Human
Poet
Therapist
(in that order)
Humans are meant to feel...
But we seem to have got used to using the
short hand of 'fine' or
'it's bad for my mental health'
to sum up our human experience.
Hi, I'm Jacky and I'm on a mission to make some shifts:
- A linguistic shift: from ‘It's bad for my mental health’ to seeing your feelings as the signposts for what you need, like: ‘I am feeling resentful, how am I feeling deprived right now?’ Feelings become wisdom to decode, not symptoms to manage.
- A poetic shift: from poetry-as-academic-snobbery (the stuffy thing we were force-fed at school) to poetry-as-everyday-human-technology. Something we can all use to understand ourselves and each other — not just at school assemblies and funerals, but in our actual lives.
- A spiritual shift: from looking outward for ‘the fix’ to recognising that when we use poetry as a tool for witnessing and reflection, we find the one thing we all share: our humanity.
I came to this work the way most cycle-breakers do - through living it first, and finding the frameworks for it later.
~ From hulp to hope ~
A mixture of psychological insight, lived experience and poetic licence
POET
Not the stuffy thing we were force-fed at school — but storytelling with a heartbeat. It is through storytelling that we make meaning from all that we experience.
CYCLE BREAKER
I came to this work the way most cycle-breakers do - through living it first, and finding the frameworks for it later. With an MSc in Addiction Psychology and Counselling and years of clinical practice, I now work with people doing the quiet, difficult work of interrupting the patterns they inherited.
Intentional Intensives with Jacky
VISIONARY
My signature framework — HULP to HOPE — takes its name from the moment you learned to censor yourself. To doubt your own experience. To police your own feelings. To reject the parts of yourself that had needs that went unmet.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER AND WORKSHOP FACILITATOR
As an Edinburgh Fringe performer and host of the Words in the Wilderness podcast, I use poetry as a technical tool — a way of holding what is true before you are ready, or able, to say it plainly. My talks and workshops create space for the experiences most of us have spent years learning to ignore.
I don't offer fixes.
I offer language, witnessing, and the reassurance that you are not as alone in this as you have been led to believe.
