About me
I'm Ella — (Helga E Goelitz), though Ella is what I go by. I'm HCPC-registered as an Occupational Therapist, and I'm currently accrediting as a psychotherapist with UKCP through SCPTI. I've spent five years building varied clinical experience across placements and private practice, and I hold a Practitioner Licence with The Liberté Code®, working directly with its founder, Charmian Berry.
I see clients in person in Northwich and online.
You don't need to know yet which of these approaches is right for you. That's something for us to work out together in an initial conversation. I offer a free 20 minute phone consultation for that purpose. If you'd like to have a chat you can get in touch here.
The Decoder & The Liberté Code® (TLC)
What the Decoder actually is
The Decoder is a structured, conversational process for making a live prediction visible while it is happening. It isn't a personality test, a worksheet, or a technique to take home and practise. It is a way of slowing down a moment — usually a moment of distress, dread, or stuckness — so that the prediction underneath it can be seen clearly enough to be questioned.
Most approaches to distress assume that the problem is stored inside us — a trauma, a wound, a story waiting to be processed. The Decoder starts from a different premise, one that has been emerging from cognitive neuroscience over the last two decades: the brain is not primarily a storage system for past events. It is a prediction machine, constantly generating what is likely to happen next and updating its best guess from experience.
Under this view, the feelings, thoughts, and relational patterns that keep showing up are not being replayed from memory like a recording. They are being predicted, moment by moment, by a system that learned something early and has never fully revised it. The past isn't remembered so much as it is forecast into the present.
How a Decoder session works
In a session we identify a specific moment: a feeling, a thought, a physical sensation, or a relational pattern that keeps happening. Then we slow it down. Not to analyse it, but to let the structure of the prediction become visible — what it expects will happen, what it prepares you to feel, and what it tells you to do next.
The Decoder doesn't interpret your history or ask you to relive it. It brings careful attention to the specific prediction your mind is generating right now — the shape of it, the feeling of it, the way it organises your response before you have time to choose.
Once a prediction is seen clearly enough, it becomes possible to recognise it as a prediction rather than a fact. That recognition is where the pattern starts to loosen. Not because you have worked hard to change it, but because the system can finally update its model from current reality rather than old learning.
The Decoder is one element of a wider framework called The Liberté Code®, developed by Charmian Berry. TLC brings together predictive processing, clinical insight, and a precise attention to language and lived experience. It is not a therapeutic modality you layer on top of ordinary life. It is a way of understanding how human beings get stuck, and how recognition — rather than force — can allow something to move.
When I "met" the Decoder, I was blown away by its effectiveness and immediate positive impact it had on me personally and as a clinician and so I decided to bring it into my client work. I became the first licenced Decoder practitioner and continue to be involved in the Decoder circle (a weekly meeting for users of the personal Decoder).
The Decoder can be powerful on its own, but I have found it works most sustainably when it sits inside a real therapeutic relationship. The relational field provides the safety that makes the prediction available in the first place; the Decoder provides the precision that makes the pattern impossible to dismiss once it appears. Without the relationship, the work can become intellectual. Without the Decoder, the relationship can remain warm but slow. Together, they make it possible to meet the pattern where it lives — not in the past, but in the present moment, as it is being predicted into being.