Kat O'Mara, therapist and founder of Safe Space Counselling Services, sitting in a chair, offering a welcoming and professional presence.

About me

I didn't come to this work through a straightforward path.

I began my career as a police and court interpreter in the UK, sitting alongside people in some of the most frightening moments of their lives. I was there for the statements, the hearings, the moments after. I could translate the words, but I couldn't offer what I kept watching people need most: someone to help them make sense of what had happened, and what came next.

That gap stayed with me. Eventually, it became impossible to ignore.

I retrained as a domestic and sexual abuse specialist and spent years working directly with people leaving relationships marked by coercive control and violence. That work took me into complex territory, supporting clients navigating honour-based violence, forced marriage, and human trafficking, as well as the more common, and no less serious, patterns of emotional abuse and control that often go unnamed for years.

In 2021, I relocated to Melbourne and completed a Master of Counselling, deepening the clinical grounding behind work I'd already been doing for a long time.

What I've carried through all of it is this: the people who come for support are not broken. They're often exhausted, confused, and hard on themselves, but the responses that brought them to this point usually made complete sense given what they'd been through. My job is to help them see that, and to work out what they want to do with it.

What drives me now is something simpler than a job title: I want people to feel less alone with what they're carrying. Many of the people I work with have spent years holding things together quietly, questioning themselves, or wondering if what they experienced was “bad enough” to deserve support.You don't need a clear label, a crisis point, or the right words to begin. You just need a space where what happened to you is taken seriously and where you're met with care, not judgement. That's what I try to offer in every session.

I work in a trauma-informed way, drawing on attachment theory, somatic approaches, ACT, and EFT, approaches that take seriously what the body holds, not just what the mind understands.