MARY STACK MBACP Senior Accredited Counsellor

Chapel End
Netherhay
Beaminster
DT8 3RH
View map		 MARY STACK MBACP Senior Accredited Counsellor
01308 867 313 / 07980 480 869
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Profile

Stressed, depressed, anxious, frightened of your anger or just needing someone outside your family or friends to talk to.   I am a BACP Senior Accredited Counsellor with 18 years' experience.  

I set up a Counselling Service in a private Boarding School in 2003 and worked on the team of the Edinburgh University Student Counselling Service for three years so understand the difficulties of being away from home and making transitions, especially from another country and culture.

For ten years I worked with a team of five counsellors at The Edinburgh Counselling Centre before moving to the South of England last July.  This service was well used by GP practices in central Edinburgh from whom many of our clients were referred.

I also work for a major provider of employment assistance programmes.  This entails offering short-term counselling for employees as part of their work contract.   Clients are working within occupations such as the financial sector, the NHS and the retail trade.

Training, Qualifications & Experience

I have an Advanced Diploma in Integrative Counselling and have upgraded this with training in working with Young People, working with people suffering from recent or childhood trauma and have done introductory training in family therapy to help me understand the Individual in the context of their Family System.

Areas of counselling I deal with

Other areas of counselling I deal with

I work with those facing a whole range of life's experiences, e.g. loss or bereavement, moving home/country, those struggling to understand relationships, anxiety or depression, mental health problems and eating disorders.

I have a particular interest in helping clients through past or present traumatic and/or abusive circumstances and those who feel they may have issues stemming from being educated in a boarding system.

I trained in an integrative approach to counselling but over the years have found that counselling from a relational perspective offers more effective help. I believe that an understanding of the ways you have been related to in the past will shed light on difficulties being experienced at the present time. For example, if you want to know how to manage your anger I would be interested in you telling me how you have learned to express or withhold powerful feelings, what it was like for you when family members became angry, how you responded and how resolution was or (wasn't!) reached. Often gaining some insight into why we behave as we do can enable change to take place.

Therapies Offered

Fees

I charge £40 for a 50 minute session but take up to one hour for an initial consultation.

Further Information

Below is an article I wrote about my experience of boarding school called "The Making of Her" ISSN 1753 5980 in Attachment Journal New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis Vol. 2 No. 3 November 2008. I was responding to another article about the effects of boarding school and in response to reading Nick Duffells excellent treatise on the British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School system entitled "The Making of Them" ISBN 0-9537904-0-1.

THE BOARDING SCHOOL EXPERIENCE

I was sent to boarding school from aged 10 - 15.  For me this was normal and to be expected. I think I felt proud to be following in the footsteps of my older brothers who had left for Prep School aged 7. As I write this I am fitting in another jigsaw piece. I must have been just one year old when first experiencing the cycle of trunks being packed and unpacked, the boys being at home and then gone and Nanny mending and patching school uniform in the holidays. I recall the anxiety about regulation items which had to be ordered from an expensive London store taking ages to be delivered. I have memories of trunks being sent PLA (Passenger Luggage in Advance for those uninitiated!). I remember going to the station to see my trunk off a few days before I returned to school and worrying about whether my belongings would be there when I arrived.

My family lived in Somerset and it was my mother who drove me the 120 miles to a village in Surrey on my first day at the school she had attended in the 1920s. Two of the staff who taught her were now joint headmistresses of this small independent boarding school of about 70 pupils. I had of course never visited the school but had been assured that I would be happy there. Why not?

I didn't fight back tears on the day of separation.  I don't remember feeling sad about my mother dropping me off (interesting choice of words). Neither can I recall the moment of parting. I do remember my first night in the dormitory and the absence of the long talked about and promised friend I would have.  Betty was the 10 year old daughter of one of my mother's old school friends who lived in the North. She had started the previous term and was to be my guardian but her family circumstances were such that she returned to school two weeks late. That first evening I remember the dark wood panelled dining hall smelling of creosote and ink, and eating cold beef and beetroot salad to a background hubbub of excited chat. I now recall one thing my mother had told me after I had left the school.  She herself had been taken away from the school because she had had a nervous breakdown. She couldn't bear the noise of the knives and forks in the diningroom. She had been sent from a home where a nanny and a governess were in charge and she had not even had the experience of learning with other children.

I experienced a kind of dull thud of landing in a strange situation and the certainty that this was to be my life.  I feel I was primed for boarding school. The undercoat of my home background was a culture to which the gloss could easily adhere.

Dormitory bedrooms were made up of girls from each of the school years aged from 10 to 17.   I was allowed three personal items from my belongings on our chest of drawers.  A hairbrush, an ornament and others seemed to have a photograph. Going to bed that night I heard stories of the Head of Dorm's sexual exploits (I think that's what they were - probably fantasy but made me feel strange.)  Another girl was Dutch and had seen her pony shot by the occupying Nazis in the field by her house. This is 1955.

We didn't have half terms. The only time my parents visited was at the annual Speech Day in the summer term and my most vivid memory is of being the last to be called from the Library where we all assembled waiting to be summoned to be re-united with our parents at the start of the various displays.  I always missed the beginning. My father was always late. I can feel the sick dragging feeling in the pit of my stomach as I recall those events.

I remember the teasing (now recognised as bullying).  In my second year dorm the other girls would make me an applepie bed each night and hide my nightie until they heard Matron's footsteps in the corridor.   When Matron came in to put out our lights I would sometimes be half naked and terrified of being punished.  I tried to rush up to the dorm straight after supper in the hope that I could guard my bed.  There were also beatings with the hairbrush and the threat of a leather riding girth from one girl in my year group.

I left school aged 15 because I had reached the VI form and got one A level at Art. The school was not academic and did not prepare pupils for any kind of higher education.  We had a riding school attached and if you kept your own pony at school you were exempt games.  We seemed to go to endless concerts, had the privilege of going to Glyndebourne in the VI form and, on looking back, I think we were being educated not so much for ourselves but for a life of service to others, as future wives of colonial servants.  Nursing and teaching were approved occupations and to be a secretary third best.  I went to my local College of Commerce aged 16 and at 17 became a secretary to a friend of my father's who was a known alcoholic and who kept a mistress living in the top flat above his office.  He got me to draft the letters he sent to his two boys at prep school. This I did thinking that I was rather special to be allowed this task. Now it horrifies me.  With hindsight I find it hard to believe that my parents approved of this man being my first boss as I entered the world of work.

To go away to school I had left my best friend at home.  She went on to the local High School. I felt rather sorry for her because I had a sense that anywhere other than boarding school was second best.  Paula and I had spent a lot of time together in the concrete air-raid shelter built in the basement of my parents' large town house.  Both her parents worked and she lived in a flat in the house opposite so we would use different shaped cardboard signs to hang in our respective windows to indicate whether or not we were allowed out to play.  We did lots of crafts and needlework together.  My nanny ironed transfers onto linen so we could embroider the hours away together in our little house underground.  It was years later in therapy that I was able to feel the impact of being given by my mother part of an old sheet with worn patches on which I was to work my stitches.  Paula always had a bought kit from a shop. When I showed my mother my finished work of art on that occasion I remember feeling bad. It seemed to be my fault that there were holes in the fabric.

I found it quite fascinating as I made contact again with old school friends in my 50s when my husband and I returned to a more settled life in the UK.  I discovered how many had parallel stories to tell and similar struggles over the years, particularly with valuing themselves and how this had often been reflected in their own intimate relationships.  Many friends have admitted to the difficulties they experienced with their mothers and how hard had been the later stage in life when they were faced with providing care as their own parents become frail.  Actually I realise that it comes naturally to provide care for others not so easy to care.  Equally difficult is knowing what it means really to love without needing to possess or to control.  I have been very good at managing my children but always aware of my lack of true engagement and with no sense of the need to be attuned to their emotional needs.  This understanding has only gradually unfolded through my own training and therapy and learning hugely from the myriad of experiences of family life which come into my counselling room.

We have been a couple compelled to repeat a pattern by sending all our children to boarding school, fully believing we were giving them the best.  I think I justified our decision because of the demands of Service life and, again, that it was the norm to believe that boarding school was a better choice than one's children having to change schools every one or two years.  If I am honest I always had a nagging sense that this wasn't natural and regularly spoke in a mantra like way - 'well of course with army life you don't really have a choice'.

When settled in the United Kingdom I had space to think about what I could do for myself.  Aged 53 I enrolled on a modular course to train as a counsellor. This was at the time my two daughters were preparing for university.  Something in me was saying: 'If them, why not me?' At the time I discovered that I was eligible for a grant for my fees because I had never had tertiary education.  This was an important factor for me because I doubt very much that I could have given myself permission to spend money on training for myself.

I think I have surprised myself all along. I had very little idea of what a counsellor was but thought it was a way of helping others who were less fortunate than myself. I didnt see this as an arrogant thought.  It felt more like a fact. Then began the most challenging three years of my life studying alongside and participating in groupwork with those who had had a huge variety of differing life and background experiences. I learned many painful things about myself but also began to emerge as a more genuine person and I trust that this continues.

I have tried to make sense of my experience growing up over a long period of time. I was warned by an experienced counsellor when putting together my application to set up a counselling service in a boarding school about the need to have worked through my own experience in order to contain the level of sadness and loss I would encounter in such work.

One eleven year old boy was being badly bullied in his dormitory.  Having met together with his housemaster to tell his story we then worked for one or two sessions on how he might be able to tell his parents what was going on for him. He made a strong resolve and I believed that he would be able to talk with his Mum.  The following week he came back and told me that when he saw the look of happiness on his mother's face as she came to collect him for the weekend he just couldnt spoil it for her.  I shall always remember his face.  Quite calm.  Quite collected. He had made up his mind.  He couldnt do this to her.

I believe I did valuable work but I was not prepared for or able to tolerate for long the stories which filled my little room each week. It was with deep sadness and regret that I felt I had to resign my post after only two years at the school.

What am I left with?

I found it difficult to mourn the loss of either of my parents or even understand what this meant for me because so much had been disconnected in the past.  This can feel, for many clients, like a permanent state of grief about relationships that might have been but weren't.

I regret not having been able to understand my own children while grappling with their own issues as teenagers emerging into young adults.  But I do know that one route to reparation is to try to be true and honest about one's own mistakes and to learn how to 'do things differently'.

I occasionally have real anxiety about travel.  Recently I was travelling from home by train to another city 40 minutes away for a day conference. After a few minutes I was aware of unfamiliar landscape. I went into panic mode. I was rooted to my seat and feeling sick.  I looked around at the carriage, emptier than it should have been.  I could so easily have checked with another passenger that the train was going to where I hoped it would but I couldn't. The terrified child in me eclipsed my rational functioning.  I was alone with my thoughts which spiralled downwards.  I began to feel huge guilt about not making the conference as if I'd be punished. I began to dream up excuses about being unwell and unable to attend (as if I had to justify my non-attendance).  I felt totally disoriented and wondered where I might land up.  Would I find my way back home?

It also scared me to witness the rawness of the memory of travelling on my own back and forth to school, changing trains, and wondering if I was on the right one. But I have learnt to be able to reflect on this kind of experience.

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