Useful Articles by Counsellors and Psychotherapists
Stress Management for Organisations
February 7th, 2012 by Steve Garrett Ad.Dip.PC Dip.Hyp.CS NCS(acc) LHS
STRESS MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS Stress is not just a personal problem – it’s a business problem that can be solved in four steps. Experience shows that stressed employees are treated a bit like radioactive material – no one wants to handle them, and the employee is sent on sick leave for a month (or several) in the belief that time alone will reduce their stress and that they will return healthy, motivated and more resilient. Nothing could be further from the...
Why it's good to fall out of love
February 7th, 2012 by Patrick McCurry MBACP, UKCP Reg
In our culture we are incredibly attached to the idea of falling in love and meeting Mr (or Miss) Right. There is something mysterious and hugely powerful about the process of falling in love with someone. But we don’t realise that a more authentic, deeper love only comes once we’ve had to let go of that initial romantic experience. It would be so nice, we may think, if that feeling of excitement, passion and bliss could last. But inevitably the honeymoon period comes...
A Minute of Mindfulness
February 7th, 2012 by Nick McCubbin MBACP MBPsS
Mindfulness interventions have increasingly been examined and recommended for a number of psychological difficulties in recent years.Research carried out by Baer (2003) demonstrates that Mindfulness can be beneficial for depression, anxiety, chronic pain and addictions amongst other things. A simple and quick exercise, that can take just 1 minute, can help us learn to practice Mindfulness and begin to offer us the benefits of Mindfulness based meditation.A MINUTE OF...
Baby Blues or Postnatal Depression?
February 6th, 2012 by Katie Leatham
Many women and some men suffer from difficult feelings following the birth of a baby. We know that the hormones in a woman’s body are adjusting to the recent changes to do with labour and breastfeeding. To a large extent this explains the overwhelming emotions that affect mothers in the first few days and weeks after birth. Tearfulness, worry about the baby and irritability effect the vast majority of women. Feelings can be very mixed, with elation and steep dips in mood following each...
Bullying
February 6th, 2012 by Louise Whitnall MBACP Accredited. UKRCP Reg.
Bullying Since time immemorial bullying has been present in our homes, schools, place of work in society at large and most recently cyber space. Often covert and not always easy to detect the subtle and overt demonstrations of bullying cause human suffering, with devastating consequences, at times leading to serious mental health problems or more rarely although not unheard of suicide. Statistics show children who are severely bullied at school are up to 4 times more likely to develop psychotic...
What is psychotherapy how does it help support those going through seperation or...
February 6th, 2012 by Louise Whitnall MBACP Accredited. UKRCP Reg.
Historical background To begin I thought that it might be useful to look at the history of psychotherapy. The actual word psychotherapy comes from the ancient Greek word ‘Psyche’, meaning breath, spirit or soul. The word ‘therapy’ means to nurse or cure. Sigmund Freud is what you might call the founding father of psychotherapy and was around in the 19th century at the same time as Darwin and Copernicus; you might also say that he was as revolutionary. The concept of the...
Help at Hand for Students - Raising Awareness of Student Counselling Services
January 31st, 2012 by Deborah Holder MBACP
This week a friend told me the sad story of a nephew who had tried to kill himself while away at university. As the story went, no-one had seen it coming. He was known as outgoing and sociable, the life and soul of the party and had apparently been enjoying life and his course. Friends were shocked, family distraught. Fortunately he survived the attempt and is now receiving the support he felt unable to seek when he needed it most. Over the last few weeks many parents packed their grown-up...
Should men be treated differently in psychotherapy?
January 31st, 2012 by Darren Barnett. BSc, Dip CBT. Specialist Practitioner
According to Dr. Martin Phillips (2008) women in our society are better ‘educated’ in understanding and expressing a wider range of emotions. For example, it is more culturally acceptable for young girls to express sadness, fear, disappointment or embarrassment. Often young boys are told, “be a man… suck it up… don’t be weak”. So why are we surprised when those boys grow up to be emotionally uneducated men? I wonder if men would be more willing...
Can we all be happy
January 30th, 2012
Wikipedia defines happiness as “a state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment satisfaction, pleasure or joy”. The problem with this is it is difficult to apply quantative measures to this definition. So if you are trying to decide if you are happy today, there is no measurement that you can make. This is particularly true if you are trying to see if you are happy compared to the rest of the population. Another definition of happiness is that: Happiness is not a...
Mindfulness is the preferred cost effective treatment for anxiety, depression and...
January 30th, 2012 by Vitor Borges-Friary BSc (Psych) MSc (CBT)
Mindfulness is a practice for wellbeing. It means bringing a gentle, curious and non-judging response to a given experience, either inner (thoughts, memories, feelings, bodily sensations) and outer (others, nature, events in general). Embodying a mindful attitude can be done at any given moment and anybody can do it but it requires practice, and appropriate coaching. In mindfulness, one learns to observe things as they really are, recognizing that there are habits in our thinking style and...
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