About me

Becoming a therapist wasn’t really a decision I made. It was something that evolved.

Before training as a therapist, I worked as an advocacy worker with children and young people in the care system. My role was to help young people have their views and experiences heard and taken seriously. Through that work, I began to feel more strongly about the importance of really understanding the young person in front of me. That wasn’t always straightforward. I could often understand and empathise with the adults and professionals around them too, the responsibilities they carried, the systems they worked within and the limits of what they could offer. But I kept coming back to the young person: what had happened to them, what they were living with, what mattered to them and how things looked from where they stood.

Again and again, it seemed that understanding was where something could begin to shift. Being listened to and taken seriously could help a young person feel less shame, more understood and cared for and more able to have a say in their own life. I think that’s where the foundations of becoming a therapist really began for me.

Around the same time, I was beginning to understand my own story in the context of my life. I had someone in my life who offered me the same kind of empathy and understanding I’d seen matter to the young people I worked with. It helped me work through some of my own shame and gave me some belief in myself. That gave me the confidence to begin training as a therapist in 2020 and to develop more deeply the things that had already become important to me: listening carefully, offering warmth and compassion, taking people’s experiences seriously and being willing to sit with the conversations that aren’t always easy to have.

The Work That Has Shaped Me

I qualified as a therapist in 2022 and continued working within the care system for a time after qualifying. Since then, my therapeutic work has included private practice, hospice care and short-term Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) counselling. Across these different settings, I’ve worked with people experiencing loss, difficult relationships, change, uncertainty and times when life has simply become difficult to manage.

Working in short-term counselling has meant finding ways to understand what is happening for someone even when our time together is limited. Whatever the setting, I try not to see a person or their difficulties in isolation. Often, the ways we feel, cope or respond make much more sense when they are understood in the context of what has happened to us, the relationships around us and the circumstances or systems we’re living within.

Hospice care shaped me in a different way. Supporting people and their families, both before and after a bereavement, brought me closer to things we can spend much of our lives trying not to think about. Some of the things I’d worried about suddenly didn’t seem quite so important. It left me with a much stronger sense that life is precious, time is short and a lot of the stuff we get caught up in probably matters less than we think. That perspective has stayed with me. In my work now, I’m interested not only in what feels painful or difficult but in what matters to you and how you want to live.

What matters to me in therapy

All of these experiences have shaped how I work as a therapist, but the importance of the relationship has probably been the most consistent thread. I saw it early on in my work with young people. Before they could trust me with what they really thought or felt, and before I could properly understand and communicate their views, there needed to be a relationship where they felt listened to, taken seriously and that I was genuinely on their side.

Therapy is different, but I think something of that has stayed with me. The relationship we build really matters. It’s not just about what we talk about, but about feeling that the person you’re talking to is genuinely trying to understand you, takes you seriously and is alongside you in figuring things out.

I’m interested in getting to know you as a whole person, what’s going on for you now, what matters to you, the relationships and circumstances around you and, where it’s helpful, the experiences that have shaped you. That doesn’t mean staying in the past. It’s about making sense of things together, understanding yourself with a bit more compassion, and working out what you want for yourself and how you want to live.