In the latest episode of Phoebe Waller Bridges’ astounding comedy Fleabag, (BBC1, 25th March) the eponymous heroine finds herself in one half a Catholic confessional. Reeling with grief for her mother and best friend and desire for the man on the other side of the confessional box, she utters a lament that sounded to […]
Today I received a call from my son while he was at school: he was feeling ill and wanted to come home. We went through the usual to-ing and fro-ing with the gatekeepers at school reception and my own maternal gatekeeper (‘is he really ill enough to stay off school?’) before he was allowed […]
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 […]
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 […]