Work with me
The questions you may not dare to ask
You want to get a sense of the person I am, and whether I am worthy of your trust. So instead of a bland blurb, here are honest answers to the concerns survivors bring me most often.
If you have come to this page, I am guessing you want to get a sense of the person I am, and whether I am worthy of your trust. That is a question worth asking about everyone who comes into your life from now on.
So I have not written the conventional blurb that tells you a little about me but leaves you wondering how it actually plays out in practice. Instead, here are answers to the questions clients most often have, but sometimes do not dare to voice. Some will feel more relevant than others. Focus on the ones that resonate with you.
Is it him, or is it me?
Is it really his fault, or am I the problem?
Without a clinical diagnosis, you cannot say for certain that he is a narcissist in the strictest sense. But here is what you can say. He keeps hurting you in the same way, over and over. He never lets go of a resentment. He blames you for everything and never genuinely takes your feelings into account. He damages you and the relationship, repeatedly, and takes no real accountability for any of it.
That makes him the problem. Not you.
Have you actually been through this yourself?
Yes. And it left me, like so many other survivors, with more debilitating wounds than I could count, quite a lot of which I wrongly understood to be my character flaws.
One of the deepest was the fear of judgement, fuelled by the shame my abuser had taught me to feel. It took me years to realise that while I dreaded other people’s judgement, I was my own harshest judge. My internal dialogue was horribly cruel, yet to me it just felt normal.
Why coaching, and why you?
I have already tried therapy. Why would coaching be any different?
Therapy and coaching are different animals, and both have their place. Therapy helps you understand what happened and why. But understanding works at head level. You can know exactly what you should do and how you should feel, and your heart still longs to love him and make it work. Getting your heart onside requires different skills.
Our work together is collaborative. I bring the expertise on healing, you bring the expertise on you. And there is a funny side too. Laughter knocks him off the pedestal you have spent so much effort polishing, and it is surprisingly therapeutic.
Reading this and feeling something shift? You can start with one focused conversation.
Book a Breakthrough SessionHow coaching works
Weekly, collaborative, and built around you
We meet weekly over Zoom, at a set time, for an hour. I do not work from a syllabus or a set plan, because you are an individual, not a problem to be fixed. You bring your most pressing concern to each session, and that becomes our starting point.
Wherever we begin always leads back to the core wounds we need to heal. My intention is for you to reclaim the fullest version of yourself. The person you already are is more than good enough.
- Weekly
- A set time each week, so it becomes a rhythm you can rely on.
- One hour, on Zoom
- From the privacy and comfort of your own home.
- No fixed syllabus
- You bring what matters most, and we start there.
- Collaborative
- I bring the expertise on healing. You bring the expertise on you.
- Laughter included
- It turns out to be surprisingly therapeutic.
Am I ready, and is it too late?
Am I too broken to be helped?
I understand why you feel that way. But in reality, you held that relationship together, at enormous personal cost, until you simply could not anymore. And then you broke open.
That is an uncomfortable, vulnerable place to be. But it also gives you the possibility of reassembling all the pieces of yourself, and becoming fully yourself in a way you never could before. All the strength you poured into holding that relationship together can now be harnessed to heal your wounds instead.
Is it too late for me?
I have heard that question from women in their twenties and women in their seventies. I agonised over it myself for months. We ask it because we do not believe life can hold anything good for us without our narcissist. And we are so wrong.
There is life after the end of a toxic relationship. Healing means you get to decide how to shape your life into one that brings you joy, meaning and connection.
Do I have to have left the relationship to work with you?
No. Clients come to me at every stage of the journey. Some come after they have already left. Others start almost immediately after the relationship ends, so they do not get overwhelmed in the divorce process. Others work with me while they are seriously thinking about leaving. And some come when they are genuinely uncertain whether to stay or go, and want help gaining clarity.
My concern, in every case, is to help you arrive at the solution that is right for you, as an individual.
Should I sort out the practicalities before I focus on myself?
I understand why you want to sort out your children’s needs and the practical issues first. I did exactly that, and it did not work too well. It is incredibly hard to make good decisions about major issues when you are feeling very low and anxious.
Making yourself one of your top priorities means you will start to feel happier and more confident far more quickly, and you will make far better decisions without the agonies of self-doubt that paralyse so many survivors for years.
I am not sure I am ready. How do I know if I am?
Nobody stays in an abusive relationship for years without being good at denial and minimising the way they have been treated. So I am guessing you have already had a fair few moments when you felt ready, and then backtracked.
You might need to ask yourself different questions. How much of the time do you feel happy in the relationship? Do your issues ever get resolved? What does he actually do to make the relationship better? Would you want to live in it exactly as it is now, forever? Only you can decide when you are ready.
Would it be better to wait until I am feeling stronger?
I understand why that feels right. But it does not quite work that way. The reason you feel as lacking in strength as you do now is because you have been in a situation that systematically eroded your strength, your self-worth and your sense of self. If you wait until you feel stronger, you could be in for a very long wait.
The sooner you start building your self-worth, the sooner you develop more strength and wellbeing than you can imagine right now.
Recognise yourself in any of this? You do not have to have all the answers before you reach out.
Book a Breakthrough SessionFit, money, and aiming higher
How will I know if we are a good fit?
That is where the Breakthrough Session comes in. We can both use it as a test run. You bring whatever problem is uppermost in your mind, and together we work on a clearer understanding of your situation and your way forward.
You get to decide whether I am someone you would be happy to work with, while I get a broad sense of the person you are and the strengths you bring beneath the trauma.
Is this something I should be spending money on?
When I was where you are now, I was terrified of spending money on my own healing. Years of abuse had taught me to live in fear of losing what I had. What I could not know then was that I could build a much better life, and that there was a real cost to not investing in myself.
Narcissists teach you to live small. That programming does not fade until you do the work of unpicking it. Right now, I am guessing you are in a cage you can no longer afford to remain in. I can only work with a small number of clients at a time, so if you are thinking about it, it makes sense to get in touch and find out when a space might be available.
Could I be setting the bar for my future life too low?
If you are anything like me, and the hundreds of clients I have worked with, you are setting the bar far too low. Survivors tend to have fantasies about how wonderful their life could be, but do not believe they could ever realise them. That low self-worth prevents them from bridging the chasm from where they are to where they wish they could be.
The work I do equips you to build and cross that bridge. I want much better for you. I hope you do too.
Shall we do a test run?
The Breakthrough Session is where we both find out whether we are a good fit to work together. 30 minutes, one to one, on Zoom.
Book a Breakthrough Session