About

I will work with clients face to face, but also online and on the telephone too. This approach offers more choice particularly for clients who may have difficulty accessing face to face counselling.

My Outlook

I am a fully qualified and experienced counsellor. My training and counselling practice is rooted in the humanistic, person-centred tradition. Counselling to me is a process whereby a client can find a way to live in a meaningful and functional way. My philosophy is that each of my clients is unique, they may need different things at different times, therefore my outlook towards to counselling is both pluralistic and integrative. Pluralistic, in that I collaborate with my clients and integrate their personal resources for self-change. This a key component of the pluralistic approach; as a client you can expect your counselling experience with me will involve shared decision making. This means I will talk with you about what you want from counselling, and what you felt to be most effective in helping you to get there. A pluralistic approach can help us to create a framework in which we can integrate a wide variety of personal, societal and cultural perspectives and methods into the sessions. We can be both problem and solution focused, so that you can increase your awareness of where issues have stemmed from, how they might be affecting you and what you may want to do about them. 

Training, life experiences and interests

Before I went into private practice, I undertook four years of counselling training concluding with achieving a BA (Honours). My skills include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Transactional Analysis (incorporating aspects of Inner Child), Gestalt, Person-Centred and Creative Therapy. I can also work with children and young people, having been trained by Place2Be, which was integrated with passing a safeguarding assessment.

I have worked with clients as a counsellor at The Probation Service, and the Listening Post C.I.C. My experience of working with different client groups and issues means I can support you whether it involves trauma or loss, to smaller issues that you feel are making you unhappy. Regardless of how different, big, or small you feel the problem is, my philosophy towards working with you is the same, “All Ideas Matter”.

I have particular interest in problems that affect well-being involving all types of loss, addiction, sexuality and gender issues. I have worked with clients who are from the LGBT community. My dissertation for which I received a 1^st, involved a qualitative study exploring the lived experience of transgender (trans) participants. This covered ambiguous loss, sources of support, and what participants felt were losses and gains, as an outcome of choosing to transition. 

Since 2016, I have volunteered in a Southend based LGBT peer support group. And this experience has helped me to understand the factors that can impact this community. This is relevant in client work, as means, I am not unconsciously invested in ideas that I think characterise what it means to be gay or trans, nor what “success” looks like for a person who may be considering “coming out” or transitioning. I also offer counselling to partners and families who have a family member who may be questioning or affirming their gender or sexuality.

I have also worked supporting the needs of the homeless community in Southend, where we provided hot food, shelter and a non-judgemental person to talk too. This role became even more important once the Covid-19 pandemic hit, as other public sector organisations were struggling to support the homeless. Volunteering helped me to fully understand the diverse issues that impact the lived experiences of people who may find themselves homeless.

For 28 years I worked within the Criminal Justice system. In this role I engaged with many people with different perspectives on life and how they saw themselves within society. The police, people involved with crime, and those who had been affected by crime. Working in this sector helped me to understand how mental health can impact people, regardless of whether they are a police officer, staff, victim of crime, or a person who has been involved with crime. This might be because they may not have the resources to practice self-care, or feel they are unable to talk to somebody because they worry about being judged. 

Whilst working in this sector I was a TRiM (Trauma Risk Management) practitioner. This gave me the skills to recognise when acute trauma might be turning to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It was my lived experience of trauma and seeing how others were also affected by it that motivated my interest in becoming a counsellor in 2017. If your issues arise from experiences involving the emergency services, I have the skills and personal experience to have empathy when others may not fully understand.