What I can help with

Depression and Anxiety

Experienced individually and sometimes together, depression and anxiety effect each individual in different ways.

The word depression is used generally to describe someone feeling down, and can affect a persons thinking, energy, feelings, behaviour and sense of self. Counselling and psychotherapy can help you to come to terms with what is happening, exploring what is helping create these feelings, and allow you find ways to manage life more effectively.

Anxiety

Anxiety is used to describe the body’s reaction to threat, fear or danger. We can experience anxiety in a number f ways, for example: panic attacks or increased sensitivity.

Health anxiety has become an increasingly common difficulty due to the Covid19 pandemic, with fears around our own and others health, cleanliness, social isolation and social anxiety.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can help you to change the patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours associated with depression and anxiety, and consequently reduce symptoms. Including relaxation techniques can help you to reduce the feelings of threat / fear and immediate physical symptoms. Counselling and psychotherapy can help to understand how these feelings developed and how they can be managed more effectively.

Isolation

Clients often seek support with feelings of loneliness. Different from the experience of being alone, which is often chosen and that we are in control of, loneliness is felt in a deep sense and can be linked to feelings of worthlessness. Isolation has recently become more of an issue for some due to the restrictions put in place due to the Covid19 pandemic, for those cocooning / in isolation, living apart from at risk family members and full / partial lockdown restrictions.

In these types of situations counselling can help us to manage these feelings and our current situation.

Bereavement and Loss

We all experience bereavement and loss in our lives. We can experience loss, not only in death or the loss of a relationship, but also in the loss of parts of our lifestyles for example a job / career, in illness at losing our sense of selves. Loss is something that we all experience differently. Our sense of loss can further be increased where it is sudden or there are unusual circumstances – for example, where a funeral has not take place as in the current case for many families.

Counselling can help us to come to terms with the changes that these loses create in our lives and allow us to mourn the person or part of our lives that are missing in a safe and secure space.

Work and Financial Stress

Given that we spend much of our time at work and given recent years of recession, it is not surprising that more and more clients rate work or financial issues high on their list of stressors. In current climate of working from home, redundancy and furlough, there are more stressors than ever related to our work and financial stability that ever before. Counselling can help you to be supported in pressures in the workplace, as well as help you to adapt to changes in circumstances.

Relationships and Separation

There are many stressors for couples in today’s society which put pressure on the couple relationship, not least the pressures of working from home, financial pressure, and for some homeschooling children. Counselling can help couples to find what triggers difficulties in the relationship and find ways of changing these to improve the relationship. Counselling can also be useful where a couple has chosen to separate, to help the couple deal with the feelings of loss experienced in separation. This can be especially important where children are involved.

The couple relationship here refers to any intimate relationship regardless of the sexual orientation or marital status of the couple.

Abuse

Abuse can occur in any type of relationship, parent to child, child to parent, domestic relationship, professional to child / adult, any family relationship, working relationships to name only a few. Abuse can come in the form of psychological, emotional, sexual, physical, neglect, discrimination, financial and verbal abuse.

Abuse by its nature is secretive and therefore is can be very difficult for you to talk about. Therapy with those who have experienced abuse can include looking at the traumatic events which occurred, but more often involves looking at the feelings experienced at the time of abuse or now about past abuse. It is most important here to develop a trusting relationship. Confidentiality is a very important element of this work. Please see Privacy Notice for limitations in confidentiality.

Low Self-Esteem / Lack of Confidence

Low self esteem refers to having little belief in yourself and often results in clients feeling despairingly about their lives and prospects, and can be an element of depression and risk of self harm and suicidal thoughts. These beliefs may have increased due to the isolation, fear and changes to our lifestyles that were brought with the Covid19 pandemic.

A lack of confidence on the other hand usually refers to activities that we feel we are not good at.

In both situations counselling can help clients build confidence for short term aims or look closely at feeling about our self worth, consequently  building awareness of strengths and resources. Psychotherapy work on long term / childhood influences to low self worth can often be useful here.

Suicidal Thoughts or Self Harm

Self Harm behaviour, whether self injury (for example; cutting, hair pulling, scratching, burning among others) or self poisoning (for example drug or alcohol mis-use, consumption of other household chemicals), may feel like the only release or behaviour available to you.

Suicidal thoughts can come about when we begin to believe that we can no longer cope with our current lives.

The reasons may be current or can be long term, and self harm and suicidal thoughts can be traumatic and scary for you in themselves. Counselling can help you to communicate these feelings. It can also form a way in which you can regain control of your life and begin to see that you can cope.

 

Children and Young People

At any stage of our lives, our emotions can get muddled up. In childhood and adolescence, this presents often as a change in behaviour: for example, acting out, bullying / fighting with peers or siblings, breaking toys, withdrawal / isolation, self harm, suicidal thoughts. Please see the Children and Young People pages for more details on how I can help.