Debi Richens

Certified Grief Recovery Specialist

I am a wife, mother, alienated parent & grandparent, and have been a carer/supporter for elderly relatives for over 12 years. I have a three-legged Plummer (Jack Russell) Russell and an African Grey Parrot. I paint and draw, I particularly like portraiture in oils. I love being out in nature, walking and local woodland is a particular love. I am creative and enjoy taking photographs, although I am not trained. I enjoy creating handmade gifts. I adore my Godson and his family, I am known as Great Fairy Godmother to his boys.

During my varied career, I have dealt with many losses both personal and work-related. I trained as an Advanced Grief Recovery Specialist in 2019, and this has evolved into coaching Grief Recovery to others through my emotional resilience programme.

I run a support group for alienated grandparents and an online group with worldwide reach on Facebook. I am also a trained I-act Therapist, trained in Suicide Prevention and ACES, and Brain Trauma Recovery. I am also a Mentor for the Santander UK Women in Business Programme and support one mentee. I nearly died in 2007 and again in 2015 and upon my recovery, I started to realise that the years and years of grief that I had lived with were having a huge impact on my emotional and physical health. I spent a long time studying various forms of therapy/holistic treatments to aid me in regaining my health without realising, that without shifting the grief I carried around, that would not happen. Grief Recovery gave me the space to be truly heard, honestly and openly about the pain I had buried inside from so many different areas of my life. As I learned the tools, I found an ability to move through a large majority of the many debilitating experiences of grief that were dragging me down: family deaths in tragic circumstances, loss of babies due to miscarriage, breakdown of my marriage, loss of home, life, family and pets, and finally, the disappointments of a career that did not take the trajectory that I had expected.

The skills I have gained to help others complete their losses and move forward in their lives is so rewarding. It has given me a passion to effect positive change to enable you to move forward in a more healthy, effective way and achieve greater depth to your own life.