Magpie Counselling

08/06/2026

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard some version of: “I know why I do it now. So why does it still hurt?”

Understanding ourselves can be enormously important. Sometimes it helps us make sense of patterns that once felt confusing or frightening. But insight and relief are not always the same thing. Many people discover that awareness arrives long before peace does. We can learn where a wound came from and still feel its ache. We can recognise an old pattern and still find ourselves pulled towards it. We can understand our younger selves with great compassion and still grieve what was missed.

Perhaps this is one reason why healing can feel so frustrating. We imagine that understanding will tie everything up neatly, when often it simply changes the question. Not “Why am I like this?” But “Can I stay with myself while this hurts?”

The piece below reminded me of something I see often in practice: that growth can sometimes become another thing to strive for, another standard to meet, another way of telling ourselves we should be further along than we are. Sometimes the work is not becoming a better version of yourself.
Sometimes the work is learning not to abandon the version of yourself that is already here.

Carl Jung once suggested that the most insidious thing isn’t your shadow, it’s the belief that you can outrun it by becoming “better.”

Many sensitive souls fall into this trap without ever realizing what’s happening. We chase healing. We chase self-mastery. We chase emotional intelligence and spiritual depth. Not always because we love truth, but because somewhere underneath the pursuit, we’re still hoping to finally silence the parts of ourselves that feel unworthy. We want to become so evolved that the pain no longer touches us, so conscious that the old wounds lose their charge, so whole that we never again have to admit we’re still fragile.

And slowly, without announcing itself, a new mask begins to form. Not the mask of the performer or the people-pleaser. Something more subtle. The persona of the healed one. The one who has done the work. The one who understands their patterns, regulates their emotions, and speaks in the language of growth. Outwardly it looks like maturity. Inwardly it can become a prison far quieter than the original suffering.

Because the psyche doesn’t negotiate. The shadow you tried to transcend by becoming more conscious doesn’t simply dissolve. It adapts. It begins speaking through your spiritual pride. Through the silent judgment you feel toward those still entangled in drama. Through the exhaustion that comes from monitoring every thought and emotion, terrified that one unprocessed trigger might prove you haven’t healed at all. You become hyper-vigilant about your own awakening, and the very thing meant to free you starts suffocating you.

Jung never suggested the goal was to become perfect. He pointed toward individuation, and individuation is not about reaching some unshakable state of emotional flawlessness. It’s about becoming whole, and wholeness is not the absence of shadow. It’s the end of your need to pretend the shadow isn’t there.

And that’s where the collapse begins. It doesn’t arrive as a breakthrough. It arrives as exhaustion. A strange moment where the self-improvement project simply stops working. You can’t meditate enough. You can’t journal enough. You can’t analyze yourself into completion. And in that quiet failure, something ancient stirs underneath the layers of healing you’ve accumulated. Not the healed self you were trying to build, but the self you abandoned in order to start healing in the first place.

The scared child who never needed enlightenment, just safety. The angry exile who doesn’t care about shadow work, just wants to be acknowledged. The parts of you that resist being transformed into lessons and simply want to exist without having to evolve. They’ve been waiting, not for improvement, but for presence.

When that moment arrives, it feels like regression. The striving collapses. The curated identity cracks. And for the first time in years, you’re not trying to become anything. You’re just here. Messy, unresolved, and strangely alive. The performance of wholeness ends, and something more honest begins.

Perhaps that’s the threshold nobody talks about. Not the moment you finally heal everything, but the moment you stop using growth as another way to abandon yourself. Not the version of you that outran the shadow, but the version that finally turned around and let it catch up. And in that terrifying, unpolished reunion, you discover that what you were running from was never your darkness. It was your depth.

Go deeper:
https://youtu.be/OPe2ScxkJZs?si=JEd3nng5ddumqIip

01/06/2026

More tea and CPD.

I completed a four-part CPD module on adolescent safeguarding. Policies, procedures, reporting pathways, risk indicators, escalation thresholds. The usual architecture of keeping young people safe.
I don’t work with under-16s yet, but I still do the training. Partly because safeguarding isn’t a separate subject that sits in a box marked “children”. It’s a way of thinking about vulnerability, context, and what gets missed when no one is looking closely enough. And partly because adults don’t arrive in therapy without history.

They arrive with patterns that once made sense. With adaptations that were once protective. With ways of surviving that were once necessary and can sometimes become embedded. Safeguarding frameworks tend to focus on what to do when something is wrong.
Therapy often sits a few steps earlier than that. Noticing what has been normalised. Asking what a person learned about safety, trust, attention, or silence before they ever had language for it. The training itself was structured, categorical, procedural. People are not.

More tea and CPD, and just enough cooling-down for my brain to actually concentrate properly.

28/05/2026

Notes from the mop handle.

I posted one of those vaguely philosophical Facebook memes last week and my daughter immediately sighed: “Stop posting Live, Laugh, Love memes, Mum.” Which, admittedly, is a devastating critique. And to be fair, a lot of modern internet philosophy does boil down to: “Protect your peace, babe x”
written over a photo of a misty forest. But underneath the scented candle energy of it all, there is actually something interesting about boundaries, friendships, and the strange social pressure to endlessly absorb other people’s behaviour whilst remaining polite about it.

Marcus Aurelius once wrote:
“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.” A line commonly attributed to Marcus Aurelius (and often misfiled under Gladiator, depending on which corner of the internet you’re arguing in). And I sometimes wonder whether we flatten Stoicism into something more passive than it was ever intended to be.
Not: “Let people say whatever they like.”
Nor: “Never respond.” More the idea that another person’s behaviour reveals their character, while your response reveals yours.

Some people weaponise gossip because it is easier than sitting with envy, insecurity, resentment, or the discomfort of their own unhappiness. Rumours often tell you far more about the imagination of the person spreading them than the person they are about. Stoicism wasn’t necessarily about allowing cruelty to roam unchecked. It feels more like a refusal to let another person’s lack of integrity recruit you into abandoning your own. And maybe thats the part the internet sometimes misses.

Boundaries are not always dramatic exits or cryptic memes. Sometimes they are simply the quiet decision not to become bitter enough to resemble the people who hurt you.
People can believe whatever version of you helps them sleep at night. You still have to wake up as yourself. And if you can do that without becoming cruel, dishonest, or permanently angry in the process, that is probably a far greater achievement than winning the argument.

Anyway. Apparently I am now one decorative wooden sign away from writing:
“Dance like nobody’s watching”
above the kettle, so I’ll leave it there.

21/05/2026

Some work happens very quietly.

In counselling, there are no standing ovations for the ordinary moments that matter: someone speaking honestly for the first time, a nervous laugh turning into grief, a person slowly beginning to take up space in their own life again. Most of it happens behind closed doors, in the small brave moments nobody else sees. Which is perhaps why this feels especially meaningful. I’m quietly delighted to share that Magpie Counselling has been nominated for a award. To whoever nominated the practice: thank you. Truly.
It means more than you probably realise.

Building Magpie has never been about being the loudest voice in the room. It has been about creating something thoughtful, human, emotionally honest, and safe enough for people to arrive exactly as they are. Somehow, amongst the cups of tea, existential conversations, nervous first sessions, grief, repair, dark humour, and occasional references to Victorian literature… people noticed.

And that feels rather lovely.

18/05/2026

Hello from Magpie Counselling. I currently have some availability for counselling sessions Monday to Friday. If life feels heavy, confusing, or simply too much to carry alone at the moment, you’re very welcome to get in touch. I can be contacted here, by phone, email or the new website at

13/05/2026

Notes from the mop handle… it’s been a while, but I can’t shake this thought.

You know that seagull from The Little Mermaid…the one who throws his whole head back and absolutely goes for it? Right. Imagine that energy, but directed into a room, with a fair few f***s in between, as I attempted to articulate the following thought…

What the bloody hell is normal?

I hear it everywhere. In comparisons over kitchen tables, in the sharp edges of shame, in the quiet internal verdicts we deliver to ourselves like sentencing. “Well, it’s not normal, is it?” And somehow that gets used like a ruler we’re all supposed to measure ourselves against, as if there’s a definitive blueprint of the human being somewhere out there. But even the fancy pants people in white coats can’t quite agree on it.

So what is it then? A 9–5 existence neatly bracketed by productivity and pension contributions? Being emotionally regulated at all times even when life is on fire? Owning a house, or renting, or never missing a reply, or always missing a reply but apologising convincingly? Being a “good tax payer” with a tidy mind and a tidy house and no inconvenient feelings spilling over the edges?Because if that’s the measure, most of us are winging it by Wednesday afternoon.

And here’s the thing that keeps catching in my mind like a thread on a jumper you can’t stop pulling. Normal isn’t a fact, it’s a story, a shifting agreement, a cultural mood ring. What gets called normal is often just what’s most visible, most rewarded, or least disruptive to the systems around it. And people rarely fit neatly inside systems. We stretch, we fracture, we cope in ways that don’t always look elegant from the outside, we build entire private architectures just to keep going.

So when we say it’s not normal, what are we actually saying? Not safe, not familiar, not approved, not understood, because those are very different things. Maybe the more honest question isn’t what is normal, maybe it’s what kind of life am I being quietly pressured into performing, and who benefits if I believe I’m the one who doesn’t fit.

From the mop handle, it doesn’t look like there is a correct shape for being human, just a lot of people trying their best to balance on a moving floor, pretending they aren’t.

08/05/2026

As the local woman whose idea of a glow up is managing to drink enough water and emotionally regulate before 9am…I am nevertheless duty bound to tell you that some of my lovely neighbouring businesses are running a rather extravagant giveaway.

And because life is about balance, apparently this week that means: therapy, tanning, aesthetics, and whatever mysterious beauty rituals happen behind salon doors while I’m next door talking about attachment wounds and burnout.

The genuinely lovely humans at Chantel’s Beauty Lounge, Bellissima Voi Aesthetics, and Sol & Skin Tanning Studio have teamed up for a competition with prizes worth having a little nose at.

Not officially prescribed by counsellors.
Not recognised by the BACP as a treatment for existential dread. But still a lovely way to support local women making their mark in 2026.

Details are on their original post if you’d like to enter

✨️ THE ULTIMATE GLOW UP GIVEAWAY ✨️

A giveaway you DON'T want to miss 😉
(AND....we are all next door to eachother, a full glow up within walking distance! 🙊)

1 winner, 3 amazing prizes!

✨️ Follow ALL steps on the post (This will be checked 😉)

✨️ Enter on Instagram & Facebook to double your chances!

✨️ 18+ Only

✨️ The winner must claim & book their prizes by the end of June. Prizes must be booked individually with each business.

Winner will be announced on Friday 15th May.

PLEASE NOTE: Any communication about the giveaway will be from the following accounts:
Chantel’s Beauty Lounge
Bellissima Voi Aesthetics Sol & Skin Tanning Studio

Terms & Conditions Apply (Each Business involved have their own T's & C's)

07/05/2026

There’s something quietly vulnerable about handing over the inside of your mind, your work, your values… and asking someone to turn it into a website. So I wanted to say a genuine thank you to Teal Fox Digital and especially to Charlotte for creating the new Magpie Counselling website.

The whole process was simple, affordable, and surprisingly painless for somebody whose natural habitat is probably somewhere between a fountain pen and a Victorian writing desk. I’m not particularly technically minded, so I needed someone who could translate vague ideas, half-formed aesthetics, and “I want it to feel warm but thoughtful but not corporate but not chaotic either…” into something real. Somehow, she did exactly that.

I’m beyond happy with what she’s created. It feels like me. Which is perhaps the loveliest thing you can say about work like this. So if you’re a fellow small business owner, therapist, creative, or generally bewildered human trying to navigate websites without crying into your tea, I genuinely recommend her.

And now I shall return to my preferred era of quills, candlelight, and emotional metaphors

06/05/2026

Last night brought a flurry of messages about the new website… and I’ve read every single one. Thank you. There have already been new enquiries, a few new followers wandering in, and a quiet sense of something beginning to take shape.

I am aware the website is having a few… personality quirks depending on what you’re viewing it on. There is a very technologically-minded human working on that as we speak, which feels wise, given I am much more quill-and-ink than code-and-click. That said, I did set up my own Google Business Profile last night to help with visibility… so naturally, I now feel only moments away from advising Microsoft on their next move.

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for gently encouraging this little corner of work into the world.

05/05/2026

I suppose this is the part where I say “taa daa” and gesture towards it like I’ve just pulled a cloth off something.

so… taa daa.

the website is live! ☺️