About 12% of older adults are estranged from their adult children so we are talking about a sizeable number of people – the same number of people who are left-handed – and there are many reasons why we might decide to separate from our family. In this blog article I am going to explore the theme of estrangement and how therapy can help us to heal from the experience of difficult family backgrounds.

Anxiety feels terrible. It can range from jittery skittishness all the way through to a full-on panic attack that makes us think we’re going to die, suffocate, do something outlandish/wrong or have a heart attack/stroke. We can also get stuck in loops of self-criticism as we tell ourselves we should be able to control our anxiety, then find ourselves getting anxious about being anxious and spiralling from there in an endless, fretful, hall of mirrors. In this blog post I’ll explain the purpose of anxiety, why it’s actually trying to protect us, and why we need to learn to make friends with it and play with anxiety, rather than let it rob us of the life we want to lead.

If you think of yourself as a “born worrier” or as someone who has “worried all my life” then this blog is for you. Excessive, persistent uncontrollable, intrusive worrying is often referred to as Generalised Anxiety and it can really mess with our body, heads, and lives as we try and cope with a constant state of stress, fear and nervousness. You may think that worrying is what motivates you to get things done, helps you to solve a difficulty in your life, prepares you for the worst, or shows the world how much you care. However, here are five ways that worrying makes things worse not better…