About Hamish
I’ve always found myself drawn to people who stood a little outside the crowd.
As a child, my closest friends weren’t the popular kids. They were the boy with an intellectual disability, the profoundly deaf boy, and, in many ways, myself. I grew up just outside the small town of Russell, never quite part of the social fabric. Later, four years at boarding school taught me what it felt like to become invisible – to keep my head down, avoid attention, and quietly hope not to become the next target.
I don’t tell that story because I see myself as a victim.
I tell it because it shaped the way I see people.
Even now, I find myself noticing the person at the edge of the room. The one who feels different. The one who has spent years trying to fit into places that never quite fitted them.
I understand that feeling.
A Lifetime of Learning
I’ve also spent my whole life fascinated by difficult questions.
Not the kind with neat answers.
The kind that become more mysterious the deeper you go.
As a teenager I disappeared into electronics, building radio transmitters and microprocessor circuits simply because I wanted to understand how they worked. That curiosity led to a career designing automation systems, robots and scientific instruments. I loved engineering, not because I wanted to master it, but because there was always another layer to discover.
Today, my deepest fascinations are quantum physics, cosmology and the human psyche.
Strange combination?
To me, they’re the same kind of landscape.
Each reminds me how much there is that we don’t yet understand.
I don’t expect to reach the end of those subjects.
That’s what makes them beautiful.
Life eventually brought me to a crossroads.
After a long career in engineering, my marriage ended, my business collapsed, and I went through a deep depression that changed how I saw the world.
When I came out the other side, something fundamental had shifted. People mattered more than machines.
The questions that fascinated me were no longer about circuits or operating systems.
They were about fear.
Shame.
Connection.
Belonging.
Why do some experiences stay with us for decades?
Why does the body remember things the mind has forgotten?
Why do some people spend their lives feeling that they have to hide parts of themselves just to belong?
Those questions still fascinate me every day.
Blending Intuition, Experience, and Formal Training
When I eventually trained as a counsellor, I thought I was there to gain the qualifications I needed to practise. Instead, the training changed me.
It challenged me.
Stretched me.
Humbled me.
It also reinforced something I’d suspected for years—that healing isn’t simply about changing thoughts.
Sometimes we need to slow down enough to notice what the body already knows.
Sometimes the most important conversations happen without many words at all.
If you work with me, you’ll probably discover that I’m curious by nature.
Not curious about diagnoses.
Curious about you.
About how your mind works.
About what your body has learned.
About the patterns that once protected you and may no longer be serving you.
I don’t believe people are puzzles to be solved.
I think they’re stories still unfolding.
My role isn’t to tell you who you are.
It’s to explore alongside you, with warmth, curiosity and respect, until something that once felt confusing begins to make sense.
And every now and then, if we’re lucky, we’ll probably laugh too.
