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 […]
Category Archives: anxiety
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. […]
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 […]
Of the range emotions that people explore in counselling, many feel most afraid and ashamed of anger – their own anger as well as that of others. Anger makes us feel out of control, unlike ourselves. It is an emotion that we believe needs to be ‘managed’; even very young children talk of having ‘anger issues’, as though […]
Statistics can be terrifying. The news from Cancer Research UK that the proportion of those expected to develop cancer at some point in their lives has ‘risen’ from one in three to half of those born after 1960 has an apocalyptic ring to it (Sarah Boseley, The Guardian Society, 4th Feb, 2015). Hidden in the […]