About Me
I worked extensively in the corporate world before choosing to retrain and become a counsellor, psychotherapist and family therapist. To each session, I bring many years of counselling and life experience and am able to draw from a comprehensive knowledge base of therapy models and tools to support and guide clients for a broad range of issues. I am passionate about working with people from all walks of life for individual, relationship and family therapy.
I have been married for almost 20 years, have two children, a cat and a dog. We are a close family and like to play sports together, go for long walks and watch movies. I love spending time in the garden learning through trial and error, how to grow veggies and fruit. When I have time, I like cooking, especially trying new recipes, reading, listening to audiobooks, podcasts and music.
Why Vanilla Being Counselling?
I hoped for a distinctive name and found all my ideas were already in use. Onions are often used as an analogy where each layer of the onion represents some conflict or issues that is being peeled away or explored in therapy. The image of a flower was appealing. Flowers can vary some having many layers that can be peeled away, petal that can bloom, or fall off and make room for new ones. With some flowers the more you prune them the more they grow. Flowers can be used to show love, express sympathy, to cheer someone up, to encourage well-being and sometimes for no reason other than sharing something beautiful.
When you see dried vanilla beans, they look unappetizing and worthless, bone-dry sticks. Once you cut a vanilla bean open, it is filled with tiny, tiny seeds full of flavour. Vanilla beans are rare, exquisite and expensive. It made me think of human beings, when we are in pain or struggling, we build walls of protection around ourselves, and like the vanilla bean we can appear dry and tough on the outside. We all need someone to connect with, someone who can help us break out of the shell to reveal our value that is hidden inside.
Vanilla bean plants have flowers that are large, pale greenish yellow, fragrant, waxy and orchid like. It is called the Vanilla Bean Orchid. Orchids are prized for their beautiful and unique flowers.
Vanilla Being Counselling is dear to me, as people are dear to me. We are all valuable, rare, exquisite and filled with seeds of flavour, waiting to be uncovered!