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.

“CBT is only a sticking plaster, it doesn’t go deep and doesn’t create long-lasting change. CBT is delivered by emotionless barely adult robots. CBT blames me as the client when I don’t feel any better. CBT feels mechanical and superficial, it doesn’t see me in all my complexity. CBT doesn’t do emotions or warmth. CBT isn’t interested in relationships it’s all tools and technique….”

In the second part of this two-part blog post, I’ll bust some of the common myths about CBT and explore where they might have come from and why.

“CBT is only a sticking plaster, it doesn’t go deep and doesn’t create long-lasting change. CBT is delivered by emotionless barely adult robots. CBT blames me as the client when I don’t feel any better. CBT feels mechanical and superficial, it doesn’t see me in all my complexity. CBT doesn’t do emotions or warmth. CBT isn’t interested in relationships it’s all tools and technique….”

These are some of the many myths that you’ll hear about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy if you do a quick Google on the subject. My favourites are the expletive littered Mumsnet ones. In this two-part blog post I’ll bust some of the common myths about CBT and explore where they might have come from and why.

“If only I’d done X instead of Y. My life was so much better back then, how did I end up like this? What’s wrong with me? Why is this happening to me? It’s my fault that I am in this mess, I’m a terrible person and everyone hates me, I should have known better, I’ve messed up my life, things will never change…” Does this sound like you? You may be ruminating and it will be taking a serious toll on your physical and mental health.

In this blog post I offer some ways out of the rumination trap and explore how therapy can help with rumination when it shows up in your life.

It’s really hard to be kind to ourselves. We are brought up in a competitive culture that tells us to strive harder, do better and to sacrifice our physical and emotional wellbeing in order to achieve (outward) success. Burnout, busy-ness and overload are almost badges of pride. Tearing each other down to get ahead, whether that’s in the workplace, neighbourhood, politics, academia or via a social media pile-on is simply seen as the “way things are.”

It’s no wonder that self-compassion is seen as somehow soft or self-indulgent; if we’re too busy wafting around being kinder to ourselves then someone else is going to grab that job/gadget/partner/piece of the pie and leave us in the dust. In this blog post I explore some of the common obstacles to self-compassion and how in fact, being kinder to ourselves sets us up to function much more healthily in the toxic systems we live within.

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…