Join Helen Kewell, author of Midlife: Stories of crisis and growth from the counselling room in conversation with Catherine Jackson 

Helen Kewell will be speaking and answering questions about working therapeutically with people in midlife, the challenges they face but also the renewal and new beginnings that can be found.

Helen Kewell is a humanistic counsellor and supervisor with a private practice in Sussex, specialising in life transitions and ageing. She is also an educator and a management consultant specialising in people and organisational change. Her previous book, Living Well and Dying Well, is also published by PCCS Books (2019).

About the book

In this challenging and uplifting book, humanistic counsellor Helen Kewell takes a compassionate look at the challenges presented to us, men, women and non-binary folk alike, by our arrival at this major point of transition in adult life. Extending life expectancy and advances in medical science have given us many more years to life than was once the norm. The concept of the 'midlife crisis' wasn't even invented until the mid-1960s. Yet today, most of us in our mid-50s can expect another 30 to 40 years of life. Most of us retire from fulltime employment in our late 60s. We have many more years to live, and much still to contribute to society and to our families. Kewell's message is that these are indeed years to be lived to the full.

In these short vignettes fashioned from her casework with clients and her personal experience of midlife, Kewell crafts a story not of decline and disintegration but renewal, revival and new beginnings. With her skilful guidance, her clients unpick and come to terms with what has driven them thus far and throw off the shackles of old ways of being.
This sensitive, thoughtful and challenging book addresses a topic rarely discussed from this perspective, bringing to it a counsellor's wisdom, rooted in humanistic and existential theory and personal experience of being female, a mother and amid midlife.