LK Counselling I see every person as a unique individual who will react to difficult life events in their own way. There is no right or wrong, or degree of distress which should or should not merit counselling.
If you are hurting to a point that it is affecting how you experience your daily life and relationships, then that is a good enough reason to allow yourself the opportunity to have counselling and work through the difficult issues causing your pain. One in four of us will experience ill mental health in a given year but very few will get help to recover. We know that there were just over 6,500 suicides in the UK and Irish Republic in 2014. Having a mental health problem can be devastating to the person experiencing it and can have an impact on friends, families, colleagues, and the community they live in and even on the economy of the country they live in
https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/publication-download/fundamental-facts-about-mental-health-2015
http://www.samaritans.org/about-us/our-research/facts-and-figures-about-suicide
Depression
We all go through spells of feeling down, but when you’re depressed you feel persistently sad for weeks or months, sometimes even years, rather than just a few days.
Some people still think that depression is trivial and not a genuine health condition. Depression is a real illness with real symptoms, and it’s not a sign of weakness or something you can “snap out of” by “pulling yourself together”.
The causes can be a mixture of life events, ill health, family history, lifestyle choices, giving birth and loneliness. The good news is that with the right treatment and support, most people can make a full recovery.
Anxiety
Anxiety is a feeling of unease, such as worry or fear that can be mild or severe.
Everyone has feelings of anxiety at some point in their life. For example, you may feel worried and anxious about sitting an exam or having a medical test or job interview.
Feeling anxious is sometimes perfectly normal. However, when that anxiety becomes more constant it can affect how a person functions on a daily basis.
Bereavement and Loss
Loss can be experienced when we enter a new stage in our lives such as our children leaving home, losing a job, suffering a severe and/or life threatening illness.
Bereavement
Bereavement is a special loss felt through death. It is natural to feel sadness, anger, denial, and shock as a result of the death. These feelings which can be very confusing to experience can last weeks or months and to a lesser degree beyond that time.
Different circumstances around the death such as a sudden death or the death of a child, can significantly affect how a person grieves. If a person has experienced significant loss, trauma or bereavement previously, it can also make it more difficult to work through the grief felt. I have specific experience working with complex grief and grief experienced by miscarriage, stillbirth and the death of a child.
Trauma
We experience trauma as a result of witnessing or possibly being told about a disturbing or life threatening event such as assault, abuse, major illness or natural disasters. Generally we can recover from trauma over a few weeks but sometimes we continue to see vivid images, flashbacks and sensations, nightmares and other difficult and unpleasant side effects. This long term trauma can seriously affect how we function and requires experienced therapists to work with the person affected.
I can now offer EMI (Eye Movement Integration) which works with trauma memory which has become “stuck” in the short term, to integrate it and process it into long-term term memory and so the memory can be recalled as an event from the past, but does not have the same physical and emotional impact as when recalled as though still in the present.
Relationships
We have relationships with people we work with, live with, in our community. How we relate can have a great impact on how we sustain or break relationships, how we feel about ourselves, and how we feel about others.
Searching for You
Sometimes we don’t have a specific life event that we want to look at in counselling; more that we feel the need to search for who we are or who we feel we want to be.
Please call or email me to discuss the particular difficulty you are looking for help with. If it is not an area that I work with, I am happy to try and help you find another therapist or support a referral to other mental health services.