Latest articles on counselling and therapy

As an analytical psychotherapist, I encounter quite a few people who struggle with panic attacks. What becomes clear pretty quickly is that some of these individuals tend to be very, very angry. However, they are not aware of their anger, and what transpires later is that they are also very frightened by their anger. It seems that they have not been able to differentiate their own angry thoughts from actions, so they are afraid that if they allow themselves to become aware of their anger, and...

Grounding techniques Practising regular grounding exercises can help you feel more secure, stable and connected to yourself, especially after a period of anxiety or dissociation. These exercises can also be used to overcome panic attacks and feelings of detachment in depression. They include learning to keep your feet anchored to the floor, finding your centre of gravity, adopting an upright posture and standing still with your legs apart. As well as practising how to move with a fluid, steady...

We can all experience anxiety at work or in social situations; but for some, this can become debilitating. Having (or even thinking you may be having) a panic attack at work can be really difficult. The fear of other people noticing what is happening to you can make the symptoms even worse. On top of this, not knowing or understanding what to do increases the fear response circle, so the fear of the fear can become the issue.If you find yourself in this situation, grounding techniques can be...

Changing anxious habits or behaviours can be very challenging. While many of us would prefer to seek instant solutions to break old habits, this can often lead to frustration and disappointment. For one reason or another most of us have felt trapped in a pattern of anxious thinking and behaving that disrupts our progress. We may feel caught by our own impulses and defensive reactions to situations, or imprisoned by anxious thoughts and preoccupations. We are often our own worst enemies: making...

We are all wired for anxiety as part of a primitive survival mechanism inherited from our evolutionary past. The fear response is deeply embedded in our neural networks, alerting the body and brain to danger. The animal in us is alive and kicking. Anxiety triggers our “fight, flight and freeze response” when we feel threatened, firing off a cascade of neurochemical transmitters in our nervous system whenever we detect danger or get into conflict. Even low-level threats such as...

Anxiety is much more than what goes on in your head. You may find this difficult to believe. You may not always be aware of it, but the symptoms of anxiety are much more than racing thoughts, endless screenplays or excessive worrying. They are more than obsessive thoughts or a preoccupation with worst-case-scenarios. You may convince yourself something terrible is about to happen and magnify the sense of drama, but distressing thoughts are not always the source of your problem. Nor are...

I am a therapist and on occasions I have panic attacks. In fact, I had one yesterday. There. I've said it. There seems to be some illogical assumption 'out there' that counsellors, psychotherapists and psychologists are somehow immune to the stuff of life because we've read some books, taken some exams and probed deeply into the understanding of what makes us humans tick. But we are still human and as such vulnerable to stress, pain, fear, rejection and even the common cold. We are not...

A definition of panic disorder is that it involves recurrent, unexpected panic attacks, where the sufferer between attacks still lives in fear of another one happening. In this article, I wish to describe briefly the cognitive behavioural theory of panic disorder (one of the most evidence based models) and to provide some ideas about how it can be tackled according to this framework. The cognitive behavioural model supplies a relatively straightforward explanation of panic disorder: according...

Panic attacks can come on for no apparent reason and at any time of the day or night. This can be a very frightening experience. These panic attacks are a form of anxiety, we all suffer from anxiety to different degrees, however, when we suffer from intense feelings of fear/panic on a much more regular basis this can be interpreted as an anxiety disorder. Because panic attacks can come on so suddenly we can have an overwhelming sense of being out of control which further exacerbates the panic...