Category archive: Blog category 1

Co dependency has many different levels and take many different routes. The road isn’t always clearly signposted. However there are some signals that may not make sense at that time but may well help inform future processes. Many years ago when Dave’s nephew was just a little kid playing with plastic dinosaurs and toy racing cars, he was asked…

Ok so it’s World Mental Day. What does that mean? What is your mental health? Hang on, isn’t mental health only something that happens to other people? I say that because I remember many years ago when studying counselling an old woman in her seventies, following me around the place I worked in talking at…

Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) is an approach to therapy developed during the 1980’s by a team lead by husband and wife Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. Unlike other kinds of counselling and psychotherapy, it doesn’t begin with and explore the client’s difficulties. Nor does it focus on the history and frequency of…

Psychodynamic counselling aims to help clients with a wide range of issues such as anxiety, phobias, OCD, addiction, trauma etc. It is also particularly helpful in relationship counselling as partners explore the conflicts within themselves and their relationships around them. It comes from the work of Freud and subsequent psychoanalytical theorists who followed; theorists such…

Sometimes people can find it difficult to separate assertiveness from aggression. Perhaps there have been times when others have asserted themselves with us aggressively and that we didn’t like how we felt about that encounter. Others may find it hard to assert themselves as they may have never felt valued or listened to, so out…

A traumatic event is a shocking experience for which our normal ways of processing and coping become overwhelmed. Reactions to such events vary from person to person but often lead to feelings of confusion and fear. Usually unsettling thoughts and feelings dissipate over a few weeks as the brain begins to make sense of and…

It is believed up to one in five people could be regarded as having, as Elaine N. Aron researched in the 1990’s, highly sensitive personality traits. The Highly Sensitive Person may reflect on things more than others do. They worry about what others think and feel and prefer quiet, controlled environments over noisy, fast paced…

Cognitive Dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling of anxiety that comes when we hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time. The level of this tension varies depending on how important the subject is. It also depends on the strength the opposing thoughts are and how able we are to rationalize the conflict. Carl Rogers referred to…

What is CBT? Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, otherwise known as CBT, is a form of counselling. It is an evidence based approach to helping emotional and physical health conditions. It’s an approach that looks at not only what we think, how we think, and how that affects how we act, and how that affects how we…