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Who you would be talking to
I grew up in Spanish, studied in French, and built a life in English
I am a counsellor in Newstead, Brisbane, and a PACFA Member. I work with adults and teenagers moving through change, grief, separation and questions of identity and belonging.
Somewhere in all that moving I learned something I have never stopped being interested in.
There is a version of yourself that only exists in your first language. When you live far from where you started, that version can go quiet for years without anyone noticing. Including you.
So when someone sits down with me and says they feel like a stranger in their own life, I am not reaching for a framework. I know that feeling from the inside.
Most of the people I sit with are somewhere in the middle of a change. A relationship ended. Someone died. The children grew up, or the country changed, or the job that held the whole identity together stopped fitting. They almost always arrive apologising for taking up space with something they have decided is not serious enough. Then they talk for an hour and something loosens.
That is the work. Not fixing anyone. Making room for the parts of a person that have not had anywhere to go.
I started Natural Zen Counselling in 2024, in a room in Newstead with good light and a window onto the garden. Before that I spent years working alongside people from everywhere, in organisations where culture and belonging were talked about constantly and understood rarely. That is probably where this began, though I did not know it at the time.
What I am most interested in now is the place where a person's culture, their family's expectations and their own idea of themselves are all pulling in slightly different directions. It is quiet, it is exhausting, and almost nobody names it as the reason they came.
JenHow I work
Four threads, at the same time
Most counselling starts and ends with what you think. The way you hold yourself, the story you tell about yourself and the culture you carry are all in the room whether we name them or not.
Mind
The thoughts that loop, and the conclusions you reached about yourself years ago and never revisited.
Body
Grief and change live in the shoulders and the sleep long before they reach words. We pay attention to that.
Story
What happened is fixed. How it gets told, and who you are in the telling, is not.
Belonging
Where you are from, where you live now, and the particular tiredness of translating yourself all day.
Languages
You should not have to translate your own grief while you are having it
Sessions run in whichever language your inner life actually lives in, and you can move between them mid-sentence. It costs no more.
Español
Lengua materna
Mi primera lengua. Podemos trabajar completamente en español, desde la llamada inicial.
Français
Courant
J'ai fait mes études en France. Nous pouvons travailler entièrement en français.
English
Fluent
The language I built a life in, and the one most sessions happen in.
Qualifications and accountability
Why I do this work
My turn toward counselling came in 2020. Inside a short stretch of time I lost my mother, came to the end of a long relationship, and found myself isolated and under financial strain a long way from the people who knew me best. I already held the qualification. What those years gave me was a far more exact sense of what actually helps and what only sounds as though it should.
I opened this practice in 2024, once that was work I had done rather than work I was still in the middle of.
- Advanced Diploma of Counselling Psychology Australian College of Applied Professions
- Postgraduate qualification in Public Health University of Technology Sydney, focused on mental health and the health issues currently facing the Australian population
Also a Certificate in Human Resources Management, and a BA in Foreign Applied Languages and International Relations from the Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour in France.
Accountability
- Member of PACFA and the Australian Counselling Association. Bound by their codes of ethics, with complaints processes that anyone can use.
- Continuing professional development completed and logged every year.
- Blue Card and NDIS Worker Screening Check held and current.
- Public liability and professional indemnity insured.
Counselling in Australia is self-regulated rather than registered with AHPRA. I have written about what that means, including the parts that are worth knowing before you trust anyone with this.
Outside the room
The rest of it
I am still a person who moves. I travel whenever I can, I read in three languages and lose my place in all of them, and I have a fourth on the go badly.
I mention this because people sometimes assume a counsellor has arrived somewhere settled and is looking back at the rest of us from there. I have not, and I am not. I am working out who I am in three languages, and I am still doing it.
That is not a disclaimer. It is closer to the qualification that matters most.