About Me - Sarah Fish

I’m Sarah Fish, a trained and experienced advanced hypnotherapist and a mum of two young adults. For me, hypnotherapy has been life changing. It’s helped me to transform my life-long, limiting beliefs and unhelpful habits and empowered me to take back control of my own thoughts.

My understanding of overthinking isn’t purely professional. I’ve experienced anxiety and burnout myself, and I was later diagnosed with ADHD. Understanding how my own brain works has helped me stop fighting against it and find ways of working with it instead. That’s something I bring into my work with clients too: understanding what’s happening in your brain can take away a lot of the judgement and help you find strategies that actually work for you.

Now, as a hypnotherapist, coach and IEMT practitioner, that’s exactly what I do.

My childhood

Looking back, anxiety took up a lot of my time and energy, eating away at me and triggering nausea. I was a people pleaser – at home and at school, worrying about everything and everyone.

Growing up, my choices were made for me – what to do, what to wear and activity clubs most nights, to occupy my active brain. I wasn’t taught how to be calm, be myself and make my own decisions (that’s the 1980’s ‘good girl paradigm’ for you). When my parents divorced, everything changed. Suddenly, aged 9, I needed to take more responsibility for myself and help out at home. My sanctuary was the library – a calm, quiet space, for me to escape into a book.

Becoming a scientist and wife

While at university, I met my husband (and became Sarah Fish!) and my eyes were opened to different cultures for the first time. Together, we travelled around Europe and then emigrated to Arizona, where he’s from.

I struggled to get a job in biomedical science, as I wasn’t born in America, so I took a job as a pre-school teacher. This fitted in perfectly with my natural instinct to care about and help others.

We came back to England, as I was offered a job in Cytology, which I did for 15 years and I loved it. In that time, we had our 2 beautiful children.

Burnout, redundancy and an identity crisis

Over time, the pent-up emotions of my earlier life, the daily challenges of being part of a neurodivergent family and the pressure to BE more and DO more at work and home, started to collide.

I was trying to please everyone but myself. My bullying manager’s outburst was the last straw and I marched out, in tears. Depression followed and 11 weeks off work. On my return to work, the department closed and I was made redundant, with a day’s notice.

I felt like my identity had been wrapped up in being a scientist and my self-worth felt shattered.

To help me to move on, I found a life coach, who taught me a lot about myself and my life. Then, unexpectedly, I was invited to train as a hypnotherapist. With my background in biomedical science and my knowledge of how the mind and body are connected, I was intrigued. I knew I needed to sort my own head out, so I booked a few hypnotherapy sessions in for myself first.