From Hedonist to Therapist

One morning I was landing home from a sex party, that afternoon I was being told I had a brain tumour. Everything changed after that.

I spent ten years handpicking guests for elite underground hedonistic parties — millionaires, government officials, sports stars and CEOs. It was a world of sex, secrecy and power. And I held everyone's secrets.

My husband and I were living a double life too. By day, we ran an investment fund and I held a senior corporate role in the beauty industry. By night, we hosted invitation-only libertine gatherings deep in the English countryside.

Guests flew in from Dubai, Singapore and New York. Executives invented meetings and fake work trips to justify disappearing for weekends. Some travelled halfway across the world for a single night.

From the outside, I appeared to have everything.

A successful career.

A husband.

A beautiful home in rural Sussex.

An extraordinary social life.

But beneath it all was a loneliness I didn't fully understand.

I'd left the energy of Brighton behind for a stunning modern wood-and-glass house at the end of a country lane. The life looked idyllic, but it could also feel isolating. The parties gave me something I was craving: community, excitement, connection and aliveness.

Then, at 35, everything changed.

I landed back in the UK after a weekend away at a party and was told I had a brain tumour in my pituitary gland. The tumour had triggered early perimenopause and a cascade of debilitating symptoms.

One moment I was living what felt like a limitless life. The next, I felt like I was staring directly at my own mortality.

What I didn't understand then was how profoundly hormones can shape your experience of reality.

My emotions felt amplified. My body felt unfamiliar. My sense of certainty became less reliable. My moods were unpredictable. Longings felt louder.

Questions I'd previously been able to ignore suddenly demanded answers.

The collision of a brain tumour diagnosis and hormonal change forced me into an existential reckoning.

Mortality was no longer theoretical.

Time no longer felt endless.

I began looking at my life through entirely different eyes.

Hormonally.

Sexually.

Emotionally.

Relationally.

And, in some ways, spiritually.

Questions that had sat quietly in the background became impossible to ignore.

Am I happy?

Am I fully alive?

Is this really who I am?

Is this the life I want for the next forty years?

Once those questions arrive, they are difficult to put back in the box.

I think many people imagine that profound life changes begin with courage.

Often they begin with discomfort.

Or grief.

Or fear.

Or a diagnosis that reminds you that none of us are here forever.

Looking back now, I can see that I wasn't simply chasing sex, novelty or excitement.

I was searching for aliveness.

For connection.

For meaning.

For a deeper experience of being human.

It was during this period that I fell in love with a 29-year-old man.

And for three years I lived a double life within a double life.

During the week, I was a wife and mother living in rural Sussex.

Then, on occasions, I would be in London, navigating a second relationship and carrying two emotional worlds at once.

At first, it felt intoxicating.

I wasn't just in love.

I felt awake, alive and finally desired.

The anticipation. The chemistry. The possibility. The fantasy.

But what I know now as a therapist is that when people are lonely, frightened, disconnected, hormonally dysregulated or facing their own mortality, they often go searching for aliveness wherever they can find it.

Sometimes that's an affair.

Sometimes it's work.

Sometimes it's alcohol.

Sometimes it's achievement, spirituality or reinvention.

For me, it was a mix of many things.

What looked like freedom came at a cost. Within that relationship structure came jealousy, compulsions, emotional whiplash and a constant fear of loss. It wasn't an easy relationship to live in for an extended period of time, and of course, like many things, it felt wonderful in the beginning.

No therapist I found could truly understand the complexity of what I was living: marriage, parenting, kink, secrecy, attachment wounds, open relationships and the psychological impact of trying to love two people at once.

So I went back to university and trained as a psychotherapist.

I studied Transactional Analysis, attachment theory, rupture and repair. I became one of the first therapists in the UK to undertake specialist training focused on open, polyamorous and consensually non-monogamous relationships.

And what I eventually discovered surprised me.

I wasn't polyamorous by orientation.

I was what I now jokingly call "Toly Poly."

I was tolerating polyamory.

I was stretching myself into a shape that didn't quite fit because the alternative — losing my marriage or losing the man I loved — felt unbearable. And in my work I see other people also tolerating relationships which no longer fit who they are now.

Today, when clients come to me carrying shame, secrets, confusion or desires they don't fully understand, I don't see pathology.

I see human beings trying to answer the same questions I was asking.

How do I feel alive?

How do I belong?

How do I become more fully myself?

Because the biggest lesson of my life wasn't about sex clubs, affairs or open relationships.

It was:

A crisis can become an invitation.

A diagnosis can become a doorway.

And sometimes the life you build after everything falls apart is more honest than the one you were desperately trying to preserve.

In many ways, I became the therapist I needed back then.

The therapist who understands that life is rarely neat, linear or easily explained.

Today I work with people navigating complexity: affairs, secrecy, shame, kink, non-traditional relationships, identity shifts, life reinvention and the messy realities that often sit behind outwardly successful lives.

I don't judge them.

But nor do I sit there simply nodding or asking questions from a place of detached curiosity.

I've lived enough of life's contradictions to understand what it feels like when your desires, values, responsibilities and longings don't fit neatly together.

When you're carrying secrets.

When you're questioning everything.

When you're trying to work out whether something is truly right for you, or simply helping you survive.

For that reason, the work we do together becomes deeply relational.

A place where people can finally exhale.

A place where they don't have to perform, justify or defend themselves.

A place where they can sit in truth.

Because sometimes healing isn't about finding the perfect answer.

It's about being deeply seen.

Deeply heard.

And remaining in relationship long enough for something new to emerge.

The therapeutic relationship is one of the few places in modern life where consistency, curiosity and acceptance still exist side by side. You don’t get this with ChatGBT!

I've walked through many of these doors myself.

Not because my story is the same as my clients' stories, but because I know what it feels like to be lost, conflicted, ashamed, hopeful, frightened and searching.

I know what it feels like to be trying to make sense of a life that no longer fits.

Today, I have the privilege of walking alongside others as they do the same.

Helping them become curious.

Helping them find their truth.

Helping them build a life that feels more honest than the one they were trying so hard to preserve.