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About Me
I used to feel like I was multiple different people.
Ben the counsellor. Ben the musician. Ben the poet. Ben the men's retreat facilitator. Ben the surfer. I kept them in separate boxes, careful about which version showed up where. I was sometimes ashamed of one set of people knowing about another part of my life.
Last year something shifted. I performed a one-man spoken word show - Petrol & Repairs - and for the first time, all of my communities were in the same room. Musicians, counselling clients, men from retreats, poets, surfers, old friends. They came together to watch and support and celebrate. Something coalesced that night that had been a long time coming.
I get to just be me now, with all of my selves present, all at once.
My Story
My first real job was as a design draftsman. Then music called louder, and I followed it. I spent years playing in bands, writing songs, doing music for films, weddings, funerals, festivals and even catholic mass. Music took me to America, to the UK, and eventually to my wife.
In the UK, a friend gave me ‘The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart - a particularly 'male' poetry collection that inspired me to write poetry. Poetry became a way to navigate experience and find the shape of what I was living through in words, that sometimes feel gifted. I still write and perform. It isn't separate from my counselling work. It's the same instinct - the search for what's underneath and unspoken.
Men's Work
In 2011 I discovered men's work.
I became absorbed by the mythopoetic tradition - Robert Bly, James Hillman - and then by the analytic psychology of CG Jung, which opened up mythology, depth psychology, and the great interior world of the psyche. I ran men's circles in London, facilitated large five-day rites of passage programs with Male Journey UK, spoke on panels, was invited to present in several countries.
Back in Australia in 2017, I continued that work with Centre for Men Australia and built a specifically Australian rites of passage program for young men in their first decade of adulthood. I still run retreats and workshops. I still believe in the power of men coming together in purposeful, held space.
I retrained as a counsellor and opened my private practice in 2021.
Suicide Prevention and JP
In 2019 I lost my good mate JP to suicide.
Being confronted with his loss - living through the shock, the difficult visitation of grief - brought me face to face with the limitations our culture has with engaging with death. But I also had the opportunity to grieve together with others, to have my experience held and shared by community.
In some ways, his death brought me further out of my own isolation. It allowed me to see that my pain can be held by others - and I got the privilege of holding theirs too.
That experience is part of why, from 2021 - 2025, I took on a role as Community Development Worker at Caloundra Community Centre, running their suicide prevention program. I work alongside people who are courageously bringing suicide out of the shadows - reducing stigma, building community capacity to respond, supporting those left behind. It is work I take personally, because it is personal.
How my music career informs my work now
I've been a musician most of my life, and it turns out that's not irrelevant to what happens in a counselling room.
Musicians learn to listen - not just to the notes but to the space between them. To timing. To what the other person is doing while you play. In a good ensemble, you're not executing a plan. You're responding to what's actually happening, following the moment, staying present to what's emerging.
That's not unlike what I try to do in a session.
Songwriting taught me to find the emotional core of a tangled experience and distill it - to hear someone's overwhelming, circular story and sense where the centre of gravity is. Performance taught me to be in my body, to trust timing, to stay present under pressure.
My life has kind of been about living inside music - inside feeling, inside the translation of emotion into melody, which is about participation and co-creating with the gods of music. I think the same type of presence is required in counselling and means I am not afraid of sitting with your 'music'.
Where I am now
I have Gestalt, Family Constellation, IFS, and Person-Centred Humanistic frameworks. I also have gut instinct, curiosity, a poet's ear, and a willingness to follow where the session goes rather than where I planned for it to go.
I am more trusting now than I was. Less directed. Less certain. More able to let the field speak, to make it about the other person rather than about me demonstrating competence. I have skill now in noticing my own inner experience in a moment - and allowing my sense of myself to support the work rather than get in the way.
In some ways I feel like a beginner again. Learning, as if from scratch, how to fully show up as my authentic and undefended self. My personas are more permeable now. I can use them to protect myself when I need to, and I can also let my heart be seen. That vulnerability - that willingness to be met - is, I think, what Martin Buber meant by truly meeting another person.
I am playful and serious. I can be deep and deeply curious. I have leaned on my intellect my whole life as a protective strategy. I am learning to let it work in concert with my heart, my internal poetic, my creativity, my body - all of it in service of being genuinely useful to the person in front of me.
Working Together
I see individuals and couples, in person on the Sunshine Coast and online across Australia.
If something in this page has landed - if you recognise something of yourself in it, or you're simply curious - I'd be glad to hear from you. You don't need to have it figured out before you reach out.