Curing by counselling...

Joyce Stableford has an aura of calm.

I pulled up on her drive, got out of my car and left the handbrake off. As I fumbled with keys and bag, the vehicle rolled slowly but inexorably down the slope towards her house.

Most people would have shown signs of alarm, but not Joyce. "You'd better stop your car," she observed mildly, as if we were approaching traffic lights in good time.

Joyce doesn't believe in giving herself or anyone else undue stress. In fact, she's made her living out of examining why we become agitated, unhappy and depressed.

She counsels clients on disorders such as phobias, depression, eating disorders, panic attacks and pain management, menopause and irritable bowel syndrome.

Counselling, like its sister stress management, can be seen to have attracted more than its fair share of phoney practitioners since the New Age explosion at the beginning of the '90s, when anyone could set themselves up as a counsellor, complete with dubious certificate framed on the wall, after an eight-week training course. Or so it seemed.

So it comes as some relief to find that Joyce's academic qualifications are copper-bottomed. She is a former psychology lecturer with a Masters degree in Applied Psychology from Manchester University who also runs training courses for other health professionals.

But just as she isn't a former salesman turned shrink, neither is she a remote academic in an ivory tower.

For this is a woman who married young to escape an unhappy home life, was a mother at 19, and struggled to bring up three children while training to be a teacher (the youngest was just 18 months when she started).

What's more, a road accident 11 years ago in which a double-decker bus ploughed into the back of her stationary car left her with a smashed foot. Doctors said she would need at best leg irons, at worst a wheelchair. Today she walks unaided.

Looking at her several decades on (it's hard to be sure precisely; she won't reveal her age: "It labels people and as a psychologist I don't believe in labelling,"), the impression is of almost palpable serenity.

She sits, hands neatly on her lap, legs crossed at the ankle, radiating relaxation. I find myself suddenly aware of arm-crossing, hair-twiddling, and pen-tapping by comparison.

Does she ever get stressed? "No," she says simply. "I've been doing meditation and yoga for years.

"We need a certain amount of stress in life to get things done but when people talk about stress they're really talking about becoming distressed. Wrong chemicals are sent out into the body. A stressed person is like an oversensitive alarm."

She believes women in particular are more prone to mental health disorders. "I think women get a raw deal. Women go through the enormous upheaval of childbirth and menopause and their families expect them to cope, to get on with it when their hormones have gone, to support.

"There's often no social support at all. I really don't think society treats women very kindly at all."

Joyce is also a trained hypnotherapist and uses the skill to help with the misery suffered by cancer patients and those with irritable bowel syndrome.

She is scathing about stage hypnotists whom she claims pick on the most suggestive and impressionable members of their audience and can do untold damage.

She uses a host of disciplines in her approach to clients, but still believes being a good listener is a crucial skill. "You have some people come here and they've never been listened to their life," she says.

She is aware that her own unhappy childhood made her determined to succeed at whatever she did. Born in Yorkshire, she soon became aware that her mother didn't like her much.

"Nothing was ever good enough for her," she recalls. "She fed and clothed us, but there was no emotion. She never should have had children. She used to tell us she could have done this and that if it were not for us."

Despite doing well at school, it was her mother who forbade her elder daughter to go to university. Joyce retaliated by marrying young and moving away to Manchester with her husband while still a teenager.

She qualified as a secondary school art teacher in 1969 but before long realised psychology would be her forte.

Her local Education authority funded a degree in the subject and she went from there into teaching at a college attached to Salford University.

Education cuts in the early 1980s meant redundancy for many academics, including Joyce who managed to go from college to teaching psychology A-level at a Manchester school, becoming head of department.

She quit teaching in 1988 after the road accident. Her right foot had been on the clutch at the moment when the bus ploughed into her and all the bones were smashed.

The pain and the intense physiotherapy which ensued made her realise she could not continue in a full-time, demanding job, but she stayed for two years while training other psychologists as counsellors at weekends.

She began taking courses and workshops all around the country before moving to Hadleigh two years ago with her husband, a retired aircraft engineer (despite her northern roots her grandmother and great grandmother were east Londoners and her children had come down south to college and had stayed).

Despite a slow start, her business has now taken off, and she hopes to start a training programme for professionals in Essex this September.

Joyce says her childhood and her training made her determined to be a better parent than her mother. As part of her Masters degree she examined the relationship between mother and daughter. "My mother told me I was a nuisance," she recalls, a glimmer of tears in her eyes.

"When she was old I'd go and see her and she'd say: 'Your childhood wasn't too bad, was it?' I'd say: 'No'. She knew what she'd done, you see. My experience has always made me tell my kids just how much I love them."

Joyce can be contacted on 01702 557649.

Calm -- psychologist Joyce Stableford who helps to cure those people suffering from illnesses due to stress

Picture: STEVE O'CONNELL

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.