The woman beside you
Goreti
Founder of Grounded Beside You. Fifteen years in premium estate agency, trained in counselling skills, born and settled in Chichester. One person, doing one thing properly — going with women to the things that are harder on your own.
Why I built this
I built it because I am the gap.
Let me be straight with you about who I am, because it matters more than any list of credentials.
I’m not the woman who has nobody. I’m the woman who has everyone, and still sometimes has no one. My phone is full. My weekends have people in them. I am close to my family, I have friends I have known for decades, and I have never in my life been described as shy.
And it changes nothing. Until the front door closes.
Until Saturday morning arrives and the weekend stretches out ahead of me. Until I look up a class in January and still haven’t booked it in June, because going alone felt too hard. Until an invitation arrives with a plus-one on it and I write back something gracious, because showing up solo felt too exposing. Until I wake up on a Sunday full of possibility and go to bed disappointed in myself.
You can be surrounded by people who love you — and still feel completely alone. Not because the people aren’t there. But because life moved. Things changed.
Everybody’s life carried on, exactly as it should. Children grew up and moved. Friends remarried, or moved to Devon, or got a grandchild every other weekend. Nobody did anything wrong. It simply became nobody’s job to check whether I had plans on Saturday, and that is not the sort of thing you can reasonably ask anyone to take on.
For a long time I assumed this was a private failing. Then I started saying it out loud to other women — capable, well-liked, entirely un-pitiable women — and watched their faces change. Every single one of them knew exactly what I meant. Most of them had never said it either.
So I stopped waiting for someone to solve it, and asked a simpler question. What if someone just showed up? Not to fix anything. Not for therapy or advice I already know. Not to look after anything. Just to be there. Beside me.
I didn’t build this because I spotted a gap in the market. I built it because I am the gap.
That is the whole business. There is no clever mechanism behind it and no methodology I’m going to give a name to. It is one woman, with a diary, who will go with you.
Fifteen years in property
What the job actually taught me.
I spent fifteen years in premium estate agency, most recently with Fine & Country. The brochures make it sound like champagne and kitchen islands. The reality is that expensive houses are very often sold because something has ended.
A divorce. A probate. A downsize after forty years, with a garage nobody has opened since 2009. I sat at a great many kitchen tables with women who were being asked to make enormous decisions in the worst month of their lives, usually while everyone around them was busy being sympathetic from a distance.
What I learned is unglamorous and it is the foundation of this work. People do not need advice nearly as often as they think. They need someone in the room who isn’t flinching. Someone to arrive first, sit through the difficult part, and go for a coffee afterwards and talk about something else entirely.
I also learned to be genuinely useful with paperwork, appointments, surveyors, solicitors and the sort of admin that grows teeth when you are tired. That comes with me.
The training
Counselling skills, Levels 1 to 3.
I have completed Counselling Skills at Levels 1, 2 and 3. I want to be precise about what that is and what it isn’t, because precision here is a matter of trust.
It is training in listening properly. In not filling every silence. In asking the question underneath the question, and in staying steady when someone finally says the thing they have been carrying around for months. It also teaches you to recognise the edges of your own competence, which is the more valuable half.
It does not make me a therapist or a qualified counsellor, and I do not offer therapy or counselling.
If something comes up that needs a professional, I will say so plainly, and I will help you find the right person rather than quietly carrying on. Knowing where my job stops is part of doing it well.
Why Chichester
I work in Chichester and roughly twenty-five minutes around it — the Witterings, Bosham, Selsey, Emsworth, Midhurst on a good run, the villages in between.
It means I know where the parking is impossible, which café will let you sit for two hours, which walk is flat and which one really isn’t, and how long the road out to the coast takes on a Saturday in August. It means I can be at your door in twenty minutes rather than an hour and a half.
Mostly it means I can be consistent. If you’re just outside the radius, ask anyway — I’ll tell you honestly whether I can do it properly.
Honestly
Who this isn’t for.
- You need medical or personal care. That is a different profession, properly regulated, and you deserve someone qualified to do it.
- You want therapy. I am not a therapist and I don’t offer therapy. If that is what you’re looking for, I’d rather help you find a good one than pretend.
- You need someone at short notice, at any hour. This is planned time, agreed in advance. I am not an emergency service and I won’t pretend to be one.
- You’re looking for domestic help — cleaning, cooking, laundry. That isn’t what this is, and there are people who do it far better than me.
- You want someone to make your decisions for you. I won’t. You are perfectly capable of deciding; the hard part was doing it by yourself.
- You’re a man looking for this service, or enquiring on behalf of one. Grounded Beside You works exclusively with women. That isn’t a judgement — it’s the boundary the whole thing is built on.
The difficult thing isn’t doing it. It’s having to do it alone.