How mid-life crisis forced high flying Tunbridge Wells woman to rethink her life through therapy

She embraced her mid-life crisis one therapy at a time after telling her husband, while on holiday in the French Riviera, she had to go.

Kay Hutchison left her holiday and husband there and then and headed off to start the next stage of her life.

Kay, who lives in the centre of Tunbridge Wells, had a high-flying media career which spanned BBC Radio, Channel Four and leading the on-air launch teams for Channel Five and Disney Channel UK.

She had also been the driving force in securing the long-term future of the multi-million Olympic International Broadcast Centre.

It could be said she had it all - the career, a loving husband, a luxury lifestyle - but Kay says she realised she was “empty and unhappy”.

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Her mother had died of cancer and she had cared for her. Only a few months later her husband was diagnosed with the disease and the “whole thing went belly up”. He got better and wanted to snap back into their routine, but Kay said both experiences had drained her. She had lost herself and wanted to find her.

“It’s just what happened. It was very hard for him. It was almost about me getting away and sorting myself out and I was changing and it was partly about all the hormones and dealing with his cancer and my mum.

"I had done all the caring for mum and a few months later I found a lump in my husband’s neck,” said Kay, who said she and her ex have remained the best of friends.

Her book, My Life In Thirty Seven Therapies, was published and Kay will have a book signing at Waterstones in Tunbridge Wells on September 18.

It’s about Kay looking for answers and working her way through 37 therapies.

Therapies

They have included acupuncture, massage, cupping, meditation, voodoo - which she says is “never the answer” - a silent retreat with 50 other women, colonic irrigation and moxibustion.

Many of the therapies she has discovered in the past five years in Tunbridge Wells which she said is just as good as London for its mind and body treatments.

And while some therapies have been ditched, others have become part of her lifestyle. Kay has fibromyalgia, a long-term condition which causes pain all over the body.

She reels off the first names of many local therapists and the best places to go for everything from massage and chiropracty to dance fit and yoga, and she is enthusiastic about Jesse’s Slimming World group in St Barnabas School.

She sees Dr Lily Chen, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, at East Natural Therapy, in Camden Road, near another of her favourite places, Helios Homeopathy.

She said: “There is nothing you don’t have here in Tunbridge Wells. It’s got everything London has. I am always trying to persuade people to move out here!”