Where do we put all those parts of ourselves that we wish we didn’t have? When we feel angry, or jealous, or greedy, how do we manage those feelings? Carl Jung suggested the concept of the shadow as a way of understanding how we can reject...
Latest articles on counselling and therapy
What is happiness? It’s a huge question, isn’t it? Many clients will say to their counsellors "I just want to be happy", yet when asked what that might look like, they have no idea. They often know that it is not 'this'; this feeling of...
When asked what they want to change when they come to counselling, many people say they just want to be happy. However, when asked how they would know they were happy, most of them are completely stumped. Happiness seems to be something people...
Often, people ask me how I am in polite conversation; my stock response is "I'm OK thanks". But, when I stop to think about how I am, often I have a lot of things going on. Things ranging from day to day mundane stuff to things that may be causing...
In December 2012, I decided that on this warm morning in Cancun, I would drive up to Mexico City. The night previous I had looked at flights, and they were all just a bit too expensive. In addition to cost, my fear of flying seemed to have overtaken...
Anxiety can affect all our lives in so many ways, and it's certainly an issue that is being explored more frequently in the therapy room. All of us can feel anxious, and we can often effectively manage these complex emotions, but sometimes our...
Tags:
Anxiety
When you come for cognitive behaviour therapy, the anxiety and depression that you come forward to work on is addressed by looking at two main aspects - cognitions first, then the behaviours. What are cognitions? The definition of cognition is "the...
Tags:
Anxiety, Depression
The idea for this article came from listening to the psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist Peter Fonagy speaking on Radio 4's The Life Scientific (Jan 2020). Along with colleagues, Fonagy developed a therapeutic approach called mentalisation, or...
Tags:
Relationship problems
At the time of writing this article, a major sporting event is about to take place. I decided to do something that I very rarely do, and I haven’t done in years, which was to go down to my local bookies and place a bet on the team that I...
Tags:
Addiction(s), Gambling
When we are trying to change a behaviour or a response, it can be a frustrating and baffling process. Why, if we try so hard, are we still doing the thing that we don’t want to do? Or how are we ending up in the same place, over and over...
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