Jacqui
MNCPS Integrative Counsellor/Certified Couples Therapist
Bishops Lydeard and online. Individuals, couples, and young people aged 12+.
You do not need perfect words. You just need honesty.
What it’s like to work with me
I’m not a neutral observer. I’m with you. I listen for what is true in the room, and for what is trying to come into consciousness.
I pay attention to what you say, and also to what happens in you as you say it. Sometimes we slow down and come back to the moment, not to scrutinise you, but to help you come home to yourself. This work is compassionate, and it is also honest. I care about responsibility, not perfection. I care about meaning, not self improvement disguised as fear.
Often, what brings people to therapy is not only the problem on the surface, but the deeper question underneath it: what life is asking of them, and what they have been avoiding, repeating, or living out of loyalty.
- I stay engaged, not detached
- I do not shame you, and I do not pretend
- I tell the truth gently, not vaguely
- I help you slow down and get clear
- I take meaning seriously, not just symptoms
- I stay close when things get difficult
- I help you turn insight into responsibility
If you want therapy that is polite and distant, I’m not the right fit. If you want a real relationship in the room, with warmth and honesty, we may work very well together.
Who I work with
This work is also about the courage to be human, imperfect, finite, and still fully alive.
The unlived life
A great deal of suffering comes from living inside an unlived life. Not consciously. Not deliberately. But slowly, through loyalty, fear, roles, and inheritance.
You may have spent years being the stable one, the capable one, the good one, the one who doesn’t cause trouble. You may have been living a parent’s anxiety, carrying a family’s unspoken grief, or staying faithful to a story that no longer fits.
In this work, I ask questions with care:
What are you being loyal to that is costing you your life?
Who is living your life?
What have you been conscripted into?
What have you outgrown but not admitted?
What are you calling “being sensible” that is actually fear?
What wants to be born in you now?
When people begin to live their own life, something shifts. They become more present. More honest. Often more tender. Not because life becomes easy, but because it becomes true.
From ashes to the Self
Sometimes the darkest seasons do not simply wound us. They reveal us.
A death. A collapse. A life event we did not choose. Or the quieter horror of recognising ourselves mid-action: saying what we never thought we would say, doing what we believed we were incapable of, watching a part of us take the wheel.
This is not only what happens to you. It is what comes up from you.
Under enough pressure, the adapted self cannot hold. The roles that kept you safe begin to crack. The “good” identity that has carried you starts to burn. And what rises with the smoke is the shadow: the denied life, the disowned anger, the grief postponed, the hunger for freedom disguised as being sensible, the need you called weakness, the fear you called responsibility.
The question is not whether you have a shadow. The question is whether you meet it consciously, or whether it takes you over unconsciously.
This is a rebirthing process. Not in the motivational sense, but in the ruthless sense. The false collapses because it can no longer hold. What remains is ash.
The work is to stay present in that ash. Not to excuse what happened, and not to drown in shame, but to tell the truth. To face what has been exposed. To grieve what has burned away. To take responsibility for the life you have been living, and to ask what you have been loyal to that has cost you your life.
When a person can bear that encounter, something changes. The energy that was trapped in avoidance, performance, and fear begins to return. Not as perfection, but as agency. Not as a new mask, but as a more truthful life.
The aim is not to go back. The aim is to become more conscious, more accountable, and more yourself.