BEYOND TALKING

There is a particular kind of person who arrives at therapy work not through a straight path but through a long, circuitous one, collecting pieces of themselves along the way. Jolene Ironside is that person. She trained as an accountant. She programmed and developed financial systems for large corporations. She also, quietly and simultaneously, trained in massage, reiki, kinesiology and Indian head massage, running a small practice on the side. Two lives, held in parallel, for years.

The thing is, they were never as separate as they looked.

'I have a curious, analytical mind that wants to understand what is happening beneath the surface,' she says, 'while also being deeply interested in what we experience through the body, our nervous system, and the things that aren't always easily put into words.' That combination, the systems thinker and the somatic practitioner, is precisely what Heart in Mind has become.

The shift came in layers. First there were the children: when Jolene became a parent, she trained as a Relax Kids Coach and began working in schools. She recognised something familiar in many of the young people she met. The overwhelm. The anxiety. The quiet exhaustion of not quite fitting the mould. From there, the therapeutic thread simply kept deepening, until it became the whole cloth. She stepped away from the corporate path and committed fully to therapeutic training, studying with the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education, qualifying as a BACP Registered Integrative Counsellor, and going on to train in Child Accelerated Trauma Therapy, the Safe and Sound Protocol, ADHD coaching and sensory integration, among others. She has since completed her Level 7 Autism Practitioner qualification.

'It doesn't feel as though I suddenly decided to become a therapist. It feels much more like something I kept following, this desire to understand what sits underneath our thoughts, behaviours and feelings, and what helps us feel more at home in ourselves.'

Heart in Mind, based in Cambridgeshire and available online across the UK, works with children, teenagers and adults. A significant part of that work is with neurodivergent people: autistic and ADHD individuals navigating identity, masking, burnout, sensory overwhelm and the considerable cost of spending years performing a version of yourself that doesn't quite fit. Jolene's approach does not ask anyone to do that here.

What she offers is genuinely broad in the best sense. Neuroaffirming integrative counselling using the arts. Trauma therapy. Somatic and nervous system work. Breathwork, both one-to-one and in small groups. ADHD coaching. Sensory processing support. The Safe and Sound Protocol. Support for parents and families trying to understand a neurodivergent child through a different lens. None of it is decorative. Each thread connects back to the same conviction: that talking is not always enough, and that the body, the nervous system, the senses and the creative mind all have something to say.

She does not separate these things. Neurodivergence from trauma. Sensory experience from identity. The mind from the body. 'I'm interested in the whole person sitting in front of me,' she says. 'I don't expect the person to fit my way of working. My job is to find a way of working that fits them.'

The moments she describes as meaningful are characteristically quiet. A young person moving from surviving their environment to actually being able to thrive within it. A family beginning to understand their child's behaviour through a neurodivergent lens rather than a disciplinary one. Advocating for a child in school. Getting the accommodations right.

This is careful, considered, deeply human work. And for anyone who has ever felt too complicated for a fifty-minute talking session, Heart in Mind might be exactly the space they didn't know existed.

Heart in Mind offers therapy, breathwork, ADHD coaching and neurodivergence support for children, teens and adults in person and online. Find Jolene at heart-in-mind.com, or on Instagram at @heart_in_mind_uk.