Two practices, one question: what conditions allow people to live with a felt sense of safety, belonging, integrity and meaning?
Counselling
Registered Clinical Counsellor, PACFA Reg. Clinical 25708
Private practice offering client-centred integrative counselling, relational and experiential in approach, including somatic and nature-based practice.
Sessions are shaped around what you bring rather than a fixed protocol. That might mean talking, working with what shows up in the body, walking outdoors in nature, depending on what is workable and safe enough for you at the time. What feels unsafe now often has more to do with what you learned to expect than with what is actually in front of you, and there is no assumption that understanding something is the same as being changed by it, or that change happens on a fixed timeline.
Delivered online globally, excluding the United States and Canada, in person, and in nature for Sydney-based clients.
This practice is held separately from my governance and psychosocial risk advisory work.
Approved Counsellor, NSW Victims Support Scheme, for people recovering from the psychological and emotional impact of crime, including domestic, family and sexual violence.
Referrals and enquiries: counselling@melissashadforth.com
This is a private practice, not a crisis service. Email is checked during business hours and usually responded to within one to two working days.
If you or someone else is in immediate danger, call 000. For free crisis support and suicide prevention, any hour of any day, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or text 0477 13 11 14.
Advisory
Independent advisory work with boards, executive teams, and purpose-led and commercial organisations. The work translates how pressure, power, structure and decision-making interact and accumulate over time into clarity boards can act on, surfacing the patterns that predict harm before they present as fragmented complaints, conflict, attrition, injury or crisis.
Engagements include officer due diligence briefings and the evidence a board needs to be holding, psychosocial risk integrated into the operational risk register, independent complaint and escalation pathways that function when the respondent is the CEO or a director, investigation processes designed as hazards in their own right, governance and policy reviews, and work redesign upstream of individual coping.
Scope and availability: enquiries@melissashadforth.com
Background
Three decades across finance, risk and governance sit alongside a decade of therapeutic practice. Ernst & Young in Sydney and Boston, Associate Director roles at Macquarie Group in Sydney and Hong Kong, and independent advisory and committee work since 2013. Therapeutic practice in Hong Kong from 2016 to 2019, and in Sydney since as a PACFA Registered Clinical Counsellor.
Under strain, a system shows what it is made of. So do people.
Member of PACFA's Governance Committee and Risk Sub-Committee, Lane Cove Council's Bushland Management Advisory Committee and Bushcare Convener, and facilitator of trauma-informed yoga and psychoeducation programs with The Yoga Foundation.
Registered Clinical Counsellor, PACFA Reg. Clinical 25708
Approved Counsellor, NSW Victims Support Scheme
ISMETA Associate Somatic Movement Professional
Yoga Australia Registered Teacher
Outdoor Health Australia Member