About Tanya

I spent years becoming easier for the world to hold.

More capable.
More accommodating.
More explainable.
More useful.
Less inconvenient.

Eventually I stopped organising my life around becoming more acceptable.

I stopped asking how to make myself fit better into lives, systems and expectations that kept asking me to become smaller.

And I started building what I could not find: places, practices and pathways where people could belong without becoming less of themselves.

As a late-identified AuDHD woman living with disability, chronic illness and trauma, and as a single mother of a transgender daughter, I know something about what happens when difference becomes a problem to manage.

I also know how much life can disappear when belonging depends on being easier to understand, easier to support, easier to employ, easier to parent, easier to treat, easier to accommodate.

That became FREE 2B ME.

Less fixing. More living.

What I built from that

FREE 2B ME is not one programme.
It is one promise expressed in different places.

The Nest

A place where therapeutic practice, shared interests, relationships, support and community life can exist together.

A place where different participation still counts as participation.
Visit The Nest
The Practitioner Pathway

Developing practitioners who can carry neuroaffirming practice with capability, humility and accountability into real work.

Not just the language. The practice.
Explore the Pathway
Books and tools

Language for recognising experience, understanding what matters and building support around a life that still belongs to the person.
Explore the books
Learning and organisational work

Helping teams, services and organisations examine what their practice is asking people to carry—and what becomes possible when the conditions work differently.
Explore organisational work

Why this matters to me

I did not build this because I found a perfect model.

I built it because I became less interested in asking:

How do I become easier to manage?

and more interested in asking:

What would make more of this life possible without requiring me to become less of myself?

That question changed the direction of my work.

What I noticed.
What I built.
What I stopped accepting as inevitable.
What I wanted for my daughter.
And what I began to believe other people should be able to expect too.

My story is about turning lived experience into infrastructure, so our daughters inherit more than encouragement. They inherit different possibilities.

Not just: be yourself.

Places that leave room for it.
Practitioners who know how to support it.
Communities where difference is not the price of entry.
Workplaces where contribution does not depend on disappearing inside the effort.
Books and tools that give people language before somebody else defines the experience for them.

That is the work.

Where I stand

Women’s inclusion includes trans women.

Belonging is not meaningful if some women have to negotiate their right to be there.

What I bring to it

Counselling and behaviour support practiceRegistered practice, supervision and professional accountability.
AuthorThe FREE 2B ME Practice Library: four books beginning with the person, four professional companions.
Practitioner developmentThe Practitioner Pathway, built around capability that can be observed—not attendance alone.
Organisational and systems workAccess, conditions, reasoning, implementation and what organisations make possible in ordinary practice.
FounderFREE 2B ME, and The Nest in Caloundra with Neurodivergent Empowered.

What did “fine” cost?

That question changed the direction of my work. But it is not the only question anymore.

Now I also ask:

What does this leave room for?
Can the person remain themselves here?
What becomes possible when belonging is not something they have to earn by becoming easier?

Those questions run through everything I build.

FREE 2B ME

Read the books Understand the Practice Speaking and media Work with Tanya