Neil Locke
ACA Registered Counsellor | AHPRA-registered Occupational Therapist
Melbourne, Australia
I'm an AHPRA-registered occupational therapist and ACA-registered counsellor based in Melbourne. My background in occupational therapy means I'm interested not only in how people feel, but in how life actually works — relationships, routines, work, decisions, responsibilities, environments and the things people are trying to do.
I'm also a husband and father, and I'm autistic and ADHD myself. Those experiences influence how I see things, but I don't assume my experience is representative of yours. I'm particularly interested in the gap between appearing capable and actually coping — and in helping people work through the parts of life that haven't quite resolved themselves.
Life outside the consulting room matters
Family life has given me a perspective that professional training alone can't provide. Parenting, relationships, work, competing responsibilities, neurodivergence and simply trying to fit everything into a week have reinforced something I first learned through occupational therapy: what makes sense in theory still has to work in real life.
That's particularly relevant to the way I think about parenting. You can love your children enormously and still find parenting incredibly hard. Different people in a family can need different things, and sometimes there isn't a perfect response. You're trying to work out what matters, where to hold a boundary, what needs to change and what you can realistically sustain.
But the same principle applies well beyond parenting. A strategy for managing ADHD isn't particularly useful if it doesn't survive a busy Tuesday morning. Relationship insight needs to translate into what happens during the next difficult conversation. A career decision eventually has to become a decision. Understanding why you're stuck matters — but so does working out what comes next.
I'm much less interested in telling somebody what they should be doing than understanding what's actually happening. Sometimes that means questioning an assumption. Sometimes it's changing an environment or expectation. Sometimes it's building a skill, having a difficult conversation, making a decision or accepting that there isn't a perfect answer.
I want our conversations to be thoughtful, but I also want them to matter outside the conversation.
Why I work this way
I'm naturally drawn to problems that don't have obvious answers.
Outside clinical work, that often means technology, AI, creating things, organising things that aren't working particularly well, or getting absorbed in a project because I'm convinced there must be a better way to do something.
That probably explains why I'm drawn to counselling and coaching in the way that I am. I enjoy understanding complicated situations, noticing assumptions or patterns that might be getting in the way, and helping someone think clearly enough to decide what they want to do next.
I don't start with the assumption that every problem needs therapy, that every difficulty needs to be eliminated, or that I already know what the answer should be. Sometimes people need space to understand what they're feeling. Sometimes they need another perspective. Sometimes they need to make a decision or do something hard.
The starting point is the person in front of me and the problem they're actually trying to solve.
