Anxiety is a physiological response to our experiences and the world around us. It can have a wide-ranging impact on our physical and emotional wellbeing. Building an understanding of what physically happens within our own body when feeling anxious can be helpful in exploring our own strategies for managing symptoms.

Reduced motivation levels, fatigue, feelings of isolation, numbness, and a lack of joy or hope are just some of the symptoms associated with depression or low mood. It is not unusual for individuals to respond to such feelings by seeking relief through self-medication, e.g., alcohol/drugs, exercise, or self-harm. Medication is often offered by GP services and can be helpful for some people.

A Person-Centred Approach is grounded in building an accepting and supportive relationship within which to explore issues you might have difficulty exploring in other relationships. You will be listened to and be provided with a supportive space to experience companionship as you explore feelings which can evoke fear or despair.

A Trauma-Informed Approach to therapy is not specialist Trauma Therapy; instead, it is away of ensuring emotional safety for clients to explore the impact of difficult life-experiences. It is important not to re-traumatise clients during therapy, therefore a trauma-informed psychotherapist will be mindful of helping a client to pace their work together, deepening their understanding of how to maintain their emotional wellbeing in day-to-day life.

How we grieve is an intensely personal and individual process; however, we often perceive there are expectations for us to behave in a certain way or to have ‘dealt with it’ within a certain timeframe.

Grief is not confined to responding to the death of loved ones, we can find a need to grieve many losses and changes - life doesn’t always go to plan and decisions can be taken out of our control.

Therapy offers a space to build acceptance of what has been lost, finding ways to process the emotional pain and work out how the future might look. It is true that we cannot reverse the loss, however we can work towards building understanding what we might need to help ourselves grow through the despair we experience.

Literature, including fiction/non-fiction, poetry, articles and even TV/film/music, can be incredibly helpful within the therapy room and beyond. Most approaches to using such resources in therapy seek to prescribe texts judged to be helpful to clients; my approach is slightly different. As a Person-Centred practitioner, I maintain that what comes from within your own inner self can be the most relevant starting point for you as a client. Having studied Literature to post-graduate level prior to training as a therapist, I am equipped to support you as you explore how your relationship with books etc could benefit your sense of emotional wellbeing.

If you are someone who gravitates towards literature and notices that feelings, thoughts and reflections affect you at a deeper level through your reading, it may be that bringing your reading experiences into the therapy room could help you to connect with aspects of yourself as you explore your emotional world. For some, the freedom to bring texts which they closely connect with can be a helpful way to begin therapy.