Hello, I’m Laurie
The human behind The Curiously Kind Counsellor
I’m Laurie, a BACP-accredited psychotherapeutic counsellor working online with adults across the UK and Europe.
I’m deeply interested in the experiences and relationships that shape and change us — from the relationships we grow up with and what they teach us about ourselves, to the losses and changes that can disrupt the story we’ve had about who we are.
That interest is professional, but it’s personal too.
Some of this I know from the inside
I know what it’s like to become very good at noticing what other people need, while finding it much harder to know what you need yourself. To question whether your feelings are reasonable, adapt to what seems to be expected of you, and gradually lose sight of what actually feels right for you.
For a long time, I didn’t make the connection between those familiar ways of being and the impact they were having on how I felt about myself, the choices I made and the way I experienced my relationships. They were simply things I had learnt to do without really questioning why.
Therapy gave me somewhere to become curious about them — where they might have come from, what they had helped me navigate, and what was no longer working for me. It also helped me begin building a different relationship with myself.
That experience still shapes the way I work now: with curiosity about how we came to be who we are, compassion for the ways we learnt to cope and adapt along the way, and the belief that understanding ourselves can create the possibility for meaningful change.
When life becomes divided into before and after
In my early twenties, I lost a parent suddenly and unexpectedly.
It was the kind of loss that divided my life into a before and after. It changed my relationships, my sense of myself and the future I had imagined.
At the time, I absorbed a lot of ideas about what grief was supposed to look like and how I should be coping. When my experience didn’t fit those expectations, it was easy to believe that I was grieving wrongly, or that something about my response needed fixing.
Therapy offered me a very different way of understanding what I was going through. Instead of treating my grief as a problem to solve, I was helped to make sense of it with compassion and to find my own way of living with what had happened.
I remember feeling incredibly fortunate to have had that kind of support — and increasingly aware that more people needed to know there wasn’t one correct way to grieve. Believing you’re doing grief “wrong” can add shame to an already painful experience, and shame often silences grief rather than making it disappear.
This a fundamental part of why I care so deeply about grief care that feels more human — care that makes room for the individual person, their relationship, their circumstances and the way their grief actually shows up, rather than measuring it against how it is supposed to look.
It’s something that has gone on to shape my work with clients and my wider writing about grief.
The slightly less direct route to becoming a therapist
Before retraining as a counsellor, I spent almost a decade working in HR, coaching and leadership development across the private sector and the NHS.
On paper, things made sense. But something felt off and I was gradually losing myself.
Therapy gave me the space to question what I was doing, what I actually wanted and what mattered to me. Eventually, that led me back to something I’d felt drawn towards for years: becoming a therapist.
After starting my training almost a decade ago, I’ve now been in private practice for over five years and continue to develop my work through further training and professional development.
Why Curiously Kind?
The name came from something that has become increasingly important to me, both personally and professionally.
We can be curious about ourselves without picking ourselves apart. We can understand why a pattern developed without deciding we have to keep living it. We can build compassion for the parts of ourselves that learnt to cope, adapt or protect us, while also creating change where something different is needed.
For me, that’s what being Curiously Kind is about.
Understanding ourselves more deeply. Relating to ourselves differently. And finding ways to live that feel more our own.
Outside the therapy room
Outside of therapy, you’ll usually find me strength training, doodling or absorbed in a good book. I live by the sea in Poole, Dorset, and enjoy long coastal walks.
I also love those quieter moments when my mind is free to wander, I can sip a hot chocolate while watching the world around me, and I’m spending time with the people I can be unapologetically me with.
I’m naturally curious, intuitive and reflective. I’m also highly sensitive and deeply empathic — I tend to notice subtleties, feel things deeply and spend a lot of time thinking about people and what shapes us. I’m endlessly interested in the different ways we come to understand ourselves — and how that understanding can change over time.
Ready to take the first step?
If you feel like we might be a good fit to work together, I would love to hear from you.