What Kind of Tree Am I? ...began in 2008.
At the time, I was working within the NHS across four GP practices. I was part of an IAPT service, working with an enormous waiting list and seeing one person after another, usually in 45-minute appointments.
I loved the work and cared enormously about the people I worked with on both sides of the counter!
The staff felt like family. Although there were stressful times and the workload could be relentless, there was also a great deal of laughter and connection.
I was a bit of an odd-bod in that I travelled from Scotland each day. Coming from Gretna Green, the wedding capital - I acquired the nickname The High Priestess of Gretna Green.
Some practices were in areas of considerable deprivation. One surgery even had bulletproof glass across reception. I loved the patients. They were salt-of-the-earth human beings, and I knew that many of them would have dropped everything to help me if I'd ever found myself in dire straits. There was enormous humanity there.
Alongside all of that, I knew something in me wanted more...
Creativity was already mine
Creativity wasn't new to my therapeutic work. In truth, creativity wasn't new to me at all. I was an artist and writer long before I became a therapist.
I experienced many years of abuse during my childhood, and art and writing were amongst the ways I survived, expressed myself and made sense of a world that often didn't make sense at all.
For many years I carried shame about what had happened to me. I don't anymore. I came to understand that the shame was never mine to carry. That understanding - alongside decades of my own therapy, personal development, training, practice and continued questioning - has inevitably shaped the woman and therapist I have become.
So creativity didn't enter my life as a therapeutic technique. It was already mine. When I became a therapist, I brought it with me.
Over the years, my life as an artist and writer and my life as a therapist became increasingly intertwined.
Between 2002 and 2006, I was a Creative Therapies Tutor on a Counselling Diploma, a trainer and group facilitator on a University Counselling Diploma.
I also travelled around Cumbria providing Creativity and Therapeutic CPD for teaching professionals on INSET days.
I developed and shared different ways of working, including something I had created called The Worry Tree, alongside Sand Tray Therapy and Creative Therapy In Practice.
My professional development continued alongside all of this. Added to my three years Counsellor Training as a Client Centred Therapist, I trained as a supervisor in 2009–10 and spent nine years immersed in the world of Transactional Analysis psychotherapy training.
And throughout it all, I continued to make, write, question, explore and work directly with adults.
So What Kind of Tree Am I? did not arrive as an isolated creative exercise.
It grew out of all of this.
My art. My writing. My life. My training. My therapeutic work. My experience of sitting alongside other human beings and my enduring fascination with what can become possible when we create enough room for something previously unseen to emerge.
Somewhere along the road, a Tree began to grow
Much of What Kind of Tree Am I? was created while I was travelling backwards and forwards to work.
My journeys took me across borders: from Scotland into England, through Cumbria into Northumberland and finally into Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
I drove through huge stretches of countryside, huge fields, woodland and trees. Somewhere amongst all those miles, I began cooking up a process.
As a child I spent hours and days and months and years sketching trees. Bare trees. No roots. No foliage. No colour. They spoke volumes.
What if somebody could create a Tree that somehow held the story of their life?
Not simply paint a picture of a tree. But create it gradually. Layer upon layer.
I began imagining the different parts. The background could hold our beginnings. The roots: our family system, our generations and the people and experiences from which we came. On and on my imagination grew an entire, deep Process which made me feel Very Excited.
Before any of that, though, I had to begin exactly where I was. I needed a venue to offer this process.
Then the process began to teach me
I first created What Kind of Tree Am I? in 2008. What I created was a beginning. Over approximately the next ten years, the process continued to develop through use.
I began running What Kind of Tree Am I? in groups, sometimes with around sixteen women working in a massive circle around the edge of a big room. Over time, something fascinating started to happen.
They came back. They wanted to make another Tree. Their second Tree wasn't simply a repetition of the first. Something different would emerge. Sometimes the Tree seemed to gather itself around a particular difficulty, relationship, transition, question or part of life that needed attention.
I began to understand that we don't have one definitive Tree. We change. Our circumstances change. Different parts of us come forward.
What needed attention initially, changed. What was ready to emerge, could. As the Trees changed, so did the artists.
The way I offered the process changed too.
Initially, I tried to contain the whole experience within an intensive day. That was a lot.
There was so much to experience, create, notice and process – especially when I had 16 participants in one space. I provided all the materials and had to transport it all to various community spaces, sometimes miles away from home.
Eventually I built a studio space and they came to me. Instead of completing an entire Tree in one day, people could spend a week with one part before moving onto another. The process began to breathe.
Taking the Tree online
By around 2015, I had begun exploring what might happen if I took What Kind of Tree Am I? online. Would this even be possible? I had a trillion worrying questions and not one single answer!
I wouldn't know until I tried it. I suddenly had to invest in tripod, video cam, SD cards, voice recorders, editing suites... Learn so many new skills my head was frazzled and sometimes in the heat and frustration of Not Knowing HOW I'd burst into tears, wonder how a counsellor and artist suddenly had to learn all these new skills, how could I possibly manage it, continue seeing my clients AND then I had to get a website!!!All I will say is Blood, Sweat, Tears and a LOT of fucking swearing got me through. Plus a refusal to be beaten.
Finally, I'd created a small online course, with poorly edited videos, written prompts for each video and put it on the website.
Shortly after I received an email. It began: "When I came across your course for counsellors, I thought What On EARTH NOW???" I froze... what was coming next??? The person continued, "so I bought it and wondered if you'd accompany through the process via email?"
Phew! Big breath out... Of course I would be delighted to! And that was it...
This changed the way I understood what might be possible. This woman was painting Tree after Tree. Beautiful trees full of rich, personal story. Women began sending me pictures of their Trees. They wanted to show me what had emerged. They wanted to talk about what they were noticing and discovering.
I realised that the relational part of this work I had been so afraid I'd lose in going online, didn't have to disappear simply because we weren't physically together in a room.
I created an online group, put out an offer and 12 Therapists and Coaches signed up.
Gosh... The same kind of exploration that had happened in my in-person groups could happen across distance. Everyone could see each other's work as it emerged, read each other's journaling and chat, explore and share with each other, with me too. Wow.
It was extraordinary. And STILL the process continued to teach me.
Some therapists wanted to work one to one with me through the process. It was deep, so so deep and brought incredible change and growth for the therapist. But also for me!
So although What Kind of Tree Am I? was created in 2008, it's more accurate to say it was created in 2008 and developed through approximately a decade of experiential practice, in person and online.
It wasn't designed at a desk and then left unchanged. It grew through people. Through their Trees. Through what emerged unexpectedly.
Through my observations as a therapist, artist and facilitator. Through returning to it again and again and allowing the process itself to show me what it could become.
The process I am inviting you into now carries that history.
This is not Art Therapy
I want to be clear about something before we go any further.
What Kind of Tree Am I? is not Art Therapy, and I am not presenting it as Art Therapy.
This is an experiential and creative process that I created from all I have known, lived, learned and developed through many years of practice.
You do not need to be an artist. You don't even need to believe that this process is possible.
We are going to use making as another way of exploring, noticing, expressing and discovering.
I will make alongside you
In my videos, I create, gently invite and accompany alongside you.
Not because I want to show you how your Tree "should" look and not because my responses to a process will be the same as yours. They won't.
I make alongside you because I don't stand outside these processes and instruct other people to enter them. Making is part of how I inquire too.
I remain curious about what happens when I begin without already knowing the answer. That matters to me.
This process isn't about deciding intellectually what something means and then creating an image to illustrate the conclusion we've already reached.
You won't know what your Tree will look like or what it will hold for you until the end.
Part of our work will be learning to stay with the not-knowing, long enough for something less planned to find its way onto the surface.
You might dislike something you've made. You might feel compelled to cover something over. You may suddenly love a part you nearly obliterated.
You will notice, listen, witness, project, laugh, cry and very probably swear.
We don't have to rush.
I won't interpret anything.
You are the authority on your own experience.
And now I give the Tree even more space
You will have twelve weeks. Not because you need to spend twelve weeks constantly working on your Tree. Quite the opposite.
I want there to be room for your every day life to continue.
Room to stop. Room to notice. Room to leave your Tree alone for a while. Room to walk past it and catch sight of something you hadn't noticed before. For example: 'Kassi!!! From this angle I can see a purply dragon with glittery paws!'
Room for something to emerge and for you not to immediately know what it means. Room to return. Room to change your mind. Room to discover that something has shifted while you weren't actively working on it.
And room for us to explore what happens along the way.
There is no prize here for finishing quickly. The space between the making is part of the process too.
This Tree is for the practitioner — and the human being
This particular What Kind of Tree Am I? has been created for counsellors, psychotherapists, therapeutic coaches and others whose work involves accompanying human beings.
I am interested in much more than your professional identity. I am interested not only in the practitioner you have been trained to become. I am interested in the human being who became the practitioner.
I am interested in the practitioner who may still be becoming.
Where did you come from? What shaped you? Who and what lives amongst your roots?
What have you grown around? What has strengthened you? What have you had to survive? What have you absorbed from your family, your culture, your training and your profession?
What have you been taught that a therapist, counsellor or coach is supposed to be? What have you learned to show? What have you learned to keep out of the room?
What parts of yourself have found their way beautifully into your work? Where have you grown in unexpected directions? What hasn't grown yet? What might be beginning to push through? What parts of you might still be waiting for more room?
I don't know what your Tree is going to look like. None of us will.
We are going to create the conditions in which something can emerge.
There will be stories. There will be truths. There may be things you recognise immediately and other things that make absolutely no sense at first.
There may be parts you love. There may be surprises. And there may be very ordinary things that turn out to matter enormously.
We don't need to know yet. We begin where we are.
And now, after all these years of other people bringing their Trees into rooms, groups, courses and conversations with me...
it is YOUR Tree I am interested in.
We begin 26 December 2026. No need to show up for lives or zooms. Create in your pj's, drink loads of tea, dunk biscuits, take photos to share in our group, share your ah ha moments, your tears, your frustration, your delight and connect with other therapists and coaches around the world, with me there to hold the space for you.
If you are interested, you can let me know, be on the wait list with no obligation and ask me as many questions as you wish.
love
Kas