MY STORY 

Breaking down -  Breaking free

My venture into the counselling field seemed like a natural progression following what I called my nervous breakdown believing I was broken and unfixable.  Broken down needing to unlearn everything I knew and replace it with the real unconditioned me, the vulnerable me, the imperfect me, the balanced me.  Finding the real me and the humanness in me by freeing the woman in chains I was, becoming the authentic me I am now. 

​

Remarkable Human Beings

 

After 26 years studying mental health, I’ve learned the human body is remarkable. Our nervous system operates in either safety or survival mode most of the time, influencing all we do. With neuroplasticity, natures gift of flexibility and adaptability, our brain can adapt and change, so we are not stuck with outdated beliefs about being broken or lost.  We can find the middle ground (rest & digest) between safe and survival because we needall in balance to live a fruitful and fulfilling life. 

​

Things Are Not What They First Appear

 

​Through my formative years of healing I learnt one thing leads to another and what started as a high anxiety state turned into other psyche phenomenon, learning we can be stuck in survival mode for years.  

​

Through my lived experience I've suffered firsthand how these natural protective processes impact self-esteem, confidence, relationships, and self-worth. They can trigger grief, anxiety, and unresolved childhood traumas, snatch away meaning, purpose and ultimately affect our self-perception and decision-making during challenging times.  Whilst leaking out in our behaviours subconsciously the rest of the time if left unresolved. In effect at one extreme they can break us down completely until we are nothing but a shaking dysfunctional mess. 

​

In the first instance these natural gifts help us to survive but over stimulated when experiencing trauma and on-going threat real or peceived, our nervous system gets stuck with the switch permanently on. After a while of this our systems get over-sensitised and finds it hard to return to balance by itself.  When this is the norm, we suffer many cognitive and physical symptoms and difficulties until we can find a regulated nervous system to help re-regulate our over stimulated system. Counselling with a practitioner who understands this can support your nervous system to return to regulation and efficient working. 

​

Time & Tide 

 

I found myself drowning, overwhelmed, I had to do something and quick, I found three books or rather they found me (but that's a story for another time), they literally saved my life and this was the beginning of my recovery journey.  The quote of Carl Jung resonated and its how I've lived my life since "until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.   The rest is history as they say!

​

Hope during those dark times came as I made myself promises when I was sat on that anxiety bed rocking to and fro “if I'm going to live then I will live fully not just exist" and "if I can help just one person then this experience would be worth it”. Although, at the time I never believed I’d really make it out of that void, never mind beyond it.

 

Yet, here I am doing what I dared envision in those dark dark moments, I still have to pinch myself now and again to realise I am. 

 

A Journey Through Adversity

 

​In those dark months, I felt as though I have been cast adrift in tumultuous seas, tossed overboard into the heart of a volcano and swept up be an overwhelming tsunami.  In the depth of these experiences I encountered the dark night of the soul, facing profound fear and uncertainty.

 

I've slowly come to realise and acknowledge my persoanl  healing journey is one marked by fear, confusion and disorientation, but most of all faith, courage, hope and transformation.

​

Through perseverance I made my way back to the safety of the shore. Learnt to walk again but with a different stride, enabling me to now walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk with lived expereince, understanding from the inside out not just outside in and with compassion, empowering me to actively rewrite my story and changed my future trajectory.

​

​Lived Experience

 

Since that time I’ve offered my experience to hundreds of people, engaging in thousands of counselling sessions, collaboratively sharing my skills and lived experiences. Volunteered with Cruse Bereavement Care, Doncaster Alcohol Services and trained with Victim Support to support victims of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault/abuse and worked within a Children’s Trust supporting disadvantaged families.  

​

Academia

​

Completing an Advanced Diploma in Therapeutic Counselling, an Advanced Certificate in Clinical Supervision (including telephone and online work), became an accredited bereavement counsellor with Cruse and a trauma-informed therapist, BACP accredited, completed many continuing professional development course (CPD)  and continue to shape, widen and deepen my extensive awareness, skills and knowledge to support others going through their own personal healing journeys. 

 

Not bad for a left-handered ginner who the teacher said I'd amount to nothing when I was just five years old. Imagine that for a five year old not even got started in life, that's some script to impart to a young mind just because she didn't like the hand I wrote with.  Well she got that wrong! But still eventually I learnt to "feel the fear and do it anyway" (Jeffers) 

​

A Question asked

 

A supervisee recently asked me, "do you live, breathe, and eat this stuff?"

​

Well I am a human being and that’s what I study.  Mark Twain said, "find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life", since I've become a counsellor that's how I feel.  Don't get me wrong I still make mistakes 'to err is human', that's what I am first and foremost and none of us are perfect after all.  What I do is learn from them which can be uncomfortable but then we need at times to get comfortable with the uncomfortable; because it is the insight and new understandings that enables you, me to grow and develop into our fullest potential. 

​

Reflection 

​

As I'm reflecting over my healing journey what I’ve being doing is to simply become more human to live as an authentic human being, sounds simple doesn't it.  But somewhere along the path of life we are taught to either be less than or more than human, both stances are not human at all and we’ve lost the connection of our natural humanness and humility.  We've learnt to cut off our emotions, being suppressed or repressed and we are really missing out on a the richeness of what a natural human being feels throughout our days, emotions havemotivations,  purpose and  wisdom.  They are not the enermy we often beleive they are. 

​

Further experience

​

My last employment was within a Children’s Hospice, supporting families facing their darkest times.  Caring for a Child with life-limiting, life-shortening conditions and terminal illness, supporting from intake to palliative care and through the bereavement process.  Achieving lead counsellor overseeing the Counselling for both Children and Adults Services.  Following more than seven years’ service,  I decided to focus on my Private Practice and retired from being an employee, entering a new phase of life and into a thriving private practice.

​

Healing & Learning 

 

Through my healing, I discovered that connection, compassion, and a stable, nurturing relationship and environment fosters safety, flexibility, and helps restore the parasympathetic nervous system to balance.

​

I’ve learnt we need others to help us co-regulate our nervous systems, especially when we're dysregulated; it's difficult to achieve this alone. Counselling supports us in learning how to regulate and maintain balance independently.

​

Growing

​

I've learnt humans aren't problems to be fixed; we're simply reacting to our environment as nature intended, our bodies hold the trauma and responed to protect us from intense damage, this can be seen in  depression, anxiety, C-PTSD, grief, and how we behave in relationships etc.  These are all reactions as a result of our nervous systems not having the right environement to stay balanced and in harmony.  We get over-sensitised and knocked off balance to protect our psyche from damage, psyche is another word for Self or Soul.

 

This is normal and natural it is our bodies way of dealing with threats to protect our psyche from damage, a pretty dynamic and amazing pieced of kits we carry around inside us. 

​

The Medical Profession

 

The medical profession pathologies, lists and labels these natural response's as symptoms even lists them in a book called the DSM-5 and calls them disorders, putting us all into nice, neat little boxes, to be fixed by medicalization, controlled and grouped together taking away our individuality and autonomy.

 

This is a reductionist model interpreting human beings as a part of our sum total and attending to just the predictable and can initself create learned helplessness. 

​

Almost as if turning its back on Mother Nature and the fundamental humanness of us as individuals in a context of our environments and relationships.   It is in relationships we get hurt and wounded and it is in relationships we heal our distressed Soul-Self,  not through medications that hit just one part of our psyche, don't get me wrong meds can help temporary, but they are not the story of healing or the whole story. 

 

Thinking outside the box

 

I never really fitted into one neat box, through my own lived experience and that of others, I've learnt to think outside the medical professions mental health box. Learnt we aren't disordered at all but distressed so I've dropped the disorder and replaced it with 'distress'.

 

When we react to traumatic and anxiety provoking incidents we become distressed in Mind, Body, and Soul, we don't become a set of symptoms, we are wounded in a context and there's a lot we can do to help ourselves once we know how.   We can support our Soul-Self to return to harmony and have well-being in abundance. 

​

I use a whole systems model that is holistic and see you as an individual who has the ability to change.  Many  symptoms disappear through being compassioantely witnessed in our pain, validated, seen, heard though genuine connection.  Within collaboration, attunement, and re-regulating your nervous systems with a safe competant other so a sense of safety and harmony is created within. 

 

Through a Biopsychosocial model putting you at the heart of our work as a natural human being in context with your environment and understanding your suffering is affected by multiple layers of context not just a list of symptoms or a chemical inbalance. We will seek to understand, slow the whirlwind, slow the pendulum, becoming aware of implicit (unconcious) body awarenss to integrate and return to homeostasis and balance between the extremes finding your freedom, peace. calm and your true humanness.  

 

​​Together in collaboration

​

Together, we can identify what you need to restore your mental health and well-being and help you achieve your goals.

​

With the approach of “facing, accepting, floating, letting time pass” (Weekes), I’ve made progress at my own pace, and you can too, with my guidance and expertise.

 

Are you ready to share your story and start healing?