Candace is a warm and compassionate counsellor, registered with the British Association of Counselling Professions (BACP). She takes an interest in all the experiences and challenges of a client’s life – past and present – to understand what might be contributing to their current difficulties. And she understands that at times anyone can feel scared, swamped, stuck, or unsure of the way forward in their life. She is known for her calm manner and ability to ‘walk alongside’ her clients, without judgement, supporting them through their individual emotional wellbeing journey. She supports adults, young people, and children.
Candace offers you a safe and supportive space to think together about aspects of yourself and your life which you may be struggling with, helping you to express your difficulties, and to recognise underlying thoughts and feelings – sometimes linked to past experiences and relationships. Candace sees counselling as a collaborative process. Through an open, frank conversation, together you can explore, with curiosity, your thoughts, feelings and patterns of behaviour, creating clearer insight into how they developed, and how they might shift.
Having a better picture of where your problems might have started, can help point you in the direction of needed change.
Therapeutic Approach
Candace largely draws on a Psychodynamic Approach. This means she thinks about how your early life experiences have shaped you, and contributed to your present thoughts, feelings, behaviours and relationships. She helps you reflect on your early experiences and to recognise how these may influence your current thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and relationships. She supports you in identifying familiar patterns, understanding internal conflicts, and developing the insight required to make meaningful changes, such as addressing longstanding patterns of behaviour that may have served you in the past, but don’t now. Through continued self-reflection and expanding self-awareness, your internal story further unfolds – and you create further opportunity to make choices, different to those you made in the past, that generate meaningful change in the present.
Candace qualified as a Psychodynamic Counsellor at the University of Oxford, and worked with students at the University Counselling Service for 3 years. She currently provides counselling to individuals of all ages and backgrounds, with a wide range of emotional and psychological difficulties – of varying levels of complexity. Passionate about supporting people’s mental health, Candace also has 25 years of experience as an Emotional Wellbeing Coach, trained in BRIEF’s Solution Focused Coaching, working with individuals of all ages, but particularly the age group 16-24. In addition, a doctorate in Educational Psychology has provided an excellent position from which to understand young people’s challenges in the academic context, and to help support academic engagement and outcomes.
Where appropriate, Candace integrates coaching practice with her counselling to meet her clients’ needs – helping individuals to navigate their challenges and empowering them to find their own solutions. Her chief aim is to form a supportive, trusting therapeutic relationship with every client, one that encourages the pursuit of personal growth.
Areas of Specialty
Candace supports clients of all ages with diverse backgrounds, experiencing a wide range of emotional and psychological difficulties, of varying levels of complexity, including:
- Anxiety (general, social and health)
- Addictions (drugs, alcohol, gambling)
- Anxiety (general, social and health)
- Attachment-related problems
- Bereavement and Loss
- Childhood trauma
- Cultural issues
- Depression
- Eating difficulties
- Grief
- Low self-esteem and confidence
- Parenting difficulties
- Relationship challenges
- Self-harm
- Sexuality issues
- Sexual identity issues
- Sexual assault
- Suicide ideation
- Trauma
- Work-related anxiety and stress
