How I Can Help
Managing Anxiety
& Stress
Experiencing some anxiety is normal and usually tolerated if it’s short-lived, but if your worries are a prolonged feature of daily life, this may have a negative impact on your moods, interfere with the quality of your relationships and work performance, and paralyse your capacity to find satisfaction in normal activities. If this sounds like you, you’re not alone – anxiety and stress are the most common reasons to seek therapy.
Struggling this way can leave you irritable, restless, angry, on edge, with a sense of dread, unable to concentrate, shaky, feeling nauseous and suffering sleep issues. It can be felt in your body, appearing as a racing heartbeat, skin problems, headaches, digestive issues and irritable bowel.
Anxiety is the main symptom of panic attacks, chronic tension, social fears or a pervasive feeling of butterflies in the pit of your stomach.
What you’re feeling anxious about may not be clear – and not knowing intensifies your distress and hopelessness about ever resolving your fears.
Our work together is aimed at helping you clarify any difficult feelings that may not be being fully addressed. I support you to tolerate your physical and emotional sensations as you learn how you may be avoiding your anxiety triggers. Importantly, we will then explore how the influence of the past may have impacted your current emotional state, thoughts and behaviours. When you understand yourself better, you can make changes that bring you closer to the life you truly want.
Lifting Low Mood
& Depression
“I’m depressed” has become a common expression to describe low mood, but depression is more than occasionally feeling down. It is characterised by a constellation of emotions and can be debilitating.
Depression is felt differently by each of us, and to varying degrees. It may be a single reaction to a sudden life change, such as redundancy or serious illness, an out-of-the-blue episode or grow over time with no recognisable cause.
Symptoms can include persistent sadness, hopelessness, lifelessness and low self-worth, loss of interest and enjoyment and crying for long periods. You may hide away from the world, feel numb and isolate from important relationships, and you end up fatigued and lethargic, and suffer from sleeplessness and changes in appetite, memory and sex drive. Perhaps you’re plagued by self-loathing, irritability, guilt, having no meaning in life and even wanting to die.
The positive news is that while there may be no ‘quick fixes’, most people weighed down with depressive symptoms can feel well again with effective support. Working with a counsellor provides a non-judgemental, safe relationship in which to address the underlying causes of your depressive experiences.
I take the journey with you as you explore your distressing feelings. Our goal is to help you understand how your symptoms may have arisen from unresolved issues in your past. Once this emerges into awareness, you will have the opportunity to work on inner resources, so you can manage your struggles more effectively in the present.
Healing Abuse
& Trauma
Traumatic experiences are overwhelming, frightening and difficult to control. This may be a near-death experience, such as in an accident or fire, being the victim of rape or assault, or witnessing a violent act. Physical, sexual or emotional abuse, or separation and loss, especially in early life, can cause your sense of self to breakdown and this creates a long-lasting mark on your emerging personality.
The trauma may be in the past, but it is relived as if it were continually occurring in the present and you will do all you can to avoid what you fear is unbearable pain. However much you may try to bury your suffering, the effects of trauma and abuse can sometimes break into consciousness through a cluster of distressing symptoms. You may be living with a condition known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in which you experience upsetting and confusing nightmares, sleep disturbances, flashbacks, and intrusive thoughts and memories.
Unprocessed trauma is often re-enacted without you being aware of how your thoughts, feelings and actions have been distorted. You may not always consciously remember your abusive or traumatic experiences but may ‘feel’ them in your body, and to mask feelings of distress, helplessness and dysregulation, you may become numbed or dissociated, or you may turn to substance use, alcohol or self-destructive behaviours.
First, we will work towards you taking back control of how you are feeling and integrating healthy ways to regulate your emotions into day-to-day living. Only when this is established, can you start to make sense of the trauma you couldn’t process while you were actually experiencing it.
Contained and supported within the therapeutic relationship, working in a safe space and at your pace, we will then gently explore the nature of your trauma. This may feel counter-intuitive to the avoidance designed to ward off distress, but, if it can be faced, this becomes a way of healing and building resilience. In this way, you will be able to confront triggers that previously reactivated the painful residues of your trauma in everyday life. The hope is this will give you the freedom to become more connected and optimistic about your future.
Accepting
Grief & Loss
Grief and loss are a universal and natural part of life. Sooner or later, we will all face the distress and heartache of losing someone, or something, we care about. Other than a bereavement, we may need to mourn the end of a relationship, serious illness, feeling we no longer trust others or the deep emotional scars of having parents who were unable to mirror our sense of self in childhood.
Everyone is unique and some people may feel the loss intensely at the time, while for others it is a delayed reaction. One aspect of a loss we face in the present is that it can trigger reactions about past losses which we have not fully mourned and accepted.
Problems occur if we try to block or distract ourselves from our sorrow and sadness. This is when we can end up feeling stuck and so overwhelmed that we believe we will never recover from our painful feelings, perhaps even leading to long-term psychological feelings such as depression.
You may need the understanding and insight of a therapist to allow you to move forward. Entering counselling is a supportive way to transform the meanings and emotions associated with your relationship to the lost person or what you’ve been deprived of. We need to accept the reality of the anguish we’ve suffered so we can restore our sense of self and find a way to live with our loss.
Developing Self-Esteem
& Confidence
Self-esteem is how we value ourselves. We may be positive and confident in who we are and our abilities, or we may be self-critical and prone to feeling inadequate, believing we’re not good enough or don’t deserve happiness. If we compare ourselves to others and think we’re worthless, this might leave us open to people using or taking advantage of us.
If you have low self-esteem a vicious cycle can ensue – you may end up cutting yourself off from social situations, stop trying new things and avoid those tasks you find challenging. If this persists, it reinforces your doubts and fears, and avoidance becomes your primary defence mechanism.
The way we value ourselves is usually rooted in childhood. We can take on critical messages and these stay with us – communications from parents, siblings, friends, school bullies or authority figures such as teachers. As we grow up, our negative beliefs are influenced by our experiences, and images we see on TV or in magazines, and our social media interactions.
Counselling can help you explore the way you feel about yourself. It will give you a space to identify what it is you would like to change, such as developing self-acceptance or building confidence to see yourself more positively.
Therapy can help understand why you fear rejection and why it’s hard for you to trust others, and to treat yourself with compassion, learn to be assertive and to say ‘no’ so you don’t feel overburdened and resentful.
Forming Healthier
Relationships
Healthy relationships are the foundation for a contented and meaningful life. We find a sense of belonging through bonds within families, friendships and partners.
Difficulties in this area of life cover an array of struggles – you may find yourself feeling emotionally distant from your partner and that communication is breaking down, or perhaps you always end up feeling jealous and betrayed. You maybe at a point where intimacy and sex no longer work for you, or you need support as you go through, or are on the brink of, separation or divorce?
Relationships with parents or siblings may be constantly strained or you feel you always repeat the same mistakes in friendships. Maybe you’re having parenting issues and can’t seem to ‘get it right’ with young children or teenagers.
Currently I am unable to offer counselling for couples or families, but I can work with you on an individual, one-to-one basis to discover your attachment style so you can understand the complex dynamics affecting your patterns of relating.
Once brought into your awareness, the hope is you will become confident in making informed relationship choices and developing more satisfying bonds.
“Everything that is faced cannot be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”
James Baldwin, writer and civil rights activist