Relational Best with Amanda Williamson

Are You Ready to Embrace Meaningful Change in Your Life? I offer sessions both online and face-to-face from my dedicated premises on Southernhay East in the center of Exeter, Devon. In this professional and confidential space, you are warmly invited to offload, explore, develop, and discover.  I specialise in working with individuals and relationships  -be they life partners or business partners - who understand the transformative power of structured, meaningful conversations. Together, we will: - Expand your thinking - Clarify your professional and personal goals - Overcome personal obstacles - Explore and realise your full potential Life often presents profound challenges; be it loss, illness, relationship upheavals, career transitions, or episodes of depression and anxiety. Such events compel us to re-examine our ways of being. I invite you to seize these moments as opportunities to embrace change and become the best version of yourself. Alternatively, you might feel the ne...

a sanity saving swim at Glencoe I know I am not alone in sitting with a sense of heaviness and unease. Not just anger at a political moment, but something deeper: a global relational rupture.  The death of Renee Nicole Good who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, has become a flashpoint not just because of what happened, but because of how people are talking about it.  Thousands have protested her death, not because they all agree on every detail, but because of the sense that something profoundly human has been lost and demeaned. Donald Trump claimed, without evidence, that she was part of a “ leftwing network ” of paid agitators; a tactic that shifts attention from the human being who lived, loved, and was killed to a political caricature. This pattern; of reducing a person to a political problem, a threat, a label, is itself a form of dehumanisation. It is not only what was said in the aftermath about Renee; it is what has more broadly bec...

I’ve been approved for (the new) Senior Accredited Registrant membership (SNCPS Acc.). After effectively losing Senior Accreditation with the BACP, along with many other Senior practitioners ahead of the SCoPEd changes, the process with the NCPS was very hard work but fair. I joined the NCPS in April this year, as an existing Senior Accredited member of the BACP, one week before the BACP demoted me to Accredited member status at my membership renewal date. I value that the NCPS gave existing Senior Accredited members the opportunity to reapply for this new "Column C" aligned Senior Accreditation, free of charge, before the SCoPEd transition period ended. It was incredibly hard work and I spent somewhere around 150 hours on it. It was an application that had to demonstrate robust, Masters-level academic rigour.  I didn't go to University. At 17 I bailed out of first year A levels feeling utterly rudderless. I was studying Biology, Chemistry and Sociology (which on reflecti...

I’ve seen BC Camplight live three times now. First in 2021, then in 2023. His music and lyrics are richly layered in nuance with a deep undertone of poignant misery. Brian Cristinzio is charismatic, if somewhat self-deprecating, with a vivid sense of dark humour.  This time, I'm going with the intention of writing a review afterwards. It’s the first time I’m doing anything like this, informed by my interest in people and my years of experience working with addiction and trauma. I’ve worked therapeutically with many incredibly creative individuals over the years.   The book  Touched with Fire  explores the link between creativity and mental health suffering and its artistic expression: the anguish, agony, and emotional depth associated with bipolar disorder often finds expression in the art of those who suffer from it. For artists, the illness can be a source of both torment and inspiration. Brian has openly discussed his own struggles with severe depression, anxiety,...

(This article first appeared in the October 2025 issue of Coaching Today , published by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. www.bacp.co.uk/bacp-journals/coaching-today/ ©BACP 2025)