About Kajal
I listen beyond the words
People rarely come to me because everything is going well.
Usually there is something they cannot make sense of. The same argument keeps returning. They love each other but no longer seem able to reach each other. Trust has been damaged. They are questioning whether to stay or leave. Money, family or cultural expectations have become entangled with the relationship. Or perhaps life looks successful from the outside — the home, career, children and years together are all there — yet privately they find themselves wondering why it doesn’t feel the way they thought it would.
I listen to what has happened, but I’m also listening for what sits underneath it.
- What keeps repeating?
- What does this particular situation mean to you?
- What are you frightened of losing?
- What have you stopped saying?
- What are you protecting yourself from?
- What did you learn about love, security, conflict or partnership long before this relationship began?
Sometimes people arrive wanting me to help them find the answer to their relationship.
Very often, I want to help them find themselves first.
Let us find you first before we find the end
When you are living in relationship uncertainty, wanting an answer is completely understandable.
- Should I stay?
- Should I leave?
- Can we repair this?
- Will I ever trust them again?
- Is there still enough between us?
- Have we simply grown too far apart?
I don’t believe my role is to answer those questions for you.
My work is about helping you understand yourself and your situation clearly enough that you are better able to decide what you want to do with that awareness.
That can mean looking beyond the argument that happened last week towards the pattern that has been repeating for years. It can mean understanding why something your partner does affects you so deeply, what happens inside you when you feel rejected or unheard, or why you keep accepting something that makes you unhappy.
Sometimes it means asking a much more fundamental question:
Who are you now, underneath all the roles you have acquired along the way?
You may have become somebody’s husband or wife, a mother or father, the person who earns, the person who cares, the one who keeps everything together. Years can pass while you are busy meeting the needs and expectations of everyone around you.
And somewhere inside all of that, it is possible to lose sight of yourself.
Finding that person again doesn’t automatically tell you whether a relationship should continue.
But it can change the place from which you make the decision.
I can’t coach the person who isn’t in the room
This is an important part of how I work.
If you come to me asking, “How do I change my husband?” or “How do I make my wife understand?”, I will listen carefully to what is happening between you.
But eventually our conversation has to return to the part we can actually work with.
You.
- What happens inside you when your partner behaves that way?
- What are you feeling that perhaps isn’t being said?
- What are you accepting?
- What are you afraid of?
- What do you need?
- What keeps repeating?
- What can you influence, and what might you approach differently?
That isn’t about making the relationship problem your fault.
It is about putting some agency back into your hands.
This is one reason you can work with me without your partner. Understanding a relationship does not always require two people to begin the process.
When couples come together, the same principle applies. I am not there to establish who has the better version of events. Two people can have experienced the same relationship very differently.
I want to understand both.
I haven’t only studied relationship change. I’ve lived through it.
My understanding of relationships isn’t purely professional.
I have been a daughter, wife, mother, divorcee and wife again. I have experienced love, betrayal and the ending of a marriage. I have raised four children through significant change, questioned myself enormously, lost confidence, blamed myself and wondered how something that once felt so certain could have ended where it did.
I also remember asking some of the questions people now bring to me.
- Why did this happen to me?
- Why did my marriage fail?
- What did I miss?
- What happens now?
And perhaps one of the most painful questions after a relationship ends: does the way it finished somehow make all the good years that came before it meaningless?
I had to find myself again too.
I don’t share my story because my experience is the same as yours. It isn’t.
I share parts of it because I know what it is to look at a life you thought you understood and suddenly have to make sense of it differently.
What I lived through, combined with what I subsequently learned professionally, has shaped the way I sit with someone else’s uncertainty today.
I know that an ending can hurt enormously without making everything that came before it worthless.
And I know that an ending does not have to define the relationships that follow.
Love after an ending
I eventually found happiness again.
My second marriage has also taught me something different about relationships. My husband Paul and I came to our marriage with different histories, cultures and faith backgrounds. I am of Indian heritage, was raised in Kenya within a culturally traditional family, while Paul is white British and Christian.
Building a life together has reinforced something I see repeatedly in my work: there are rarely only two people in a relationship.
We bring our childhoods with us. Our ideas about love. Previous relationships. Children. Parents. Faith. Money. Culture. Traditions. Expectations about the roles a husband or wife should play. What family means. How conflict should be handled. What security looks like. What we believe we owe other people.
Most of this isn’t written down anywhere.
Yet it can exert enormous influence over a relationship.
That gives me a particular understanding of people who find themselves caught between personal happiness and family, cultural or community expectations.
Sometimes the question “What do I want?” becomes incredibly difficult when answering it honestly feels as though it could disappoint your parents, disrupt your family or challenge something you have been taught to believe for most of your life.
I understand some of that territory personally.
But I also know that two people do not have to come from identical worlds to create a life that belongs to both of them.
Relationships rarely exist in isolation
One of the things that fascinates me about relationship work is how much of the rest of our lives eventually enters the room.
Love is part of it, of course.
But so are money, identity, sex, children, work, ageing, ambition, family, culture, independence, confidence, responsibility and our ideas about what a successful life is supposed to look like.
Money is a good example.
I am not a financial adviser and don’t give financial advice, but money enters relationship work frequently because money rarely represents only money.
It can mean security. Freedom. Dependence. Power. Control. Worth. The ability to leave. The fear that you couldn’t cope alone.
In the same way, an argument about household responsibilities may not really be about who emptied the dishwasher. A disagreement about family may contain years of unspoken expectation. A conversation about intimacy may be carrying rejection, confidence, resentment or fear that neither person has known how to express.
I am interested in those connections.
Because sometimes the thing that finally makes sense of a relationship is understanding that the problem you have been trying to solve isn’t quite the problem you thought you had.
Twenty-five years of working with people
My work with people began more than 25 years ago in health and wellbeing.
I originally trained and worked across areas including baby massage, Reiki and massage therapy, before my work expanded into nutrition, healthy living, workshops, programmes, breathwork, yoga therapy and retreats.
I founded Kajal’s Healthy Kitchen, where my love of creating gourmet healthy food grew into a community of more than 25,000 people. Paul and I subsequently ran gourmet supper clubs together, alongside cookery workshops, 21 Day Transformation programmes and wellbeing retreats in Turkey.
I later created Kajal’s Wellness Tree, bringing together different strands of my wellbeing work.
Over the years, however, I found myself becoming increasingly interested in the conversations underneath wellbeing.
Relationships. Identity. Expectations. Confidence. Loss. Change. The patterns we repeat and what happens when the life somebody thought they were creating suddenly looks very different.
In 2022 I formalised that direction through specialist breakup and divorce coach training.
Untangled Relationships brings those years of experience into the work I feel most drawn to today.
My approach is coaching
I want to be clear about what my work is and what it isn’t.
My relationship, breakup and divorce work is coaching.
I am not here to diagnose you, provide financial advice or give you a formula that decides whether you should remain in your relationship.
Coaching is also not something I want you simply to sit back and consume for an hour.
This is participative work.
Depending on what we are exploring, I may invite you to reflect between sessions, journal, notice particular patterns, experiment with approaching something differently, or pay attention to what happens in your body when certain situations arise.
I am also trained in Transformational Yoga Therapy and breath coaching. Where appropriate and within my scope of practice, I can draw upon breath, body awareness and nervous-system regulation to support the coaching work, particularly when stress or emotional overwhelm is making it difficult to think clearly.
Sometimes insight happens in our conversation.
Sometimes it happens three days later when you notice yourself about to respond in exactly the way you always have — and, perhaps for the first time, understand why.
That curiosity about yourself is an important part of the work.
You don’t have to start at the beginning
Not everybody comes to me in immediate crisis.
Some people have already done a great deal of personal work.
They understand much more about themselves than they once did, but they have reached another question:
What now?
That may mean learning to trust again after betrayal or divorce. It may mean rebuilding confidence, approaching a new relationship differently, becoming more comfortable travelling or living alone, changing your relationship with money, establishing boundaries, exploring a new direction in work, or simply discovering who you are in this next part of your life.
You don’t need to squeeze yourself into a predetermined starting point.
My role is to understand where you are now and what still feels difficult to reach on your own.
What I hope changes
I don’t measure good work by how much information I have given somebody.
I want you to begin seeing your own life differently.
You may start recognising a pattern that has followed you through more than one relationship. You may finally find language for something you have felt for years but could never quite explain. You may understand why a particular conversation always becomes an argument, or why rejection, money, intimacy, family or independence carries so much emotional weight for you.
You may become better able to notice what is happening inside you before automatically reacting to it.
And you may become clearer about what you want to approach differently next.
I don’t need to give you the answer to your life.
I want to help you understand yourself and your situation clearly enough that you are better able to decide what you want to do with what you now see.
Professional training and experience
- Coaching practitioner
- Accredited Breakup & Divorce Coach PractitionerCertified through specialist breakup and divorce coach training associated with the International Divorce Coach Centre of Excellence and Sara Davison. That specialist training includes Master Practitioner training accredited by The Dash Charity, a UK-regulated domestic abuse charity.
- Membership
- Member — The International Divorce Coach Centre of Excellence
- Experience
- More than 25 years working with people across wellbeing, personal development and coaching.Specialist breakup and divorce certification since 2022.
- Yoga therapy
- Certified Transformational Yoga Therapist — 200 hoursAccredited by Yoga Alliance International. A separate body-based training area, distinct from Kajal's relationship coaching.
- Breath coaching
- Certified Breath CoachA separate body-based training area, distinct from Kajal's relationship coaching.
- Professional insurance
- Westminster Insurance.
- Languages
- English, Gujarati, Hindi and Swahili.
Kajal’s relationship, breakup and divorce work is coaching. She is not a therapist, counsellor or psychologist, and does not hold a personal ICF accreditation.
Bring what’s real
You don’t need to prepare the perfect question before speaking to me.
Bring the relationship you can’t understand. The conversation you’ve been avoiding. The argument you’ve had twenty times. The money pattern that keeps returning. The partnership that feels more distant than you want it to.
Or simply bring that uncomfortable feeling that you have created so much of the life you once wanted, yet something still isn’t working.
We can begin there.
We start connecting the dots between the way you love, the way you relate, the patterns you repeat, the way you show up in partnership and the life you are creating.
And we see what becomes clearer.
Let us find you first before we find the end.
Twenty minutes online, with no obligation to continue.