The person behind the practice.

Meet

Dr Amar Freya

Researcher · Counsellor · Advocate

I know this work from more than one side of the room.

My path here wasn’t a straight line. I started in science, curious about how things work. That curiosity carried me into teaching, where I saw first-hand how much a person’s context shapes what feels possible for them. It followed me further still, into research, and eventually into a PhD examining family violence — years spent listening closely to the systems meant to protect people, and the gaps where they don’t.

Some of what drew me into this work I learned from years of study. Some of it I learned earlier than that — growing up in a household where safety wasn’t a given, and later, coming to understand my own mind on its own terms rather than the terms it was first described to me in. Both shaped how I show up in a room with someone. I don’t come to this work as a neutral observer, and I don’t pretend to.

Counselling is where all of it comes together: the research, the teaching, and a lived understanding of what it costs to hold yourself together — and what it can look like to soften that grip. I’m drawn to this work because it sits at the intersection of the personal and the structural: what happens in a single session matters, and so does the system it happens within.

I bring the same rigour to a single counselling session that I once brought to a PhD — because both deserve exactly that kind of care.