How my own journey led me to the path of helping others
Hi, I'm Kate. Â
Hi, I'm Kate. I'm a trauma-informed transformational hypnotherapist, and the creator of Inner Gardening™ and the Evolve Your Perspective® framework.
I work with sensitives, creatives and change-makers who feel stuck. Most of them have tried a great deal already, and they keep coming up against the same wall, because what they're trying to change lives somewhere that surface-level approaches can't reach.
If you've landed here, there's a good chance you already recognise that feeling.
My story
I didn't come to this work only through an interest in therapy. I came to it through my own life.
As a child, I was split in two. There was a deep inner self, the real me, and there was a surface self that learned to adapt to whatever was needed to feel safe and connected. The deeper part of me checked out early, and the surface part became very good at its job.
That job was to become the good girl, the clever girl, the fun girl, the quiet girl, the achiever, the people-pleaser, whichever version felt safest depending on who I was with. I was a highly sensitive child with a habit of absorbing whatever room I was in. I became the room, mirroring the personality of whoever I was with and sometimes even picking up their accent without meaning to. My empathy ran so high, and my sense of who I actually was underneath it ran so faint, that by adulthood I genuinely didn't know.
The deeper me had checked out, and the adaptive parts had taken over so completely that I had no idea they weren't the real me.
For a long time I held on to one belief, that adulthood would fix everything. Once I was away from the chaos and harm of childhood, I would finally be free to start living. The real me would come through, and everything would be different.
Adulthood arrived, and it didn't work that way. Those adaptive parts, the ones that had worked so hard to keep me safe, didn't stand down once the original threat was gone, because they didn't know how. They had become wired into my personality, my nervous system, my whole way of reading every room and every relationship, so they kept finding the same patterns wherever they looked, and wherever they found them they took over again, doing what they knew and keeping me in what felt familiar. The deeper self rarely got a look in.
What adult life looked like
What followed was what tends to follow when this goes unaddressed. Without realising, I rebuilt the same familiar dynamics, the same kinds of relationships and the same roles. I was the caretaker, the fixer, the one holding everyone else together while quietly coming apart inside. I exiled the parts of myself that felt shameful or inconvenient instead of understanding what they were trying to do for me, and I numbed myself emotionally to manage the constant anxiety that all that suppression created.
I built a career in fields I had no real passion for, mostly because I'd lost touch with my own desires so completely that I couldn't have named them. I kept up friendships where I was never quite myself, whoever that self was. And my body started to struggle, with chronic pain, fatigue, low immunity, insomnia and depression, trying to get my attention in the only way left to it.
Everything changed when I reached a crisis point. All the self-suppression and people-pleasing had never managed to please anyone, and still more of it kept being asked of me, until I finally saw that the things I'd been gripping so hard, the relationships, the job, the lifestyle, weren't even what I wanted. So I put down every rock I'd been carrying and gave myself over to finding a better way. That better way became the long journey back to myself.
How my journey became the method
Everything I lived through, every wound, every adaptive strategy, every stretch of numbing and waiting for change to arrive from somewhere outside me, shapes the way I work now.
I know from the inside what it is to split off from yourself in order to survive and to fit in, so I never ask clients to eliminate or exile the parts of themselves that feel like problems. I help them understand those parts, work alongside them, and let them finally relax, so the deeper true self can lead.
I know what it is to be failed by surface-level strategies that never quite reach the personal roots, so in my work I go straight to your own roots.
I know what it is to carry in the body what the mind can't yet process, so I work with the whole system, the subconscious, the unconscious, the body and the visionary mind.
And I know what it is to be the empath in the room, the mirror, the one who feels everyone else's pain more keenly than her own. That sensitivity lets me see my clients clearly, often more clearly than they can see themselves, and my deepest wish is to help them see themselves just as fully.
This is why Inner Gardening™ and Evolve Your Perspective™ carries my own fingerprints the whole way through. I lived my way into it first, and then spent years understanding why it works the way it does.
What it's like to work with me
Most people describe me as deeply compassionate and entirely non-judgemental. Whatever you bring into a session, you're safe here, and nothing you say will shock me. Like many therapists, I have my own lived experience of complex trauma, abuse and complex PTSD, and I've walked the long road of unlearning the adaptive behaviours that come with them. When I sit with you, I bring my own version of what you're carrying, navigated from the inside, alongside years of study of why it works the way it does. Carrying both at once is what lets me meet you where you actually are.
I'm also highly intuitive. I follow the live threads in a session and let them lead, and that intuition, honed through my own healing and through years of clinical practice, is one of the gifts that early sensitivity can leave you with. It guides my questioning towards the root of a problem quickly, so we often reach in a single session what might take months to arrive at through talking alone.
I work in a way that goes deep, and it gets there quickly. Clients comment on it often, so if you choose to work with me, it helps to come ready for that, because we won't be staying on the surface for long.
And I'll be seeing you in your widest potential the whole time, the version of you underneath the stuckness and the hiding, the one that's been waiting. My greatest hope is to help you see yourself there too.
What I specialise in
The three types of problems I work with most:
- Deep-rooted issues -the long-standing subconscious and sometimes deeply unconscious patterns that have begun showing up in the body or in behaviour.
- Resistance -the invisible blocks and fears that keep pinging you back into the familiar just as you try to move.
- Programmed perspective - the gap between what you genuinely want and where you keep finding yourself instead.
If any of these sound familiar, we should talk.
How to work with me
My one-to-one work happens through Inner Gardening™, trauma-informed integrative hypnotherapy for deep subconscious change. Find out more
The Evolve Your Perspective® framework is available through retreats, online courses and the EYP book, for anyone who wants a practical lens for understanding their own patterns and changing how they respond to life. Find out more
I work mainly online, with an international client base across several time zones. If none of the available slots suit your timezone, let me know and I can usually find a way.
A note on timing
I work with people when they're ready. Not perfectly ready - nobody arrives perfectly ready. What matters is being genuinely willing to look at what's underneath and to take new steps from what you find there.
If that sounds like you, I'd love to hear from you.
"Kate was so kind, gentle, focused and alert. She understood my problem and led me to new insights - reflecting my own words back to me in a way that was surprising and deeply beneficial"
Isabella I
"A positive, proactive, highly intelligent woman who works with compassion and dedication. If I could recommend one person to guide and care for someone's wellbeing and success, it would be Kate every time"
Ray B
"Kate is a phenomenal therapist who really takes the time to understand your needs. Professional, understanding, and extremely good at helping you get to the root cause"
Taryn J
Ready to begin?
Book a free conversation with Kate
Professional Background
Â
Alongside my own healing, my path into this work came through more than a decade of committed, self-directed study running alongside developing clinical practice. The practitioners who have most shaped my thinking have almost always worked at the edges of their fields rather than in the mainstream, because that's where the most honest and useful work, the kind that leads to deep change, tends to happen.
My educational foundation is my undergraduate BA Hons degree in Criminology, with significant components in psychology and sociology. It gave me an early framework for understanding human behaviour, social conditioning, the systems that shape us and the impact of harm, and it set the direction of a lifelong inquiry that eventually led me here.
Work in restorative justice, and the training around it, has been as directly relevant to my therapeutic work as anything else I studied formally. The trauma-informed principles of restoration, repair and being genuinely heard sit at the heart of how I approach integration work with clients.
Â
Here is what the highlights of the rest of my training looks like.
Â
Formal qualifications and certifications
- Clinical Hypnotherapist, trained to the highest therapist/practitioner level at the Marisa Peer School of Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT)
- Restorative Justice Practitioner, trained with Remedi, fully trained in RJ skills, safeguarding, risk assessment, partner-abuse and neurodivergence support
- HeartMath Institute trauma-informed practitioner training
- Level 2 Certificate in Awareness of Mental Health Problems
- Reiki Master Level practitioner
Â
Specialist CPD and advanced study
National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioural Medicine (NICABM):
- An Integrative Mind-Body Approach to Healing from Trauma and Complex PTSD
- Healing from Shame
Diane Heller:
- Restoring Resilience, Somatic Healing from Complex Trauma
Inspire Professional CPD:
- Understanding and Working with Suicidality
- The Unwanted Legacy: Understanding the Impact of Transgenerational Trauma
- Exploring the Mother Wound
- Exploring the Father Wound
- Understanding and Working with CPTSD and Dissociation
Â
Ongoing independent study
Alongside ongoing formal training, I've accumulated several hundred hours of independent reading and study across somatic therapies, parts-based approaches, attachment theory, trauma and CPTSD, consciousness studies, the work of Carl Jung and Caroline Myss on the subconscious and archetypes, and emerging theories at the intersection of neuroscience and psychology. This is ongoing, and it continually shapes how I work.
Â
Â
I work within a clear ethical framework, I hold professional indemnity insurance, I engage in clinical supervision, and I maintain my CPD as an active and ongoing commitment. My practice is built on do-no-harm principles, transparent boundaries, and a genuine commitment to referring on when I'm not the right fit for someone's needs. I will only ever work within my scope.
If you have any questions about my background or my approach before booking, I welcome them. Reach me through the contact form above, or raise them on your free discovery call.