Counselling in Bristol
Trauma focussed therapy for those with PTSD or life affecting issues. Delivered within a caring and warm professional relationship, supporting you to explore and resolve past events and situations in order to move forwards with your life. Suitable for anyone looking to engage and work on their issues, benefitting from the combined effort and professional guidance.
This is a golden opportunity to move your life forwards, discover, heal, grow, whatever you dream of. Why not try a first meeting? If you feel the match is good then you could be starting on an important new journey!
Trauma focus
I feel trauma underlies many of the issues we deal with in adult life. Simply put, trauma is a natural response to stress that forces us to change our behaviour in order to survive. It is a mechanism to keep us safe in the dangerous environments of our ancestors. Due to the way it works, we can often be left with fears from past situations presenting themselves repeatedly at times when there really isn’t any danger. Our mind/body generalises about situations that might be close to the past times of stress and can cause a lot of overreaction. Without being addressed, we continue to react in these unhelpful ways and can actually strengthen the fearful reactions through repeat behaviours. Trauma focussed therapy helps to break these reactive behaviours, delivering healing work to the parts originally wounded, dissolving the fear reactions and helping build new healthy reactions.
Anxiety and fear
Your anxieties can be held and carefully followed back to their origin. By doing this we can untangle how your present day anxieties and fears are related to your past, and work towards dissolving the activation of them.
Sexual abuse
Sexual abuse in childhood can have castrophic effects on our ability to be intimate and maintain relationships in adult life. It can interrupt and distort behaviour into sabotaging patterns, often without being aware of what is happening. By gently exploring your history and experience of being close with people, we can create a picture of how your reactions to situations play out. From here we can form a strategy to bring healing to the parts of you that were hurt, and help the body understand it can be safe within adult relationships and intimacy.
Self Esteem
Much of our self esteem is originally developed through a healthy interactive relationship with our parents or caregivers during childhood. Interruptions, abuse or neglect during childhood creates a break in the development of self esteem. This can be addressed in therapy, changing self-defeating beliefs formed as a result of how you were treated, and creating ways to build your self esteem in adult life.
