Photo by Sue McLauchlan

Experience

I’ve been counselling professionally for 35 years.

Counselling experience

One-to-one counselling, both long and short term, with adults and young people. I’ve worked in primary care, student counselling, social work, prisons, employee assistance programs (EAPs) and in private practice. I’ve worked with victims and perpetrators of abuse.

I’ve been supervising counsellors for 30 years. I’ve run training workshops for counsellors.

Please see my approach and my training

Other work experience

Reception teacher, TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language), web developer, gardener, builder’s labourer, night porter, delivery driver.

Life experience

It is important for counsellors to have quite a bit of counselling themselves. This is so they can recognise their own issues and put them to one side rather than muddling them up with the clients’. I am grateful to the counsellors I have seen at different times in my life.

I was brought up in the Lake District, went to boarding school, lived and worked in France, Germany and Togo, volunteered at a night shelter, did a bicycle journey from London to Cape Town, was a home carer. I am a survivor of colon cancer.

I’ve lived in Birmingham, Paris, Nurnberg and Leeds. I now live in Marsden, in the Pennines.

I’ve been practicing yoga and mindfulness for many years.