30/03/2026
This is what I would say if I was not worried about how you would receive it. I have been thinking a lot about comments I have heard about my profession. These are just my personal opinions.
I did not end up here by accident. I chose this work the moment I watched children in a school lose the only way they had of letting out what was happening to them. That stayed with me. It still does.
What followed was seven years of learning. Not just about therapy, but about myself. You have to understand yourself before you can sit with someone else in their pain without your own story getting in the way. That work never really stops. It is ongoing, and it is hard, and most people never see it. I wish I could explain just how many hours I have put into understanding myself better so that I can sit with you, in your world, without getting in the way of it.
I have sat with survivors of r**e and abuse. With people living with addiction, personality disorders and eating disorders. With people who have watched someone be killed, or who have survived an attempt on their own life. I have sat with doctors and nurses who are so burnt out they cannot see a way forward, carrying the full weight of their role with nowhere to put it. With carers who are just trying to get through the day. With parents of children with additional needs who have not had a proper break in years, because no service and no family member can manage what they manage every single day. With men who cannot find the words to tell anyone that their partner is hurting them, physically, emotionally and financially, because nobody expects it of them and so nobody looks. With children whose burns and bruises are hidden in hairlines and in places nobody thinks to check, and who are not believed because of it. These are the people who come into my room. And I hold all of it.
I wish I could explain what it is like to sit in front of every client as a student and realise, sometimes for the first time, just how much I have been through myself. How that changes you. How it also, in ways that are hard to put into words, makes you better at this.
On a typical day I will see three or four clients. I will move from r**e, to grief, to complex trauma, to undisclosed abuse, to domestic violence, each within the space of an hour, with very little in between. Then I write my notes, do my research, prepare summaries, find resources, join a meeting, sometimes deliver training. Then I go home and try to be a partner and a parent and a person. Somewhere in all of that I am also processing what I have just held for someone else. There is no clean line between work and not work. The weight does not just switch off.
What most people do not know is what this costs, and I do not just mean emotionally. Supervision, which is not optional if you want to practise ethically, can cost up to £90 a month. Continuing professional development is forty hours every year, and courses range from £10 to £5,000. Accreditation fees are over £200 a year. Insurance on top of that. Resources. If I held full accreditation in every model I am trained in, it would come to close to £1,000 a year. And I am still paying back my student loan. Nobody talks about this enough.
I have trained in neuro-linguistic programming, cognitive behavioural therapy, dialectical behavioural therapy, EMDR, emotional freedom technique, polyvagal theory, grief and bereavement counselling, and specialist training in autism and ADHD. I am a clinical supervisor. I have worked as a trained SEND teaching assistant. I have spoken publicly about neurodiversity and fertility from my own lived experience. And yet what I do is still seen by some as less than. Still compared unfavourably to a single therapy model, and found wanting, because what I do is harder to measure. Still dismissed, sometimes, as nodding and asking how does that make you feel.
That dismissal is demoralising in a way that is hard to describe. Research tells our main NHS systems that what I do cannot be measured the same way as CBT or the IAPT service. I understand that systems need measures. But people do not arrive with one clean diagnosis and a straightforward history. They arrive as full human beings, with layered and complex lives, and a one size fits all approach does not serve them. I have seen what a holistic approach does for people who have spent years not being helped by something more rigid. That impact is real, even when it is hard to put a number to it.
The truth is I do not make people deep dive into their past. I do not push anyone into places they are not ready to go. I help people change the way they see their story. To understand themselves a little better. To feel less alone in what they are carrying. To lighten the load and feel that what they have been through, and how they feel about it, is valid. And sometimes, in the middle of all that weight, there is real laughter. There is joy. I do a quiet happy dance when someone reaches something they thought they never would. I think about my clients between sessions. I wonder how they are. I feel their grief when they lose someone we have been preparing for together, or when they suffer the loss of a child or a pregnancy. I choke up sometimes. I am not distant from it. I am human, and I feel it.
My lived experience of most of the issues my clients bring is not separate from my practice. It is part of it. It gives people permission to open up in ways they never have before. That is not something you can train into someone who has not lived it. It is one of the things I bring that cannot easily be accounted for in an accreditation framework or a commissioning decision.
What I wish people understood is that behind the support I offer, I am also a human being managing my own life. I have sat with clients while dealing with chronic pain that I cannot medicate against. A pounding headache, joint pain, limited movement, and still present, still holding the space. I have sat with someone else's grief on days when I have received my own hard news. Behind the work, there may be caring responsibilities, depression, loss. I am also someone's partner, someone's parent, someone's friend. I have dyslexia and dyscalculia. I am still studying because this work demands constant growth and quality from the people who do it. All of that is happening underneath, every week, while I show up for the people who need me to.
I do love this work. That is true, and it has never been in question. But loving something does not make it light. And I think it is time that the people who do it were taken as seriously as those who do it in a different setting, with a different title, under a different model. A holistic counsellor is not less than a psychiatrist. Seven years of training and lived experience and constant professional development is not nothing. The people sitting in my room, and the changes I see in them, are proof of what this work can do.
That is all I wanted to say, really. I just needed to say it out loud.
