I’m just squeaking in to maintaining my blogging streak each month by writing to you today on the last day of January 2026, where I am looking back on this first month of the year and how tough it has been (and long it feels!).

Everyone I work with this month has shared a new play on the concept of “500 weeks of January” or it being “January 57th”, and I have laughed each time, because this year it really does resonate. And this sense of a long month has not been helped by the annual dose of illness that my toddler brings home in the colder seasons. In the last month, we have survived a brutal (say no more) bout of gastroenteritis, and I am presently fending off the final stages of the flu. Grateful as ever that I received the vaccine back in November 2025, this flu has been monstrous, and there is no other word for it. I dare not think of what it could have been like if I had not been fortunate enough to preempt it.

Nonetheless, I am wiped - with a busier practice this month and client numbers picking up, I have also enjoyed the concretisation of directions that I hope to take my business in over the next twelve months, including new texts, downloads and an entire website migration. Fortunately, my tech background means that I get to do all of this myself (!!), but it does take me away from writing for a while, which is where my appreciation for sharing my blog with you is renewed afresh, if not each week, certainly each month.

Over to you

So my focus this month is on the topic of illness in private practice. I’m wondering how you - the therapist - handle this? I know that my own approach to taking care of myself has evolved throughout the journey of working in private practice, with necessary modifications and tweaks throughout my experiences of serious illness, becoming a parent, managing childcare and the inevitable waves of viruses and germs.

However, looking after ourselves in private practice can be layered - as anyone who was practising during the COVID 19 pandemic will recall, both our own and our clients' physical safety and wellbeing have to be paramount - we cannot ethically continue to show up to sessions when we are fluey or have an illness that we could pass on to someone else. I am fortunate to work exclusively online, and so this issue impacts me less than others, but it is a serious consideration for those who hire rooms and see clients in person.

Similarly, this is a resource-hungry career - I have found out since the early days of chronic pregnancy insomnia, that performing as a professional counsellor and delivering the quality of therapy and care that I pride myself on is not something that I can do if I am under-resourced in terms of energy, health and sleep. Flu and toddlerhood have been rude awakenings to me as to just how little sleep and energy a person can wake up with in the morning, and it has taken no insignificant effort to set up systems and methods of resting and self-care that allow me to continue to function and work effectively in the event of a disturbed night or feeling unwell.

This is partially what limits me to currently "only" offering three days of client-facing time per week. I would dearly like to do more - as I used to face-to-face from my old office in Bristol - however, I now know that I can reliably commit to a certain number of well-resourced, attentive and attuned sessions per week, and no more. I intend that my clients are only as aware of my life around the edges of sessions as I choose to make them, to remain focused on their process - and this is one of my methods for doing so.

Helping therapists manage practice when sick

It strikes me that this kind of decision-making and setup is really something that arrives in our practice after years of trial and error, of testing availability and timings of sessions, of client subgroups and work types. I take it for granted that I know how to do this now, as I have been through this process over the last decade and a half of private practice - and so I believe it is incumbent upon me to support colleagues and other therapists as they seek to do the same. No doubt there is a book in there (there almost always is, as my hard drive will attest), but I’m considering also offering this as part of my Therapy for Therapists offering.
​
I truly see therapists as an underserved community - ironically, but perhaps somewhat predictably - in the landscape of mental health care. Due to stigma, due to economic and time pressures (few people have a “to-spend” list like a therapist with CPD, insurance, membership, subscriptions etc) and I know as well as anyone in this field how hard it can be to prioritise the self when there are so many responsibilities and tasks to take care of in a timely, ethical and professional way.

So I come back to the question for you, therapist - how do you handle your workload, client lists, therapy responsibilities, costs, when you are sick, unwell, tired or otherwise underresourced?

I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Well, that went quickly.

I’m sitting here on my son’s final day of childcare for the year in what will almost certainly be the last period of uninterrupted writing (and perhaps thinking) time that I will have for the next few weeks, so I’m doing what I would encourage my clients to do - I’m taking this space and time for me.

I will begin this piece by admitting that I’m feeling a bit tired. 2025 has been a year of incredible ups and downs for me outside of work, and I’m very much happier to be sitting here writing this from my desk at home rather than the hospital bed where I spent far too many weeks at the end of 2024. It feels a little self-indulgent to revisit that memory (not to mention unpleasant), but even the most cursory comparisons between my lead-up to the end of 2024 and 2025 reveal that this year is treating me much better.

Sepsis recovery

This time last year, I was in the very, very early stages of recovering from sepsis with months of strong antibiotics ahead of me, even after weeks of powerful intravenous ones. It was truly a miserable experience. January, February, March and April passed me by in a haze of medication and a PTSD diagnosis. It’s safe to say, I never want to go back to that place again. And here, almost a year on, I’m very fortunate to be able to note that I have not experienced any recurrence of sepsis and am approaching the one-year point from which likelihood of recurrence statistics become much more favourable. However, I did, and still do, struggle with post-sepsis syndrome and an ongoing impact on my physical mobility from the damage done to my foot by the infection that spread from my joints, to my bones and into my bloodstream.

Being chronically unwell is not totally new to me - I have had spondyolysthesis since my teens - however, having it be physically noticeable that I was unwell was. This time last year, I could not leave my house, go upstairs, walk or move around without a wheelchair. It was incredibly frustrating to lose mobility and autonomy in a flash, and the psychological impact will probably always be with me to some degree.

Grateful reflections

The only thing that I wanted when I was in the hospital was to be back with my son. He was 16 months old and a late walker, so he required a great deal of parental input. Then, when I got home, all I wanted was to be able to stand to pick him up, which he solicited constantly. It broke my heart to be unable to do that. Then, once I could do that, I desperately wanted to be able to walk him in his stroller; however, as the weather improved, I became more able to do it for short periods, using the stroller for support. Finally, what I wanted more than anything else was to be able to lift him out of his crib in the night when he cried and wanted comfort. It was the most heartwrenching feeling I’ve ever had to hear him call for me and to be unable to soothe him in the way that he needed.

Now, thankfully, I can do all of these things. Not without pain, not without consequences on my mobility for the next day or even week, but I can do them. And just typing out and recognising these things that I longed for and reflecting on how I do them instinctively now, without the angst I struggled with a year ago, makes me conscious of how the goalposts for the things that we want so very dearly change. And often we don't have the time or the inclination to reflect on just how grateful we are for them coming to pass.

Recognising how far we have come

It has made me think that it would really be useful to have some way of recognising just how far we might have travelled on a recovery journey - either physically or in terms of our mental health, or both - and how much I would have appreciated a structure to remind me of the changes that my healing body was going through. To point out to me how much it had achieved that I could be grateful for - even when there is still so much work to be done. In fact, that’s the point at which I find myself now. Even a year into my recovery, it’s still easy to stumble back into negative thoughts and feelings about why this should have happened and what I’ve missed as a result. I developed health anxiety under my umbrella PTSD diagnosis, and even now, occasionally, I will notice my hypervigilance kick in and start worrying about something that looks or feels like an old symptom that I thought had gone away.

So what better way to encourage reflection, appreciation and recognition than to write it down?

Anyone who knows me will know that I am in a serious, long-term relationship with the written word. I share the same ethos that Joan Didion did:

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

I’m guessing that there are lots of other people out there who feel the same as she did, and I do.

That by giving myself space, time and reverence for my feelings, thoughts and experiences, that I can come to know how I really feel about a thing - because if I rely on my in-the-moment, managing-101-tasks brain to do it, then it will probably struggle - because there are just too many priorities in my busy life vying for my attention at any given time.
Only by making time for myself, my thoughts, my feelings and allowing them to flow privately and freely on paper, can I summon my gratitude, so often buried under the next great want or need.

A workbook for those who are still going through it

So, for myself as much as those of you out there reading this who are also going through something challenging, I have been inspired to create something which will allow us to do just that. I’m going to create a psychotherapeutic workbook that will offer structure, reassurance, accountability and the space for quiet reflection and gratitude as we pass healing milestones and recovery targets.

It’s not a gratitude journal.

It’s a tool for figuring out how you really feel.

It will offer questions, prompts and enquiry into what the events that you’re going through really mean to you, to your past, and crucially to your future. It will encourage you to ask yourself some really difficult questions about why you might think the way you do, and illustrate what the consequences of that might be.

It’s going to be a way to access a therapeutic conversation directed by me, and delivered by you. You’re going to have the space and occasion to follow a difficult thought or feeling down a road and understand why you might have acted or be acting the way you do, and what you might be able to do to change that, if that’s what you seek.

I’m excited to offer this to you

And to myself - I know that if I had accessed a tool like this from the darkness and isolation of my physical and mental health challenges over the last year, that it would have brought me structure, a feeling of reassurance, and peace in knowing that I was paying myself and my process the due attention needed to come out the other side in the best place possible. I want to frame it so that it helps many people - the grieving, those healing and adapting to physical challenges, the new parents whose lives have changed unrecognisably, those struggling with enormous decisions, those on a mental health journey - basically anyone who has healing to do in some way, to take care of themselves and support their future wellbeing.

2026 is my year of publishing

In all honesty, I’m unlikely to get much time to sit down with this idea until January, and I find that hard. I’m full of inspiration and thoughts about what to put into this workbook in order to make it as useful and impactful as I can. And I know that I’m also reaching the tail end of my second edit of Confidential Grief*, which will be published in a few months. Clearly, I like to have a full plate.

But in the interim, I’m going to try to stay present and focus on the immediate, as I enjoy this end-of-year period with my son that I so wanted and needed this time last year.

And as I tuck him into bed on Christmas Eve, I will try to remember that previous me would have considered present-day me to be the luckiest person alive.

I must make sure I write that down...

Joyeuses fêtes
Laura x

*Confidential Grief is my latest book due for publication in early 2026. To be updated upon its release and other offerings from me, you can subscribe to my mailing list.

What is money trauma?

When we think about the concept of money trauma, we might imagine someone who has had to declare themselves bankrupt, or who has lived with homelessness, or suffers from gambling addiction. And we would be right to assume that these more extreme experiences of suffering due to a lack of money are responsible for traumatic consequences. However, I would argue that there are far more of us walking around with unconscious money trauma that is going unrecognised and potentially damaging our relationships, our careers and even our lives.

Why is it even more prevalent at Christmas?

Christmas is a time when our generosity is most visible. It is expected that we will participate in and receive transactional gifting with friends, colleagues and loved ones. Even if our gifting is not transactional, donations or charity offerings, for example, it is often visible to someone. How generous we can afford to be financially is not usually the issue - most of us can find a way to offer a gesture, favour, gift or food offering to someone in some form, no matter the size or cost - however for many of us we feel a cultural expectation of spoiling and treating others that is particularly intense at this time of year.

There are certainly many people - often parents - who worry that they are not able to provide their children with the quantity and quality of gifts that their peers may be gifting, and that comparison can lead to some complicated feelings about their worth as a parent.

It can be even more complex for the self-employed - especially counsellors and service providers

Being a self-employed person is no mean feat, and it’s not just a question of turning over enough money to keep afloat - the mechanism of transacting money with customers and clients can itself be layered in years of trauma response and shame. If you are a self-employed service provider - particularly a therapist or counsellor - it can feel even more difficult to confidently and tactfully ensure that invoices are paid and clients do not fall behind with payment for sessions due to our own loose management of financial boundaries. It can feel awkward to chase payments from people who have shared their vulnerabilities with us, and for some therapists, it leads them to leave private practice altogether.

Where does it come from?

Money trauma can arrive for any of us at any stage of life - including divorce, property repossession, redundancy or illness. Anywhere where money shows up as a means of transacting in the world or accessing services, money is also to be found. It can also stem from the environment that we grew up in and the level of exposure that we had to financial stressors, or conversations beyond our ability to understand, when we were too young to be able to do anything about them.
If you grew up in a home where money was scarce and your parents struggled to feed you, clothe you or access services, then you will almost certainly be impacted by the effects of growing up in poverty. Conversely, if you grew up in a very affluent family setting where money was always available, but required great sacrifice through the absence of one or both parents, or you were housed and schooled away from your family, then a less recognised - but no less painful - impact can be made on a person via this kind of money-influenced trauma.

Ok, I recognise some of these feelings and behaviours. Now what?

The good news about money trauma is that it’s never too late to work on. Money is a tool which we must all use to move through the world, and it is something that will always exist in some form or another, so working on how we feel about these necessary transactions is a piece of counselling work with perennial value.

• This could mean delving into why you find it so hard to chase clients for unpaid invoices, and recognising that you have internalised messages about your own financial worth that are impacting you as a professional.
• It might mean looking at what financial success really means to you, and challenging ideas that you picked up from family members or teachers.
• It might mean reassessing whether you can build resilience to retrain or change your working schedule to accommodate other activities that might not pay, but which fill you up in other ways - without panicking about a lack of financial security.

Counselling for money trauma

As a certified Trauma of Money Facilitator, I have been trained to identify and work with money trauma of myriad styles and flavours. There are activities, behaviour modifications, texts and resources which we can collaborate on to better understand and modify how you relate to money in your everyday life.

If you would like to understand more about your own money trauma, then click here to book in for a free 30-minute introductory session to discuss how we can work together to change your relationship with your financial future.

This year, my partner and I have decided to gift each other the same thing; we have purchased Oura rings with a year’s subscription to their health app to devote some energy to the project of feeling as physically well as we possibly can in 2026.

2025 - Sepsis, PTSD and losing mobility

This is off the back of a very difficult end to 2024, where I was gravely ill and hospitalised with septic shock and the ongoing impact of sepsis. It has taken me all of 2025 to return to the point where I can do many of the things that I ended 2024 with. I was on intravenous antibiotics for some weeks, followed by an incredible cocktail of medicines upon discharge from the hospital, and unfortunately, I went on to develop PTSD and health anxiety as a result of my experience.

Last year, I was lucky to spend Christmas at home with my partner and baby, but I was severely weakened by my infection and had lost the ability to walk. I was in a wheelchair for some months and then on crutches for longer. I have only really regained the ability to “walk” in the last few months, and my energy levels have begun to return to normal (though what is normal with a toddler remains to be seen!).

I remain impaired physically and cannot walk for long periods without pain. I can’t participate in exercise or sport the way I used to, and driving long distances can be difficult. My life has been profoundly changed, and so have those of my partner and child. I mention all of this to contextualise my decision to go “all-in” on this innovative health tracking device and focus so much attention on my wellbeing in 2026.

What impact on mental health?

It wouldn’t be like me to only focus on physical health, for without my brain, I am lost, and with everything that it went through over the last year, I am keen to treat it kindly and do my best to support it. Working through the PTSD of post-sepsis syndrome was difficult, and the health anxiety that came with it has now, thankfully, been processed. But I’m really interested in how this health data impacts how I feel about myself. Will it marry with the scores that Oura gives me? Will I be able to tie good mental health to certain outputs and make feeling good feel more predictable? Will having so much data at my fingertips mean that I pore over the numbers and obsess over metrics? Time will tell.

Tracking my wellbeing

I’ve had my Oura ring for a week now and have been wearing it comfortably without noticing it in my everyday tasks - bar showering or bathing my son. For me, this element is important because for health monitoring to really become something that I integrate into my routine, I’m the kind of person who really needs to not notice it. As someone who doesn’t usually wear a watch, this is where the jewellery format of this tracker piqued my interest. If I can forget that I’m doing something good for myself (until I reap the benefits), so much the better.

I’ve already had some sleep readings and activity readings that make the act of living feel a little more gamified. As a former avid gamer, I really enjoy being scored and feeling challenged to improve my numbers - so for a person who is extremely competitive with themselves, this works well! However, I can see that if our personality has a tendency to focus on this kind of data with a negative lens (i.e. our inner critic takes hold and uses this data as a means of admonishing us for our shortcomings), then I can see that this level of information could potentially be problematic.

Interaction with health anxiety

One of the principal concerns with sepsis is that the infection that has become blood-borne will have travelled to major organs, including the heart, and have begun to damage the tissues there. As I have a family history of heart issues, this is something that concerned me greatly, so the combination of this pre-awareness, coupled with the vulnerability of the situation and the worry that swirled around me in the hospital, eventually manifested in some overdeveloped concerns in my brain once I was back home and convalescing.

Developing health anxiety - even for a relatively short period, such as I experienced - was exhausting and very consuming. Fuelled by the fact that I had not recognised the grave nature of my symptoms and the shock at my diagnosis and urgent hospitalisation, did some work to undermine my confidence in my body and in my ability to recognise when it was in danger. Essentially, this and living through a deeply traumatising hospitalisation and a great deal of physical pain made me the ideal candidate for this kind of suffering.

How Oura is helping me to push back on anxious thoughts

I’m very lucky to be able to say that I am no longer struggling with this. Over time, my confidence in myself returned, and as my health improved, my belief that I would be okay eclipsed the fears that I might not. One of the ways that I decided to put data to good use in support of this recovery is to have a device do the work of monitoring my well-being for me. At the time, I began to use my old Fitbit Charge to track my heart rate. I have experienced periods of having an irregular heartbeat several times in my life, and there has usually been a precipitating factor linked with it, so when I started to notice a few off-beats, I decided that I needed something less subjective to monitor my heart whilst I waited for an appointment with my doctor.

The act of giving the task of monitoring to an unemotional, unbiased machine, such as the Fitbit or Oura ring, means that I can delegate the task of paying attention to it, and for me, it is the burden of noticing, which can feel so weighty. I cannot - naturally - always trust myself to be an unemotional, unbiased reader of my own data. But I can trust these devices to do so (to a degree, I would always advocate that a medical professional would be the ideal data interpreter, but they can be difficult to come by), and they are available at any time to respond to my needs, truly what a brain with an anxious propensity can benefit from.

So does this mean guaranteed good mental health in 2026?

Here’s hoping for a better twelve months to come in terms of both physical and mental health in 2026. I’m going to be rounding off my year with some good intentions and plans in place for supporting myself the best I can. I’m going into the new year with more information, more confidence in my body’s ability to heal, and more awareness of how profound the mind-body link impacts us deeply. I’ll be checking in with my own mental health needs as the year progresses and being sure to maintain my journaling practice, which is the cornerstone of how I proactively take care of how I think and feel. I'm going to dive into my Oura data when it feels right to, and use it to encourage me to build positive physical habits, including significant periods of rest, which can be hard to come by as the parent of a toddler, to support my brain to be the most well it can be, whilst also being kind to myself.

What are you planning for yourself in 2026? Perhaps now is the time to note your intentions? Will you be investing in a device? Journalling? Going to therapy?

Let me know in the comments.
​

• This is an unbiased and unsponsored article which has received no remuneration for the mention of the products of brands therein - all opinions are authentically my own.  I include my referral code here if you would like to try Oura 4 with a 10% discount.

Being a foreigner

For those of us who have made the change of living in a country which is not the one in which we were born or grew up,  we recognise that there are thousands of elements of assimilation and adaptation that one must go through to make it in a new culture with new people and circumstances.

Many times, I’m fortunate to be able to say, as in my own situation, this change is the result of a positive choice made to improve quality of life, take an opportunity or fulfil a long-held dream. In 2018, I decided to move my entire life and work to France to move away from what I found to be the stresses of city-living (that I once loved) and a change in political atmosphere in the United Kingdom. And whilst my little corner of rural France is not perfect, I like to think that I am making the most of my decision and enjoying it more than I would enjoy living where and how I used to.

Choosing a different life

Since that date, I’ve met many people who made the same kind of choice as me at different times in their lives. They left their mother-country to try something new, to take up a job, to raise their family differently, or simply to embark upon an adventure, thinking that they will probably one day return “home”, but for now at least, they are enjoying the challenges presented to them.

However, one of the most difficult challenges that those who live away from their friends and family can face is the idea of spending Christmas, New Year’s Eve or another end-of-year celebration far away from the ones that they love.

Christmas can make us question everything

I read post after post of those who find themselves pensive and unclear as to whether the pull to be back with loved ones at Christmas is the sign that they should abandon their changed lifestyle and return to their country of origin. And I get it, it is hard to be away from the familiarities and traditions of our country of origin.

Whenever I have returned to the UK to visit friends or family, I have felt a similar thing. The convenience of having the people that I love and yet rarely have the opportunity to see, so close at hand, has felt wonderful. The busyness and bustle of the UK is a very stark contrast to the slow rural pace of where I now live in la France profonde, and so it’s a pretty heady feeling to be back in an environment where you can order pretty much anything for delivery to your home from the convenience of an app, at almost no cost, when even takeaway or supermarket home delivery doesn't exist where I live.

The combination of familiarity, sentimentality and convenience is a very tempting offer if we are exposed to them early on in our experience of being an immigrant, and I can well see why some of those people I have met and read the forum posts of are angsting about whether or not they should just pack up and go back.

When we decide to return home

Unfortunately, two of the dearest friends that I have made since moving here are in the position of selling their beautiful French home and returning to the UK, not just for sentimentality's sake, but also for work and fulfilment. I both support and grieve their departure equally. And it's not just them, the going rate for immigrants returning to their country of origin, anecdotally, seems to peak at around three years post arrival - once the honeymoon phase of a new life in a new culture wears off (and it definitely does) and the realities of the banality, or even increased difficulty, of beauraucracy in the new country sets in.

So when I meet people in therapy who have the same question, they are often checking in with me as a professional to talk through their decision before committing to go (or stay). Happily, I consider myself well-placed to empathise with this difficult situation, and endeavour to offer a holistic approach as to how to answer the question of “I miss my friends and family terribly, especially at Christmas - should I leave France and go back home?”

My free prompts to help you interrogate your urge to go back

In case you should find yourself asking the same kind of question, allow me to offer you some of the suggestions that I might make if we were to have a conversation on this topic:

• What were your reasons for leaving your country of origin? Have circumstances there changed since you left?
• What are the top two things that you are missing from your home country? Are you able to reasonably create a new version of this where you live now? Have you tried?
• What kind of frequency of contact do you have with those that you are missing at Christmas? Would you like a greater frequency of video calls or trips back to visit?
• How much time have you spent there since you left? Short weekend trips can feel like a gleeful toe-dip back into a familiar and exciting life, but consistent time - weeks, for example - might give a more accurate sense of what everyday life there is like now.
• Remember that if you have been gone for a substantial length of time, then both people and places will have moved on somewhat. Friends and family will be able to prioritise you when visiting on short trips, but when everyone is in the regular flow of their lives, contact will probably be less intense, as it must be. Would that be okay for you?
• How much have you integrated into life in your new country? Are there any things that you would like to try but that you have been holding off doing? Perhaps trying them before you make a decision would help you to know more firmly whether or not there is room for improvement in your current situation.

Pushing back against feeling like we’ve failed

It can feel like there is a stigma around changing our minds, or that going back on a decision is something that we should be ashamed of, and I would like to offer that this is, in fact, nonsense.

If you want to go and are in a position to do so, then I say go! Don’t apologise for it, try not to consider it a failure (I certainly wouldn’t!), and I would encourage you not to feel shame about the idea of saying no to something that you once thought you wanted. It’s okay to change our minds, it’s okay to want something different, and it’s okay to say, “I tried this, and it didn’t bring me as much happiness as I had hoped, so I’m going to try something else”.

If someone tries to make you feel bad for your decision, then I would be inclined to think that there is more going on in their response than perhaps meets the ear, or that perhaps they are simply unkind! Good friends will only ever want the best for us, and if that is making a change that differs from our own choices, then so be it. If their concerns come from a compassionate place, then we will be able to thank them for their care, but reassure them that we have come to the right decision for us for now.

Talk to Someone about it

If you find yourself in this position, I would urge you not to stew on these feelings and ruminate in shame or angst in the period of the year when we usually need the most connection and support to help us through the darker, colder months. Instead, speak to a trusted friend, seek out someone who has done the same or who has talked about their own challenges. Find a therapist or even a trusted group with whom you can share your thoughts, and above all, don’t be alone. Christmas and New Year are often already laden with complex feelings; this one need not bring further distress.

End-of-year expense

As we approach an expensive time of year for everyone - be that in increased heating costs, travel costs or celebrating end-of-year holidays, I, like everyone else, look at my own income as a self-employed person and try to calculate what I’m going to need for the coming months, and whether what I have coming in is going to comfortably meet what I anticipate going out.

Since the arrival of my child two and a half years ago, I have seen my personal outgoings do little else but increase, naturally, and I pay greater attention than ever to my household’s finances to ensure that we can have the kind of lifestyle that we want.

Some years, I have to admit that with health crises and some unexpected periods of being unwell and unable to work, it's all felt a little too close for comfort. However, as someone who came from humble beginnings, I am pleased to have been able to draw on that experience in shaping my expenses according to my situation. I know that I’m not alone in this.

A quiet time

If I look at my diary for the rest of 2025, honestly, it looks a little sparse. I know this is not because people have stopped thinking, feeling, or suffering, sadly. Sometimes it is because the end of the year is a busy time and people are travelling or seeing friends or family in the spaces when they aren’t working or doing their usual routines, and I get that. I do it too.
Some people are cutting back on sessions or letting me know they’ll be able to return to our work in the new year or early spring 2026, when their finances feel more predictable and they can commit to this investment in themselves. Again, totally relatable.

And the message that I have replied to them with, that I am hoping to convey to you and, perhaps above all, to myself, is that this is fine. More than fine. Normal. Expected. Essential.

Because, as much as I see many mental health organisations and practitioners rightly reminding us that counselling and therapy are essentials that we should consider akin to heating, water, and even pension contributions, the fact of the matter is that this year, perhaps more than many years in recent memory, people are struggling. People are having trouble feeding themselves and paying their rent. In this economy, it’s easier and easier to think of the talking therapies as an unnecessary expense to be able to cut back on.

The hungry gap (psychologically speaking)

If I may reassure any counselling clients out there reading this that the only acceptable answer from me or another private therapist is that this is no problem whatsoever, and it is absolutely, completely, wholly the decision of the person paying for the service and that I respect it. I'm not here to dissuade someone from making a decision that is probably a) difficult and b) possibly feels stigmatised (by our culture, not by therapy, I should add).

That said, my suggestions for those who feel the need to cancel private therapy in times of financial hardship would be:

• If it can be, let a lull in therapy be temporary - coming back to anything after a break is usually difficult, and it makes sense that coming back to counselling, the requirement to be reflective, vulnerable, and honest, can feel that much harder to access after a long break from your work. If you can get back to therapy sooner rather than later, there is a chance that your therapy will be that much fresher and more present in your mind to pick up on (with whomsoever that therapist might be).

• If you can, keep your work going to some degree - whether that be making sure that you block out some cost-free time for self-care, self-reflection, a walk to give yourself some solitude and thinking space, a journalling practice to keep your reflections deep and useful, or simply making sure you listen to some music or get the chance to read a few chapters of a comfort book over the busy end of year period. There is so much going on at this time, it’s important not to neglect ourselves.

Let me know your thoughts

I hope that therapists and clients alike find these reflections useful. Money and therapy are famously uncomfortable bedfellows, so if you have any comments, please do share them. I’m always delighted to talk more about the role of money in therapy, as my specialist training with The Trauma of Money betrays!

Anxiety is one of the most prevalent and damaging mental health issues impacting our society today. I have spent my career working with those suffering from anxiety on various levels of the spectrum of suffering, and all humans experience anxiety to some degree.

Typical anxiety happens to us all, and in the modern world, we usually experience it to some degree every single day in small doses. Sometimes we suffer from longer circumstance-induced bouts of anxiety, and some of us seem to have anxiety written in our genes - it’s the model with which we came to understand the world, and it underpins how we react to the things we find in it.

The human brain is extraordinary

It never ceases to amaze me how human brains find new ways, methods, and behaviours to manifest anxious feelings, and it can be extraordinarily distressing to those who suffer from it when the symptoms begin to become debilitating. This post is not for those who are suffering from the “anxiety impacts my whole day” variety of struggles. For those people, self-managed interventions are, in my experience, more difficult to make work, and I would wholeheartedly suggest seeking and speaking to someone who can offer you direct support and guidance in how to work with your debilitating anxious feelings and behaviours. It doesn’t have to be like this, and there is absolutely no shame in seeking help for it.

For those who feel like their anxious thoughts are more frequent, but perhaps annoying or frustrating, I would like to offer a quick therapy tool that I use with those who are presenting mild anxiety symptoms. It’s a logical question that we use to analyse the thoughts that we are having and make a judgment on how useful it is. An example is:

The situation and the tool

I’m late for a dentist appointment and I’ve just got in my car to realise that I have no fuel. I will definitely need to refill before I get to the clinic, and that will no doubt add extra lateness to my arrival time. My anxiety kicks in, and my heart rate increases. My hands become sweaty, and I get hot. I’m having a physical reaction in the moment to my panic that I’m going to be late for my appointment and maybe admonished or ignored by the dentist. I hate to be late; I find it crushingly embarrassing. What will they think of me? My dad always scolded me for my lateness, and I haven’t changed at all...

Time for analysis, not self-judgement

We look at the circumstances to see if the situation allows for any wiggle room or change in outcome. If I cannot change the outcome - i.e., I’m going to be late no matter what and there’s nothing I can do about it, then we have to accept that these thoughts are “pointless ruminations”. This means that the thoughts and consequent feelings of this event have no impact on the outcome and only serve to encourage us to spiral further into distressing or unpleasant feelings.

It’s at this point we can acknoweldge the thought directly with something like “thanks brain, I can see this is something that I can’t change and I’m going to have to stop ruminating and concentrate on calling ahead to the clinic to let them know I’ll be late, or just getting there as soon as I can, and stop this thought cycle before it takes up any more of my time and peace”.

This allows us to stop spending any further time descending into unnecessary stress and rumination on the perceived consequences. What is the point of spending time grieving something that we can’t do anything about? If something is unchangeable, then perhaps we can permit ourselves to move into pragmatism and cut off the shame spiral before it gets worse.

Adapt, improvise, and overcome

However, what if our analysis concludes that there is something we could do about the situation?

What if I realise my car has no fuel and I’ll be really late if I refill it before getting to the dental clinic, but if I quickly order an Uber or minicab straight there, then I can forget my fuel gauge. Plus, since I will no longer need to find parking, I won’t be as late as I feared and will ultimately be able to keep my appointment.

This kind of response recategorises the initial thought as “useful worry”. It’s the kind of stress that kicks us into the “adapt, improvise, and overcome”* part of our brain. This is the kind of stress that drives us to be extra early for a train, or to make sure we have our passport for our flight, or, as recently happenned to me, have the ability to think quickly and book an alternative form of transport out of a city when trains are cancelled and suddenly hundreds of stranded passengers are looking for a way home (thanks Bla Bla Car!).

If you can sit with your anxiety in the moment, analyse it and reframe it as “pointless rumination” or “useful worry” then you might be able to transform your relationship with your sometimes anxious brain and bring back online the parts of it which allow you to flow through the world and its eventual ups and downs with a little more ease and peace.

Questions to ask yourself

• Is there anything that I can do about this?
• Will continuing to think about this only serve to make me feel worse about the situation?
• If I can do something, will it affect the outcome in a way that makes the situation better?
• Is this worry useful? Is it helping me to be on time or prepared for an event?
• Are these thoughts ruminating? Am I going over the same thing repeatedly without resolution?
• Can I thank my brain for trying to protect me, but push back against the “pointless rumination” and move on to something else? (an activity, a distraction, a task)
• Can I thank my brain for converting the stress of a situation into actionable steps and use the feelings as “useful worry”?

What next

These are some of the ways I encourage my clients to challenge the data that their brain presents them with. Of course, these are innocuous examples, and I hope that your own anxieties are manageable and work with this kind of tool; however, as I said before, if they do not, and you cannot manage them alone, then do not be afraid to talk about them with someone, a friend, a therapist, or a trusted third party. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and there are many ways to work with these difficult feelings; it can just feel really hard to do so from the confines of our own thoughts.

Book a free 30-minute introductory session to talk about these feelings with me, a BACP-accredited counsellor and talking therapist, here.







* Unexpected thanks to Bear Grylls for this phrase!

I work with several people who have chosen to remove themselves from certain family members' lives. This decision has been unilaterally something that these people have considered deeply for long periods of time before doing so, and they have all reported overall improvement in their lives for having done so with these particular people.

After the separation has been in place for a while, this relationship management might require perhaps minimal ongoing maintenance (blocking contact efforts, managing security settings on social media posts, rebuffing phone calls or texts for example), however I have noticed that in almost all cases, these usually strong boundaries that give these clients so much freedom, peace and clarity, can become burdensome and complex as the end of the year approaches.

Setting boundaries in our modern world

Setting a boundary is something that is often talked about in a throwaway fashion these days. I am very glad that we are all talking about managing our relationships and the energy that we put into them, but I am also mindful that the way that we talk about boundaries can sometimes be confusing. It’s a really useful tool for managing our wellbeing around others who can be challenging, but I’m not convinced that what we often see described as “setting boundaries” is really that.

What it is and how to do it

A boundary is a statement that we say to ourselves, and may even share with another person, that describes what we will do in the event of a certain behaviour or communication.

An example of this might be to say “Dad, I don’t feel comfortably talking about my marriage breakup right now. If you ask me about it when I come home for Christmas, then I’m not going to talk about it” or “Mum, I don’t want how my body looks to be a topic of conversation between us anymore. If you mention my body size or shape when I come to see you for New Year, then I will leave the party”. It might even be something like “You’re my sister and I love you, but I do not want to get into politics when we see each other this year. If it happens, I’m not going to engage with it”.

That is to say, boundaries are kind. We let people know that we do not wish to participate in something - a conversation, for example, or maybe an action - and that if they go on to engage with us in the way that we have described, then the consequence will be x. We have given them a structure that tells them that we find something too distressing to engage with, and that we won’t be part of it.

What boundary setting isn’t

It is very important for me to highlight that boundary setting is not about setting rules for other people. Boundary setting is about recognising that most of us have enough agency in the world to behave and speak as we please. It is not for us to demand that someone not talk about a certain topic to us, or ask us a rude or hurtful question. That is control, not boundaries, and it is neither reasonable nor kind to put them on others. It usually sets them up for failure, and it takes the power over the situation away from us.

What boundaries can do for us?

Instead, making these statements - expressed or otherwise - puts us in the position of saying, I cannot control other people, but I can control what I do and how I react, and if they do something that I have told them hurts me, then I will remove myself from the situation. I take care of myself.

Family estrangement as a final straw

Removing family members from our lives usually happens after repeated efforts to maintain a boundary with someone have failed. They either do not care that they hurt us or they are intentionally hurting us. Either way, many individuals find that this kind of repeated distress is just part of a bigger picture as to why they come to the decision to remove an individual from their life. The problem with this, as we approach the end of the year, is that the cultural and societal expectations and assumptions that many people hold over others are that they will joyously and willingly be reuniting with loved ones and those to whom they are related over the end-of-year festivities. We can hardly escape advertising and entertainment based around the idea of the sanctity of family and how integral it is to our happiness, particularly at the end of the year.

Let's say no to forced closeness

I want to push back on these assumptions that my clients report to be so painful. I want us all to try to be a little more tactful in the way that we engage with those who have complicated, nuanced, and usually painful family estrangement stories.
That said, we cannot know what we don’t know, and as someone who has experienced the estrangement of a family member, I know that I would not have minded that someone might initially assume a positive relationship with someone with whom I did not share it. However, once explained, I would expect them to be tactful and thoughtful about the way they might explore that information, and afford me the space not to engage with the topic if preferred.

Your family estrangement experience

If you find family estrangement to be difficult at the end of the year, then know that you are not alone. That this is a time of increased social assumptions, cultural expectations, and commercial sentimentality, and that most people realise that the decision to sever ties with someone to whom we are related is a significant and serious decision that deserves respect and consideration.

If you struggle with your feelings around this topic, please do feel free to contact me and arrange a session to discuss further. These are circumstances in which I have a great deal of experience and empathy for, and I hope to be able to offer my support to those who experience it in a useful way.

The price of becoming a parent

A few years ago, I became a parent, and whilst I would consider my life pretty thoroughly examined through many rounds of my own personal counselling and psychotherapy, I have been incredibly surprised by just how much material has resurfaced now that I am responsible for the well-being of another human.

Recently, my son has started to go through a period of anxiety about the world - he is understanding that he and I can physically be separated (typical separation anxiety for his developmental age), and he is also becoming very aware of the world around him. He hears noises and asks me urgently what they are. “What’s that noise, Mummy?” is a very common phrase in my life at the moment.

On top of this, he is beginning to have nightmares and even night terrors when overtired. It’s horrible to witness, and I can relate very strongly to my own memories of being a fearful and anxious child. These present-day struggles led me to question my own mother as to whether she remembered me being an anxious or frightened child, to which she replied simply “no”.

This was not my experience.

Parental misattunement

I remember numerous moments where I felt real fear and terror as a child. I was terrified of the dark. I was frightened of something grabbing my feet if I let them stick out from under the duvet cover on my bed. I was scared of the parts of our house that were in poor repair and feared they might collapse. I was absolutely terrorised by the idea that burglars would break into our home, surely in part due to the popular crime programmes that my parents would watch in the evening.

I therefore find it hard to reconcile my mother’s response to my question with my still very palpable memories of those fears, and whilst I no longer fear any of those things, I can empathise with my son’s worries, and I’m mindful to take them seriously in a way that I was not.

I was not provided with a nightlight. My worries about burglars were - perhaps understandably - given little consideration, but I have to wonder - particularly when I now see how distressed my son is when his imagination gets the better of him - what might my own experience of anxiety as an adult have been like if I had been offered more security and safety early in life?

Reexamining our childhoods in light of those of our own children

These reexaminations of what appear to be the more benign aspects of our childhoods surface when we are confronted by the real-time experiences of our children. It is almost impossible not to recall or feel some of our childhood memories, triggers, traumas, or processes when our small people present their needs to us, particularly if those same needs were not met in our childhoods.

These questions pop up for many of the other parents that I know, and whole swathes of online groups and forums exist where people try to process their reemerging emotional pain as they try to manage the issues of their child.  If this is something that you can relate to, then I would encourage you to consider looking deeper at these recurring questions, dreams, feelings, or thoughts.

Whilst accessing counselling whilst parenting might not seem like ideal timing, I believe that the moment where our own thoughts and feelings are being stirred is a great time to reconsider our old wounds and establish whether the way that we have healed (or not!) allows us to be the kind of parent that we can be proud of offering our children, and I for one am deep diving back into some early work to answer some pertinent questions.
​
It’s an opportunity for growth that is too good to miss, and I hope that you will have the space to take care of yourself in the same way.

A happy problem

Last month marked the end of some years of psychotherapy for two of my longest-standing clients. We celebrated the end of this part of their process and parted company for now, knowing that they were leaving this period of sessions as quite different people from those that I had met several years ago.
​
It is a bittersweet moment for the therapist, as we counsellors know that our own redundancy is the ultimate goal we are working towards with some of our clients. It is, however, enormously positive to see these individuals doing with ease some of the things that they had struggled to verbalise even twelve months ago, and what a privilege it has been for me to witness.

And so, these celebrations leave me with my own problem to solve: two free spaces in my diary.
​
Back to advertising

To remedy the situation, I took myself to one of the advertising platforms that I have previously used in my career as a private therapist, and reactivated my profile on Counselling Directory. And whilst browsing some of the functionality that I have not been privy to in my long absence as their customer, I happened upon some profiles of old colleagues and acquaintances with whom I have not spoken for years.

I was delighted to see that they were still practicing, as with some it has been more than a decade since we’d had cause to speak, but interestingly I noticed that my professional interest went further than simply noticing what modalities they were working in now (it is usual for therapists to evolve with their training over the years and sometimes they can change they way that they work quite markedly). But I also noticed that some individuals had participated in some trainings that I myself would like to explore further, and I noticed how much clinical availability some of them were offering - for example, twelve-hour clinic days, five days per week (!!).

Jealousy strikes

I have to admit there was a little part of me that felt simultaneously envious - jealous even - of the amount of time that they were able to devote to their practice, and in a couple of instances, a little intimidated by just how much training some of them had done over the last decade.

By contrast, some of my personal experiences of the last eight years have greatly impacted my ability to do many of the things that I would like to do with my career. There are numerous trainings that impress and interest me that I have not yet been able to plan into my diary. There are books unread on both my Kindle and my Audible accounts, and honestly, I am sometimes lucky to get to a couple of podcasts and articles over the course of a week, around the edges of client sessions, business admin, writing, and, of course, my personal life.

So when I had my moment of professional insecurity, dare I say even professional jealousy, I had to take a moment to breathe.

Reflecting on my why

I needed a moment to think about the reasons why those things haven’t all yet been possible for me, and to alleviate any self-blame or guilt that I might put upon myself for this momentary sense of lack. I had to remind myself of all that I have achieved over these eight years: moving to a new country, surviving bouts of serious illness, becoming a parent, and managing my own matrescence. Thankfully, this is a much more forgiving lens through which to see myself when I reflect on why I might not yet have those extra letters next to my name, or be able to open my clinic as much as a version of me from the past might have liked to.

There is a great lesson in all of this about acceptance.

Comparison is normal

Sometimes it is uncomfortable to see and hear how our peers and colleagues are doing, and it is natural to compare ourselves. But it is not necessary to use this information to punish or blame ourselves for our differences. As I so often hear in the parenting podcasts that I listen to these days:

All feelings are welcome, all behaviour is not.

And I think aptly, this applies not just to my toddler tantruming over me giving them the wrong colour cup, but also to our own thought behaviours. It is so important that we might catch our thoughts being unkind to ourselves. To acknowledge this, and instead offer ourselves the compassion and understanding that we would so quickly give to a loved one.

Life skills to carry forward

It’s important that we all learn to put in place thought behaviours that support, encourage, and reassure those insecure parts of self that surface from time to time. We all need skills that allow us to take care of those parts that still need soothing occasionally. Those parts that counsellors and therapists still have too.

Just like a toddler.
​

Why do people become therapists?

Many therapists come to this work through their own experience of therapy. They have been so transformed, moved, or altered by the process of their own psychological journey that they have decided to continue practicing the same work, utilising the same learning, and bringing to it a flavor of their own challenges and perhaps even suffering.

What a gift.

Many people who are not therapists, but who work with them, might not - at first -appreciate that there is no such thing as “done” when it comes to therapy. No matter how much we might revere our own educators and role models, we can confidently say that none of them will ever have it all figured out forever, or even be able to say that they will never have poor mental health. That is not how it works. The experience of being a human is not a linear one, and I believe that we are so much better off for that fact - though I know that this can be an unwelcome realisation for some.
We can know all of this intellectually. We can also agree that therapists, trained listeners, counsellors, and psychotherapists are simply humans moving through the world and doing what everyone else does. And simultaneously, we can hold a false expectation that these people don’t ever need support, help, or healing. If they know how to help others, they should just do it for themselves, right?

Therapist, therapise thyself!

But, we can’t.  It doesn’t work like that.

Counsellors need support too

One of the great problems of any profession of service providers, carers or “givers” is that sometimes they need to take, access services, or be, themselves, cared for. Sometimes accessing that care can be difficult. Along with the societal and cultural expectation that these individuals do not need these kinds of help, the individual too can internalise a sense of it being a sign of them not “performing” as a professional, and that they “should” be able to take care of it themselves (I am always wary when the “shoulds” come out in my own thoughts). For these reasons, it can be hard for psychotherapists to find another professional to work with.

Sometimes therapists who don’t want to work with other therapists

It is also unfortunately not uncommon for some therapists and counsellors to shy away from working with other trained listeners. This is an experience that I have had as a client, and that others have reported to me as their therapist. I have even had clients who are professional therapists who have hidden their livelihood from our work until much further into the therapeutic relationship, explaining that they did so due to the difficulty of finding counsellors who take on other therapists as clients. The reason for this is sometimes cited by these people as this treatment of the professional client being more in-depth or complex than they like to go, or more often, I suspect, it is down to the therapist themselves feeling insecure about working with someone else who has more than a passing awareness of the potential psychological theories, counselling models and other suggestions or tools of the trade.

My work with other psychotherapists and counsellors

I am very pleased to say that I welcome this often complex and highly rewarding work in my private practice. My broad experience has given me the confidence and capability to work at a deep level. I have worked with individuals who began in one career and ended their sessions as qualified therapists. I have therapists who have come to me after feeling they could not be honest about themselves with others, and who found great relief at being welcomed into therapy, which in this career is often much needed and dearly overdue. I have worked with people at the end of their careers as therapists and those who work in therapy-adjacent positions, such as social workers, medical and care staff, and mental health practitioners.

This work is deep, layered, and vital, and I love it.

How to access support with me

So if you are one of those people who spend their days supporting others and recognise the need or wish to work on an issue in therapy, or to simply spend some time in a space that is for you rather than your clients, then do get in touch.

My diary is and always will be open to you.

Click here to make a booking for a free 30-minute introduction session.

Click here to read more about my work with other psychotherapists and counsellors.

I had an interesting conversation with someone this week about the support needs of those who work in service to others. For those who are - like me - a counselllor, or like you, perhaps a social worker or a public servant. We noticed that for those of us who are trauma-adjacent and work with those in great distress, the silent toll on the helper can particularly become evident when the helper goes through a life change or difficulty themselves.

My own experiences

When I think of my own experience, two recent sets of circumstances have had a profound impact on how my work goes on to take a toll on me.  The first was having a child, and so the impact of sleep deprivation and the enormous changes in priorities that happen to a person when we begin caring for an infant impacted me greatly.

Another event was developing sepsis as a consequence of a routine surgery. Whilst I have been fortunate to recover from this illness, some effects have not gone away even now, a year later, and my physical recovery has been frustratingly slow.

I silently carry these circumstances in every connection or communication that I make, and as a consequence, also bring them into my therapy. On one hand, I believe that this is no bad thing - I have lived through more life challenges, and this allows me to be an even more understanding and rounded human with broad human experiences. I understand the impact of a dynamic disability now in a way that I could not have before, and similarly, I now understand more deeply the impact of raising a child on individual identity and independence.

But these circumstances have also introduced a vulnerability to my practice that I believe that I have a responsibility to manage - I have to manage the availability of my emotional energy to ensure that I am resourced for my clients, and I also have to manage my physical symptoms as a consequence of my illness, to ensure that these do not distract me from my work. These elements and changes are not my fault, but they are my responsibility, and I carry them gladly.

Community for the caregiver

This brings me back to the role of community for the caregiver - to whom do we go to with our own issues when we notice that there is an accentuation or amplification of difficulty in our own lives, alongside witnessing our clients' struggles and suffering? The knee-jerk reaction here is, of course, clinical supervision, but what about when we need more connection? Few of us have an informal relationship with our supervisors; such is the nature of the professional relationship; however, we might feel more drawn to informal relationships for the processing of our day-to-day struggles as just another human in the world.

The second automatic response might also be to have “good boundaries”, and I agree, but I would also argue that we cannot be a totally robot-like separate self and remove ourselves from the issues of our clients - good boundaries are one thing, but good human-ing seems to me to involve simultaneously being a conscious being, aware of, impacted by and empathetic towards others in the world.

This original conversation was centred on the idea of the value of a supportive community for therapists and counsellors. The argument being that even though we are not sharing details of the work we are doing with friends or peers, we can nonetheless connect with them and find common ground through our shared experience of witnessing the human experience, all the while having our own troubles. We can offer knowing looks and supportive words. We can hold silence for those who need it, and we can understand the other’s drive to give to their clients, even though they might also need someone to give to them.

Personally, I think there is enormous value to this kind of supportive community that goes well beyond the experience of the easier to find peer supervision, but unfortunately, finding informal relationships with others with whom we can feel a shared experience as a psychotherapist or carer can be difficult.

What I’m doing about it

This year, I am going out of my way to try to build this very helpful network. If I see an opportunity to be with those who understand this work, then I try very hard to grasp it with both hands and welcome opportunities to connect. Even when it feels like a lot, or as though things are hard - I recognise the value in this space.

I’m scouring notice boards and email chains for the details of events that I know will bring other like-minded peers. I’m turning up to professional coffee calls to share with others who work in the same way as I do, and I’m being gentle with myself as I remind myself that this is sometimes a challenge, but in the words of Glennon Doyle, “we can do hard things”.

If you are a trusted listener, a carer, or someone in service to others, do you have a community that you can turn to in your more difficult moments as a professional and as a human?

I’d love to hear more about how you manage it in the comments.

In a therapeutic relationship, therapists are - on paper - the ones who talk the least in a counselling conversation. Our role is to be an excellent, invested, actively listening conversation partner. It is our responsibility to notice the vocal inflexion of our client, to hear the unsaid, to absorb the story that we are hearing, and to aid the client in processing and perhaps seeking change.

One of the tools that some therapists will use - particularly with clients with whom the rapport is strong - is self-disclosure, the act of sharing some of their own story, experience, or learning with the client.

A dirty word

I recall when new to the world of therapy, that we trainee-counsellors were warned off even the slightest glimpse of self-disclosure. It was deemed forbidden - a powerful tool only to be used in the most wisened and capable hands. It felt uncomfortable to think that something as easy to do as mentioning a shared experience could derail someone's therapy completely.

Thankfully, now with so much experience and many years of full-time private practice under my belt, I feel as though I have learned how to wield this interjection of self with skill. My lecturers were right. It is a powerful tool, and not to be used in anything but the interest of the client; however, we are talking about a conversation here, yes, a therapeutic one, but also a (hopefully) flowing, authentic, natural exchange of information between people. The choice to self-disclose is not a binary one, and we can absolutely seek the approval of the client in doing so, but over time, I believe that we therapists become more accustomed to understanding what it is about the self that makes therapy work best.

The therapist matters too

I think too many therapists are encouraged to lose themselves in deference to the client in therapy, especially early on. This is not to say that the client is not and should not be the focus of the therapy, but if we diminish ourselves as service providers and trusted confidantes to the point where we are only repeating theory and offering psychoeducation, then I think we run the risk of largely missing the point of therapy.

To remember what we - as a person, not just a membership body subscription number - bring to the session, is vitally important. It is important for the esteem of the therapist, for the humanising of the therapist for the client, and I feel that it is an important element in the service of offering (a professional version) of one’s authentic self in a counselling relationship.

I believe that there is space for everyone in the therapy room

I’m in no way suggesting that we should go into sessions with our clients telling them our worries or deepest-darkest-secrets, but there absolutely is space to be a real person, meeting another real person, and to offer our professional support in humility and honesty. The version of myself that I am proud to bring to my sessions is a whole, flawed, past-having human, and in the right moment, with the right client, and the right set of circumstances I think that self-disclosure is absolutely a valid tool for healing, and one that therapists should be trained to use wisely and appropriately rather than shut down and shooed away from.

If I think about my own experience as a therapy client, the therapists that I have had who shared snippets of useful anecdotes and experiences with me, were infinitely more human and rapport building than those that did not, and I have worked with a range of experience in my own therapist library - from those at the beginning of their careers through to my work as a client of Dr Irvin Yalom (as you will no doubt know from his books, he too believes in a certain amount of self-disclosure). And so I am convinced that we can use both our experience as clients, alongside our experiences as psychotherapists and counsellors, to inform our own ethos in the use of this tool.

With great power comes great responsibility

So, counsellor, I present to you another element to keep in mind when reaching into your toolbox in your efforts to support your clients in their process. A tool not to be feared, but to be seriously considered.

One of my earliest - and hugely positively impactful -therapists used to close her self-disclosures with “...and I’m telling you this because...” which I liked very much at the time. - It’s not a phrase that I have gone on to use myself - I find my own working process to feel more organic, but it is a nice way to reassure a client that the inclusion of some kind of self-disclosure in a session has been, and always should be, in the service of their work.

Perhaps this is something that you might consider bringing to your work with clients? If it is, do let me know in the comments.
​
Similarly, if you have had a negative experience around self-disclosure, either as a therapist or as a client, I would be interested to hear your thoughts.

I think it is good practice for therapists to occasionally do a little self-examination about why their clients might be choosing them.

It seems to me that many of the people I work with are looking for someone with whom they can be authentic. Having to hold ourselves in a way that is unnatural or performative when we are trying to be simultaneously vulnerable and self-reflective seems, frankly, like too much hard work to me. Not to mention, it is likely counterproductive to the therapeutic process. So, in thinking about what it is that permits a person to embody those things that I believe are conducive to good therapy, I was wondering what it might be about me that makes that possible.

This is not a self-congratulatory post, much as it may seem so until now! But rather, an examination of a specific element of therapy that makes the whole thing “click”. We talk a lot about “clicking” in therapy - clicking with the therapist, with their approach, with their personality, but what about their language?

Is language a barrier to therapy?

I would argue, yes, it can be.

I have experienced my own personal therapy in both my native language, English, and in my second language, French. I feel very fortunate to have been able to access both flavours of this counselling, and I recall how much harder it was for me to find someone that I could click with now that I no longer live in the UK.

But would my experience have been or felt different with an anglophone therapist?

Yes, I think it would have.

Because, for all my abilities in French, there are some thoughts, feelings, or memories that I personally feel might have been easier to describe and communicate had it not been for the parsing of that information through the filter of my second language.

I recall the (self-imposed) stress that I felt in the moment when talking about my experience of a complicated pregnancy and difficult family dynamics, and how I - even now, years later - sometimes catch myself cringeing at the use of the wrong word in a vulnerable and sensitive moment. I remember feeling totally derailed in what I was trying to say, because it resulted in primarily feeling embarrassed by my linguistic gaffe.

So when I look at what I offer to my clients, I think one of those elements is the fact that I can offer the fact that I, too, am a foreigner, living in a place where they were not born, living in a culture that is not the one that they grew up in. I have also faced the struggles of being an immigrant, and I can connect with these people in their first language.

They can describe to me their difficulties, their frustrations, their sadness, and even their fears, without having to do the work of translating their stories, or having concerns that they are not going to understand what is being said to them in a relationship where there is an inherent imbalance of power.

Even for those coming to therapy for the first time (and we all have to be new to it once!), it can be a relief to know that one of the things that can take off their list of worries about beginning counselling is concern about communication - and I’m so pleased to be able to offer that. That peace is valuable. And it's one of the many reasons that I do the work that I do.

So if you are considering counselling, and are - like me - an immigrant looking for someone who can understand the context of their situation, of the burdens of cultural assimilation and adapting to a new place, then know that you can be supported, heard, and easily communicate with me, an English-speaking counsellor and therapist living in the EU.

Book a free 30-minute introductory session here.

I look forward to speaking with you.

Previously when writing blog posts for an early incarnation of my website I have provided practicable hints and tips, counselling strategies and ideas for problem solving. I have reviewed products and resources which I find useful in both my work with clients and also my own life - however given the memoir based nature of my writing projects these days I am inclined to restart this blog with content that is more aligned with those newer creative challenges.

Therefore, the series of posts following this one will be based more from my own point of view, opinion and experience - which I know can be a bit of a rare beast when it comes to therapists self-disclosing, certainly publically.

Nonetheless, after some careful consideration I have chosen to do so - to give a grounding and hopefully positive insight into how I work for those clients whom I have not yet met. And to allow those readers who might never have a session with me to come to know me through what I put on paper.

I believe that those I have worked with would consider me to be open and honest when it comes to relevant self-disclosure. Of course, there are many occasions when I have declined to share with my clients that I too have experienced what they bring to session. However, when I have believed it useful to do so, I have dared to offer them the knowledge that I understand their issue in the way only experience can inform us.

I think this sharing is very natural, paricularly for those clients whom I have known for a long time. We have been living alongside each other and growing simultaneously during those years as fellow humans. We are collecting good and bad life experiences in parallel along the way, and I think it is a typical rapport building reflex to share some of those things verbally. It builds connection, trust and safety - plus I hope it is useful to know that your therapist is not a perfect person. That they also have complex feelings and don't have everything figured out. 

My work on this blog will therefore be to determine which of those personal experiences might be relevant and helpful to read about, and for me to find a way to share them with you, dear reader, in a way that offers something of worth whilst also respecting the relationship that I have with my clients, and the knowledge that they don't all want to know what their therapist had for breakfast... or perhaps you do?