Frances Salles

In the year 2000, life threw me a curve ball. I was living in London, married to my soulmate, a proud mum of a 5 month old, and life was looking good:  and then my husband died. He took ill one night, got up and collapsed the next morning and dead by lunchtime. At 33 I was a widowed with a young baby and all my plans for life and work were out the window.

 

It was that day 21 years ago when my life changed for ever: my professional understanding of counselling and stress management suddenly became deeply personal. I had to draw on everything I had learnt in my 4 years of holistic counselling and pyschotherapy training, and I had to lean on the support of family, friends, and use all the understanding I had gained from my spiritual community to get through. So many ups and downs, so many tears of laughter, joy and pain, making choices, questioning life, and above all, never giving up, moving forward when I could, and resting when I needed.

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And this is my passion and what I bring to my work - helping people in real and practical ways deal with life as it is: messy, challenging, sometimes heartful, sometimes heartbreaking, and always amazing. So much of life is out of our control, including when we are at work, but if we can learn to identify and understand what is in our control, who knows what can happen?

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When I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2006, I worked with young Palestinian and Israeli women on leadership, peace and social justice issues before running a non-profit home-care agency and founding a residential hospice home. I brought my experience in stress management into supporting carers, both family and professional, as well as the people we cared for, facing serious illness, old age and the end of life. My own father's dementia diagnosis and eventual move into residential care brought me back to Europe, allowing me to once again work in-person, not just virtually, with Karen at HSC training.

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