When the body or the future changes the plan
You didn’t choose this. A diagnosis, a parent’s fall, a slow change in your own body or mind, a redundancy, the future you were quietly assuming got rewritten. Maybe you’re the one who’s ill. Maybe you’re the one holding everything together for someone who is. Maybe nothing dramatic has happened at all, just a body and a life in midlife that no longer feel entirely like your own.
Either way, the plan changed, and you’re left living the new one before you’ve had time to grieve the old.
This is often relational, not just personal. Perhaps a partner adjusting to a diagnosis alongside you, a marriage reshaped by caring, a couple renegotiating who they are to each other now. I work with individuals and couples across the different shapes this takes:
Chronic illness and cancer Living with an illness that isn’t going away – visible or invisible, newly diagnosed or long-standing – changes how you relate to your body, your work, your relationships and your sense of a future. This is a place to be honest about all of it, including the parts that don’t fit the “brave fighter” story that you might feel you are expected to tell. → Find out more
Caring for someone you love Caring for a parent, partner or someone else arrives sideways and quietly takes over everything: your work, your marriage, your friendships, your own life still ticking underneath it. People tell you you’re wonderful. Almost no one asks how you are. → Find out more
Midlife and menopause Identity, body and meaning shifting all at once, often while everyone around you assumes you’re fine because nothing “happened.” I hold firmly that this is a serious transition, not a joke or an inconvenience to push through. → Find out more
What the work involves
We start with what’s actually true for you now: the diagnosis, the caring role, the body that doesn’t feel familiar, rather than the version of coping the way you think you’re supposed to be managing.
Much of this work is nervous-system and body-aware: learning to stay present with a body that feels unpredictable or unreliable, finding rest inside a life that doesn’t have much room for it, noticing the resentment and guilt that live alongside love and duty.
From there, we look at what it means to build a future you didn’t choose into one that still has meaning in it.
Creative practice can have a natural place here too. This might include drawing the illness rather than only describing it, morning pages as a space for the parts of you the caring role has no room for, marking milestones and losses that don’t come with any ritual attached. Small, concrete ways of putting something down that’s otherwise carried silently.
Experience
My work in this area draws on time working with the Brain Tumour Charity and ongoing work alongside clients living with life changing diagnoses, including stage 4 cancer.
Common questions
How do I cope with a chronic illness diagnosis changing my future?
You don’t have to cope with it all at once. A diagnosis can undo the future you’d quietly assumed: the career, the holidays, the version of yourself you were counting on, and grieving that loss is part of living with the illness, not a distraction from managing it. Therapy gives you somewhere to feel the anger, fear or exhaustion without having to be brave about it, and to slowly work out what a life still holds when the plan has changed. This isn’t about finding the silver lining; it’s about building a life you can actually live in.
What is anticipatory grief when caring for a partner or parent?
Anticipatory grief is the grief you carry for someone who is still here, mourning the partner or parent you are gradually losing while you are still looking after them. It can feel confusing or disloyal, because you are grieving and caregiving at the same time, often with no space to do either properly. You might notice it as sadness that arrives before any loss has technically happened, or a strange numbness that sits alongside your care. Naming it as grief, rather than just stress or exhaustion, is often the first relief.
Is therapy helpful for menopause, or just medical treatment?
Medical treatment can address the physical symptoms, but menopause is also an identity shift, and that’s where therapy has something to offer. It can bring up questions about who you are now, what your body means to you, what’s ending and what might be beginning: none of which HRT or supplements can touch. Therapy sits alongside medical care rather than replacing it, giving you a place to think through the parts of this transition that are about meaning, not just hormones.
Getting started
If any of this sounds like your life, the next step is a free 20-minute introductory call. This is a chance for us both to sense whether this is the right work at the right time.