As children we absorb experiences and information around us without necessarily having the ability or maturity to defend ourselves and our best interests against it, or to make complete rational sense of it at the time. This is particularly true of behaviours and emotions both expressed and unexpressed in the relationships around us when we…
Category: anxiety
The Traumatised Psyche
Trauma in Simple Terms Psychological trauma describes the experience of difficult and distressing events or extended circumstances that we have suffered in life with which we have been unable to cope, give a clear rationale, recover or learn from at the time they happened. Instead of being able to make rational and emotional sense of…
Mental Distress and Suicide
Statistically, suicide is the highest cause of death in men between age 20 and 49. This is not to diminish the female suicide rate, merely to present statistics. And the suicide statistics are shocking, with greater numbers of men taking their own lives than are killed in road accidents, or by cancer and coronary heart…
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…
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…
Depression Part 1: Causes, anti-depressants, and 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…
CBT: a low-cost ‘cure’ for psychiatric ‘Illness’?
As a psychotherapist I continue to come across the ad nauseam promotion of CBT – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – and its derivatives, 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…
