to do my student counselling placement  at our local hospice. This work resonated with me so deeply, that I have continued working there ever since. I find it a great privilege to walk alongside those who have been given a life-limiting diagnosis, and to support them and their families as they wrestle to come to terms with and adjust to its implications. I see, day in day out, how as a society, we struggle to know how to care for grieving individuals. Grief, whether anticipatory or following a loss, can feel one of the most lonely and disorientating times, despite the simple fact that it is something that we can guarantee will affect us all more than once.  I will sit with you, listen to you; however many times you want to share the same story, and together we will  make sense of the devastation and find a way to integrate your loss into your future, at the pace that feels right for you.