I began my professional life as a teacher, specialising in special needs teaching. This first career allowed me to witness the breadth of humanity, working across the UK and overseas. Moving in to special needs education allowed me to understand neurodiversity and the effect it can have on the individual, their sense of self and the impact it can have on the wider family system around them. Diversity in any form, shapes who we are and how we interact with our world and we can feel this as both positive and negative.

 

Whilst I loved teaching, increasingly, I felt drawn to the human aspect of the profession, the children, their families, the effect working in education can have on staff, the impact of loss, hardship, difficult home lives. I knew I wanted to support people in a deeper, more informed way. After much searching, I made the decision to move in to my second career - counselling.

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I completed both my Foundation Certificate and Diploma in Humanistic and Integrative Counselling, at the Bath Centre for Psychotherapy and Counselling (BCPC). This is a well established and highly regarded training centre, affiliated with BACP, the largest and leading professional body for counselling and psychotherapy in the UK. The training process was robust and demanding which felt essential when qualifying to support people at vulnerable and crucial times of life.

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Throughout my training I worked as a volunteer at the wonderful charity 'Cotswold Counselling'. Here I worked alongside highly experienced counsellors with a wide variety of clients. Gaining hundreds of hours of client work here brought the theory to life and gave me the competency and confidence to begin my own private practice. 

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Growing my own counselling practice - Nic Foster Counselling - is a privilege, each client is important and integral to the transformative process of counselling. We all arrive with our own experiences, patterns, feelings, responses. These have all grown with us, keeping us safe along the way. It feels special to witness my clients noticing these patterns and deciding which ones are unhelpful, how they can let them go and which ones continue to serve them.