Holistic Practitioner, Coach and Counsellor
Pevensey, near Eastbourne, East Sussex, Online and Face to Face
Frequently asked questions
The success of any therapy relies on your therapist being the right fit for you. Kim offers a free 30-minute complimentary discovery video consultation with no obligation to begin treatment. You can ask Kim as many questions as you would like to.
The relationship between you and Kim helps create a powerful foundation for you to work through and create the life you wish. This therapeutic dynamic fosters a safe space to enable you to believe that you can flourish and thrive.
Kim has over 25 years of experience in offering support to reduce stress and anxiety through proven treatments, and her approach has lasting effects. She will help you uncover your underlying issue(s) and find a way to make positive changes to your needs.
You will be treated as a unique individual.
Kim uses a proven scientifically based blend of stress and anxiety therapies, depending on your personal needs and requirements.
We collaborate as equals to facilitate and co-create the right therapeutic approach for you that responds to your unique needs in a warm, non-judgemental and supportive way.
As we create a unique partnership, I will adapt my skills and knowledge to interweave the approaches that will be the best fit for you.
As you progress, each session you have will be different because your needs will change. All sessions are relaxed and informal to help you feel at ease. The approach will be tailored and shaped around your unique needs and preferences, where we will combine different techniques from various theories that resonate with you. There will be specific information support in the form of psychoeducation, and detailed techniques either in written form, video form or an audio recording.
Where appropriate, specific recordings such as meditation, breath work, and yoga poses will be sent to the Google Folder that we share. This is to establish and enable a comprehensive library of information to be stored and created for you to recall and use in a secure location. You will learn and have a menu of ‘tools’ to enable you to support yourself on an ongoing basis.
We collaborate to create a bespoke action plan to wellbeing to help support you in rebalancing your body to a state of equilibrium by the Wellbeing Strategy Plan:
- Balancing the nervous system
- Emotional regulation
- Hormonal health
- Sleep
- Relationship with self, others and community
- Gut-brain health and nutrition
- Movement and exercise
Counselling is having a safe, supportive, non-judgemental space to explore your thoughts, feelings and experiences. The relationship with your counsellor helps you to explore difficult challenges, feelings or thoughts that you may be experiencing.
Counselling can help you to find new perspectives, and new understandings and explore different ways of coping, which helps you gain a greater relationship with yourself, helping you to find greater clarity.
Wellbeing Coaching aims to empower you to make the changes you wish to make, you have complete agency over your wellbeing. Wellbeing coaching incorporates all the main ideas from ‘Pure Coaching’ protocols and develops the ‘GROW’ model into ‘GROWTH’. So if there are facts or techniques you are not aware of, you will be able to learn these with my help. Any blocking beliefs or obstacles will be worked through to enable you to thrive.
GROWTH Wellbeing Coaching:
- Goals - an overarching goal is set to enable you to achieve the resolution you wish. Smaller session goals are created enabling you to reach your full potential goals.
- Reality - your reality is looked at, as well as past habits, limiting beliefs, behaviours and thought processes
- Options - different ways of moving forward are explored to create an ongoing foundation for wellbeing.
- Way forward - simple, specific and achievable steps to move on for a lasting change. This action plan is tailored to your needs and will be reinforced by the detailed information, techniques and practices in your library of information stored in your Google Folder.
- Touch base - accountability by you.
- Health - the ability of the coach at the end of the session to make recommendations to share with others will be the basis of a great resource for you as you have a record of Kim’s support now and in the future.
Wellbeing Coaching is about objectivity, structure and empowerment. We celebrate and turn towards your strengths in a co-partnership to fully support you to flourish on your wellbeing journey.
Specialist techniques based on core psychological principles and natural intuition are key. You’ll be encouraged to look internally to find the tools to confidently face difficult situations and turn towards emotional barriers or limiting beliefs to create a healthier lifestyle.
Some Basic Principles of Wellbeing Coaching such as:
- It supports you in exploring your needs, motivations, desires, skills and thought processes to assist you in making real, lasting changes to your health and wellbeing.
- Specific sessions and long-term goals are created and set by you.
- Creatively apply tools and techniques such as one-to-one training and simple exercises, visualisations, and affirmations which enable you to achieve your personal wellbeing goals.
- It uses questions to support your thought processes to identify solutions and actions.
- All goals set are achievable and time bound.
- Kim is non-judgmental and works to ensure that you feel continued ‘unconditional positive regard’ throughout your sessions.
Some basic principles of Wellbeing Coaching can also be practised through a neurodivergent lens:
- It supports you in exploring your specific needs, motivations, desires, skills and thought processes to assist you in making real, lasting changes to your health and wellbeing.
- Specific long-term goals are set by you.
- Creatively apply tools and techniques, which may include one-to-one training and simple exercises, somatic work, yoga, visualisations, and affirmations which enable you to achieve your personal wellbeing goals.
- The sessions will create a unique plan to help you through your specific challenges such as executive functioning skills, interpersonal communication, heightened sensitivity to rejection, extremes of time management, and managing strong mood swings.
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that can lead to difficulties with inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity. In the brain of someone with ADHD, the neural paths are different. Brain chemistry (hormones) such as dopamine (a chemical messenger or neurotransmitter is produced differently, and dopamine is linked to sleep, motivation, attention and learning.
Some individuals with ADHD may have difficulty regulating their emotions. Others may have challenges around executive functioning such as how to plan, monitor, make decisions, complete tasks efficiently, and manage time.
Some research shows there is a link between both. Changing female hormones in the menstrual cycle can have a big impact on ADHD. If we compound the idea that within a day during menopause and perimenopause, there can be huge fluctuations, thus intensifying the fallout of symptoms.
High levels of oestrogen are thought to lessen ADHD symptoms in some women. Thus, during the follicular phase of menstruation (straight after the egg is released, when oestrogen is rising and the intensity of symptoms at their worst during the luteal phase when oestrogen falls sharply, dopamine is affected which impacts the symptoms. This fall is often when premenstrual symptoms (PMS) such as mood swings, fatigue, irritability, and low mood occur.
Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), a severe version of PMS, is shown to be more prevalent in women with ADHD than women without ADHD, which suggests the emotional changes and cognitive problems that occur because of fluctuating hormone levels have a big impact on ADHD symptoms.
There is an overlap with the symptoms of ADHD and Menopause:
- Emotional dysregulation (mood swings, finding it difficult to control your emotions in certain situations). We can then turn towards self-medicating behaviours to avoid or get short-term relief
- Self-harming/self-medicating behaviours including drinking too much alcohol
- Binge eating or other unhealthy behaviours around food
- Irritability and getting frustrated more quickly, mood changes, inability to control anger, having patience. These emotions can become very intense
- Chronic pain, joint pains, muscle aches
- Fatigue or tiredness
- Depression, loss of interest, low motivation
- Anxiety
- Libido changes
- Urinary symptoms, urge to urinate, leakages
- Urinary infections, genital symptoms, dryness, soreness
- Changes to skin, hair, bone strength
- Weight management
Women with ADHD are increasingly reporting struggles with menopausal physical symptoms such as pain and fatigue. More scientific research is need in this area. However, the latest research is showing that the severe fluctuations in oestrogen levels affect dopamine production and levels within the body, which in turn can increase symptoms associated with ADHD, autism and sensory issues.
EMDR is an abbreviation for Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing. It is a tried and tested technique to help with difficult, unprocessed or repeated memories. Memories are stored in the brain as a form of neural networks which is a group of interconnected brain cells (neurons) that fire together.
Traumatic unprocessed memories are stored in maladaptive neural networks that result in a limited capacity to process and resolve trauma and stress. It is like an old vinyl record having a scratch on it and the needle will skip to the scratch unless we help. Memories can be smells, tastes, images, touch, sounds, thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and beliefs. Ideally, networks of memories connect across left and right hemispheres of the brain which helps us express feelings, with words and integrate good and negative emotions.
Connections between upper brain centres (neocortex and lower brain centres (the limbic system and brain stem) help to manage impulses and develop greater self-control. Traumatic memories can be thought of as impaired coding and these trauma memories do not get integrated with other positive experiences, which impairs us to be cognitively flexible or constructive when thinking about difficult emotions or feelings.
EMDR helps you to reprocess difficult and traumatic life events through eye movements and other stimuli which ultimately helps you to stay in the present moment, while simultaneously recalling and reprocessing the traumatic event helping you to re-orient and integrate new information and perceptions from emotionally loaded feelings, sensations and memories.
Somatic tracking helps us learn to track the sensations in our bodies (interoception), to get in touch with our feelings of sense and to notice what's happening inside us. Often, we can go through life and ignore what is happening inside our bodies. This can be true when life or emotions become too intense, and we avoid or repress them.
Perhaps we are just too busy to ‘allow’ ourselves time to ‘acknowledge’ that maybe there has been a stressor around us that activated a stress response – which stays activated. If we are neurodivergent, it can prove very difficult to track our internal sensations for many reasons as we can often ignore the feeling of what's going on in our bodies. Any sensation whether it be a pain, a symptom, or an emotion are all feelings that we notice in our brain coming from our body. Sometimes the brain misinterprets the signal of a feeling into pain for example.
The purpose of somatic tracking is to help you get in touch with your feelings/sensations and to be able to feel them from a very open neutral ‘safe’ place in your mind. The activation of the feeling can then move through to come to homeostasis, to a completion. It can be considered like a wave of sensation moving through.
We are combining what's called "mindfulness" or "awareness" with tracking our sensations in the body. When we do this, we're looking to reduce any type of reaction mentally, or resistance physically, to what's happening in us – we turn towards our sensations, feelings or emotions to help ensure that we do not repress or avoid them.
Many people with chronic pain, chronic inflammation and other chronic symptoms experience much anxiety, stress and fear around their symptoms - and we are trying to reduce that through somatic tracking. When we are neurodivergent it can also be difficult to be aware of our inner sensations. Somatic tracking is one way to reduce fear and to learn to reinterpret these feelings or sensations in your body that in the past may have been dangerous or threatening to you.
We turn towards the sensation and acknowledge it as something happening in our body. With somatic tracking, we learn to reinterpret uncomfortable or painful sensations as something that 'might be wrong' to 'accept' them and "allow" them to move through us. When we have been activated by a stress response in the body, with somatic tracking, it can help the sensation to move naturally through to completion, back to homeostasis.
When we do that, these sensations can start to shift and move, ultimately to be reinterpreted through our nervous system and processed to a natural completion. ‘Rest and digest’ - the branch of your nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system, starts to ‘digest’ the chemicals and sensations.
Trauma informed yoga is a gentle and safe way to become more aware of our bodies. Allowing us to become more in tune with physical sensations and feelings. Yoga can help us ‘upregulate’ in a safe environment if we have become ‘stuck’ in a depressed, frozen or shut down state. We can also turn towards our bodies if we feel sensations of hyperarousal of anxiety where we can learn to ‘down-regulate’ our autonomic nervous system to reach a balance of homeostasis.
Whatever our body needs, we are looking to promote a pathway to the ‘rest and digest’ response of the parasympathetic nervous system (the opposite of the activated fight or flight sympathetic dominant part of our nervous system – hyperarousal). With trauma-informed yoga, we are increasing our internal body awareness in a safe and controlled way to help support feelings of physical, emotional and psychological safety. We are learning how to regulate a dysregulated nervous system and the feelings of disconnection from our body and our environment which are common with trauma.
Reiki is a natural healing energy that works on every level, not just the physical. The Japanese word Reiki means ‘Universal Energy’. Eastern medicine has always recognised and worked with this energy, which flows through all living things and is vital to wellbeing.
Reiki is a gentle, non-invasive holistic therapy that restores homeostasis. Reiki can help us cope by encouraging relaxation and bringing balance to the mind and emotions to create a sense of calm and peace on all levels. Entering greater inner harmony and balance, regular Reiki treatments promote a calmer response to life’s challenges.
In your treatment journey, you may have come across or been introduced to the terms mindbody pain, stress-induced conditions, neuroplastic pain, or tension myositis syndrome (TMS for short). These terms are synonymous with one another and refer to a process in which our unconscious emotional issues such as anxiety, past trauma, or fear, can result in physical pain or other symptoms.
Symptoms may include chronic fatigue, back pain, insomnia, anxiety, migraines, sinusitis, abdominal pain… the list is quite extensive. Even if you do not see your specific symptom(s) listed here, if you are experiencing physical, chronic pain that is persistent, cannot medically explained, or traditional treatment options have so far been unsuccessful, the answer may be mindbody pain.
Your Pain is Real
To be clear, this is not to say that your pain is not real or is happening only in your mind. Just the opposite. Emotions and mental state are capable of changing a body’s physiology. The underlying cause of the bodily pain you are experiencing may be your mind’s defence mechanism against unconscious mental stress and emotions.
In other words, your brain is protecting you from these harmful emotions and creates pain as a distraction from them.
That is why, when exploring treatment options for chronic pain conditions, it is important to treat the whole of the body. The more you are able to learn and understand the origins and foundations of your emotional responses, the better equipped you are to manage the events that trigger those responses. Over time, the management becomes easier, and the symptoms that emerge from the emotions lessen.
Together, we will explore the mindbody connection to first identify the emotional issues that you may not even be aware are feeding your chronic pain condition, and then influence them through a variety of treatment types, which are detailed below.