If you are feeling…
• Overwhelmed and wondering where your life got lost in a maze of medical appointments that seem to use your energy (and money) but achieve uh, well… very little
• Like a failure for not being productive enough or spending so much time ‘doing nothing’ aka managing your symptoms
• Worried you are wasting your life and secretly start to panic that you aren’t really ill or maybe it’s your fault or all in your head
• Feeling lost and uncertain how to pick up the reins of a life that no longer feels like or fits you, post-diagnosis
• Desperate to rest but also desperate to do ALL THE THINGS
• Drowning in grief because you’ve got big plans, but your body can’t meet them
• Capsized by emotional pain that it feels your body isn’t strong enough to hold
• Disillusioned and alone when you’ve tried every cure with no lasting results
• Craving something to hold onto in a life that is spiralling out of control like tornado season and a body that is feeling less and less like yours
• Angry that you don’t know how to navigate your boundaries and challenging relationships because they were a whirlwind of pain before you were hurting and now it feels insurmountable
…then I hear you and I designed Onwards Together Coaching for you.
Do you crave…
• Waking up and seeing life ahead of you, rather than just another day struggling through symptoms
• When you feel something more than just tired-all-the-time
• Spending less money on every new supplement and class, because you don’t know what to do, so you’ve just been doing everything (and it’s not working)
• Making purchases to nourish yourself and water your roots, not to try and fix yourself
• Feeling connected to the pulse of your life, so you bring in what feels nourishing not punishing
• Space where you won’t be punished for being you or not being a white, neurotypical, allistic, thin, non-disabled, straight, cis person
• More joy in your daily life. And less time feeling awful after comparing your life to the highlight reels on Instagram
• More time doing what you actually want to do and less time dreaming of how it could be (but really isn’t)
• Confidence that you are doing what you really want to do in the world and an antidote to all the rhetoric on living now that just made you feel stuck and ashamed for going gently
I’m Grace Quantock, an anti-oppressive psychotherapeutic counsellor, writer and advocate.
I help marginalised folks to live well with pain, illness and trauma without disembodiment, burnout or blame.
Across the last 15 years, I’ve provided therapeutic support, psychoeducation and advocacy to thousands of people with complex bodies and lives in workshops, courses, books and 1:1 therapeutic sessions.
I write a lot about the Bootstrap Wellness Narrative because I want us to resist the messages that demonise our bodies and our struggles under inequitable and failing systems.
The change we can make when we are no longer blamed or burned out by our healing journey allows us to make shifts in our communities and in those systems, which is also one of the goals of the creative, socially committed clients I work with.
My clients want to live well in their own lives, personally, while also being part of the change and making a fairer world.
If you are living with pain, illness or life challenge.
If your world has been overwhelmed by grief.
Or you are searching for your identity in a maelstrom of medicalisation and judgement.
If you’re suffering isn’t visible and it’s being invalidated on all sides.
…then you know what it is to lose your path, your roots, your anchoring.
You know what it’s like to spend hours in hospital waiting rooms, to sleep by the side of your loved one, to the very end (except there’s not much sleeping, of course).
You know how it feels to drag yourself upright when you’re so tired your very bones hum with the ache of it.
Or you’ve been there when you try to stand up and hit the wall (literally) because, in your waking-up moment, you forgot that you can’t stand up any longer.
But you also know the community of texting at night from your hospital bed, care packages made with love and too much glitter.
The fathoms-deep solidarity of finding accessibility, determination, compassion and connections forged in pain that transcends distance, difficulties and doubts.
Results and Accolades
“I am my best work, a series of roadmaps, reports, recipes, doodles and prayers from the front lines”
— Audre Lorde
How I work
Coaching is a collaborative working relationship.
Suppose you want to learn how to live well, work and love when you are ill, struggling or lost in a tempest of suffering.
In that case, Onwards Together Coaching offers an intersectional integrated psycho-neuro-spiritual space where you can find safety in exploring being human and discovering yourself.
I endeavour to offer culturally responsive, trauma-informed, non-coercive, non-carceral care and support, building on work as a peer wellness advocate.
I help you figure out what fits you.
I want to listen and learn what’s important to you.
I have over
a decade of experience working with pain, illness and life challenges.
That means hundreds of hours working with clients to build lives they love now, within the needs and tides of their lives, not when they are cured or things are ‘perfect’.
My work has been honed over years, I’m not teaching you my personal treatment protocol or telling you what you ‘should’ be doing.
Instead, we work together to forge a healing path.
My approach is based on:
Respectful empathy,
Psychotherapeutic depth coaching,
Holding space,
Creative tool gathering
The sacred arts.
I am inspired by:
Disability Justice and Mad Liberation movements.
Feminist Jungian practice.
Somatic psychotherapy theory.
Jewish (and jewitch) folk healing practices
Innovative disabled people making it work.
Punk DIY ethos.
The deep listening of nature.
I offer integrated emotional mindbody work, not simply coaching but inviting energetic, intuitive, embodied healing.
My chief influences are:
Marion Woodman,
adrienne maree brown,
Linda Kohanov,
Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes,
Karla McLauren,
Jerome Bernstein,
James Hillman,
Sins Invalid,
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha,
Caitlin Matthews,
Rachel Naomi Remen,
Mary Brave Bird,
Tricia Hersey,
Christina Rasmussen
Alice Wong,
Dori Midnight
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman Mthimkhulu.
I give thanks to my teachers, named and unnamed, known and unknown (Credit to Lianne Raymond for the concept of known and unknown teachers.)
My lineage includes:
A personal family history of sacred Celtic prayers and practice.
I am the descendant of witches, devout Catholics, baptists and blessings.
I have my grassroots in spells, herb allies and ancient hedgerows, seers and seekers.
And the wisdom of the animals I’ve learned from.
I work proudly in the tradition of the midwives and wise women, feminists, sacred prostitutes and holy anchorites, queers, femmes and glitter-loving folx of the wilds.
I am with the disabled women with raised voices, the activists, poets and painters, writers and rioters, punks and riot grrls and tender-hearted fighters.
All this means I bring a wider understanding of systems and context to our work.
It’s all about you, but it’s not just us in the room.
I can speak to the complex societal, political and historical prejudices and privileges that intersect through our lives as well as the liminal aspects of our experiences.
I offer an alternative to the medical model and the individualistic self-help model.
Together we integrate the practices, tools and possibilities that fit you and find a new path to your potential.
I am known for learning to live well in dark times, and for kindness and compassion in healing and growth.
For going deep, riptides notwithstanding and coming out the other side.
Although I am qualified in psychotherapeutic humanistic and integrative counselling with an MA, and this influences my coaching practice - this isn’t therapy.
We are working together to create possibilities and support for you, it’s collaborative.
I will bring all my skills and knowledge where appropriate, everything from mindful movement, art journalling, story-making, myth exploration, and creative practices, to sacred arts and energy work.
I hope to support you to explore and understand yourself, resolve difficulties and move towards more productive and fulfilled ways of living.
Book Your Session
If you resonate with this, please join me.
However, if you are interested in this coaching because you feel manipulated, a fear of missing out, false scarcity, or that any hesitation you have is “just an excuse and means you don’t want it badly enough”, please do not purchase this, as I don’t want to be a part of, or participate in creating that experience for you.
If you feel this is a path or truth, depth, transformation, and kindness, then I am already doing my job and would love to have you join us. (credit to Randi Buckley)
However…
• If you are looking for me to tell you how to live
• If you are looking for an easy fix (I can’t promise an easy nor a quick fix, though some clients work for 1 session, some for 3 months, some for much longer)
• If you are looking for a 10 step plan that works for everyone
…then this isn’t for you. And I respectfully invite you to find someone who can meet that, and I wish you luck in your journey.
I guarantee that I will show up and do my best for you.
And that you will leave our first session with a practical step to begin shifting your healing journey.