The Counsellor Who Didn't See Her Own Crisis Coming with Jenny Marshall

Jenny Marshall spent her career being the calm one in every crisis. Then a traumatic birth put her on the other side of the bed -2 and taught her the difference between coping and living.

Jenny Marshall has spent close to twenty years in mental health, the last seven of them in private practice as an integrative counsellor. She's the person other people fall apart in front of. She's good at it. She's always been good at it.

Then, at 34 weeks pregnant, she found herself on the other side of the bed. And she had to ask a question she'd spent her whole career helping other people answer: what happens when the person who holds everyone else together runs out of road?

The Classic Underachiever

At school, Jen was chatty. Daydreamy. The kind of kid teachers describe as "not quite living up to potential" without ever asking why. "I was what would be deemed a classic underachiever," she says, "which is that beautiful label that we would get. Chatty, daydreamy." It would be decades before she had language for what was actually going on - a sprinkling of neurodivergence nobody was looking for in a girl who talked too much and dreamed too big.

What she did have was her gran: gregarious, non-judgemental, the kind of woman who'd chat to anyone in the supermarket queue. Long before Jen trained as a counsellor, her gran had already taught her that talking to people, really talking to them, was never something to apologise for.

Diving In at Twenty-Three

At 23, with no clinical training, Jen took a support worker job in an acute inpatient eating disorders unit. "I quite frankly don't think I really understood the gravitas of that," she says now. "I don't think I really understood what that was going to entail."

She learned fast. She trained in person-centred counselling on the job, and climbed steadily through the NHS over the years that followed, eventually landing five years specialising in gender identity, and the most senior banded role of her career. "We do this thing in the NHS where we kind of talk in banding," she says. "I went from a three to a six. So it's like, I've done it."

The Birth That Broke Everything Open

Thirty-four weeks pregnant, preeclampsia, a haemorrhage - for the first time in her adult life, Jen wasn't the calm one managing someone else's emergency. She was the emergency. Her baby was wheeled into one room. She was wheeled into another. She had no control over any of it.

Afterwards, her own therapist gently wondered aloud whether Jen's fear in that moment might be about more than the moment itself. Jen's first response was anger. "I remember getting really angry with her," she says. "I was like, that's such a cheap shot." On reflection, she saw it: being "great in a crisis" - endlessly capable, endlessly composed - had been her own coping mechanism all along, built so early and so thoroughly that she'd forgotten it was ever a choice.

The Quintessential Goal

By her 30s, Jen had everything that's supposed to add up to a life going right. A senior NHS role. A marriage. A new-build house. A fridge stocked from M&S. "I had the big house, the new build," she says. "I had the fridge stacked with M&S. I had the great glorious kids that are doing well. I had the senior role. In all this stuff, I was unbelievably unhappy."

Nobody looking in from the outside would have guessed. That's rather the point.

Choosing Herself

Jen didn't wait for her life to collapse around her. She left her marriage and her senior NHS role at the same time, on her own terms. "It's the most profound and important thing I ever did," she says - not just for herself, but to show her daughter that a woman is allowed to choose herself too.

These days, Jen runs her own practice, drawing on person-centred counselling - the same tradition that gave her Carl Rogers' image of a potato in a dark basement, still growing toward whatever light it can find. It's an approach she describes as a bit like DJing: blending different modalities under one belt, until it all moves as one and you don't even notice the joins.

What Jenny's Story Teaches Us

• Calm can hide crisis. Being "great in a crisis" isn't always a personality trait - sometimes it's a coping mechanism doing its job so well you stop noticing it's there.
• Looking fine isn't the same as feeling fine. A life that adds up on paper can still feel wrong from the inside, and that gap is worth paying attention to.
• You don't need permission to ask for help. Nothing you bring to a therapy room is too much or too little — there's no threshold of crisis you need to cross first.
• Choosing yourself takes courage, not chaos. Jen's biggest change didn't come from falling apart. It came from a quiet decision, made on her own terms.
• Healing rarely looks tidy. Even in the most unfavourable conditions, something in us still finds a way to grow toward the light.

A Final Thought

If you've ever been the person everyone else calls when things go wrong, and quietly wondered who's supposed to call you. If you've ever built a life that looks right on paper and felt something was off underneath it. If you've ever waited for permission to ask for help, certain you hadn't earned it yet — this conversation is for you.

Listen to the full podcast episode 

Find Jenny

Website: counselling-directory.org.uk/counsellors/jenny-marshall-2
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jenny-marshall-556905192
Instagram: instagram.com/jen.counselling_/

Not lost, not arrived, just not there yet.