Hello, I'm Alison. Counsellor, hypnotherapist and pharmacist, and I work with the whole of you, not just the symptom.

I qualified as a pharmacist in 1991 and have worked in hospital and community pharmacy ever since. I still practise, as a locum community pharmacist, alongside my therapy work. Pharmacy taught me how medicines work in real people rather than in textbooks, and it taught me that most people leave a consultation with questions they never asked.

It also showed me, over and over, people managing well on the outside while feeling anything but. Medication helped with the symptoms. It rarely reached the cause.

I did a PhD in pharmacy education at The University of Nottingham, and spent ten years at Keele University as a lecturer, postgraduate tutor and programme manager, leading the professional doctorate in pharmacy. I am still an honorary lecturer there.

Teaching is where I first saw the power of hypnotherapy to help with studying, focus, exam nerves and fears about school and college, and where I saw how much anxiety was sitting underneath academic problems. I have worked with hundreds of students, and I know what examiners are actually looking for, which is usually not what candidates fear.

I trained as a hypnotherapist wanting ways to help people with anxiety and stress that would work alongside conventional medicine where needed. For six years I practised part time while still working as a pharmacist, and I have been full time since 2020.

I rarely use hypnotherapy on its own. I blend it with counselling, parts therapy and other therapeutic techniques so that we are working on the underlying issue and not just the symptom. If you have never experienced hypnosis, it is a relaxed, focused state in which you stay fully aware and in control. Most people find it calmer than they expected.

I later qualified as a counsellor, working with an integrative approach, and in 2022 trained in EMDR incorporating hypnosis, which is central to my trauma work. Much of that work now is with people who have experienced domestic abuse or sexual assault.

{{one paragraph, in your own words, on why trauma work, and why domestic abuse and sexual assault in particular. This is the paragraph people will remember.}}

Galene was one of the Nereids, the sea nymphs of Greek myth, and the word itself means the calm of the sea: the stillness that settles over the water once a storm has passed. Not a sea that never had weather, but one that has come through it and is quiet again.

That is the feeling I wanted the practice to carry. People come to me in rough water: anxious, worn down, carrying something they have not been able to put down. The work is not about pretending the weather never happened. It is about finding the calm on the other side of it, and learning that you can get back there on your own.