Counselling: Specialist counselling in coercive control

The collage imagery throughout my website and handouts carries deliberate meaning and hope.

Each artwork, designed by Lucie Blaze, represents the “taken parts of the self” those whose lives have been diminished by both perpetrators and systems that perpetuate injustice.

The partial faces and layered shapes symbolise how women’s lives are devastated and constrained through systemic coercive control, how a perpetrator tries to dismantle her from her own core, her sense of knowing, and from all the parts of herself.  These images hold hope - as the women are “not broken” - they remain present, visible, and whole within their complexity.

The bright colours reflect their true inner vibrance and the possibility of recovery, restoration, and the reclaiming of what has been dismantled and fragmented.  

As responders, we hold a profound responsibility - as our actions can either compound harm or contribute to safety and dignity. From a place of safety, space and justice, the fragmented parts of herself may be restored to wholeness as they are still there. This, like the images, is the embodiment of hope.