I began my conscious journey with ‘self’ sat in a fine art studio, sculpting my inner world into being. This process of making the invisible visible was how I began exploring what it was to ‘embody’. I have always been drawn to noticing what occupies the ‘empty’ space in art and life. This void connects things. This space in between is where we meet. I now take great joy and feel privileged to move alongside others as they explore the inner spaces.

Following my MA in Art Psychotherapy, which involved two years of supervised practise and my own personal psychotherapy, I worked at a residential school for children with special educational needs and emotional and behavioural difficulties. Here, I deepened my clinical practice through working with challenging and complex presentations.

This helped prepare me for my next role in an NHS in-reach team, working in a young male offender’s prison. Alongside this, I worked with children, young people and their families in NHS Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. All of this work was primarily attending to complex trauma secondary to abuse and neglect. Within these settings, I worked one-to-one or in groups with service users and offered clinical supervision to staff. Here, I observed the central importance of early attachment relationships and experiences. It became increasingly apparent that the earlier we can intervene, the better chance we have of preventing damaging relational cycles from being created and perpetuated.

In order to deepen my knowledge of human development, I undertook a postgraduate diploma in Psychoanalytic Infant Observation at the Northern School of Psychoanalysis. This entailed an in-depth study of development, involving weekly observation, of an infant from birth to two years and a young child from 3 to 4 years. The richness and depth of the study supported my professional development, and also afforded much needed space to appreciate the impact that working with severe trauma for 8 years had upon me personally. I also began to fully appreciate the negative impact of working in a team without enough support, especially damaging in dysregulated, highly stressed teams. With this came a decision to redress the balance.

I went part-time, fuelled with an ambition to help other psychotherapists feel supported and avoid burnout. I setup privately to do clinical supervision and consultation work. Eventually I left the NHS altogether to pursue this. It was then that myself and, my now husband, decided to move to Cornwall. Here, I began to work privately for Clear, a charity who work countywide with children, young people and families who were suffering with effects of addiction, trauma, emotional and educational difficulties. Still passionate about making a difference at the start of life, it was then that I set up ‘Paint and Clay’, a parent and baby group. Grounded in attachment theory and psychotherapy, I created a safe place for parents and their babies to bond, for parents to seek support from myself and from other parents. This was a very successful space, yet, ironically, it was my own advancing pregnancy that brought the group to an end.

After 20 plus years of academic and work life experience, it was my own burnout from work (meeting myself as not being invincible) and my experience of carrying and birthing two babies, that has most powerfully informed the way in which I now shape my practise and choose to live my life. These experiences gifted me rich insight into the empowering nature of what we are all capable of when we fully embrace the inseparable connection of our bodymind. My journey continues to be transformative as with continued curiosity I learn, daily, from my role as a mother and continued personal and professional development.

I am fascinated with the links of physical, mental and emotional health issues. Armed with emerging, hopeful, information from neurobiology and epigenetics, we know that it is possible for us to shift from ‘trait to state’. Training with The Somatic School and completing their ICF Accredited Somatic Body-oriented Coaching certification, has given me more tools and experience to put what I am passionate about into practise.

Life is precious, and I want to offer people the opportunity to experience themselves as whole, healthy, creative, joyful beings.