Welcome
Lic.Ac., M.A.A.C.
Acupuncturist, Counsellor, Educator and Advocate
“I will shout for justice until my last breath.”
Meet Sue
“Passion” is the word that best describes Sue Cox: in her teaching, her writing, her practice and her advocacy.
Sue is passionate about restoration — her preferred word for recovery — and about helping people rediscover their dignity, purpose and potential after addiction, childhood abuse and trauma.
Her own life is a story of transformation. With more than fifty years of lived experience in addiction recovery, she knows how much can change, even when hope seems beyond reach.
We are all made of the same stardust. Each one of us is unique and irreplaceable, and each life has value. We all deserve the opportunity to flourish.
Teaching & practice
A qualified acupuncturist, practitioner of Chinese medicine and counsellor, Sue has spent more than thirty years teaching healthcare professionals, prison staff and communities.
As Founder and Director of SMART-UK, she has personally trained more than 31,000 healthcare professionals. Staff have been trained in 128 UK prisons, and SMART-UK’s work has reached hospitals, mental health services, community organisations and the military.
Her teaching brings together Chinese medical theory, Western neuroscience and lived experience, making complex ideas accessible and connecting understanding with practical skills.
I am privileged to have worked with amazing people, who have taught me as I have taught them.
Writing
In her book, The Hidden Superpower of Addiction, Sue explores the strengths and untapped potential she has encountered throughout her working life.
She challenges approaches that reduce people to a diagnosis or their most difficult behaviour. Her focus is on understanding what lies beneath that behaviour and helping people build the foundations for lasting restoration.
Sue is also co-author of Auricular Acupuncture and Addiction, which explores a scientific hypothesis for the use of auricular acupuncture as an adjunctive treatment.
People who have experienced addiction have extraordinary drive and potential. We need to help them recognise and develop those strengths.
In prisons
Developed with colleagues and people with lived experience in prison, the SMART-UK Five Star Wellbeing Programme brings together ancient wisdom, neuroscience and practical ways to support wellbeing.
Designated prisoners train as Five Star Wellbeing Coaches, learning skills they can use for themselves and share with their peers.
The programme reflects Sue’s belief in the power of understanding, connection and mutual help. People who have needed support can become a source of hope and encouragement for others.
Advocacy
Sue is a mother of six, a great-grandmother and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse by a Catholic priest.
The abuse she experienced between the ages of ten and thirteen was followed by years of profound distress, alcoholism, drug addiction, an eating disorder and self-harm. She also survived a violent first marriage and became a single mother while all six of her children were under twelve.
Restoration took time, support and determination. Those experiences continue to inform her work, but they have never defined the limits of her life.
In 2010, while receiving her first award, Sue chose to speak publicly about the childhood abuse she had previously kept private. She hoped that standing openly as a survivor might help others find their voices.
That year, she delivered the opening rallying speech at the “Protest the Pope” march, attended by approximately 20,000 people, and appeared in the television documentary The Trouble with the Pope.
Later, Sue travelled to Rome to join survivors from fourteen countries. Among them were seventy deaf and speech-impaired survivors from the Provolo Institute in Verona, who described abuse by the priests and nuns entrusted with their care.
Their courage and the barriers they faced in being heard had a lasting impact on her.
In Rome, Sue also met Dutch survivor and activist Ton Leerschool. Together, they founded Survivors Voice – Europe, supporting fellow survivors and campaigning for accountability.
Their advocacy took them to the United Nations in Geneva, where they gave evidence concerning the Vatican’s handling of clergy sexual abuse to the Committee on the Rights of the Child and, subsequently, the Committee Against Torture.
Sue has also spoken in the Italian and Polish parliaments, at international conferences and rallies, and through television and radio.
She remains determined that the consequences of childhood abuse should be properly understood. Her professional knowledge and lived experience inform her insistence that its effects must never be trivialised or dismissed.
Watch
Sue receiving her OBE for her services within the UK prison system.
More on Sue’s YouTube channel →A life with purpose
Across her teaching, clinical work, writing and campaigning, Sue’s purpose remains the same: to help people understand themselves, reclaim their power and discover what is possible.
She brings warmth, humour and an enduring belief in human potential to that work.
I have never believed that people should be defined by the worst thing that has ever happened to them.
