TESTIMONIALS
Zoe Mallett, Founder & Radio Host
I've been working with Jarah for a year now, when we first met I was in a really low place after a difficult breakup, my mum suffering from bad mental health and addictions and unattended trauma, my mind was chaotic with intruding thoughts that I couldn't seem to calm. Jarah helped me by listening intently, offering professional guidance and practical strategies that helped me take back control. Her calming yet firm nature helped move me through the healing process in a healthy way, at first I mostly cried in sessions and now we've got to a place where we can share a laugh - the transformation over the last year has been incredible. There is still work I want to do on myself so I'll be continuing my sessions with Jarah to guide me through.
Trainee counsellor
After an extensive search for a therapist I felt I could connect with, I came across Jarah. She provided me with the space to cultivate an attentive environment in which I felt comfortable, warm, healthily challenged & safe.
Jarah has played a pivotal role in encouraging a shift in my self awareness and has helped me to value myself.
As a trainee therapist, many emotional (and some what existential) obstacles came up for myself.
I’m deeply grateful to Jarah for providing me with the tools to access an understanding of myself & my interpretations of the world me. While I understand that the healing process is ongoing & rarely linear, I certainly feel more equipped to manage difficult emotions and understand my thought patterns.
Coaching client
I have completed the 8 week therapy/coaching programme with Jarah 2 months ago and have done biweekly sessions since. It has made the biggest difference for me than any other help I have gotten before. Jarah is very experienced and knowledgeable. She is also very kind, understanding and flexible. Without her and the journey I describe below, my relationship with myself would not have improved in the wonderful way that it did.
I started off from a place of struggling with a few self-sabotaging patterns that got firmly rooted in me over a few years of ignoring them. Those mainly included an obsessive relationship with food and recurring negative thought patterns that would lead me to lay in bed sometimes for hours feeling sad and unworthy. I brushed those things off because “everyone does this”. I just thought I had to get on with life and just ignore the uncomfortable feelings.
The first few weeks of the programme have already started shaking things up. The sessions were twice a week at the start which made me feel emotionally supported. Knowing that I had a session coming up every few days would make me want to witness what I was going through internally, to have something substantial to talk about in the session. Getting a new journal and starting to write my thoughts was something Jarah recommended to do from the beginning, and it helped with untangling my thoughts into manageable chunks of my experience that would prompt the discussions in our sessions. Some habits, like laying in bed, feeling sad and procrastinating, I couldn’t even notice within myself before literally being asked about why I was late to one of the sessions with Jarah. Those behaviours were so on autopilot for me that I didn’t think they were worthy of attention, I just thought that they were a part of me.
Jarah introduced those to me as blind spots that I have of my own behaviour, which is exactly what they were - pieces of me or states of my mind I was choosing to be blind to because I didn’t know how to deal with them. Me thinking that everyone does it was an excuse to not face them. By doing that they were only growing and sometimes overtaking all aspects of me. Getting into the habit of journaling made me get into the habit of being consciously aware of everything I do and why I do it, and start gaining power over my thoughts and actions.
The interesting part was that the conscious awareness attitude that Jarah introduced to me, was something I knew well about by having been practising meditation regularly for 4 years now. However, once my daily meditation was ticked off the list, I would slip back into autopilot, and not actually be mindful of my thoughts throughout the day. Having someone kind and patient like Jarah helping me reflect on my past and present and holding me accountable for my day to day approach to my own experience was what I needed, to engage with the things I already knew, like journaling and meditation, in a much more deep and helpful way.
Further, I came into the sessions expecting to get on the right track career wise. But during the sessions I started realising that what I needed most was to reground myself and gain back the self love and self compassion that have slipped away from me during the traumatic experience of Covid. This was the first and most important step in any future success for me. Because without self love It is very hard to go through the ups and downs of any path. Thus I realised that taking time to journal or have an occasional therapy session is never a waste of time and is so much more fundamental to success than any specific goal that I would have set out for myself prior.
I am immensely grateful to Jarah, and would recommend her therapy/coaching programme to everyone, even to those people who may not think they need help, but are just interested in self-improvement and going about life in a better way.