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Magpie Counselling, 19 Wimbledon Avenue, Brandon (2026)

24/04/2026

Not All Exhaustion Means The Same Thing

It is not always an easy thing to answer. There is overlap. Blurred edges. And sometimes, if I reach too quickly for a label or a diagnosis, I risk missing something more important, the very particular way someone is experiencing their own life. That said, having a framework can matter. A name, a pattern, a piece of language that makes something click into place. I have seen those quiet “that’s me” moments shift things for people in a way that feels relieving rather than limiting.

I came across a research paper recently, Burnout as experienced by autistic people: A systematic review, and it helped clarify something that can otherwise feel quite hard to pin down. I wanted to share it here in case it offers something useful to you too. In simple terms, this is what the research suggests:

Autistic burnout is not just feeling tired or low.
It is a deep, whole-body exhaustion that builds over time, often from trying to live in environments that do not quite fit. This might include managing sensory overwhelm, navigating social expectations, or constantly camouflaging, which means hiding or adapting parts of yourself to feel more acceptable to others. Over time, that effort can become too much.

People describe not only exhaustion, but a loss of abilities they usually rely on, such as communication, organisation, or coping with everyday demands. Unlike short-term stress, this can be long-lasting, sometimes with periods of crisis alongside partial recovery.
The research also points to what can help:

Understanding yourself more clearly.
Having space for rest, solitude, and sensory relief. Being supported, both by individuals and by environments that are willing to adapt.
Which, in a way, brings us back to that original tension. Sometimes it is not about deciding what something is, burnout or depression, but about understanding why it is happening, and what might actually meet the need underneath it.

If you are curious, you can read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2025.102669

16/04/2026

Notes from the office plant:
Needs were present. Signals were given.
They were… not fully met.

I want to reassure the people I work with that, unlike this plant, what you bring won’t be met with vague good intentions and irregular attention.

09/04/2026

Tea & CPD… And I’ve Wandered Into Loneliness

Loneliness as a word didn’t really exist until Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Before that, people felt it, carried it, lived it in ways that had no shape. Solitude, forsaken, melancholy. Something that pressed in on the body and mind, leaving traces in letter, song, and silent gesture long before it could be named.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the word surfaces, but it has nowhere to settle. Hamlet moves through a court where nothing is as it seems. He is surrounded, watched, spoken to, and yet there is no real meeting of him. Madness becomes a language or perhaps somewhere to put what cannot be said. Ophelia’s loneliness is another kind of weight. Shaped and controlled by voices that do not belong to her, she fragments when those structures fail. What remains is almost untranslatable, a human echo of what has always existed in the shadows.

This isn’t new. Loneliness has always been lived in the spaces that language could not touch, in the cracks of families, courts, cities, lives. It has carried itself forward, waiting for words that could hold it. Watching Joker, I was struck by how little has changed. Arthur Fleck is rarely alone. People, systems, noise swirl around him, yet he has nowhere to land, no one who truly sees him. What lives inside him spills out, distorts, reorganises itself in ways impossible to ignore. I am in no way suggesting that loneliness equals the kind of madness Joker depicts, but if you need me to walk alongside you as you metaphorically strut down some steps to a 70’s classic, I’m in.

I work with loneliness not as a problem to fix but as a presence to notice. I am curious about the ways it shapes lives long before words arrive to name it and how it lingers even after a word exists. How it asks to be met, not solved. How recognition, small and fleeting, can sometimes shift its weight. Even now, it can be named, and yet it still lingers in the spaces between.

31/03/2026

The face you might see when you tell me you’ve lost an hour…maybe two… maybe the whole evening… to scrolling. Not even enjoying it. Not even really choosing it. Just… there.

Me, in this chair, nodding like I’ve cracked the code. Curious. Thoughtful. Gently wondering what the scrolling might be doing for you. Also me, in this exact chair, at a different hour…
double chin, phone glow, fully horizontal…
doing exactly the same thing. No insight. No neat formulation. Just thumb, screen, thumb, screen. Gone.

It’s not always a lack of discipline. Sometimes it’s tiredness, or noise, or not wanting to feel whatever’s waiting when the phone goes down. Anyway, if you’re disappearing into your phone a bit more than you’d like…

I see you.

(Posted after “just checking something” and immediately entering my chinnie era.)

30/03/2026

On inconvenient evidence

People are very good at keeping a tally against themselves.
Rarely written down, never neat:
• didn’t do enough
• should have done better
• why can’t I just…

The mind is an excellent prosecutor.
It’s terrible at disclosure. But if you slow down, awkwardly, deliberately, and write a different list, something shifts. Not grand achievements. Nothing LinkedIn would applaud. Just what actually happened.

Got up.
Answered that message.
Fed the kids.
Went to work, even though it felt impossible.
Kept something together that could have quietly fallen apart.

Seeing it all in one place makes it harder to keep calling yourself useless.
Not because anyone argued you out of it.
Because the evidence is inconvenient.

No affirmations.
No “you’ve got this” (that line makes me want to fling myself at a wasp nest). Just a list.
And the quiet realisation that the story might not be as complete as it first sounded.

28/03/2026

More tea and CPD

I did something slightly uncomfortable this week. Before starting a piece of LGBTQ+ CPD, I took the test cold. Not to prove a point, but to notice one. To see where my answers came from when they weren’t being guided. To look, quietly, for the edges of my own understanding. There was one scenario that stayed with me. Someone speaking negatively about a transgender person. The “correct” answer was to challenge them directly. To tell them they were wrong.

I didn’t choose that. Not because I think harm should go unchallenged. Harmful language needs to be named. Safety matters. But because I have rarely seen anyone think differently after being told they are wrong. More often, I have seen people dig in. Armour up. Become less reachable, not more. So I chose the answer that opened something instead of closing it. A response rooted in curiosity. An attempt to understand what sits underneath the words, not just correct what sits on top of them.

It cost me a mark. But it raised a question I am still sitting with.

In my work, whether with colleagues, young people, or the people who sit across from me, is the goal only to confront harmful language, or also to create the conditions where thinking can actually shift? Because safety matters. Language matters. And so does the possibility of reflection. In my work, I try to hold both. A clear boundary around harm, and a belief that people are more able to reflect when they feel met, not managed.

I am not sure that shows up neatly in a multiple choice answer.

But it matters in the room.

13/03/2026

Notes from the mop handle: shadows, moors, and selfhood

I have never quite managed to read all of Wuthering Heights. I have dipped in and out of the book over the years, and recently found myself watching reel after reel of trailers for the new adaptation. Wind on the moors, dramatic longing, everyone looking beautifully miserable. But here is the bit that always stays with me.

It struck me again how impossible it is to step into someone else’s life. You can copy the phrases, the posture, even the dramatic pauses. You can mimic the exterior. But the interior, the tilt of thought, the way longing touches you, the quiet nervous tics that make a life yours, is impossible to borrow. Identity is not a costume. It is not a performance. It is what makes your anger, your curiosity, your sadness feel like yours and no one else’s.

Perhaps that is why people can end up exhausted by masking, by upholding a persona at work or in public. Like Catherine, torn between social expectation and authentic longing, we carry masks that never fully align with what we feel inside. Performing someone else’s life takes a toll because the interior never matches the exterior. Jung called it the tension between persona and self. Frankl noted that meaning cannot be borrowed like someone else’s shoes. It must be lived. It’s not vanity that notices a shadow. Perhaps it is the quiet recognition of what belongs to you.

And sometimes, if you stand long enough by a mop handle, you can see the difference between storm and shadow, and no one else’s hands could hold that view.

12/03/2026

You may have heard the sad news that my lovely neighbour at Magpie, New Leaf Massage in Brandon, has departed. Wishing Lorna the best of luck on her next chapter.

If you’re one of the people who works with me, you may also have heard me quietly swearing as I get up to fetch my diary. This is because I have somehow managed to hurt my back… sleeping. Yes. Sleeping.

Through my moaning, a friend recommended Liv Therapy - Shona Liversidge in Brandon. Another fabulous woman in business, and the difference she has made to my ability to move without sweary commentary is incredible.

So if you happen to see me getting up from my chair a little more gracefully this week, that’s why.

08/03/2026

More tea and CPD…

Today’s reading wandered into bereavement; one of those subjects where theory fills entire shelves, yet the lived experience stubbornly refuses to stay inside the pages. Grief has always struggled with language. In therapy we try: stages, processes, frameworks. Useful things, sometimes necessary things. Yet when someone we love dies, the experience rarely arrives as something tidy enough to categorise. It arrives as a weight in the chest, a strange quiet in the house, an absence that feels louder than presence ever did. Which may be why so many of us first recognise grief somewhere else entirely. In a film. In a line of dialogue. In a song that suddenly feels as though it was written about someone we once knew.

I was thinking today about the old film All Dogs Go to Heaven and the line, “Goodbyes aren’t forever, kid.” It is such a small sentence, yet it carries something enormous inside it. Children’s films often do. They slip past the intellectual defences and land somewhere more honest. Cinema has always been strangely good at grief. There is the quiet devastation at the end of Forrest Gump when Forrest stands at Jenny’s grave talking to her in that gentle, uncertain voice, telling her about their son and how smart he is. The scene is almost unbearably simple. No grand speech, just a man speaking to someone who can no longer answer. Or the tenderness in The Green Mile when John Coffey says he is tired of the pain of the world, tired of people being ugly to each other. It lands somewhere deep because grief often reveals the same truth: that love makes us exquisitely vulnerable to loss. Irvin D. Yalom wrote that grief exists because love exists. The pain is not a malfunction of the human system; it is evidence of attachment, proof that something meaningful lived here.

I often notice people eating alone in cafés or chip shops and feel a quiet sadness about it. Recently I managed to put my foot squarely in it at the local chippy. I had enjoyed a glass or two of wine before heading out to collect fish and chips, and while I waited I plonked myself on the bench next to a pensioner waiting for her supper. “Ooh, treating yourself to a fish supper for one,” I said, immediately realising my brain and my mouth were not operating on the same shift.

I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me. She, however, was much wiser than me and could see the panic written all over my face. Instead of letting me dissolve into the lino she rescued me. We ended up chatting about ordering supper for one, about grief, and about the strange things people say when they do not quite know what to do with someone else’s loss. Apparently people putting their foot in it, like I had just done, often makes her laugh. It struck me afterwards that eating alone is not always about being alone. Sometimes it is about learning how to sit on a bench where someone else used to be.

Perhaps that is another truth about grief. It does not only live in the big cinematic moments. Sometimes it sits quietly beside a plate of fish and chips. Sometimes it shows up in awkward conversations with strangers who mean well but get it wrong. And sometimes a line from a film suddenly finds you and says the thing that was too difficult to say out loud.

Goodbyes are not forget. Sometimes the ache we carry is simply love with nowhere obvious left to go.

07/03/2026

I wanted to come on and say thank you again to everyone who has taken the time to like, share, and follow Magpie Counselling on Facebook and Instagram.

Despite being listed on some of the more traditional platforms used to advertise counselling services, it’s really been these spaces and the support of the local community, that have helped Magpie grow to almost 500 followers over the last few months. More importantly, it’s led to some really valuable connections with the people I work with. Word of mouth in this field is a huge compliment. Trust can’t really be manufactured, so when people choose to share my work or recommend Magpie to someone else, it means a great deal. That said, the time has come to spread my wings a little. I’m currently working with Teal Fox Digital to develop my very own website.

When I was training, there was some discussion about whether private practice really warranted a “fancy website”, or whether it was just a bit of ego fluff. But feedback from families during a previous business venture stayed with me. Many said that seeing a thoughtful, well-designed website helped them feel reassured; it felt professional and considered. And that really landed with me. If we’re not willing to invest in ourselves, why would anyone else feel confident doing the same?

So, watch this space. I can’t wait to share the finished product.

06/03/2026

Based in Brandon and welcoming clients from all surrounding areas.
If you feel it might help to talk, you’re welcome to get in touch.

Magpie Counselling

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