Services Provided

Overcoming anxiety:

• Anxiety can and does arise in everyday life and relationships affecting our reactivity to people and situations. For most of us, anxiety is a normal part of life and is helpful for people to explore in order to increase their awareness and have a stronger sense of self and well-being as they approach relationships and life’s challenges.
• For some people though, anxiety can be taken to a whole other level. It can be crippling. In order to avoid a chronic panic attack, they will step out of life, away from opportunities and live a half-life. It is incredibly common and affects people in different ways. Some people know that they need help but are too anxious to seek it.
• Anxiety can be the hidden force under depression, anger, grief and loss. It can be the result of trauma and prolonged life stress. Anxiety when it dominates mean that life is lived in fear.

Common anxiety-related problems and disorders include:

• Social anxiety including fear of public speaking
• Excessive worry or generalised anxiety
• Panic attacks
• Posttraumatic reactions
• Fears and phobias
• Obsessions and compulsions

If anxiety gets out of hand, it can interfere with enjoying life and reaching your potential. An anxiety disorder can hold you back at work, stop you doing things you’d like to do, interfere with social and family relationships, and undermine confidence and self-esteem. People often become quite depressed about feeling excessively anxious, which only makes their situation more stressful, isolating, and difficult.

Fortunately, the vast majority of anxiety disorders are treatable. A substantial amount of research in the last few decades has focussed on understanding anxiety disorders, which has given anxiety practitioners good knowledge of what underlies various different anxiety conditions, and what helps to overcome them.

Overcoming depression:

• When sadness becomes all encompassing, drains us of energy and gets in the way of enjoying the important things in life, it has more than likely become depression. If you’re feeling stuck, it might be time to seek treatment.
• Depression is the sense of being stuck in sadness for a prolonged period of time. There may also be a lack of energy or enthusiasm for the things you once enjoyed, difficulty getting out of bed, feeling exhausted, fogginess in your thinking, having issues with sleep, eating issues, suicidal ideation, a lack of interest in caring for self and others and withdrawing from friends and family. Being caught in the symptoms of depression can bring about a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness for the future. The sad thing is sometimes depression is exacerbated by a sense of shame about having these feelings. Stigma stops people talking about depression. This can hold back recovery.

Depression is often referred to as the “psychological common cold”, partly because depression is such a common psychological difficulty, with pervasive implications for mental health. Depression can also be recurrent and hard to shake, often hitting when our resources are low.

Although the word “depression” is frequently used as a blanket term, the experience of depression can be very different for different people. Depression varies greatly in the feelings that it brings, its severity, and the effect that it has on a person.

For some people the predominant feelings of depression involve being sad or blue or down. Depression may also bring feelings of hopelessness, pessimism, or despair. Other people experience depression more as a feeling of fatigue, and a lack of energy, motivation, interest or enjoyment. Still others may predominantly experience feelings of guilt or failure. Many people experience varying combinations of all these different feelings.

In its most severe forms depression can stop people from eating, washing, sleeping, or getting out of bed. For others it interferes in some areas of life, but they carry on with the essentials, such as work and domestic obligations. Others may carry on as normal, but go about their life with a certain sense of detachment, disinterest, or depleted energy and motivation.

At times depression comes on suddenly, bringing a marked change from a person’s previous life and outlook. Other times it builds gradually, growing steadily more intense over time. Alternatively it can linger for many years in a mild form, coming and going and fluctuating in intensity, but never too far away.

A period of depression is often triggered by difficult life events, or during a period of stress. Equally, it can come out of the blue, seeming to hit for no apparent reason.
Psychological therapies for depression
Whatever form it takes, depression can have significant effects on mental health and wellbeing, relationships, work, and physical health. Not surprisingly, a great deal of research has gone into developing effective treatments and therapies for depression, both psychological and medical. For some people psychological therapies by themselves are effective in resolving their depression. For others, a combination of therapy and medication is the most effective path. Together with your medical professionals, a psychologist can help you find the combination that is right for you.

Resolving trauma:

Traumatic experiences inevitably have a significant impact on people’s lives. Events such as abuse, assault, injury, accidents, natural disaster, and war are by their very nature overwhelming and difficult to deal with. It is normal to have a wide range of reactions following a traumatic experience. Common reactions include feeling tense and on edge, numb, shocked, fearful, angry, irritable, sad, guilty, and lacking in interest and motivation. It is also normal to experience difficulty concentrating, and to feel as though you are in a fog.

In the period following a trauma, support, patience, acceptance, and freedom to respond in your own way are very important. For some people, professional help is also useful. Others prefer to process their experience in their own way and in their own time.

For many people, given time and understanding, their emotional reactions to a trauma settle to manageable levels, over days, weeks, or months. Gradually finding ways to come to terms with what happened, they manage to carry on with their lives.

For others, however, strong reactions to a trauma persist. When strong posttraumatic reactions endure for more than three months, and interfere with a person’s life, the person is said to have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Symptoms of PTSD include:

• Re-experiencing symptoms, such as unwanted intrusive thoughts and memories of the trauma, nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of re-experiencing the event, physically or emotionally, often triggered by reminders of the original experience.
• Symptoms of heightened arousal, such as feeling constantly on alert for danger, being easily startled, being irritable or having angry outbursts, having difficulty sleeping, or difficulty concentrating.
• Symptoms related to avoidance and “switching off”, such as trying to avoid people, places, activities, thoughts, or conversations that remind you of the trauma; difficulty recalling important aspects of the traumatic event; diminished interest in your usual activities; feeling detached or estranged from others; feeling emotionally numb, such as difficulty having loving or tender feelings; or finding it difficult to envision a normal future for yourself.

Sometimes these symptoms appear shortly after the trauma, and sometimes they appear after a delay, up to months or years later.

If you are experiencing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, effective treatment helps you to understand your reactions, and to process the trauma in such a way that you are able to come to terms with it and it intrudes less on your day-to-day experience. Therapy also allows you to regain a sense of equilibrium and stability, and to take part in your life with renewed peace and engagement.

Management of stress:

• Post-traumatic Stress and Stress Management are common reasons people will seek therapy. The stress becomes so prominent that elements of their life that were once working well begin to break down.
• Post-traumatic Stress occurs after a particularly stressful event, where the event may be played on repeat in your mind, or triggers set the memory off again. These can include, abuse, rape, violence, accidents and victims of crime and tragedy. Post-traumatic stress is intimately connected with grief and loss. It can result in heightened anxiety, avoidance of opportunities, hypersensitivity, bursts of anger, withdrawal from life, loss of sleep or need for too much sleep, sadness and depression and exhaustion. Life is not lived to its fullest.
• General life stress shares much of the same symptoms as post-traumatic stress. However, rather than a single stressful event it is more likely to be an ongoing experience of stress throughout daily life. Stress can be prolonged unless life changes occur or coping skills are employed. Work stress, ongoing abuse and violence, parenting and ongoing conflict in relationships are common forms of life stress for which people seek therapy and skills in stress management.
• In both Post-traumatic stress and general stress management it is the constant replaying of events and conversations and reliving it that causes ongoing effects and symptoms of stress.

Parenting challenges and concerns:

• Parenting can be satisfying and fulfilling. But it can also be difficult and time-consuming. Parents must tend to an infant or child’s daily needs. They are also responsible for helping each of their children develop life skills. These skills include daily living skills, social skills, and appropriate behaviours. Parents with more than one child must account for the personalities of each, as well.
• New parents, overwhelmed parents, and parents facing mental health conditions may benefit from the support of a mental health professional to help parents through difficult situations or behavioural concerns.