Blog
Autumn update
Autumn update One of the most helpful practices I use is also one of the most simple ones: taking a moment to breathe and checking in with myself. How am I doing? how does my body feel and what is it telling me? am I heading in the right direction in my life or have I...
About self-care
Self-care is a really personal and individual thing. Each person has different needs, preferences, commitments, and challenges and there’s no one-size-fits-all formula that will be useful for everyone. So here’s my two-pennies worth and an example of a self-care chart. It’s a circle because there’s no hierarchy; each item serves a different function.
Returning from holidays
Returning from holidays Returning from holidays can be (often is!) challenging and even daunting. After spending days/weeks away mostly doing what we want and like to do - as opposed to what we should and need to do - then it takes some effort to readjust back to...
The journey
The Journey Changing our lives is one of the hardest things possible. We work so hard to gain some sense of stability, security, and safety that it can be unthinkable to leave it all behind and risk some unknown pathway that may or may not succeed. It's hard enough...
Trauma recovery & empowerment
Trauma recovery & empowerment One of the biggest issues with trauma experiences is that they affect people's sense of autonomy. As a result of trauma people often feel out of control and they might lose the connection with their own source of power. That's why...
Processing and Integration in Therapy
There’s hardly any way of knowing how long a process will take to run its course or when it will be finished. Usually it’s not until a while later, when time has passed and created some distance and perspective that we are able to look back and realise that a process has ended, what we learned, and how it changed us. At the time of its happening all of our attention tends to be directed at completing the task at hand, managing the situation as best we can, solve problems, find solutions, survive, and hopefully also thrive.
Offering help and support to others
Feeling helplessness by witnessing others’ difficulties can happen often and is a type of mirroring, or echoing of their experience inside of us. That’s connected with the idea of empathy and the kind of sensitivity that enables us to tap into the emotional experience of others. However, it can also originate from an embodied memory or experience, triggered by witnessing others in a difficult state which somehow reminds us of what we felt at a given point in the past.
So bearing all this in mind, what’s useful to remember when offering help to others?