IAHIP Accredited Therapist
There are two characteristics that identify social anxiety:
– the fear of doing or saying something foolish in public
– the fear of being judged negatively by others
The specifics can vary from person to person. Continue reading “Social Anxiety from a CBT Perspective”
Advantages
I always say that there’s a place for denial. It has its uses. Denial is a very powerful defence, it protects us from feeling painful emotions and from addressing difficult issues.
Many of us go through life blissfully unaware of our ‘issues’. Continue reading “Denial: Advantages and Disadvantages”
Anger is a normal healthy emotion, it is what we do with our anger that makes it an issue or not. It can energise us and enable us to be proactive and driven. It becomes an issue we need to manage if we allow our anger to control us or it becomes a destructive force in our lives. Continue reading “Managing Anger”
Many people who present for therapy cite wanting to ‘feel comfortable in their own skin’ as their main objective. Feeling ‘not good enough’ is another related and very common theme. I’m interested in the history of where these beliefs came from to help the client gain more awareness and choice in their current situation. At the same time it’s important to reality test current perceptions.
Image source: Monstrous Discrepancies
A man, we’ll say his name is Tom, gets a flat tyre whilst driving in the countryside.
He realises that he is missing his jack and can’t change his tyre with out it. He sees a house a mile or so away and walks towards it in order to ask for a loan of a jack. During the walk Tom anticipates the unwanted disruption he will cause to the occupiers of the house. He begins to imagine how annoyed the ‘man of the house’ might be for being disturbed to answer the door to a stranger looking to borrow his property. Tom works himself up imagining how angry this man will be towards him about the inconvenience and intrusion of his request. When he reaches the house and knocks on the door, a man opens it, and Tom shouts at him “you can shove your f#($ing jack up your a***!” Continue reading “Anxiety”
For some people being the victim of a crime is their first experience of feeling powerless. For others the crime can trigger a re-experiencing of past events where there was a similar theme of powerlessness or fear. It can shake us deeply to have our primal impulses perceive a threatening event and to feel that we were unable to defend ourselves against it. Continue reading “Surviving Crime and Trauma”
Recently I co-facilitated Post Natal Adjustment Groups, with a former midwife, in order to address the issue of Post Natal Depression. At least 20% of women experience post natal depression, which should not to be confused with the ‘baby blues’ that can appear in the first week after birth and typically last a few days. Factors increasing the likelihood of experiencing PND include isolation from support, a traumatic labour, a family history of PND, and/or a personal history of depression. Some women in the group cited other contributary factors such as finding it hard to reconcile the difference between their birth plan and the reality of their labour where they felt out of control, others were very disappointed to find that they were unable to breast feed. Continue reading “Post Natal Depression”
