everyone has a story to tell
Carefully Worded
therapeutic and creative storytelling
Storytelling for
individuals, groups,
and organisations
supporting people to share their stories, their way
Therapeutic Life Story Work with individuals to support
reflection, integration, and
future planning
Storytelling with groups to
advance collective action,
promote solidarity, raise awareness, and support unity and wellbeing
A range of services to support
organisations who work
with humans - evaluation,
engagement, consultancy
and more
Why choose
Carefully Worded?
My name's Rachel, and I founded Carefully Worded because I'm passionate about the therapeutic and practical benefits of storytelling.
Every ordinary, quirky, or somewhere in between human has their own unique story. The act of telling that story in a safe and supportive therapeutic space can be transformational, helping to reframe unhelpful and outdated narratives, bring compassionate closure to previous chapters, and prompt us towards what we hope for in the next one.
I have a rich, multi-faceted knowledge and experience base across social work, social care, research, policy, and publishing. The central theme running through my work over the past two decades has been capturing stories of different sorts and presenting these in various ways, to maximum effect.
So, why me?
Because I’m a human who knows how to really know other humans and how to work with them so that they feel better about themselves and their life stories.
And because I’m a human who knows how to create, with impact.
Carefully Worded is about bringing those things together in
compassionate, trauma-informed service of others.
Awards
Leadership in Social Work (SASW, 2016)
Student Activism (Social Work Education: the International Journal, 2017)
Susan Reid Memorial Prize
(University of Dundee, 2018)
Wimberley Award
(University of Dundee, 2019)
Sir James Black Prize
(University of Dundee, 2019)
British Education Award
(Degree, Scotland, 2020)
Hope lens
My academic research focus since 2022 has been into the concept of hope: how people experience it, what hope actually is, how we feel it in our bodies, how it shows up in the world around us, how we share hope with others, and how we sustain hope when life - and the world - feels challenging.
Click below to read the thesis which emerged in 2024 around hope in social work, from practitioners' perspectives. This was submitted (and accepted!) as part of an Erasmus Mundus joint Masters programme studied at Aalborg University and the Universities of Lisbon and Lincoln.