Growing up in Northern Ireland as the only girl in a family of six children, from an early age I was acutely aware of how gender roles shape our everyday lives.

My mum, Rose, ran her own hairdressing salon and my dad, Joe, his own car garage. Both were equally accomplished in business but, while I saw my dad’s working day ending as soon as he came through the front door, my mum’s work was endless and the expectation that she ran all aspects of domestic life alongside her professional life was never questioned. As the years, and children, went on it became almost impossible for my mum to maintain this so, in need of support, my aunt, who we called Bay, moved into our house, and essentially became our second mum – disrupting the idea of the nuclear family and allowing me to see first-hand the transformative power of a wider support system.

As a Catholic family with public-facing businesses in a predominantly Protestant area, we were taught to keep our heads down and to fit in with those around us to avoid drawing attention to ourselves. This ethos went directly against the Irish story-telling culture that we knew from our own community but for my parents it wasn’t a choice, it was a survival strategy. In my work today, I see this same strategy playing out again and again. As was the case for my family, for many, not talking about the difficult things or keeping our heads down is used to try and create a feeling of safety and if this is how we’ve grown up breaking this cycle of not talking can be hugely challenging. I recognise that not all of us have the tools to tell our stories in the same way but, through therapeutic work, I believe that we can develop these tools and in doing so move through and beyond the difficulties we’ve experienced in the past.

Feeling restricted by the ‘heads down’ culture that I grew up with, in my early twenties I moved to Scotland to work with children in residential care and from here moved to Wales to study social work.

For me, social work offered a space to help people create opportunity for themselves. I found that often people who experience the social services system can feel that they are being ‘done to’ and have no choice in what is happening in their lives, a mindset that I often encounter in my coaching and counselling work today. I strongly believe that even when there are influences in our lives that are beyond our control, we always have choice. As a social worker then, and counsellor and coach now, my purpose is to empower those I work with to see the choices they have and support them in taking action. In my social work practice I regularly worked with families and couples with experiences of domestic violence, and this quickly became my professional specialism.

Having grown up with five brothers I was very interested in working with men, who are more commonly the perpetrators of domestic abuse, and I felt clear from the outset that compassion had to be at the heart of my approach to this complex work.

It was this clarity that led me to developing my own private counselling practice in 2005 and from here my practice and ‘storytelling’ toolkit has expanded to include coaching, consulting, supervision and training services.

Coming back full circle (as every good story does!) when working with new people I often think of Bay, my aunt, and the sacrifices she made to move into our home. After years of putting her own life on hold to support my parents and our family, in her fifties she decided to go back to school to study English and, after graduating, got a job in our local library. At the time this was shocking to me and my brothers, she had always been there and now she wasn’t. It took some time for us to adjust to the changes she was making but ultimately it was clear that this was what she needed to do and, for the first time in our lives, she was doing something purely for herself.

Engaging with counselling and coaching can be like this, it can sometimes be difficult for those around us to understand why we want things to change or to accept the changes that they experience in us as we begin to make different choices.  

Opening up the possibility that things can be different for you is at the heart of my work. If you’re reading this it is likely that you are already starting to feel the pull to change and, as a counsellor and coach, I am here to support you in this courageous exploration.