Hello.
I’m Becky, founder of Becoming Her.
The Person Behind It All
Before I tell you about this space, I need to introduce the person behind it.. And it’s not who you think it is. It’s not me and it’s not a woman.
It’s a young man named Will.
This young man – my brother – unknowingly shaped every part of the work I do today.
In 2008, five months before I was due to start university, Will died unexpectedly at just seventeen years old.
In a single moment, life split into two parts.
Life before Will died.
And life after.
Everything I knew suddenly made no sense at all. The plans I had made for my future suddenly felt meaningless and I remember being so confused (and also angry!) at how the world was just carrying on around me, whilst mine had come to a complete earthshattering standstill.
Internally, I was trying to comprehend how something so devastating could happen and yet, how a person was supposed to keep living afterwards. How had it come to be that the youngest member of our family was no longer here? No longer sitting in that armchair watching Soccer AM on a Saturday morning or pacing around the kitchen doing his excitable little ‘skip’?!
I vividly remember the thundering sound of hundreds of cards of condolences slamming to the floor through our letterbox each day and now I can see that right there and then, I created a limiting belief that ‘to receive was bad news’.
For a nineteen-year-old girl trying to make sense of loss, receiving became associated with heartbreak. The phone ringing brought bad news. The knock at the door brought bad news. The emails and notifications brought bad news. Infact, at one point of my young adult life, I had attended more funerals than I had weddings, as life kept presenting to me, loss after loss.
And so, without realising it, I spent the next seventeen years becoming far more comfortable giving myself away, than receiving.
Receiving support.
Receiving help.
Receiving opportunities.
Receiving abundance.
Receiving rest.
I became fiercely independent. Capable. Self-sufficient. But beneath that strength was a woman who had quietly learned that opening herself up to receive might come with a cost.
The Search That Followed
Looking back now, I can see that this was the beginning of a search. A search that would span nearly two decades.
I searched through grief, through counselling, through nervous system regulation, through personal development, through spirituality, through energy work, through books, endless courses, conversations and questions.
Questions that I still ask today;
Why do we suffer?
Why do we stay stuck?
Why do we lose ourselves?
Why do some experiences break us apart whilst others transform us?
From Personal Healing to Professional Purpose
That search eventually became my profession. I qualified as a Person-Centred Counsellor in 2017 and spent years supporting people through some of the most difficult periods of their lives.
And from that work, in 2025, after five years of motherhood and another devastating loss within the family, The Holistic Healing Field was born. I wanted to move away from the box counselling was putting me in. I wanted to offer a more holistic approach; an approach which combined talking therapy with nervous system regulation and energy work. I wanted to support other women who too were feeling lost in their lives. Lost, perhaps, in grief and motherhood too like I had been, career, relationships, or perhaps just lost within societies timeline of where they should, or ‘shouldn’t’, be.
A business inspired by my surname, Barley, but more importantly inspired by Will.
Because if he hadn’t have died, I honestly don’t know if I would have ever become a counsellor. I don’t know if I would have spent years trying to understand human behaviour, trauma, grief, healing and transformation.
The bittersweet paradox of losing a dear loved one I suppose.
The Holistic Healing Field wasn’t just a business. It was a love letter. A tribute. A way of honouring the journey that his life and death unknowingly set me on.
I Thought Healing Was The Goal
And for a long time, healing was exactly what I needed. It gave meaning to pain, purpose to loss and it gave me a way of understanding my own story whilst helping others to understand theirs.
For years I thought the goal was to become whole again. To return to who I was before grief, before loss, before motherhood, before life happened.
But I can see now that I was never meant to go backwards.
I was never supposed to rebuild the old version of me.
I was meant to become someone new.
Healing Is The Bridge
And so recently, something has shifted.
Not because healing is no longer important. Quite the opposite – healing will always be woven through everything I do personally and professionally – but because I began to realise something.
Healing isn’t the destination.
Healing is the bridge.
Because beyond the healing comes something else.
Becoming.
The women I work with don’t need ‘fixing’. They’re not problems to solve. They are the most incredible women who have spent years caring for everyone else. Women who have built lives, careers and families. Women who look perfectly fine from the outside and yet somewhere along the way, they’ve become disconnected from themselves internally.
Not because they’ve failed, but because life happened. Because grief happened, motherhood happened, relationships happened and expectations happened. And so slowly, often without realising it, they became who everybody else needed them to be.
I know this, because I’ve lived it too.
Losing Will changed me.
Becoming a mother changed me.
The woman who became a counsellor isn’t the same woman writing these words today.
And that’s exactly the point.
We are not meant to stay the same.
We are meant to evolve, to question, to unravel, to grow… to become.
And that is why Becoming Her was born, not as a replacement for The Holistic Healing Field, but as the next chapter.
A chapter that acknowledges that healing matters deeply, but healing alone isn’t the goal.
The goal is becoming the woman you were always meant to be.
The Kintsugi Lesson
There’s a form of Japanese art which repairs broken pottery called ‘Kintsugi’ and translates to ‘golden joinery’.
This centuries-old technique celebrates the flaws by mending the cracks with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum.
I can see now that I once viewed myself as the piece of pottery.
Grief came along and shattered me.
Motherhood came along and shattered some of those pieces a little more, and so I tried to repair the cracks to get back to the version of myself I thought I had lost, but that’s not what Kintsugi is about.
It’s not about pretending that the break never happened.
The beauty comes because of the break, not despite it.
And so, I spent years searching for the magic healing ‘gold’, when in actual fact I lost sight of the bigger artwork at hand here; the new piece of pottery I was becoming.
Why Becoming Her Exists
Today, I continue to work closely with women through private 1:1 sessions.
That work remains at the heart of everything I do.
Through a blend of talking therapy, nervous system regulation, energy work, identity embodiment and deep questioning, I help women reconnect with themselves so that together we navigate the space between who they’ve been and who they’re becoming.
The articles you’ll read here, the stories, the interviews, the reflections and the conversations all exist to support that same mission.
Not to provide answers, but to create space for women to explore who they’re becoming.
If This Is You…
This space is for the woman standing on the edge of a new chapter.
The woman whose life looks fine but no longer feels like hers.
The woman who knows there has to be more, even if she can’t yet put it into words.
The woman who is ready to stop performing and start living.
You’ll find conversations here about grief, motherhood, identity, style, energy, astrology, limiting beliefs, nervous system regulation, purpose, self-expression and so much more.
And you’ll also find a place where you can work with me directly, one woman to another, or as group with multiple amazing women, as you navigate the space between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming.
Becoming
Because despite everything I’ve learned over the years, I no longer believe we’re here simply to heal.
I think we’re here to meet ourselves, to know ourselves, to trust ourselves, to express ourselves and most importantly, to become ourselves.
And perhaps that’s what my brother’s life taught me all along; that life is precious, that tomorrow is never guaranteed and that becoming who you truly are is not something to postpone.
It was never about the healing.
It was always about the becoming.
A Final Thought
Welcome to Becoming Her.
I’d love for you to stick around.
Not because I have all the answers, but because perhaps somewhere amongst these articles, conversations, reflections and stories, you’ll find a piece of yourself.
Something might land that feels life-changing, be it a single sentence, a new perspective, a question you’ve never asked yourself before, or a moment of recognition.
Like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, perhaps you’ll discover that some of the parts you’ve been trying to hide are actually part of what makes you whole.
If Becoming Her helps you gather even one small piece of yourself and place it back where it belongs, then this space has done exactly what it was created to do.
With warmth,
Becky
Founder, Becoming Her