About Lilian Pilgrim
I did not need to become someone new. I needed space to meet who had always been there.
My story is not one of extraordinary strength or a life neatly repaired. It is a quieter story of recognising that many of the parts I once wanted to fix had spent years trying to protect me — and learning to meet them from a place of greater safety, curiosity and compassion.
A quieter kind of return
For a long time, I mistook coping for who I was.
I knew how to adapt, work, remain useful and keep life moving. Many of those ways of being functioned for almost a lifetime. They were not mistakes; they were intelligent responses to what life had asked of me.
What gradually changed was my relationship with them. Through therapy and other forms of healing, I began to understand the mechanisms I had previously wanted to remove or repair. With greater co-regulation, safety and space, I no longer had to organise all of myself around protection.
Energy slowly became available for something else: knowing myself, creating a life that made more sense, and reconnecting with interests and qualities that had not disappeared — they simply had not had enough room.
What changed was not my past
It was the way I could be with myself in the present.
Recognising protection
Seeing old responses as attempts to preserve connection, belonging or safety — rather than evidence that something was wrong with me.
Making room
Allowing feelings, needs, limits and desires to exist without immediately translating them into guilt or responsibility for someone else.
Reclaiming energy
Using less of myself to maintain an identity built around coping, and finding more capacity for rest, simplicity and choice.
Returning to what was alive
Reconnecting with art, music, beauty, creativity and the quieter inner life that had always been present.
The Camino · 2013–2015
A dream from eighteen, walked in three chapters.
At eighteen, walking the Camino de Santiago was one of many things I imagined for my future. Decades later, I returned to that dream.
Between 2013 and 2015, I walked the route in three stages — fifteen days, then sixteen, then eighteen. There was no single dramatic revelation. There was walking, repetition, physical tiredness, beauty, simplicity and enough distance from ordinary life to hear different questions.
The Camino did not turn me into another person. It helped me remember the young woman who had once imagined a wider life — and recognise that she had not vanished. She had been waiting for space.
“The path was not an escape from who I had been. It became one way of returning to who I still was.”
More than one doorway
My own healing has never belonged to a single method.
Talking therapy gave language and relationship to experiences that had often been carried alone. Family Constellations offered another way to understand belonging, loyalty and the larger systems around an individual life.
Art, music and sound created forms of expression when explanation was not enough. Spiritual healing, for me, has meant reconnecting with an essential and divine part of myself — not following a prescribed religion or asking anyone else to share that understanding.
I do not speak from a place of having arrived. I continue to care for, question and reconnect with myself in ordinary life. Healing, as I know it, is less a final destination than a relationship we keep learning how to inhabit.
I know therapy not from having completed the journey, but from continuing to return to it.
Book a free initial callBefore becoming a counsellor
I arrived here through several working lives.
My path into counselling was not direct, and I value what the earlier chapters taught me about adaptation, responsibility, change and beginning again.
- Brazil
Working from fifteen
I began in technology, later worked in banking and ran my own business.
- 2000
Moving to London
I built a life in another country and another language, learning from both belonging and difference.
- 2009
Family Constellations
I began working with constellation processes and have facilitated this work since 2011.
- Study
Psychology and counselling
After a year studying psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, I trained as an integrative counsellor.
- 2023
BACP registration
I qualified with a Level 4 Diploma in Integrative Counselling and became an MBACP Registered Member.
Professional grounding
Lived experience informs my humanity. Training, ethics and supervision hold my practice.
My own story helps me respect the intelligence within protective responses. It does not mean I assume that your experience is the same as mine.
Your sessions are not a place for my story to take over. They are supported by professional training, ethical practice, ongoing reflection and supervision.
Explore my counselling approach- Study
- Bsc Psychology for two year at Birkbeck University - London
Bsc Computer Science for one year at University College of London - UCL - Qualification
- Level 4 Diploma in Integrative Counselling
- Registration
- British Association of Counselling ad psychotheray - MBACP Registered Member
- Systemic training
- With the Centre of Systemic Constellations in London- Foundation and Applied Training
- Additional experience
- Course assistant in support of the Year 1 Foundation training course in Systemic Family constellations.
- Practice
- Online in the UK and internatiionally | in-person in Crediton & Exeter - Devon - UK.
What I hope to bring into the room
Not perfection — presence, curiosity and enough steadiness to think together.
Warmth
A human relationship in which you do not need to perform being fine or make your story easy to hear.
Depth
Willingness to stay with complexity without rushing to a neat answer or reducing you to a label.
Honesty
Thoughtful reflection and questions offered with respect, including room for you to disagree with me.
Humility
An understanding that I can offer perspective, but you remain the person closest to your own experience.
Beyond the therapy room
A life with more room for simplicity, beauty and what feels alive.
I am Brazilian and have lived in the UK since 2000. I remain drawn to art, music, nature, travel, meaningful conversation and the quiet forms of beauty that make ordinary life feel inhabited.
These things are not proof of a perfect or permanently balanced life. They are some of the ways I remember to remain connected to it.
Your story does not need to resemble mine
You are welcome to bring the life you have lived — and the part of you that may be asking for more room.
A free initial call offers a chance to talk about what brings you to counselling and consider whether working together feels right.
Book a free initial call Prefer to write? Send an enquiryLilian Pilgrim · MBACP Registered Integrative Counsellor