About me

A long way round

I came to counselling later than some, and by a route that turned out to matter.

For many years I worked in the NHS as a radiographer, directly involved in patient care. People arrived frightened, or in pain, or waiting for news they dreaded. Some of them were treated wonderfully. Some of them were processed. The difference was almost never about clinical skill — it was about whether anyone slowed down enough to see the person in front of them.

I loved that work. I also, in the end, burned out doing it.

I’d had a long-standing interest in mental health, psychology and counselling, and I’d been on the other side of the counselling room myself, where I saw first-hand what it can do for wellbeing. When a change in personal circumstances made it possible, I trained.

I chose Gestalt deliberately. It looks at the whole person rather than a list of problems. It treats counselling as something we do together — two people working side by side, rather than an expert and a patient. And it makes space for creativity — which matters enormously when the thing you’re trying to express doesn’t come easily in sentences.

Why neurodivergence sits at the centre of my work too

I have lived experience of neurodivergence, and of the way it moves through families and relationships — the misunderstandings, the exhaustion, the relief when something finally has a name.

I want to be careful about what that does and doesn’t mean. It doesn’t make me an authority on your experience. Neurodivergent lives differ from each other enormously, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I assumed mine mapped onto yours.

What it does mean is that you’re unlikely to spend our sessions explaining the fundamentals. You won’t have to justify why the fluorescent light matters, or defend needing longer to answer, or translate your inner experience into terms that suit somebody else. We can start from further along.