Certified EFT Practitioner and Counsellor

Hi, I’m Susan and am a certified EFT practitioner and a counsellor. I am a mother of three and also a grandmother of three and I have had many varied life experiences which help me to understand and empathize with other women, especially those in midlife. My path to becoming an EFT therapist has been a winding one with many delays. I left school at 16 and worked as a receptionist and a waitress and eventually returned to study and did all my study as a mature age student while juggling family demands.

I first became a teacher before I became a counsellor and then an EFT therapist. I majored in history and politics in my BA, but I always had an interest in sociology and psychology and did some units in these areas in my undergraduate degree. I eventually completed a Master of Counselling at the age of 58 in 2014 which focused on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The 100 hours of client contact was done with secondary students in a local school where I also wrote ‘well-being’ curriculum for different year levels but I felt my calling was to work with women. I eventually started a private practice from home while teaching part time and retired from teaching in 2020.

My own experiences help me empathise with women on what it is like to juggle many roles such as being the taxi driver for a young family, and later on caring for aging parents while trying to be present for teenagers. I have been through a divorce and remarriage and have experienced the complexities of having a blended family and the struggles at times of making it work. So many women, especially of my generation, have had expectations put on them of being the carer and putting themselves last. Sometimes they are just not taken seriously which then leads to them unconsciously limiting their lives.

Over time I came to realize that talk therapy was not enough to help others as it did not address the subconscious processes that strongly influence our behaviours, and it did not consider the nervous system and how it is wired differently for each person. It was a top-down approach that did not emphasize what the body was feeling or trying to communicate. After reading ‘The Body Keeps The Score’ by Bessel Van Der Kolk, and ‘When The Body Says No’ by Gabor Mate, I became determined to find a somatic therapy I could use and fortunately came across EFT. What attracted me to training with Jules was that she used a trauma sensitive approach and I had come to respect how essential that is in therapy.

Areas of expertise: Anxiety, depression, grief and loss, trauma.

• Certified EFT Practitioner with EFT International

• Post Graduate Certificate in Grief, Loss, and Trauma

• Master of Counselling

• Master of Education