Counsellor in Cawdor

Hi, I’m a counsellor based in the Highlands of Scotland, working with adults, children and young people.

 

Over the last 25+ years, I’ve worked across education, pastoral care, youth justice, community wellbeing and therapeutic support. Somewhere along the way, those experiences started changing how I understood people and behaviour.

 

A lot of behaviour makes more sense once we slow down enough to look underneath it.

 

What sits underneath is often far more human than people realise, anxiety, overwhelm, fear, shame, grief, uncertainty, or experiences someone has never really had the space or safety to make sense of properly. Sometimes that shows up quietly. Sometimes it doesn’t.

 

Through the conversations I have with people, they often sit there unsure where to begin. Do they start with an event, a feeling, or try to explain why everything feels so muddled? Often they genuinely do not know where to start.

 

That’s usually where I begin with:

 

“Your story is your story. You only need to share what feels right, when it feels right.”

 

A lot of the work is not about having perfect words or immediate answers. Sometimes it’s simply about having enough safety and space to slowly start figuring things out.

 

Over time, I found myself becoming more interested in behaviour as communication, relational safety, nervous system regulation, and the ways children and young people often express distress, overwhelm or unmet needs long before they have the words for them.

 

I also became more aware of the gap that can exist between therapeutic understanding and the realities families, schools and communities are trying to navigate day to day, and how those worlds can work together more effectively.

 

Too often, behaviour gets approached only at surface level. The focus becomes stopping it, managing it, or reacting to it, without enough curiosity about what the behaviour may actually be expressing, protecting or adapting to underneath.

 

Whether I’m working therapeutically or alongside parents, professionals and education settings, I’m usually more interested in understanding the person than controlling the behaviour.

 

I don’t think people thrive through nurture without boundaries, or boundaries without understanding. Both matter.

 

In my experience, meaningful change rarely begins through pressure or perfect words. More often it begins slowly, through steady relationships, honesty, reflection, curiosity, and enough safety to begin seeing things differently.