Considering Starting Psychotherapy or Counselling?
Where to start The whole psychotherapy, counselling and psychology field can be very confusing if you are unfamiliar with how it all works and have no experience of seeking such help and don’t know where to start. Here are a few points to consider: Are you ready for change? A good psychotherapy relationship is one…
Prevalence of Autism Study Comparing Vaccination Schedules in a Pediatric Patient Population — Madison Area Lyme Support Group
Approx. 2 Min New comparative Autism Rate Data Study Published March 14, 2019 Dr. Paul Thomas commissioned an independent quality assurance project. The researcher found 3,345 patients born into Thomas’ practice in the last 10.5 years. 715 in his practice had ZERO vaccines. Autism rate 1 in 715. Remaining 2,630 followed his “vaccine friendly” getting…
Mini Survey: help me help you
In a continual effort to expand my understanding of the needs of people who need help, I wanted to invite people to tell me something about their experiences of seeking help or being helped and what could be helpful to them during times of need. Your comments are valuable in developing my own psychotherapy and…
Depression Part 5: Listening to Elvis
“I believe the key to happiness is: someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to.” – Elvis Presley 3 key changes to remember: find someone to love in our life do something we love to do every day have something we love to look forward to Someone or some thing to…
Free therapy session
After the positive response to my offer at Christmas, I thought I would repeat the offer of another opportunity for anyone to use a therapy session totally free and with no obligation to continue. It gives people a chance to get an idea of what therapy can be about and to ask any questions about…
Dissociative Identity Disorder
Still Like A House Fractured? No, curiously I feel fractured but I see myself in the mirror and I’m whole, standing still like a house. The mirror may be fractured, but my eyes still swivel like windows in this head, guided by a nose that acts as a weather vane. I open and close my…
Self-development Courses
Courses – coming soon I’m currently designing a series of what I anticipate will be twelve week courses focussing on specific topics to help improve the quality of your life through awareness development, psycho-education and focussed therapeutic work where appropriate. Courses will comprise weekly sessions, experiential learning, workbooks, therapeutic tasks and between-session support to help…
Spirituality II: Developing an Existential Practice
In an earlier post I outlined an existential perspective on spirituality as a means of responding to existential needs and questions by recognising and forming a more meaningful relationship to the bigger context in which we live as human beings. In this post I list some of the pragmatic aspects of developing existential awareness by…
Ways of passing the time
Indifference Here I am and there you are. And there’s the clock on the wall. I pretend I don’t want anything from you. You pretend you don’t want anything from me. Our pretending binds us like a form of artificial intimacy. And keeps us hungry, a million miles apart. Conversation I pretend I’m listening to…
Recovering your self in 7 days
Hollowday There’s a hollow in me; an absence. Like a piece of furniture missing from a room I haven’t been in for years. I enter knowing something’s changed and I can’t say what. There’s just the feeling. Hollow. Dumbday I feel dirty on the inside. I scrub the outside; wet hair, towel and soap, and…
Spirituality I: An Existential Perspective
“One day your soul will depart from your body and you will be drawn behind the curtain that floats between us and the unknown. While you wait for that moment, be happy, because you don’t know where you came from and you don’t know where you will be going.” ~Omar Khayyam A feature of the…
PTSD, cPTSD, and Dissociative Experiences
I wanted to write something about the relationship some of us have to traumatic experiences from our past. It seems important that I write this from an intuitive, non-technical place. For me, this is because intution – as opposed to fear – is what we need to develop regarding our power to manage our way…
Beyond Asylum: society’s contribution to mental distress
[updated January 12, 2019] Mental distress as the individual’s expression of societal overwhelm I’ve been a psychotherapist for nearly twenty years and the longer I practice the more I recognise the foundational cause of human distress and disturbance tends not to be an isolated failing in the individual, nor defect or deficit, not a pathology,…
On choosing a psychotherapist
When choosing the right psychotherapist it’s important to remember some basic facts about psychotherapy if you want it to work for you: Psychotherapy is founded upon a trustworthy, secure relationship. The best evidence from the longest-term study supporting psychotherapy’s effectiveness in helping people make changes in their lives says that the quality of the therapeutic…
Depression Part 4: downhill or uphill?
There are simple reasons we end up depressed, getting deeper and deeper into a state of numbness or hopelessness or meaninglessness or apathy. All of the characteristics of a depressed state are the result of going away from something. That something could be a problem, difficulty or truth we are avoiding. Or feelings. Or people. …
Depression Part 3: ‘bad’ feelings, alcohol and substance misuse
The world loves to divide feelings and thoughts into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. But feelings and emotions really aren’t good or bad in the moral sense. When we call them ‘good’ or ‘bad’ we tend to mean pleasant or unpleasant, comfortable or uncomfortable. Most importantly, feelings and emotions are useful information; information designed to tell us…
Depression Part 2: a well-worn path
Depression is one of the most common afflictions of human beings and one of the main reasons why people seek some form of help. Depression has been medicalised in the last hundred years and ‘treated’ as a disease. In some cases there are, of course, biological or other physical reasons for depression, such as chronic…
Depression Part 1: two simple steps on your road to recovery
First of all, this isn’t a ‘how to get over depression’ guide. It’s something of a response to quite a few blog posts and articles on depression I’ve been reading lately and some concerns about what I’ve read. Many of the blog posts I’ve been reading seem to automatically define depression in medical terms and…
The Outsider Part 2: living off-label
Whilst most of us long for kinship with others who will accept us, approve of us, validate our ideas and beliefs, some of us don’t. Many of us will adjust ourselves in order to fit in and secure such approval, or for the sake of ‘a quiet life’, even to the extent of compromising our…
Why is CBT still being promoted as a cure-all?
As a psychotherapist I continue to come across the ad nauseam promotion of CBT – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – both within the NHS and outside of it for what seems to be any and every ailment known to man, woman and child. This is partly due to the lasting momentum of a politically-motivated campaign of…
Personal Authenticity Part 3: the healing power of truth
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Johnn 8:32 When it comes to healing ourselves from significant troubles, distresses, wounds, afflictions and traumas that we may have suffered, the one thing that I have found to be of primary importance is clearing any and all impediments to our seeing…
The Outsider Part 1: clarifying our place in society
If there’s one area of my work that I have a special interest in it’s working with people who feel like they don’t fit in or who find themselves rejected by the group. I wanted to start writing a series of posts on this subject because of the confusion and assumptions that we typically make…
Suffer the Little Children: abuse and its legacy for survivors
The term ‘child abuse’ opens a Pandora’s Box of definitions and meanings. From words like neglect to domestic-, emotional-, physical- and sexual abuse; to bullying, genital mutilation, exploitation, trafficking, grooming – the list goes on. These definitions describe the behaviours of the perpetrators: words for what ‘they’ did. Not what ‘we’ did… But this post…
Healing Minds: what works for you?
Often we are so socialised into looking to ‘professionals’ for their expertise that we forget that, prior to the boom in professions, we did a pretty good job of taking care of ourselves and one another. Family, neighbours, community, aunts and uncles, grandparents: all of these community bonds have been eroded by massive shifts in…
Change Your World: Self-healing and Loving Kindness
Inspired by an article I read speaking about the benefits of pets to depressed people, I wanted to write a little bit about the therapeutic value of caring for other living things both as an aid to preventing and treating mental disturbance, particularly but not exclusively depression. “The greatness of a nation and its moral…
