I am here to provide a supportive confidential space to be used if you are considering counselling and/or psychotherapy and if you need to discover different coping strategies with your emotions and thoughts .
Do you suffer from any of the following, for example;
Shock Trauma, Bereavement
Anxiety, Separation Anxiety, Life Changes, Menopause Problems Health changes
Depression, Personal Grief, Post Traumatic Stress Symptoms
Living with others Alcohol and or Drug Addictions
Difficulty with Thoughts, Feelings, Behaviours
Difficulty with a loved one in the Mental Health System
Self Harm, Existential Issues or Crisis?
If required as part of my treatment planning we can address difficulties with Personality Adaptations or Disorders.
Our personalities are developed from birth that can hold defenses. In Adult life and especially in times of stress the defenses can hold us back or don't work for us any more. The Transactional Analysis world has created what I think as a therapeutic diagnosis rather than a Mental Health Diagnosis.
Transactional Analysis Personality Diagnosis Mental Health Diagnosis
Be Strong Schizoid Personality
Charming Manipulator Anti Social Personality
Please Others Please Others Personality
Brilliant Skeptic Paranoid Personality
Try Hard Passive Aggressive Personality
Be Perfect Obsessive Compulsive Personality
Other Mental Health Personality Adaptations and dysfunctions like Narcistic Personality, Borderline and Bipolar can be a combination of the above personalities depending on a persons experience in life.
Please find below examples of how I can help you with the following issues. If you think you have different issues not outlined below I would be happy to have a discussion to find out if we could work together with your problem(s)
Abuse
Living with the experience of abuse can be very painful. No matter how long ago it may have happened, people can continue to experience unwarranted feelings of anger, shame or guilt which makes life very hard to live. In adult life, these experiences may lead to feelings of depression or anxiety, to difficulties in managing and maintaining relationships, to feelings of self-harm or suicide, or to abuse behaviors. Often someone has rarely shared these experiences with others, and carrying them alone feels like a great burden. Counselling and psychotherapy can help change a situation like this. By building trust with your therapist you can begin to share your painful experiences, find tools for feeling and behaving differently, and find support and healing.
Anger
Feeling and expressing explosive anger can be frightening and damaging for you and those around you. We often carry anger and range inside us from the past and if it leads us to feel or act aggressively it can become damaging to ourselves, our loved ones or our careers. In therapy you can think about how you can choose and decide healthier behaviors by exploring your problems, options and solutions in relation to anger. If you were a child who was not allowed to be angry Psychotherapy can help you to normalize authentic anger and find a different response and reaction to your anger. Anger can be a healthy and normal response to situations we wish to change. It can also help to address and heal the parts of you that carry rage and anger from past situations into the present.
Anxiety
Living with anxiety can be uncomfortable and debilitating. Anxiety, nervousness and fear are appropriate feelings in some situations, but if we carry them in everyday life they can get in the way of achieving the things we may want. Sometimes we try to soothe our anxieties in unhelpful ways; by overeating, by drinking too much, by becoming obsessional about aspects of our lives. Psychotherapy can help you to develop more healthy coping strategies. In my practice I can offer tools to help you manage your feelings of anxiety and fear more successfully. Psychotherapy and counselling can support you to understand the underlying causes of your anxieties. Working in a therapeutic relationship you can work through these issues to support you to feel less anxious and more confident.
Depression
Whilst many of us feel down or sad from time to time, depression describes an experience that persists and is unresponsive to the usual things that make us feel better like a good night’s sleep, the comfort of friends, physical exercise and time spent outdoors. Depression can be experienced as a persistent low mood, lack of energy and motivation, sadness, poor concentration and feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness. It can be accompanied by anxiety, poor sleep, and feelings of isolation or with thoughts of suicide. Psychotherapy and counselling can help you to address depression, to develop tools to feel better and to understand why you feel depressed. It can help you to address the underlying issues causing a depression, for example difficult childhood experiences, or perhaps losses or experiences as an adult. Therapy can support the effectiveness of a course of medication prescribed by a doctor, or it can address depression without using an anti-depressant.
Eating Disorders and Poor Body Image
Sometimes people can feel bad about themselves and the way they look, and find themselves altering how they eat as a response to this. Sometimes people try to feel better by controlling what they eat in extreme ways, or they may binge eat and then make themselves sick or perhaps they may use exercise in extreme ways to feel better about themselves and their body. In many cases, these behaviors are symptoms of underlying feelings or the person is not aware of the reasons under-lying the unhelpful behaviors hide. Psychotherapy can support increased awareness and understanding of why you are eating and feeling as you are. It can offer tools for feeling and behaving differently and it can support you to feel fundamentally differently about yourself, so that you don’t need to manage your eating in negative ways.
Obsessive-Compulsive Concern or Disorder
People often talk about being ‘a bit OCD’, but for some people, experiencing obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors can be deeply distressing. Obsessive thinking can take the form of persistent worries that keep going through your mind; sometimes these seem like important things to worry about, other times they might seem irrational but nevertheless important to continue to think over. Compulsive behaviors can take the form of repeatedly checking things, or patterns of behavior that have to be completed before you can move onto the next thing. Sometimes obsessive and compulsive thoughts and behaviors can take control of a person’s life. Working with a skilled psychotherapist can support you to develop new thoughts and behaviors that start to interrupt the obsessive compulsive ones. Psychotherapy can then carefully examine the fears that might lie underneath obsessive compulsive patterns, and address them properly so that you no longer need to use obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors to maintain your feeling of safety.
Grief and Bereavement
Losing someone or something we loved is intensely difficult for everyone. Grief is a natural reaction to bereavement such as the death of a partner, parent or child. We can also experience grief when we experience the unexpected ending of a relationship or the loss of a job or a home or your teenager leaving home. We may feel that we need support, but don’t wish to burden our close friends of family. Having a counsellor or therapist to help you through this experience and to understand your feelings better can be both comforting and valuable. Sometimes grief can persist long after the incident that caused it, and therapy can help you to move on from the experience and to re-attach to life without the person or aspect of life that you lost. Counselling and Psychotherapy can support you to complete the grieving process in a healthy way.
Self Harm
Many people, beginning in their early life and teens, can experience such intensity of feelings that they feel the urge to harm themselves to relieve these feelings. Other times an urge to commit suicide can lead from intense feelings of emptiness, hopelessness or despair. It can be extremely distressing to know that this is part of your coping strategy for the difficulties of life, and working with a psychotherapist can support you to share this burden, to develop healthier coping strategies to manage your feelings, and to address the underlying problems that might be causing the intense feelings in the first place.