Specific Issues
I have experience of working with clients who have come to therapy for a variety of reasons, including:
Anxiety
We all worry or feel nervous occasionally, especially when we face stressful situations. We have a sense of tension, and may experience physical symptoms such as sweaty palms or ‘butterflies’. When anxiety becomes a very frequent feeling or becomes overwhelming, it can interfere with our work, our relationships, and our mental wellbeing.
Therapy can help with identifying triggers so that coping strategies can be used to manage in the moment. Longer term, it may be possible to explore the root cause or origin of the anxiety, which might have developed in childhood, or be related to childhood experiences. Understanding when anxiety is experienced and how it developed can help to identify where a change of perspective or narrative can reduce its impact.
Depression
Depression is characterised by persistent and ongoing feelings of sadness and emptiness. Often eating and sleeping habits are diminished or exaggerated, with either constant restlessness and agitation, or fatigue and complete loss of energy. When depressed, our ability to make decisions is challenged interrupting our attempts to get anything done. Sometimes we have feelings of worthlessness and that there is no point to life.
Therapy can provide a safe space in which to explore and express your experience, and support the thoughts and behaviours that can lead to the desired change.
Grief
Grief is a natural response to the loss of someone or something precious, such as a broken relationship, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, or significant and unwelcome change in a way of life, such as moving to a new country.
Talking about loss in therapy can help you to understand your range of feelings, which might include anger, sadness, guilt, despair, shock, numbness, confusion, yearning and tiredness. Therapy provides time and space in which to express and explore those feelings, to think about your loved one, or place; what they meant to you, how you’ll miss them, and when it’s most difficult to cope, and find ways to accept and adapt, and integrate back into life.
Workplace Challenges
With 20 years’ experience of workplace mediation, I understand how deeply work relationships can affect our home lives, sleep, and general wellbeing. One poor relationship at work can overtake our thinking and impact on all our relationships, our concentration, our ability to look after ourselves, and replaces joy with a sense of dread.
I have experience of supporting effective problem solving; helping people understand the workplace dynamics, and improve communication so that you can respectfully change the power balance, have meaningful discussions, and help you to deal with different situations, and improve workplace relationships.
Social and Familial Identity
Each of us can identify with a variety of social identities which intersect, including (and not limited to) race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, age, religion, culture, and unique familial identities. How we experience the world can be so different from how others experience the society we live in, that we may feel misunderstood. We have different experiences of discrimination, oppression, safety, and these may be complicated by our different intersects.
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Therapy can help explore your social identity with an intersectional lens, and identify the different forms of discrimination and oppression you experience, how they impact on your interaction with others, so that you can make decisions about what you want to do about them, and develop confidence and pride in your intersectional being.
Childhood Experiences
Our foundations are laid in childhood. As we grow up, we often continue to use the strategies learned in childhood, as a way of being. In adulthood, these strategies may no longer serve us, and could be limiting, or interfere with our adult relationships, or career goals and dreams.
Therapy can help you explore and discover your way of being, perhaps learned in childhood, and identify the triggers that pull you back into using those old strategies. Understanding these triggers, and recognising those feelings, can help you cope better in challenging situations, and help you develop more age-appropriate strategies.