Hello

My Story

Hi my name is Robyn, but I prefer to be called Laurie. I am a qualified Counsellor and Equine Assisted Mental Health Practitioner. I offer individual sessions to children, teenagers and adults who are seeking to improve their overall quality of life and work through concerns that are affecting their mental health or wellbeing. Offering trauma informed practices, choice and collaboration to explore emotions and develop healthy coping skills to support you to facilitate your own growth and healing. Working with horses provides a safe empathetic space to explore emotion, develop self-awareness and develop regulation skills. By taking the therapy session outside and including horses and sometime other animals into the therapeutic space, it expands on the traditional room-based client-therapist relationship. Working in an outdoor environment, we include grounding exercises, mindfulness and talk therapy, which helps foster a therapeutic relationship built on trust and mutual respect. Horses can provide a mirror for our behaviour, they give immediate, honest and non-judgemental feedback. Working in this way offers the client a safe space to build trust, connection and provides opportunities for the client to explore self-awareness, take time to reflect and make meaning. Embrace Counselling services is nestled in a little pocket of rural land near Tygum Lagoon at Waterford West, not far from transport and motorway links. Because we are situated between the lagoon and the river, we quite often have native birds visit, adding that extra layer to your nature-based therapy experience.