All posts by: Angela Keane

The emotion of politics

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 sitting comfortably? Bodily distress and its meanings

  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. […]

A picture paints a thousand words: using photographs in counselling

Like many people, I have a peculiar relationship with cameras and photographs. I recoil when a lens is pointed in my direction and tend to avert my eyes when I’m confronted with the resulting images of myself. There are large gaps in my ‘photo history’, when I simply didn’t have a camera, or when I […]

moving on from stress and trauma

We frequently talk about being ‘stressed out’ or even ‘traumatized’ by our everyday experiences. But what distinguishes manageable ‘stress’ from something more damaging to our wellbeing and when are we mistaking being traumatized for stress? Neither stress nor trauma can be objectively nor definitively categorized. There is not a discrete set of events or circumstances […]