About you Counselling and Psychotherapy
Bullying
Most of us are familiar with the idea that bullying occurs in schools. Many of us will have personal stories of witnessing or experiencing bullying while children.
However, bullying also takes place in the workplace, within families or within sporting clubs among friends.
How I deal with a client who seeks help with such an issue will depend upon the age of the client, where the bullying is occurring and the severity of the effects.
I also provide assistance to companies and organizations who have had difficulties with bullying behaviour among their staff providing training and concrete verifiable steps to eliminate the behaviour from the organization.
Bullying behaviour can do immeasurable damage to the reputation of a company which can find itself before the courts and the subject of unwanted media attention.
Anxiety
All of us will have experienced anxiety at some point in our lives. In reality it is a normal healthy response to stressful events that happen from time to time such as the ending a relationship, changing jobs, or having money problems.
It is natural to find that we feel physical symptoms such as churning in your stomach, difficulty sleeping and concentrating. When the triggering event is resolved everything usually settles down and we go back to normal … or so it should.
However sometimes we have a response to a normal stressor which is much greater than one would expect … Others might feel that we are “making a mountain out of a mole hill” We might be described as a “Drama queen”
If the Frequency intensity or duration of our anxiety is greater than what we expect then this might be considered clinically significant and require outside help and guidance.
Let’s be clear, anxiety disorders can be quite debilitating, however the good news is that they can be managed with the proper professional guidance.
Sound like you? Then you could benefit from therapy.
Trauma
Trauma is a person’s emotional response to a very distressing experience which was unexpected and for which the person has no similar reference template to create a gauged response to.
Few of us will go through life without experiencing trauma of some kind. An event which causes trauma will typically be very sudden and unexpected. It will involve a real or perceived threat of bodily injury or death either to yourself or to another. There is typically a feeling of a loss of control.
A traumatic event will undermine a persons feeling of safety in the world and they will often say that “The world suddenly felt more dangerous from then on” leaving the feeling that something terrible could happen at any moment.
Examples of traumatic events can be car accidents, a physical attack, sexual assault and the unexpected loss of a loved one.
There are a variety of techniques to deal with trauma and I tailor my clinical effort to respect the clients life experience and specific traumatic event/s.
Abuse
Abuse is best understood as the misuse of power one person has over another.
The power imbalance can be as a result of age, as in the case of children or the elderly, or because of status, gender, religion or indeed anything which creates the potential of imbalance.
Whatever the nature of the abuse it causes pain and emotional or psychological distress. The intention of the abuser is to harm and or control the survivor. There are as many kinds of abuse as there are power imbalances but the ones that have most prominence are sexual, physical, emotional, elder, and financial abuse.
For a long time after the abuse has stopped it is common for survivors to continue to have distressing after-affects. These often include anger, shame, depression, trauma as well as difficulty in forming relationships.
If you have experienced any of the above, then therapy has proven the most reliable long-term way of coming to terms with and leaving behind these difficult issues. You have come to the right place.