I started wondering – What does ‘healed’ look like? Sound like? Feel like? We hear the terms ‘healing’ and ‘closure’ all the time on TV and the media, but how does this manifest itself if it is to be anything more than lip-service to our emotional need? How do our ‘external’ images of healing and […]
“During my thirteen years in the mental health system, I believed that I was broken and incapable of being fixed. That I needed psychiatry to create a life that came anywhere close to being considered normal. That my emotional suffering was due to something wrong with my brain, and not to the fact that I […]
For as long as I have been working with trauma victims, I have been interested in the effects of trauma on the body. More and more research is being done into the possible links between trauma and conditions such as arthritis, lupus and Fibromyalgia. What I want to talk about here is how traumatic experiences […]
Being Here, Being Now Gestalt Psychotherapy has always been a mindfulness-based therapy. Not in the “sitting quietly – doing nothing” sense but in the “living now, in this moment, experiencing, feeling and being in your life” sense. Gestalt Therapy’s main goal is to help raise your awareness, and it does this by helping you to […]
The emotional spectrum is wide ranging, encompassing all sorts of subtleties of feeling which we don’t give much thought to as we go through the day. But there are three main groups which I would like to outline here because we can find ourselves suffering with them without realizing it. I call them the 3A […]
Ask yourself this question: How many people are likely to want your attention today? Ten? Twenty? Fifty, maybe? That might be all the people you encounter face to face, but in truth it barely scratches the surface. When you leave the house you will be swamped. Are you driving? Think about all the pedestrian crossings, […]
Thoughts can be very habit forming. We go over them (or versions of them) again and again. Thoughts about work, home life, relationships past events and traumas. These thought habits are not healthy but we get stuck in them all the time. And all thoughts come with emotions. Whenever we think, we feel. There’s no […]