Hello, I'm Clare. Positive Psychology and Nervous System Expert.
Founder of Happya. Author. Coach, therapist and counsellor. And someone who knows from the inside what it takes to move from surviving to truly living.
Not just a coach. Not just a therapist. Something rarer.
I work with women who are done with surviving. Women who appear to be managing on the outside and are quietly falling apart on the inside.
My approach combines positive psychology, trauma-informed practice, nervous system work, hypnotherapy, EFT and counselling into something that doesn't fit neatly into one box. That's intentional. The women I work with haven't been reached by the things that fit neatly into boxes.
I went back to university in 2018 to study psychology. Before that I spent years in business, strategy and management, which means I understand systems as well as I understand people. I think in frameworks and feel in human. That combination is unusual. It's also why this work reaches women who have tried everything else.
I established Happya in 2021. But this work began long before that, in the life I was living and the losses I was navigating, and in the growing conviction that the women falling between the cracks of the mental health system deserved somewhere to go.
Quirky. Courageous. Expect the unexpected.
I grew up in Winchester. I wanted to be an accountant with a corner office and a red Porsche 911. Life had other ideas and I am genuinely grateful for that.
I'm a single mum to three teenagers, including twins. My days start before the school run and end somewhere between a drama on the sofa and a very occasional facemask and early night. In between I run a business, support my mum, try to keep the house standing, and find time for the things that fill me up: projects, home interiors, music, craft, learning something new.
I am still doing the work myself. I am still figuring out who I am, especially as my children move toward independence and I get to ask for the first time in a long time: who am I when I'm not needed? That question doesn't frighten me anymore. It excites me.
If you're expecting a perfectly polished expert with all the answers, I'm not her. If you're looking for someone who has genuinely been in the difficult places and found a way through, that's exactly who I am.
Why I do this work.
I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters.
I grew up in a home marked by domestic abuse and violence. That shaped who I was allowed to be for several decades of my life. I learned early to make myself smaller, to manage everyone else's emotions, to hold everything together while quietly disappearing inside it.
I lost my husband. That grief reshaped everything. It was also, in the most unexpected way, the moment I finally stopped waiting for permission to become who I was always meant to be.
But here is what I want you to hear. You don't need a story like mine to deserve support. You don't need tragedy or newsworthy adversity before you're allowed to ask for help. The women who fall between the cracks aren't the ones with the dramatic stories. They're the ones who are functioning, capable, holding it all together, and quietly drowning in a life that should feel better than this.
That woman deserved support long before anything went catastrophically wrong. She deserves it now. And she doesn't need to earn it with suffering first.
"You don't need a dramatic story to deserve support. You just need to be done with surviving."
Clare Deacon
I built Happya for her. For the woman who has held everything together so long she's forgotten who she actually is. For the woman who knows something needs to change but doesn't know where to start. For the woman who is done with coping and ready, finally, to live.
What you can always expect from me.
The training behind the work.
I went back to university in 2018. Before that I had spent years in business strategy and management. The combination of those two worlds, analytical thinking and deep human understanding, is what makes this approach different.
As seen and heard in
The conversation starts with a cuppa.
No pressure, no agenda. Just 30 minutes with Clare to talk about where you are and what might help. That's where everything begins.