Recently I’ve been reading memoirs: mainly by women (well, all by women), and mainly by women of my age and older. Musicians, politicians, biographers, writers, performers…in some cases I’ve by- passed the life’s work and gone straight to the life story, as if to say ‘I don’t care what you’ve done, just tell me how […]
All posts by: Angela Keane
One of the things that people who come for counselling most frequently want is a strategy or technique to help them to cope with whatever it is they’re finding difficult. Of course they do; that’s why they’ve turned to a counsellor for help. One of the more challenging but ultimately rewarding aspects of counselling is […]
Having a sense that you don’t belong is profoundly isolating. For many of us, our childhood and particularly our teenage years may have been dominated by a need to fit in, to work out and conform to the rules of whichever group we were trying to belong to. The cost of not doing so was […]
Along with the exhortations to ‘lose weight’, ‘dry out’, ‘get fit’, ‘save up’, which assail us from every direction at this time of year, come the calls to ‘clear out’. Declutter. Spring clean. To paraphrase William Morris, if it’s not beautiful or useful, dispense with it. If you haven’t worn it for a year, pass […]
Counselling is referred to by the medical profession as ‘talking therapy’, harking back to the Freudian ‘talking cure’ and, presumably, to distinguish it from drug-based therapies or more directive, technique-based approaches like CBT. Certainly, having the space to talk is part of the therapeutic benefit of counselling. Counsellors, however, while far from silent partners […]
The last few months have been traumatic for the UK population. Terror, tragedy and a political process which is throwing into relief division upon division, has left us shaken and grief-stricken. ‘Look for the helpers’, we’re told, to console ourselves in the face of each new wave of grief. And there are many helpers. Like […]
A recent episode of the BBC series ‘The Truth About…’ dealt with what it and the World Health Organisation called a 21st century health epidemic: stress (4th May, 2017). Stress, it told us, is a primal emergency reaction to a perceived threat. It is a physiological and neurological reaction in which a part of the […]
Are you menopausal? If so, how do you know and how do you feel about answering yes to that question? Or if you’re not yet, how do you feel about menopause as part of your future? As a fifty-ish year old woman, I assume I’m ‘in the change’ as my mother (and Marie Stopes, Germaine […]
How old does Jeremy Corbyn make you feel? It’s an odd question, but it’s the sort that might come up in counselling; you might make an emotional timeline to help you to understand why you feel as you do in a particular situation or relationship. I resigned from the Labour Party a couple of weeks […]
Are you happy with your body? Happy with your body as it is now, with how it functions, how it looks, how it feels? If the answer is yes, that’s brilliant, read no further. If you answered with a resounding ‘no’ or had to have a think about it, you are far from unusual. […]