Nicola Madden

As a Relationships Coach, I support people with ALL relationships in life. Please read more here to find out how I work with both individuals and couples. I am not a traditional couples therapist. In my work with individuals, the primary focus of our work together is your relationship with yourself, because the quality of all our relationships – including our relationship with life - is determined by the quality of our relationship with ourselves. I offer support for you to understand and connect more deeply with yourself, working with a variety of models and approaches, including the powerful parts work model Voice Dialogue, which enables you to directly experience and speak from the many different parts of you that make up your whole self. I work with a range of themes, including: - Authentic Relating & Kind Communication - Befriending Your Whole Self - Deepening Connection & Intimacy with Yourself & Others - Everyday Spirituality - Healthy Boundaries, Saying No & Assertiveness - Self-Love & Self-Care - Understanding Relationship Dynamics. If you want to experience healthier, more harmonious and fulfilling relationships - both with yourself and others – please do get in touch. My fee for individuals is £90 per hour-long session. In my work with couples, there is a focus on teaching you practical skills, tools and positive habits that will empower you both individually and support you to have a happy, harmonious relationship in day-to-day life. I provide a supportive space for you both to be heard around the challenges you are experiencing in your relationship, with a strong practical element. For example, teaching you communication skills for having deeper conversations and understanding each other better without blame and attack; supporting you to understand the dynamics that are happening between you and how to step out of dynamics that create disconnection; helping you finding ways to connect more deeply day-to-day and ways to reconnect and repair after a rupture; having an awareness of what's happening in your individual nervous systems (your fight-flight/freeze/shut-down responses), how that impacts your relationship and ways to emotionally regulate, and understanding how the different parts of you play out and interact in your relationship, to support greater harmony between you. My fee for couples is £135 per hour-long session and a minimum of six sessions is recommended. With both individuals and couples, I work with a variety of models and approaches: - Voice Dialogue (parts work) - Inner child re-parenting - The Initiator-Inquirer process (for deeper communication) - Body awareness – Present moment awareness - The Polyvagal Theory (nervous system awareness exercises and regulation) - Attachment theory/styles – Bonding Patterns - The Drama Triangle - Non-Violent Communication (NVC) - Guided meditation - Menstrual cycle and menopause awareness and care - A wide range of experiential exercises and models that support greater awareness, deeper connection, learning and growth in your relationship with yourself and with others My coaching approach is both inner-process oriented and action-oriented. It is practical and includes homework or homeplay that will help you to practice what you learn, stretch your comfort zone without overwhelm, and integrate what you discover in our sessions into your everyday life.

In my early twenties I took a masters degree in community development and began my professional career supporting the empowerment of local communities, soon realising that community empowerment was impossible without the individuals of those communities becoming personally empowered in their own lives and relationships. Realising that life is all about relationships, I began offering an assertiveness course. I loved seeing how people’s lives transformed when they learned how to listen to themselves and say “no” and “yes” clearly and kindly. Many reported being newly empowered to speak up and handle difficult conversations at work, communicate better with their partner and set healthy boundaries with their children and other family members, feeling freer to be themselves, happier and more at peace. And the personal challenges I faced in my own relationships led me to seek out training that would equip me to navigate them with more skill and kindness, and to support others to do the same. This includes training with Jan Day, Voice Dialogue training with Transforming Dialogue, A Year of Polyvagal with Deb Dana and Irene Lyon’s Nervous System Health Program Smart Body Smart Mind. The huge shifts I’ve experienced in difficult relationship patterns means my life is now much happier, healthier and more fulfilling than I ever thought possible. I’ve learned and discovered a great deal since my early thirties, that, if I’d been taught at school, would’ve made life so much simpler, happier and more peaceful. I have a huge passion for sharing with others what I find most helpful, and a deep wish for us all to experience what we most long for in our relationships with ourselves, with others and with life.