Cheltenham Counselling Blog

Threat or opportunity? Retirement is little discussed meaningfully as it looms. Usually it is simply treated as a date and I have not come across any business that prepares it's staff at any level from board-level to shop floor, partner to administrator, for...

FAITH, SPIRITUALITY, PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY.This is the first in a series of explorations reconciling these purposeful four brothers and sisters.The core text of this reconciliation, simply because this is the one with which I am most familiar, is the Christian...

MAKING A DIFFERENCEHow quickly therapy will take to make a difference will vary from client to client. What is certainly true is that the simple process of talking in a therapeutically trained environment can of itself make a...

THE KNOWN When clients come into my counselling room it is usually because life in some way has ceased to become manageable. They have become aware that something is not right; they cannot understand responses and reactions. The responses may be anger, chaotic, deep...

It certainly does. I suppose I would say that wouldn't I? But don't take my word for it. We have a social brain. That means we learn by experience. If we have unhelpful experiences then we are left with unhelpful assumptions about life as recorded by the synaptic...

Did you know that 95% of perception of ourselves in the world is shaped by the time we are 3? Therefore becoming older can be difficult; maturing physically into an older person from teens to twenties, thirties and into old age. - Childhood...

There has been some publicity recently around some research that suggests that there is no such thing as the true self.  The true self is the Holy Grail of counselling; it represents that sense of self wherein we are truly able to be ourselves in every...

There is a significant debate between Counsellors both between themselves and with recovering addicts on whether counselling is appropriate or helpful to those with addictions. Addicts who are struggling to conquer their cycle explain that counsellors...

Psychotherapy and Counselling  began with Freud.  Days before Neuroscience.  Freud creatively created a way of thinking about others to help them to hep themselves.  there was no proof for these theories simply that some people reported getting better as a...

Shame Fear Counselling Understanding shame is a core element in discerning the ability to relate to oneself and others. Shame is an inevitable consequence of our early life nurturing. We understand and perceive ourselves in a world and to the extent  we...

There is so much discussion on whether Counselling works, makes a difference to clients lives, whether there is any evidence and it is certainly one that most clients will ask in one form or another during the first session. In this counsellors...

Addiction and Counselling is such a rock and a hard place subject. Whether it is alcohol, pornography, smoking, drugs the addiction is effectively a self-medication in the majority of cases against pain. So often it is effective until things go even more...

During any single year 25% of the adult population will suffer from a Mental Health difficulty. 10% will suffer from a clinical depression sometimes combined with difficulties. 33% of the CEO's of the Worlds top 500 companies will at some point...

One of the main objectives of Counselling is to help clients to notice how they are feeling, that the noticing should be accurate (in other words not influenced by inaccurate assumptions that are based on past unhelpful experiences) and to express those feelings...

I find it very difficult not to look away from the television when the horror of Aleppo, Syria Generational Impact. The trauma that is being forced onto the children is so hard to look at. When I say 'look away' I mean in every sense: visually, emotionally,...

When clients arrive in the counselling room they are there because they are finding life difficult to deal with, they have found that life has stopped working as well as it has done previously, or that they are feeling very hopeless indeed. Explaining what has brought...

In writing about trauma there can be a danger that the more extreme forms in the news can appear belittled. Trauma is not the same as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which is usually, but not always, the extreme of an individual's experience. It came first to public...

There is a counselling argument that can be made based on a proposition that all non-chemical psychological disturbance can be traced to the degree of fear which is held within a life. This could be analysed as the extent to which an adrenalin impulse is present or...

In one form or another fear shapes who and how we are. Or, put another way, where we have not experienced love from conception (yes, that’s conception) we are left fearful and we defend against the source of the fear, the consequences of the fear and the felt emotions...

The baby is born but even by that stage the brain may have experienced many experiences from it’s mother reacting to events and generating a bio-chemical response. Imagine the brain after birth as a simple sponge of experience.  All the baby knows about life is what...

There seem to be so many involved in Mental Health that treat the human mind as something to be fixed prescriptively as though it were a machine in which nuts and bolts could be tightened or oiled or perhaps even have some pistons replaced. Yet the generally accepted...

A child given the good enough start will trust.  The bundle of baby birthed into primeval fear should, in a good enough home, be comforted and come to trust through the giving of love.  Love protects from the harsh reality of the world; it creates the safe environment...

This is a hotly contested debate between some who have had one form of training and others who have a had a different form of training.  The differentiation made by one professional organisation is based on the length of the counselling/psychotherapy. It does not...

I am reading a thought provoking book by Barbara Taylor.  She uses the word madness to apply to discussion of mental illness from which she suffered appallingly and has had considerable Psychoanalysis. Madness is not a fashionable word but it has certainly mad me...

I was reading an interview with Philip Zimbardo an eminent psychologist discussing the impact of absent fathers and the response from boys: to escape into alternative, usually technology based, worlds. 40% of marriages do not survive, many of them with children who...

Research, statistics and newspapers constantly tell us in headline language that depression among children from as young as 5 is increasing significantly year on year. I believe that this is hardly surprising when set alongside the statistics for single parent...

One in four of us suffer from anxiety and/or depression says the latest mental health research.  I don’t think it is that surprising given the pressures of life generally, family and work or the absence of each or all of them.  Perhaps we are just becoming more...

A study of 6,000 breast fed babies in Brazil following 3,500 of them through to 30+ years has produced evidence that breast fed babies across a whole spectrum, in a sample where bias from other factors has been taken into account, perform better in IQ tests and have...

Shame.  One of those interesting words that seem to have a flexible use.  ‘Shame about that’ or ‘such a shame’, for example.  What does shame actually mean? Shame might be regarded as a concept.  For example: we can suffer from ‘shame’ and from ‘being shamed’.  Shame...

Some of us suffer from addictions, some of us may be prone to uncontrollable outbursts of anger, some of us may be compelled to deceive and betray. The question to my mind is why?  This question can be interpreted as a simple ‘why can’t they not be like this’.  The...

Received and well established wisdom in the fields of emotional and mental well-being tells us about the importance of a loving and trustworthy (not to say consistent) early relational environment. 50% of the brains development is shaped by the age of 12 months and...

I have just seen the most recent statistics for suicide: 6,233 in 2013.  17 people each day who have decided that death is better than living. I can only wonder at how someone may be feeling who finally arrives at that point.  Perhaps feelings of hopelessness...

Relationship, or at least to be able to give and to receive qualities that create fulfilling relationships, could be said to be the ultimate purpose for our life on earth.  It is certainly at the heart of each of the main faiths.  Many of us are pretty good at giving...