Hi, I'm Fathima Nahan.

I have spent an unreasonable number of hours in tiny chairs. My knees have opinions about it now.

Nobody has ever walked into my office and said "I think I have developed a maladaptive coping strategy." They say they are fine. They say it's nothing. They say it's just been a weird week, and then cry about a broken pencil.

Years in, here's what I actually know:

Nobody sets out to be the difficult one. Not the child under the table in literacy, not the teenager who has stopped answering, not the teacher who snapped at 2pm and has been replaying it ever since. We don't do inconvenient things for no reason. We do them because, at some point, it worked.

The most useful thing I say in a session is almost never the clever thing. It's usually the obvious thing, said out loud, by someone who isn't in a hurry. And the person in the building who knows what's really going on is usually the one who apologises for taking up my time.

So that's what Bear Hug is.

I'm a Psychology Specialist with a Master's in Clinical and Counseling Psychology, and a list of accreditations that live on my professional page where they belong. What I do with them is less impressive sounding and more useful. I build counseling departments. I write wellbeing and SEL programes that survive contact with a real timetable. I work with staff and make the practical things nobody gets round to making, For example, the handbook for the behaviour you're facing at 10:40 on a Tuesday, the group that a counselor can actually run in twenty minutes, or the script for the phone call home that you are dreading.

So nothing I make is complicated. If it needs a training day to understand, perhaps I built it wrong.

But a worksheet has never fixed anything. What actually helps is harder to put on a page. The hard conversation handled gently. The kid carrying something heavy that nobody else clocked. The moment someone starts to believe in themselves again, and if something I made got you five minutes closer to that, it did its job.

Welcome to Bear Hug. Have a look around, and if something here sounds like your situation, tell me. I would rather you asked than kept wondering. Now go make your Monday easier.