Hi I’m Lizzie, founder of Compass Counselling & Psychotherapy and a qualified psychotherapist. I’d like to welcome you to my blog ‘Mind your Head’. Here I will share some useful articles with you that will hopefully be worth reading whether you are currently in therapy, interested in therapy related issues or you simply enjoy reading up on all matters of health and wellbeing.
As a trained professional, I have had to sit in the client’s chair for many hours over the years. Receiving personal therapy has been a cornerstone of my training. I have faith in therapy, and continue to dedicate myself to both professional and personal development. I have received good and bad therapy, both have been valuable learning curves and have helped shaped the therapist that I am today.
I never really had much therapy before embarking on my career in it. As I settled into the client’s chair for the first time, I was slightly nervous about the prospect of talking about myself for a full 50 minutes. Yet I sat with a quiet confidence that I was there to merely satisfy an educational requirement, a tick box exercise if you will. How wrong I was. It only took a few sessions for me to unravel myself and see that there was quite a lot of work to do. I’d often leave sessions, sit in my car for a bit staring into space in pure amazement, wondering how I had got this far in life being totally oblivious to the power of the unconscious mind? I find the very process of therapy amazing. The profound experience of multiple aha moments as your self-awareness expands is difficult to describe, but it’s as if a light gets switched on in your head and heart for the first time. And just when you think you’ve reached the peak and enjoy the view, you realise you’re in fact standing on a whole mountain range. Like climbing, therapy takes hard work. It also takes commitment and courage, but the exhilaration when you reach certain points is worth the effort. Making a positive difference to your life is invaluable.
I feel blessed I found psychotherapy and I wonder what my life would be like now, had I not learned to think this way and affect positive behavioural change. There are no magic tricks involved, it’s ultimately about having awareness. They say knowledge is power, well self-knowledge is life changing. I never get bored of seeing my clients make significant psychological connections and alter their lives for the better either. It can be an inspiring and dynamic process and one that I’m honoured to be part of. Some people think that psychotherapy is something you only engage in when you are at breaking point. While many people do wait until things become totally unmanageable, ideally, people seek help before that; it’s a much easier road back.
Psychotherapy involves talking to a trained therapist, either one-to-one, in a group or with your partner as part of couple therapy. It allows you to look deeper into your problems and worries, and deal with troublesome habits and a wide variety of issues. People attend therapy to try and combat mild complaints, right through to the more challenging diagnosed mental health problems. No problem is too big or small.
Psychotherapy usually involves talking, but sometimes other creative methods may be utilised, for instance writing exercises or projective drawing. Interventions used ought to be done so according to your personal preferences. My therapeutic method as a pluralist, pays close attention to your chosen ways of working, and I make a point of addressing this regularly. I don’t believe in just prescribing the same approach to everyone. People have different needs at different times, and it’s crucial to be attuned to these variances.
How do you know if you need therapy?
Some signs include, but are not limited to:
- You’re in need of support
- You are struggling to deal with an issue that doesn’t seem to be going away
- Talking to friends and family isn’t bringing relief, or you would rather talk to a non-biased third party
- People who care about you have advised you to seek help
- Everyday life is affected by impaired functioning (e.g. eating, sleeping, hygiene and grooming, social situations, going to work etc)
- Relationships are suffering and under strain, or you find yourself repeating unhealthy relationship patterns
- You feel sad, anxious, stressed, depressed, confused, hopeless or helpless quite a lot
- You have experienced a traumatic event(s) at any point in your life and a) find yourself thinking about it a lot or b) are experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress (PTSD)
- Certain behaviours, emotions and/or thoughts are troublesome
- You feel like you can’t cope or perhaps feel the discomfort of a build-up of pressure
- Identifying better coping strategies would benefit you
- You’re experiencing physical symptoms that have no known medical cause to your GP or health provider (psychosomatic)
- You think that your quality of life could be improved but you need a third party to help you achieve it
I hope this article has been of use to some of you. There will be more to follow soon, on various topics that might pique your interest.
Take care for now and whatever you do, please mind your head! Lizzie
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