Stephanie Radford, Northern Aurora Counselling

I’ve been working as a counsellor based in the North East of England since 2014. I work online, offering sessions via Zoom, because I feel it helps make therapy more accessible, and it allows me to connect with people all over the UK. 

I started my career specialising in disordered eating, and my work has largely focused on working with people in the queer, neurodivergent and disabled/chronically ill communities, where people are more likely to have experienced rejection socially, systemically and even from loved ones, and highly critical internal voices and harsh coping mechanisms can develop. 

We might begin working together by looking into your past – before you or others had a concept of what your identity meant, or certainly before there was true permission, understanding and acceptance to be who you were, or, you might want to start with the future – how to live life with authenticity and self compassion, how to shift our goals to have empathy for what we need and approach things differently with individual strategies that work for YOU.  

Self esteem and trust in ourselves can be badly damaged when we grow up feeling somehow different from other people, or that “if you could just change something about you, life would be easier” , and there can be layers of internalised shaming messages, but with the right support, we can develop the self compassion to unpick and rebuild a different way of seeing ourselves and existing in the world.