Parent and Family Support with Sam McCarthy

If you’re a parent carrying a lot, navigating diagnoses, appointments, and systems while holding your family together, you don’t have to do it on your own.

I’m Sam, a BACP-registered counsellor, an EMCC-accredited coach in training, and a group facilitator, with a decade of practice in therapeutic settings. I founded Ochre House in Brighton, also known as UMEUS CIC, a therapy service rooted in community, supporting new parents, families navigating difference, and people at every stage of life’s complicated, beautiful unfolding.

So much of this is close to home. I’m a mother to a home-educated human who lives with disabilities, and between us we have spent more than a decade navigating NHS provision, local authority systems, and the particular bureaucracy of care. So many parents, and women especially, carry enormous reserves of emotional and practical knowledge, managing practitioners, navigating hospitals, holding families together, and quietly leave it out of how they present themselves. I bring all of that into the room with you.

I came to understand my own neurodivergence later than some, though in truth I had always known. Late diagnosis brings a particular twist of liberation and loss, and I’ve sat with both.