Following the death of her son in Syria in 2015, Nicola Benyahia founded the counselling organisation Families For Life. She is a fully qualified, registered BACP (British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy) Counsellor with specific experience in mental health, brain injury and most recently working and counselling young people aged 14 to 25 years old.
Families For Life aims to support families through the psychological and counter radicalisation process. She hopes, through her organisation, to support and empower families to combat the shame of radicalisation and provide them with a platform for their voices to be heard. As a mother personally affected by the impact of violent radicalisation process in her own family, she decided to give her own experiences a voice and stepped forward for other families facing similar problems.
Through her own personal quest to better understand the radicalisation process, she attended specialist de-radicalisation family counselling training in Netherlands with Daniel Koehler (German Institute of Radicalisation and de-radicalisation Studies), researcher and pioneer in the field of counter-terrorism. She has since built international links with a community of individuals, families and agencies who are all collaboratively working to combat and counter radicalisation. In order to raise greater awareness on the subject, she has since provided talks on the subject at conferences and on the radio and TV in the UK, France, Netherlands, Brussels and most recently Jordan.
Although Families for Life primarily focuses on providing support to families and individuals affected by radicalisation, it also offers a range of other supportive services with specialism in the following areas:
-Depression
-Anxiety
-Bereavement & Loss
-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
-Addiction
-Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
-Domestic Violence
-Brain Injury.
Based in the UK, Families For Life offers support in a number of ways: