About me

My name is Ayanda Dlamini-Wolff MBACP (she/her) and I am a black non-disabled cis het woman. I’m originally from South Africa and moved to the UK over 15 years ago.

I came to counselling following a career in market research. What I brought with me from that career is a deep curiosity about people and how they understand themselves and the world around them. It helped me to understand the importance of social and cultural context and how this shapes the needs people have as well as they things they value.

This understanding was also informed by an MA in Psychosocial Studies which I completed prior to my training as a counsellor. This MA was focused on the themes of culture, diaspora and ethnicity using frameworks such as cultural and post-colonial studies to explore how we as individuals are constituted by the societies which we come from. After my own journey of transformation, which was facilitated by therapy with a black woman therapist, I trained as counsellor in the hopes of facilitating spaces of exploration and transformation for others which incorporates the social and cultural in how the challenges that clients bring are understood.

My approach

I trained at The Minster Centre and the integrative training I received means I am able to tailor my practice to address your individual concerns. I draw primarily on relational and embodied approaches. This means considering the role relationships (both past and present) have played in shaping your experience (including with yourself, within your family and wider society) and ways that your concerns can manifest themselves in/through your body. What clients bring is looked through the frame of the social and the cultural and incorporating the different ways that we know/have been taught to know – the mental, the physical, emotional and spiritual.

I have also completed specialist experiential training on:

• Family and Belonging

• Skills for Trauma

• Working with the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse

• Death and Bereavement

• Working with Erotic Charge

• Time Limited Therapy

I hold the necessary insurance to practise, and practise according to the BACP Ethical framework. I also attend regular supervision and seek and attend seminars and trainings to keep up with my professional development.

I am a registered member of the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists. I am also a practitioner member of the Black and Asian Therapist Network (BAATN), whose goal is to address the inequality of access to appropriate psychological services for Black, African, Asian and Caribbean people.