It’s not you, it’s your brain.

Anxiety is an emotion that often creates internal turmoil and chaos.  Anxiety is a natural and normal response to your brain’s interpretation of danger/pressure.  Everyone feels anxious from time to time, but when the anxious feelings don’t go away it can make life very hard to cope with.  Counselling can support you through exploring what is emotionally triggering you. Gaining a greater understanding of the neuroscience of anxiety, learning new ways to manage it and understanding what is happening in your body and your brain can be empowering. You can calm your nervous system and rewire your anxious brain. Fear and anxiety is lowered, bringing you to a place of calm, safety, and well-being.

Depression impacts how we feel, think and act. Feeling sad, down, overwhelmed, a feeling of emptiness, guilty, loss of interest or pleasure in what you used to enjoy are some of the emotions you may be experiencing. Thinking negative thoughts over and over. You may withdraw, stop going out, and feel ‘shut down’. Physically feeling tired and run down, disturbed sleep patterns, loss or change in appetite, weight gain or loss. Unexpressed buried emotions lie dormant until triggered. Counselling can help support you through identifying the root cause and how your life is being negatively impacted.  Working with me, we can explore what changes will help you become ‘unstuck’ and how to reconnect to your authentic self.

Low self-esteem is the opinion we have of ourselves,  a healthy self esteem is when we feel positive about ourselves and positive about life in general. When our self esteem is low we tend to see ourselves and life in a more negative way. This can cause a lack of confidence, low resilience, fear of judgement and rejection . People with low self-esteem often feel unlovable, awkward, a failure, often feeling ‘not good enough’ through listening and believing the harsh inner critic voice that maybe running the show! Adult low self esteem often has its roots in the way we were raised in childhood.  Do you ‘people please’ and give away all your time and energy to your loved ones and to the world, leaving yourself feeling depleted and empty? This can cause anxiety, depression, and the feeling of emptiness. Counselling can help you identify and recognize your suffering. Through reframing your ‘belief system’ and exploring your habitual patterns of behaviour, gently challenging your thinking process, you can begin to identify what your needs are, build a healthy relationship with yourself, and the world, in a positive way that enables you to experience calm, serenity and inner peace.

The Sonas programme is a therapeutic communication activity for older people, which focuses on sensory stimulation in the belief that the senses are the gateway to communication. This programme is of benefit to older people with cognitive differences with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, advanced Parkinson’s disease and certain types of stroke’.

Someone once said that when you love someone with dementia you lose them twice. Caring for someone with dementia is heart-breaking, exhausting, frustrating and an often lonely experience. Alzheimer’s is known as ‘the long goodbye’. Seeing your loved one suffer from this disease and caring for their needs and new behaviour e.g. sundowning, can leave you running on empty, emotionally and physically.  Your self-care and needs often go out the window as the needs of the person you are caring for always come first. Carers are the unsung heroes of the world.  I have completed the ‘Understanding Dementia’ course from the University of Tasmania which has given me greater insight into this complex disease.  Coming to counselling can give you space to be you again and where you can express how you are truly feeling. To be heard with compassion and to have sacred space just for you. I understand how difficult it may be for you to attend counselling in person so I offer online counselling as well as face to face counselling as an alternative way for you to have emotional support during this difficult time.