When the mask is too heavy to hold
If it's a struggle to keep up that calm, capable exterior while quietly hoping someone might notice and share the weight — let's look at what could come next, so you're not carrying it on your own.
Maybe inside you're rehearsing all the ways to just disappear for a while, because it's too much, and part of what makes it heavier is keeping it hidden — because you're not sure how the people around you would handle this side of you.
And still, somewhere underneath, there's a quieter voice: it could be different from this.
There's somewhere to bring that voice.
You don't need to have it worked out before you come. You've already spent a long time trying to work it out alone. Come as you are — uncertain, messy, mid-thought. Let's build something new together: a bit of movement, a bit of hope.
My Journey to This Work:
A thread running through every chapter of my life: helping people put words to what's really going on for them, underneath the version of themselves they show the world.
The professional settings have changed.......
Where it started: In a community pharmacy, sitting across from a patient in a consulting room. Nothing needed to be said outright for them to know: it was safe here to name the fear, the fatigue, the difficulty of juggling a health condition alongside everything else life was still asking of them. They'd leave lighter for having had that moment. A natural shift for me, from the prescription and more towards the person holding it.
Where it deepened: A quieter room, this time in a hospice, listening to someone describe the particular devastation of losing a person or losing the life they knew. Grief work taught me how to sit inside "scary" without rushing anyone out of it and to trust that something genuine comes next when there's room for it.
Where it is now: A Zoom call or a phone line with someone who has chosen, in their own space, in their own time, to start telling me their story. Whatever shape that story takes.
I trained as an integrative counsellor alongside my pharmacy career because I'd always known the two threads: the clinical and the human needed to meet somewhere. This is that somewhere.
Outside the therapy room, I'm someone who thinks in image and rhythm rather than straight lines — music has always felt like it carries a whole story inside it and I notice the same thing happening for clients: the picture or the piece of music you reach for often says more than the "correct" clinical word ever could. I bring that same instinct into sessions, following your metaphors rather than replacing them with mine.
I'm also someone who's learned that the body keeps its own record. And when life gets loud, walking and time outdoors is where I go to think clearly again which perhaps is why I never rush a client toward clarity either. Some things need room and their pace before they'll show themselves.
-
When the gap between how you appear and how you feel has become too wide to sustain......we'll take the different parts of what you're carrying and help you see them differently, together. This draws on my integrative training and years of sitting with people doing exactly this kind of unravelling and re-imagining.
-
When your usual spaces have started to feel like the wrong shape for you......I bring my specific training in working with and supporting neurodivergence including Working with Neurodivergence in the therapy room, a Certificate in Working Therapeutically with Autistic clients and the Certificate in Adult ADHD+ with Dr James Kustow so this isn't guesswork for either of us. Training that looks at these areas of neurodivergence as a whole-body, whole life picture, not just a list of traits — more the reality of how it actually feels to live with.
-
When you're in the pain, the numbness or within the whirlwind that grief can bring......I trained and worked within a hospice bereavement service and I know grief doesn't move in straight lines.
-
When you want to know the space is genuinely safe...... I prioritise your confidentiality as one element of working to the ethical framework of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, as an Accredited Registered member (BACP reg. 381846).
-
When health, illness or your body's changes are a part of what has shifted......I bring insight from my years in NHS community healthcare and an integrative awareness of how feeling lives in the body, not just the mind.
.png)
