Abuse is an action that intentionally causes harm or injures another person. The effect on a person who has been abused is devastating affecting their self-esteem, self-worth and leads to anxiety, depression and in extreme cases suicidal ideation.

Signs of emotional abuse:

• Isolation from friends and family

• Verbal abuse - insults humiliation and blaming

• Emotional manipulation and control

• Demanding of all your time

• Public embarrassement

Some of the signs of financial abuse:

Missing personal possessions

Undue duress, threat or influence on a person in connection to loans, wills, property, inheritance or other financial transactions.

Withholding money and using money against a spouse in marriage. For example, constant checking of your personal spending and receipts.

Unexplained withdrawal from accounts or taking out loans in yours or joint names without permission.

False representation, using your bank account

Unexplained lack of money or inability to maintain lifestyle.

Exploitation of your assets, using your home or car.

Power of attorney being obtained when a person has ceased to have mental capacity.

Physical abuse is when another person is deliberately agressive or violent toward another resulting in bodily injury.

Abuse in all forms causes a person to become withdrawn and quiet or angry and aggressive for no reason. They can often look unkempt or thinner with signs of being tearful, depressed and in a state of helplessness.

Therapy can help clients recover from trauma, regain licence in their lives, build up their self-confidence and self-worth and neutralise the impact of the abuser’s behaviour.

Addiction psychotherapy is a structured psychological treatment that helps individuals understand, manage, and recover from addictive behaviors by addressing both the emotional and behavioral roots of addiction.

It combines evidence-based therapies, emotional support, and coping strategies to empower people toward long-term recovery.

Core Principles of Addiction Psychotherapy

• Understanding addiction as a condition: Addiction is seen not as weakness but as a progressive psychological and sometimes physiological disorder.

• Exploring root causes: Therapy often examines past trauma, stress, or emotional pain that may have triggered addictive behaviors.

• Developing coping strategies: Clients learn healthier ways to manage cravings, stress, and triggers without relying on substances or compulsive behaviors.

• Restoring relationships: Therapy involves family or group sessions to rebuild trust and strengthen social support networks.

• Promoting long-term recovery: Psychotherapy is not just about stopping the addiction but creating sustainable lifestyle changes.

Explosive or uncontrollable anger is a maladaptive behaviour that has its origins in the past and subconscious. Therapy can help identify triggers that spark anger, help the client understand the causes and develop new skills to communicate and react in a healthier way.

Anxiety encompasses a group of mental health conditions that cause persistent or intermittent feelings of fear and dread that are disproportionate to the situation. Physical symptoms include pounding heart, sweating, tightness in the chest or stomach. It’s normal to feel nervous at times, an anxiety disorder happens when it interferes with your ability to function, you overreact, you loose control of your responses to situations.

Types of Anxiety disorders:

GAD - Generalised anxiety disorder characterised by excessive, frequent and unrealistic worry about everyday things.

Agoraphobia is an intense fear of becoming overwhelmed or unable to escape and get help. People often only feel safe in their own home, avoiding new places and unfamiliar areas.

Panic Disorder involves multiple panic attacks which happen without warning and are not due to any other mental health concern. The body has a dysregulated ‘fight or flight’ response linked to a previous negative experience.

Phobia is something that causes you to feel fear and anxiety that is so severe it consistently and overwhelmingly disrupts your life.

Social anxiety disorder - An ongoing fear of being judged negatively and / or being watched by others.

Separation anxiety disorder - Excessive anxiety when seperated from a loved one. Whilst this is somewhat normal for babies and toddlers this can affect adults and children.

Selective mutism - Refraining from talking due to fear or anxiety.

Other connected disorders but with distinct classifications are:

OCD - Obsessive compulsive disorder which occurs after a traumatic event manifesting in flash backs, anxiety, negative thoughts and beliefs.

PTSD - Post traumatic stress disorder can develop after a traumatic event and involves symptoms like flash backs, negative thoughts and beliefs and hypervigilance.

ASD - Acute stress disorder is closely related to PTSD and happens within a month of experiencing a traumatic event.

At one stage in life, we will all face the sadness of losing someone we love. We can struggle with imagining life without the other person and feel overwhelmed, as though no one else can understand the depth of sorrow or loss. Therapy helps the client to understand the stages of grief, the changing of negative thoughts and provides a path to accept what you cannot change, towards acceptance.

Bullying is a repeated, intentional and hurtful behaviour of one person or a group towards another where there is an imbalance of power. It can be physical, verbal, in person or online and it can have devastating, long lasting consequences on the victim’s future sense of self and pattern of behaviour.

Therapy helps victims and perpetrators understand the mechanisms behind the hurtful acts. It can help survivors of bullying regain self-confidence, process the trauma to neutralise its effects. For perpetrators it can help with guilt, shame and with understanding the effect their actions had on others.

Depression is characterised by persistent low mood and the loss of interest in activities you used to enjoy.

Signs you might be depressed:

• Feeling hopeless,

• You have pervasive negative and dark thoughts,

• You feel fatigued (sleeping too much or too little),

• You feel Irritable or guilt ridden

• You are engaging in troublesome habits or using drugs or alcohol to cope

• You are experiencing eating dysregulation,

• You feel sad, have foggy thinking or lack of focus

or

• You have suicidal ideation

SAD - Seasonal affective disorder - Low mood affected by the seasons which often starts late autumn and winter.

PMDD - Premenstrual dysphoric disorder is a severe form of PMS with significant depression and anxiety symptoms that occue the week before the period starts and improves when menstruation begins.

Bi-polar disorder - Extreme swings in mood between depressive and manic states which can either manifest with a short duration between episodes or longer lasting episodes of depression or mania.

During periods of depression suffers experience lethargy, overwhelming feelings of worthlessness and sometime thoughts of suicide.

In a manic phase, sufferers will feel wired, behave impulsively and frenetically, have high energy, often experience sleeplessness and periods of forgetting to eat, putting forward a flurry of new ideas and ambition.

Therapy can help.

Moving country or job, away from family and close friends can be isolating and stressful. Speaking to a therapist can help combat negative thinking and help with feelings that help with integration.

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Personality disorders represent a complex and enduring pattern of inner experience and behaviour that deviates markedly from the expectations of an individual’s culture. These patterns manifest across cognition, affectivity, interpersonal functioning, and impulse control, often leading to significant distress or impairment. Psychotherapy remains the cornerstone of treatment for personality disorders, aiming to improve functioning and quality of life.

Therapy can help address the effects of extreme anxiety and stress in the workplace due to :

• Unrealistic demands made on an individual through unreasonable workload. The more you do, the more you are assigned to do, never ending, unachievable goals.

• Uneven work life balance with no time to spend with friends or family, rest or doing anything that brings personal joy.

• Toxic work environment - bullying by an individual or group in the workplace, discrimination, micromanagement, unfair pay or commissions/bonuses

• Burnout - unable to continue to work due to severe mental and physical exhaustion leading to fatigue, lack of drive and low mood

• Impostor syndrome - Perfectionist tendencies, focusing on mistakes not achievements, a feeling you will mess up causing anxiety.

We can help individuals or couples address psychological or emotional issues impacting their sex life of sexual self-identity.

• Commonly treated issues:

• Low sexual desire

• Erectile dysfunction

• Painful sex

• Difficulty with orgasm

• Issues relating to gender and sexuality

• Compulsive sexual behaviours

• Kink

• Sexual trauma

When difficulties with relating are persistent and keep us stuck in a negative pattern of anger, loneliness and disappointment. It’s time to get help. Therapy helps to put an end to being misunderstood. It can help the tendency to blame relationship conflict on others and running from one relationship to the next expecting things to be different.

Healthy relating is a skill that can be learnt. Our behaviour in relationships is often rooted in our past history, how we were treated as children and how out parents were in relationship. Looking at attachment styles and inner child work can be illuminating.

We are all ‘good enough’ so why are we so hard on ourselves? Having a low self-esteem or self-worth prevents us from moving forward out of the fear that no one will accept us or we will fail.

Therapy helps understand our inner voice which is often highly critical but can also be informative. In therapy, we explore our shadows and go deep into the subconscious to identify the origins of negative thinking which is found in past experience.

The aim is to challenge the inner critic and find a healthier affirmative pattern of thinking.

Sometimes we struggle to understand who we really are and what we want from life. Our outward behaviour with others (persona) might be at odds with how we feel inside and this can leave us feeling incomplete, socially exhausted, indecisive and underconfident.

Therapy helps us make the journey to the authentic self by identifying who we were at birth, before life left its imprint. Being sure of who you are, realising your self-worth and simply knowing what makes you happy, brings a sense of calm and relief.

Stress is a response that helps us gain alertness and take action when in danger and it can be helpful when limited, to allow us to meet a challenge. However, modern life stressors which are not inherently dangerous such as, job interviews, public speaking, running late or family issues for example, can leave us feeling unnecessarily stressed and strung out, for an extended period of time.

When stress becomes ‘acute’ and prolonged there is a dysregulation in the automatic bodies ‘fight flight’ response which is a physical reaction to a perceived threat and prepares the body to confront or runaway to safety. This response is triggered by hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which cause increased heart rate, faster breathing, increased alertness, blood diversion and muscle tension. There is a tremendous negative effect on the body and mind.

Therapy can help reduce the maladaptive flight or fight response, techniques such as meditation, breathing work to calm the body. Getting to the origins of ‘fear’ and understanding that we are no longer under threat has a positive effect on the mind, lessening overthinking and catastrophising which in turn affects the physical response and vice versa.