Amanda Williamson Coaching and Counselling Service in Exeter, Devon

I have a very clear idea about what I believe are the answers to these important questions and I think that by sharing my thoughts you can get a little idea of the kind of counsellor I am and how I work.


Would everybody find some benefit in counselling?

No, I do not think so. The very idea of counselling is abhorrent to some so how would it possibly benefit them? I know counsellors, and people who have had counselling, who say that everyone should do it because it has been so helpful for them.  I get this, as having personal counselling was very effective and powerful for me, so much so that I decided to train in it. However, it is my belief that it is only helpful to those that believe that it might be helpful for them. It is certainly not for everybody. Some people really have no reward in talking to a stranger about their innermost thoughts and feelings. Some find it hugely helpful. There is no right or wrong here, just different ways of being in the world.

Do we have to talk about our traumas to be able to move on from them?

Hmmm. This is quite a contentious issue. Somebody might have an awareness of a traumatic incident such as abuse. Is it helpful for that person to go over it in therapy? Possibly... to a point. But it depends...

Looking at trauma work, and post-traumatic stress recovery, it is understood that talking about a traumatic incident and simultaneously expressing the associated emotions can help the brain relegate the event to the past. Until this stage, of the trauma being 'processed', the brain flags the incident as 'current threat' and the trauma can infiltrate the here and now through flashbacks and extreme anxiety (a great book for this topic is Babette Rothschild's The Body Remembers). So in these circumstances it may well indeed be in a client's best interest to explore the traumatic event within a therapeutic relationship to facilitate the processing, if there are signs that the trauma is affecting the here and now AND, and this is most important, the client believes that it might be helpful for them.

However, traumatic incidents do not always wreak havoc with people's lives. Is it always essential to poke around in the past and reopen old wounds?

I did have a therapist once try to dredge up some old alleged trauma that he believed I had encountered. This was highly annoying because the fact was, I had no recollection of said trauma, and in fact, was not exhibiting any symptoms of PTSD. What he might in fact have been doing is a very dodgy thing referred to in therapy as false memory syndrome. This is very dangerous territory and one of the reasons I believe that therapy should be regulated. Unfortunately there are some therapists out there that believe that they know better than their clients and highjack the therapeutic space with their own agendas. This I believe is akin to the gay-conversion therapy that has been in the press recently, and, quite rightly, is not tolerated by the vast majority of therapists.

So what about the pussycats?

Well, once I had two cats from the same litter, a boy and a girl. The male was robust and the female was the runt - slightly frail, undersized, poor sense of balance and prone to infection.

When the cats were approximately 8 years old, I noticed that Leo, the male, had some sort of injury, There was a wound on his back and he was clearly in pain. I took him to the vets and was told that it appeared he had been shot by an air-rifle in the back. The vet suspected that it was quite some time ago, and that the bullet was working it's way out. Later that night, I inspected his sister, Lili, and found that she had a lump in her back. I wasn't quite sure how I had not noticed it before, but it felt like an air-rifle pellet under her skin.

I took them both back to the vets. Leo was not responding to the antibiotics and the wound was getting worse. The vet said that the best thing would be for him to have it surgically removed. She inspected Lili and said that she was certain that it really was quite a long time ago that both of the cats had been shot. Lili's pellet was causing her no problems whatsoever, and the safest thing to do would be to leave it alone. Leo's body however, was struggling and causing a bit of a mess trying to purge itself of the pellet.

And so, it is my belief that some people suffer trauma with self-limiting effects, and others are affected more profoundly. It just depends. As it happens, with the pussycats, it was the robust one that suffered the most with this particular trauma. It just goes to show that you can't necessarily predict who will struggle more.

I have just left a comment on a LinkedIn discussion regarding gay conversion therapy. You can read more about the exposé of conversion therapy by journalist Patrick Strudwick here. There were some comments being left on the discussion that concerned me. Some therapists (a minority I might add) believe that if a client has unwanted gay feelings then we have a duty to help convert them to heterosexuality. This jars with my way of being and I wanted to share my contribution here:

By Amanda Williamson

I've been thinking a lot about mindfulness and meditation (been mindful about mindfulness?). Based on ancient Eastern philosophy and largely poopooed by the West until recently, we can finally see the 'science' that 'proves' it works, and so it's all the rage in the therapeutic community. I am feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the fad-like nature of the increase in popularity. I'm not entirely sure it will integrate healthily into our collective psyche in a truly evolutionary way but rather, be a passing fashion that gets replaced by the next big thing in self-help. Which would be a huge shame.

Mindfulness today seems to be increasingly equating to a bourgeoisie ideal of finding inner calm in lives filled with First World Problems. Take a look at the pictures that TIME magazine choose to adorn their vision of the Eastern concepts:



I welcome anything that helps to make people's lives better (and the articles above are pretty good actually), and I actually do feel a lot of compassion towards those that suffer from First World problems such as being inundated with information and technology and finding it increasingly difficult to Be Here Now (an excellent book by Ram Dass about what taking LSD taught him about finding out how not to need to take LSD to continue the learning…), it is difficult when we supposedly have it all and yet we are distracted from it all by this bombardment in amongst our busy lives of texts, 'news' alerts, Facebook messages, emails...and on...and on...

But, I would like to find a new word for mindfulness, one which doesn't have the connotations of the white, middle class, middle aged "worried well" and links it back to its roots based on universal truth and the sharedness of human existence. Of course the roots are attached to that scary, airy, fairy concept SPIRITUALITY, which means that it can't possibly be marketed to theophobes...Whilst I'm on that topic I consider myself an atheist, possibly agnostic, veering towards pantheistic...the point is, my own spirituality is organic, developing, work in progress. I am secure enough in my stance to invite and welcome other frames of reference, especially if there's usefulness and learning attached. I believe that there are many of us out there able to deal with the spiritual frame of reference associated with meditation, and to incorporate something that science has finally proven has benefits, without making it into a glamourous, de rigueur fad, that somehow takes the essence out of it.

I often recommend a mindfulness based exercise, such as yoga, pilates or a martial art to my clients because this type of exercise "flexes" our frontal lobe as well as our muscles, and it is in doing so that we pop out of our automated way of thinking and provide our minds with the space to change. That is what learning is all about - forming new neural connections. This is also what unlearning is about - severing the neural links that have been long established and which cause us to react in the same old unwanted ways…unless we utilise our incredible frontal lobes and literally change our minds. This process is known as neuroplasticity and was introduced as an idea in the West by William James  in 1890, and was largely rejected until the 1970's. James stated:

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind". 

It took us a while to get with the programme but getting there we are with the NHS embracing mindfulness and the University of Exeter investing in the clinical development and research of mindfulness based therapies.  

Here is a short video by Professor Williams from Oxford Mindfulness Centre, on The Science of Mindfulness:




Mindfulness alters our perspective and gives us the mental space to develop a new way of thinking, as well as calming down our emotional reactionary circuits.

Several years ago I tried kenjutsu which is the art of the Japanese sword.  I joined whilst I was training as a counsellor and tried weekly for about three years. It was helpful when I have been stressed, or busier than I'd like to be, or had challenging times in my life.


I am fortunate in that my counselling work is very mindful in that I am aware and present in the moment with my clients. It is easier to be mindful when we are doing activities which promote mindfulness. My enabling work with an autistic teenager is also very mindful. William is perpetually mindful of the immediate here and now. I had a dream about him several years ago; I was in a forest, taking part in a gruelling assault course. I was struggling to climb over and under things at breakneck speed. I glanced over at the other competitors and all I could see was William, skipping up and down on a tree stump, flicking a ribbon, whistling and smiling, totally at peace with the world.

I have many clients who are aware of the concept of mindfulness and have read books or attended a course but struggle to integrate it into everyday life. There are ways of weaving mindfulness into our everyday lives. Walking is an excellent way - thinking about what we can see and hear right now as we walk, rather than losing ourselves in thoughts/concerns/worries that are miles away from where our feet are…

A great martial arts class can be a highly effective way of developing strength of body and mind, of switching off the old, habitual thought processes and turning on that part of us that makes us uniquely human - our frontal lobes. Flex that frequently and you'll have a young mind as well as a young body.

Finally, I asked many people I know who do a martial art to tell what their Myers-Briggs type is. I was hoping to see a pattern. I had assumed that they would be mainly introverts rather than extroverts but actually, there was a fairly even spread. However, the majority of martial artists were *NF* types, that is intuitive and feeling (as opposed to sensing and thinking). Hmmn. Food for thought.

Boarding school survivors?

To whom does this term apply? Would that be anybody who went to boarding school and was abused? Is it anybody who went to boarding school and was distressed at being separated from the family and home? Does it refer to everybody who went to boarding school?

The term has emotive and probably contentious connotations so I shall proceed with referring to those that attended boarding school as ex-boarders. The workshop I attended referred to the subject matter as "The Boarding School Experience" and was run by local counsellor/psychotherapist Jane Barclay, herself an ex-boarder and a director of Boarding Concern.

I was keen to go and learn more about the boarding school experience as I have worked with some ex-boarders. Certainly, I have found anecdotally that the impact of that particular education format has left an undeniable impact on some in respect of self-esteem, the insistence of denying vulnerability and/or having difficulties with intimacy (all intertwined).

I attended the workshop with an open-mind. I have never set foot inside a boarding school. I had my prejudices and sketchy preconceptions based on Enid Blyton books (sardine sandwiches and ginger beer at midnight). I was interested to hear about ex-boarders' insights and really learn about their experiences.

Of the 12 delegates, all of whom were either qualified, or trainee counsellors, 3 of us had not attended boarding school. Of the remainder, all had had a negative experience, apart from one who had had a very positive experience. It was agreed that it was good to have the presence of somebody who had had a positive experience to add perspective to the emotive topic.

The workshop was held over 2 days, split by a 5 week interval. The first day we looked at how a child might adapt to the boarding school existence and how they might construct a Strategic Survival Personality. This consist of the ways of coping with the separation from home and family at an early age. The child identifies with power and independence and disowns their vulnerability and dependence.  This way of existing then continues on into adult life.

We then watched a video of a documentary by the BBC in 1994 called "The Making of Them". It was watching this that evoked a very strong emotional response in me. I was so overwhelmed by what I saw that I fought tears. I struggled with my own perception of the parent-child bond and how my intuition informs me. Keeping an open mind became more and more unmanageable. The documentary itself is about a number of young boys and watches them and their families as they are sent off to boarding school. We see some of them blatantly suffering emotionally, and others, more stoic, and "grown-up" and having already started the construction of a Strategic Survival Personality. There were many poignant moments. One was when you see one of the mothers at home, denying any hurt that her son may be encountering, stating how good for him the experience is, whilst dotingly stroking the pet dog planted firmly on her lap. Also, one of the stoic little boys, convincing us (or himself?) at how good it is to be so grown up, just like an adult...then proceeds to talk about the red clown nose on his birthday cake in a manner completely befitting of a very young child, juxtaposing what he is telling himself and the reality of his vulnerability.

Afterwards, we split into groups to discuss the film and how we noticed how the children and parents managed their feelings. I burst into tears, and felt an utter fraud. I never went to boarding school. How could I find this so upsetting? This is something I struggled with for a week or so, and went on to examine - what is going on for me in all this? On the one hand, I want to retain a genuinely open mind and not judge the experience of any ex-boarder. Yet there I was having a very passionate response. Every cell of my body was screaming to me that it is wrong to send away a precious child to a school where yes, they may be looked after well, and have a great education and lots of friends (although many delegates at the workshop did not have such experiences), but, WHERE IS THE LOVE?

By the second day, 5 weeks on, I had calmed down quite a bit. We shared our journeys since the last workshop, and most people had had interesting and powerful process.

We talked more about the Strategic Survival Personality and how this translates to character traits, about how difficult it can be to change those traits, about examining whether they are appropriate or helpful traits in adulthood.

We looked at how the young child might learn to deal with the separation, and and what they might be missing out on in being sent away from the home. We also looked extensively at the older boarder, the one who is sent away at age 13, and the effects of being sent away by their parents, the development of sexuality without the safety of flirtation with the opposite sex parent (not restricted to boarders of course).

Throughout the course, I recognised elements of my convent grammar school education in some of the criticisms of the boarding schools. I was not a boarder, but I was affected by a heavily Catholic flavour to the education process. Sanitary towels were bricks that we pinned to our underwear. Our uniforms were the most unflattering, sexuality-repressing garments imaginable (long a-line skirt and deck-chair blazer and faun socks - gorgeous!). The nuns were cold and sometimes cruel. I could identify with some of the issues that the ex-boarders had to face.

Most of all though, I realised that the fact that my mother left the family when I was 13 meant that there were parallels between my experience and that of female boarders sent to board at the same age. Perhaps I was there for this subconscious reason.

Working with Ex-Boarders

So how about working with ex-boarders? Well, much like my GamCare training, which was not about "which technique to use with people with gambling issues", this course was not about "how to counsel ex boarders". The intention, as far as I am aware, was to equip us with insights and awareness around the potential issues that may be relevant to working with this issue. This was very much accomplished.

After the workshop I feel that I have gained wisdom around the issues, rather than information and techniques. Wisdom is so much easier to integrate into the counselling process.




Amanda Williamson in a counsellor working in Central Exeter. Please click here for more information.