About Lavender Counselling

Why I started Lavender

I knew I wanted to start Lavender Counselling when I began doing experiential work in my counselling training. That work opened something important for me. I became excited about helping people know themselves more deeply, reconnect with their inner sense of self, and move toward a life that felt more honest, whole, and alive.

Before becoming a counsellor, I had been a high school teacher for 12 years. I loved working in schools, and for a long time I assumed I would return to the school system after completing my master’s degree in counselling. My husband and I had three small children when I went back to school, and the practical path would have been to return to full-time work as a school counsellor.

But as I came toward the end of my education, I realized I felt stuck. I still cared deeply about working with youth, and I still valued the school system, but I was concerned that I would lose the kind of depth work I had come to love. So much of school counselling can become triage: helping students function, supporting graduation requirements, course planning, crisis response, and managing needs that far exceed the resources available. That work matters, but I knew I wanted to do therapy. I wanted to help people move toward lasting change, not simply help them get through the day.

Honestly, I was scared to leave the security of the school system. I loved the students I worked with and the colleagues I had there. But I also knew it was not going to be quite right for me.

For my birthday that year, my husband bought me a website and a bottle of wine. We spent the evening with a glass of wine, talking through what the practice might be called. At first, I considered naming it Carolynn Turner & Associates, which was common in the profession at the time. But Neal helped me think less about putting my own name at the centre and more about how I wanted people to feel when they encountered the practice.

I wanted people to feel a steady sense of calm, care, and groundedness.

When we landed on Lavender, I knew right away that it was right.

Our counselling philosophy

Lavender is grounded in a person-centred understanding of counselling. To me, that does not mean a counsellor simply sits back, listens politely, and offers warmth. Person-centred therapy, when understood in its fuller theoretical context, is much more demanding than that.

Mearns and Thorne describe person-centred counselling as an approach with both substance and discipline, and they caution against using the term “person-centred” without a real grasp of the theory and practice behind it. They also name the approach as one of the most demanding forms of therapy to emerge in the twentieth century.

At the heart of this work is the belief that people are not problems to be fixed. Clients come with pain, protection, contradictions, longings, fear, hope, and parts of themselves that may not yet feel fully known. The work is not to impose a predetermined outcome on them. The work is to create the kind of relationship where they can come into deeper contact with themselves and begin to trust their own movement toward growth.

Mearns and Thorne’s writing on configurations of self is important to me here. People are not always one unified, consistent self. We often carry different parts, or configurations, that hold different needs, fears, memories, and ways of surviving. One part may long for closeness while another protects against it. One part may want change while another fears what change will cost. One part may carry a belief such as “I must be perfect to be acceptable,” while another part objects to having to live that way.

Therapy can make room for this complexity. It does not treat people as problems to be fixed or contradictions to be corrected. Many of us experience ourselves differently depending on whether we feel safe, hurt, criticized, overwhelmed, or alone. Therapy helps people understand these different ways of being with more honesty, compassion, and clarity.

This is why we value depth over quick fixes. Strategies can be helpful, but lasting change often requires more than being told what to do. It requires being met in a way that helps a person become more honest with themselves, more compassionate toward themselves, and more able to live from the inside out.

Our values

Some of the values that shape Lavender are quality over quantity, congruence, unconditional positive regard, depth, integrity, and care.

These words can be misunderstood. Congruence and unconditional positive regard are sometimes confused with being “nice” or agreeable. That is not what we mean.

Congruence means being truthful and real. It means you do not have to leave a conversation with us and lie awake later wondering, “Did they say one thing and mean another? Was there something underneath that they did not say?” We value kindness, but not the kind of niceness that avoids honesty. We want to be warm and clear at the same time.

Unconditional positive regard does not mean approving of every behaviour. It means seeing the worth of the person underneath the behaviour. It means understanding that people often do what they do because, at some point, it served or protected them in some way. We can prize a person’s humanity without pretending every choice has been helpful. We try to see the best in people while still being honest about what may be getting in the way of growth.

Neal joining Lavender

In 2023, as our kids were growing, Lavender was also growing. I had long since left the school system, and the organization had grown beyond what I could hold on my own. I knew something needed to change. I wanted to be present in my life and present with Lavender, and I was not balancing those things well.

As I was processing all of this with Neal, he asked what I would think about him joining Lavender. I had never really considered that this could become something we shared together. He had certainly offered advice over the years and had listened to more than his fair share of late-night conversations about running the practice, decision-making, and the weight of carrying the business.

When he offered to join me, I was overjoyed. It felt like two important parts of my world could come together in a really lovely way.

, Carolynn