The importance of forming effective boundaries in helping us protect ourselves against hurt and abuse
Tag: therapy
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…
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?
“Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement” Albert Camus 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…
Depression Part 3: ‘bad’ feelings, alcohol and substance misuse
Depression as a Response to the World 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…
Depression Part 2: a well-worn path
“It is better to try something and fail than to try nothing and succeed. The result may be the same, but you won’t be. We always grow more through defeats than victories” Søren Kierkegaard Depression is one of the most common afflictions of human beings and one of the main reasons why people seek some…
The Outsider Part 2: living off-label
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” ~Albert Camus 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…
CBT: a low-cost ‘cure’ for psychiatric ‘Illness’?
“The fact remains that the construct of psychiatric diagnosis and the construct of a psychological model aligning itself to it are both divorced from the actual, more complex and individuated realities of the particular patient and the individual practitioner. The technocratic relationship of the first denies the non-mechanistic, much more complex organic nature of the…
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…
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 – not only pets – both as an aid to preventing and treating mental disturbance, particularly but not exclusively depression. “What wisdom can…
Existential Analysis: how I work with you
I first read Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea” – a classic existential novel – when I was nineteen. From a place of teenage angst it struck a chord with me as I recognised the overwhelming sensitivities I felt at the time and typically kept to myself. Sartre speaks of experiencing the world in a felt way; a…
Self-healing: a shift from pain to compassion in five minutes
Periods of mental distress are often characterised by a hyper-focus on our own struggles to the exclusion of everything else. In the midst of pain and suffering, loneliness and desperation we can end up so concentrated on the distressing aspects of our lives and on what is missing that we literally forget ourselves and what’s…
Existential Analysis and the differences between a psychotherapist, counsellor, psychologist, CBT therapist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst!
This is a somewhat contentious area for many practitioners because, as with most fields of endeavour, everyone has their own territorial imperatives and personal definitions. So with that disclaimer, here is my simple outline of the differences between each of these helping activities, the length of their training and training requirements. Counsellor Counselling as a…
Mental distress: a sane response to an insane world
Is there something wrong with me? Or am I responding sanely to something wrong with the world?
Fees and Payment Alternatives
The normal means of paying for therapy sessions has traditionally been payment in cash at the end of each session. This is my standard payment method as it is straighforward and time-efficient. For this reason I don’t accept cheques or credit cards. However, times are changing, and as more people recognise that the central banking…
A Guide to Making the Most of your Sessions
“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.” ― Eckhart Tolle If you only read one page of information on this website then make it this one. It could be the difference between wasted time and a successful…
