Read our posts about therapy

08Sep

How Creativity Can Help With Grieving

Sarah Royle

bereavement, creativity, therapy

Mind

Alesha sought help through therapy after her father died.  Her mother had died some years before, around the time Alesha had her two children, and she found that the death of her father was unexpectedly complicated by grief for her mother. The grieving process can be seen as a balance between grieving and coping, and coping had taken precedence.As an only child it fell to Alesha to sort out her parents’ belongings.  Although she had managed to dispose of furniture and other objects quite successfully, she had packed up over twenty boxes of other belongings, which she...
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25Aug

Military Stress

Julia Cole

counselling, stress, therapy

Therapists

I am a counsellor and psychotherapist with almost 30 years experience of working as a therapist. For the last 9 years I have been a full time therapist in an unusual environment for therapy - the welfare department of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, situated at the naval base in Portsmouth. This has been a voyage of discovery for myself and the clients I have seen, chiefly because of the learning that has taken place - for me about the military ethos, and for my clients about the very concept of therapy that can seem very alien to a military mindset. Joining the...
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20Aug

Sigmund Freud and the Nazi Who Saved Him

David Cohen

psychology, therapy

Mind

The Nazis were persecuting Jews in Germany but Sigmund Freud, who lived in Vienna, refused to leave Europe.  The 82-year old psychoanalyst remained stubborn about that even after the Nazis marched unopposed into Austria in March 1938. He only changed his mind when, on March 22nd 1938,  his beloved daughter Anna was arrested by the Gestapo. I wrote a book on the subject, The Escape of Sigmund Freud, and am now planning to make a film of it. David Suchet, famous for playing Poirot and much else, has agreed to play Freud. The film will tell the extraordinary story of how...
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19Aug

How CBT Helped Me Change Bad Food Habits

Rachel Kelly

counselling, nutrition, therapy

Body

In a recent blog, I shared what I have learnt about using food to combat my depression and anxiety. But knowing what you should eat won’t automatically cure you of bad food habits. Our attitude to food is as much about emotion as it is about satisfying hunger. Throughout my battle with the Black Dog I have tried many approaches – one of the more effective for me being Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This involves retraining your brain to avoid patterns of negative thinking, replacing them with new more positive neural pathways. I tried to stop and judge what my...
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04Jul

Therapists and Pets: Is Three a Crowd in the Consulting Room?

Camilla Nicholls

counselling, therapy

Therapists

When therapists talk about providing a ‘safe space’ where clients feel able to open up we are usually speaking metaphorically. We mean to indicate that the consulting room will be a place where everything is treated confidentially and judgements are on hold  regarding what is said or done by the client. But ‘safe space’ took on quite a different significance for the unsuspecting client who, towards the end of her session and in mid-thought, was attacked by a Manchester therapist’s cat. The feline who broke the therapeutic boundary had slipped unnoticed through an...
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02Jul

Writing Fiction Airs My Demons

Joanna Briscoe

books, creativity, therapy

Soul

Writing is a form of therapy. The creative act seems as necessary for my mental health as a social life and exercise. And beyond that, I find that my deeper, darker soul emerges in my novels in ways I never expect… We all know that diary and letter writing can be cathartic  -  and certainly my own teenage diaries were where I worked out the passions and indignities of life – but writing longer fiction works as therapy on several different levels. I’m not proposing that we should all attempt to write full-length novels, because it’s horribly difficult and takes...
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27Jun

The Toxic Legacy of Jimmy Savile

Anonymous Therapist

abuse, family, self, therapy

Therapists

It’s more than a year and a half since the first shockwaves of the Jimmy Savile sex abuse story hit, and I find it harder than ever to listen to the seemingly endless avalanche of disturbing voices testifying to the horrors he inflicted while the world looked the other way. I can’t say exactly how I came to ‘know it’, but the news story when it broke in the autumn of 2012 only served to confirm what I already knew in my guts; that Savile was a predatory abuser. Interestingly a lot of people I’ve discussed this with have also said the same thing.  We all somehow knew...
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26Jun

The Draper Complex: When a Man Turns Against His Defences

Aaron Balick

emotions, therapy, TV

Therapists

Mad Men's Don Draper is not Tony Soprano.  The weird world of psychoanalysing fictional figures  had a field day with the latter – from labelling him with narcissistic or anti-social personality disorder to settling on a severe Oedipus Complex.Whatever the conclusion, the Mafia boss was clearly symptomatic. However little you’d expect a man like Tony to seek psychotherapy, he had to. You cannot run the North Jersey crime syndicate while suffering panic attacks. People don’t turn against their defences when they are perceived to be working in their...
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25Jun

Why is There So Much Anxiety?

Sue Cowan-Jenssen

anxiety, counselling, stress, therapy

Therapists

Given that we enjoy longer and healthier lives, why are so many of us suffering from anxiety? We do live in an increasingly competitive society. We are bombarded with images of ‘success’. Are we thin enough, handsome enough, rich enough, and clever enough?  We readily use words like ‘success’ and ‘failure’, yet what do these terms really mean? It doesn’t occur to us that these ordinary concerns might be a symbolic reflection of our anxiety about mortality. In my work as a therapist I have come to understand that, often, underlying our deepest anxieties are...
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07Jun

Couples Therapy: Taking sides

Susanna Abse

couple, divorce, love, marriage, therapy

Relationships

At least 110,000 people had couple counselling or therapy last year according to the Relationships Alliance, though this is no doubt a huge underestimation of the numbers, as it doesn’t include those who saw a therapist in private practice. It is noticeable though that we tend to hear far less about couples seeking help for their relationships than we do about those seeking help as individuals. Are people more embarrassed to say they’ve been to see a couple’s counsellor than an individual one?  It seems that if our relationship hits problems, we can feel very exposed and if...
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