Here at Counselling Connections this week one of our partners was away at an important business meeting and her return to the office was anxiously awaited. When she got back we sat down in the kitchen to catch up. ‘I’ve been really anxious to know how you got on’ I said. ‘Yes’, she replied; then paused and said ‘I wonder if this is how clients and their partners feel after a therapy session’. News of the business meeting would have to wait while we teased this out and spoke of our clients’ experiences of this phenomenon, the experience of being debriefed.

It is not unusual for a partner of a client to be waiting anxiously for their return from a counselling session and to expect to hear in great detail what had transpired. There are many questions about what the therapist is like, what they said and what did they expect you to talk about. And what did you talk about? The discourse in therapy is different to ordinary social interaction; it is so much more about being listened to than an everyday social exchange. It takes a little getting used to; it is new. A loved one will have an interest in hearing about how you begin to deal with the issues which caused you to begin the therapy in the first place. As we discussed this we realised that there was a range of different feelings associated with this therapy ‘debriefing’ and they’re not all positive.

From time to time in therapy the facing of a ‘debriefing’ from a partner on returning home can cause a real difficulty. You have to feel able to say anything that comes to mind in your therapy. It works best when you feel free to speak of your worst fears and traumas, of strong feelings, of love and hate, of jealousy, of rage, of loss and regret, of dreams, disappointments; anything and everything really. It is harder to speak freely of these things without censor if you feel you have to report on them afterwards.

Additionally, something of the power of the feelings in therapy can be lost; diluted maybe when they are repeated outside of the therapy room. Your partner may feel threatened if you don’t tell them about these things but working through them may have to be done without your partner’s active involvement. This may leave them feeling left out, or even that they are not being heard themselves.

Sometimes a relationship is not good or supportive and the partner can make hurtful remarks or insinuations about the therapy. The therapy itself can become a safe sanctuary for these feelings. At other times a loved one may feel a little threatened or envious of the therapy. They may wonder that a stranger, the therapist, is hearing intimate details of their loved one’s life, things that they may not know of themselves. After a while in therapy, noticing changes in their loved one may also evoke some feelings of anxiety. A partner who starts to become more self reliant or who no longer reacts to things in the same old ways causes an adjustment in a relationship. When thing are going well this is a wonderful process; but it still means a change for the partner.

At times therapy can mean trawling over details of very upsetting things from the past. This can create special challenges for loved ones. Sometimes it is really comforting, having revealed something distressing in therapy, to have the love and support of a friend or family member who may know a little but not a lot of what is going on but who makes it clear to you that they are there to support you as you go about your difficult journey. This represents a change in the nature of ‘debriefing’ where your loved one understands that you are working through some difficult things; doesn’t enquire as to the details but remains steadfast in their support. This is a wonderful addition to the work of the therapy.

There is so much more that we could say about this. Reading back over what we’ve just written we realise that this is addressed to the loved one as much as it is to a client. I suppose that is appropriate. At times a client will have little support outside their therapy. At other times their partner will feel threatened by the whole process. Sometimes the important people in your life will try to undermine your therapy, for a range of reasons, some benign and some less so. In any event all these things can be talked about in therapy as you negotiate the changes in your life and your relationships. It is primarily a personal process, about your self and your choosing the best ways to proceed in love and in life.

Counselling Connections, Dundalk.

We awoke on Friday last 11th March to the news of a nine magnitude earthquake in Japan and a subsequent tsunami that caused great devastation and loss of life. The scenes of cars and houses being swept away by the waves were almost unbelievable. It happened in the afternoon when children were still in school and workers in offices, just getting on with everyday life. One wonders what the problems each was facing that morning before disaster struck and how this dissolved into oblivion with what followed.
As many of you have said, it brings to light our vulnerability as a human race. In the face of natural disasters, we are unprepared, despite our best efforts. Japan has apparently some of the best protective procedures in place with respect to earthquakes and tsunami warnings. These manmade efforts were in vain last Friday. The knock on effect of the damaged nuclear plants and the pending meltdown now adds to the magnitude of the problem. We can barely take it in.
World disasters like this prompt us to lift our heads and look towards what other people have to face in countries where natural disasters are more common than here in Ireland. There is often a mix of relief and guilt that we don’t have to face what other countries do. Human nature sees us fascinated for a while with sky news on continuously, followed by a retreat to one’s own life as the days go on. There have been numerous world disasters over the past few years, one seeming to be followed by another. We’ve been asking ourselves here, what is it in human nature that prompts us to eventually dissociate from the realities of what others go through, when we have been shocked and upset by it initially?…
When we face traumatic situations in our own lives, to help us to continue on living we ‘split off’ or disconnect from the feelings associated with the event. In counselling terms we refer to this as dissociation. Often the person reports feeling as if they had left their body and were looking on at the event. This is an inherent defence mechanism which allows us to keep functioning and helps us to get through. It works temporarily. If we were to feel the feelings at the time, we fear we may be overwhelmed. However, these feelings are still inside and will need to be dealt with at some point. Counselling seeks encourage the client to feel in relation to traumatic events, a little at a time.
Take Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after a car accident. The person may be dealing with other people involved in the accident, physical injuries, being grateful that all are still alive. But over the coming weeks and months the person may experience feeling down, crying, insomnia, worry and stress. This is the person coming to terms with the actuality of the accident, of what they felt and witnessed at the time. The body and mind need time to work through and adjust to what it has experienced. We also see this at play with adults who have been traumatised as children. It’s as if they can only afford to deal with it now as adults, that it may not have been ‘safe’ to feel the feelings before now.
So when we look at the tragedy and the trauma Japanese people are suffering, of course we feel sympathetic but in order to keep going in our own lives, we disconnect at some level from the enormity of what it must be like to be there. To allay our guilt in doing this, we look to contribute financially to a recovery fund. When we are faced then with stories from individual families or people in crisis, it evokes an empathic response in us because we can now identify with them as being like ourselves. Like with the four month old little baby who was found alive, we find ourselves drawn into the real life situations and wonder did the baby’s mother survive. But these feelings in us are temporary. We close them off when we close the newspaper or turn off the TV and we get on with what we have to do. It is human nature, not because we just don’t care. Were the countries reversed, Japanese people would be having the same reaction as we are. No doubt there are thousands of traumatised people who are trying to recover the basics of their lives food, shelter and clothing. It is only over the coming months that the reality of the devastation will impact psychologically on the victims.

In other offices people gather around the water cooler or meet over a cup of coffee and discuss the latest office gossip and organisational intrigue. And we at Counselling Connections are no different. Regular readers will know how partial we are to a cup of coffee and also how sometimes, because of the nature of our work, our coffee break chats turn to all sorts of eclectic subjects. This week is no different. We are branching out into addiction counselling and we’ve been reflecting on ways in which addiction behaviour can become a fundamental part of a family’s way of being. This can permeate the minds of individual family members and can have lasting and catastrophic effects on the way they love and allow themselves to be loved, or not, as the case may be.
If this all sounds a bit vague lets try to make it a bit clearer. The coffee break musings that we are talking about began with a question posed out of the blue. It was ‘do you think some girls grow up believing “I know how to love daddy better than mammy does” ‘? The question relates to the situation that we are all familiar with of a woman who seems to gravitate from one abusive relationship to another. She might escape an alcoholic, abusive or violent husband or partner only to find herself not too much later in a similar, damaging or abusive relationship. It seems counter intuitive and it can be a confusing, disorientating experience for the woman concerned. What we are trying to visualise is the process of thought that a little girl goes through as she grows up in a house with a violent abusive father.
There are a number of points of interest. First among these seems to be a learned ability to tolerate and excuse the worst of behaviour in the father. It is like his violence or abuse presents his daughter with a riddle. To solve the riddle would be to end his bad behaviour before it begun. This would present her with the loving, caring daddy of her dreams. But first she must roll up her sleeves and work hard at trying to figure out how to get on his good side. It is clear that when he comes home late that he and mammy fight and in the little girl’s mind the idea forms that this is the wrong way to go about things. She may even get to feel that her mammy gets it wrong by saying anything critical to her father, anything at all really that might draw out his anger. Her fantasy of a beloved, caring father demands that she overlook his part in these nocturnal arguments and in this the seeds are sown of a life of heartbreak, of hopeless forgiveness and even of facilitating another generation of addiction.
In psychoanalysis a pattern of bad relationships is sometimes attributed to something called a repetition compulsion. In simple terms we feel compelled to repeat previous mistakes. Again, this seems to be counter intuitive and it certainly baffled Sigmund Freud when he saw it in his patients. Indeed, the professor had to tear up the rule book and start again and incorporate the compulsion to repeat in his theories of the mind. If we pass our scenario through the test of this theory of repetition it seems that what happens is that the girl puts herself unwittingly in the same abusive situation again and again in order to try to work out exactly why it didn’t succeed the first time, the most important time, with her father.
She has followed her childhood logic of ignoring, excusing and forgiving bad behaviour in her loved one and for some reason which she can’t quite grasp it doesn’t turn him into the loving, caring partner of her dreams. It is our sad task in psychotherapy to break it to her that she has been basing her relationships on a faulty premise. This can be a difficult thing to face up to because it also involves letting in the understanding that her father behaved badly. It can be very difficult for us in life and in therapy to let go of the fantasy of a loving parent and face the reality of their human failings. Sometimes the worse the behaviour of the parent has been makes for stronger resistance to face up to this. This is something that has to be dealt with slowly and sensitively.
So, the childhood idea that ‘I can love daddy better than mammy can’ will provide a child with some confidence that they can cope with a difficult situation in the home. But it can also lead to difficulties in that it facilitates a tolerance of abusive behaviour and an almost masochistic determination to overcome the worst of situations. This is just one scenario that we have discussed here this week. There are many other similar possibilities including trying to cope with an alcoholic mother. What we see is that an addiction in a family can pass from a substance addiction to fixed way of behaviour. Initially these are set in place to help us cope but they don’t adapt well to later situations. Whatever your interest is in exploring these issues we’d be glad if we could be of some assistance to you and we have added an addiction counsellor to our team to help with this work.
Counselling Connections, Dundalk.

We are noticing in our work with you who are new mothers that there is a need for greater awareness of what you really need in the weeks and months after giving birth. Many of you come to our attention through becoming postnatally depressed. It can be an emotionally and physically draining time. There are many new adaptations to be made in the early weeks and strange and all as it may seem there are also many losses to mourn at this time.
One of specific problems we see you encounter is a social pressure to leave your baby with family and friends so that you can have some ‘time to yourself’. This rarely works for the new mother. There is no doubt that as a new Mother you need support and sleep but time spent away from your baby in the early weeks can often leave you feeling more anxious and upset. This can have an adverse effect leading to a deeper level of depression and a feeling of worthlessness. Here’s why…..
During pregnancy you have been intimately connected to your baby for nine months. It’s a long time. Your baby knows your every breath and heartbeat and is attuned to your voice. He is safe and protected while in your womb and you are providing the ultimate protection for him. The bonding process has already begun and you are forming an attachment that for your baby will be the template for which all other relationships are formed during his lifetime. With breastfeeding and skin to skin contact, there is a continuation of that intimate bodily connection between you. You get to know your baby’s cues and are able to read his needs like no one else. Love hormones are flying all over the place leaving you feeling relaxed and in love with your baby. This in turn combats depressive feelings as endorphins (the ‘feel good’ hormones) are released into your bloodstream just as they are when we exercise. So cuddling your baby can do more good than several hours in the gym. This is the way nature intended it but is all too often not the way it works out.
Feeling very protective of your vulnerable little baby is a natural instinct therefore feeling reluctant to leave your child is normal. You are meant to feel that way so don’t apologise or feel bad about it. Mothers are incredibly instinctive when it comes to their babies and new mothers must be facilitated in tuning into and trusting that instinct. There is no better mother for your baby than you. Yes, your own mother or the midwife may be more skilled at changing your baby’s nappy but they can’t do it with the same love that you will do it with. Grow in confidence that if you are doing it with love to the best of your ability (considering physical discomfort and lack of sleep) then there is nothing better for your baby.
For the most part in the third world, babies are carried by their mothers with a sling until the baby is ready to walk. But here in the developed world, we often insist that what new mothers need is time away from their babies. Not so… what a new mother needs is support to be with her baby until it feels right to her to begin the separation process. When this is decided by anyone outside of this dyad it will result in problems. Friends and family can best help in practical ways with household chores, rather than offering to feed and bathe and babysit. And just to dispel any myths, you cannot spoil a newborn baby…. Trust your instinct to pick him up when he cries. He needs you and you need to cuddle him and soothe him. That’s what Mommies are for…. And you know the payoff will be a far more contented baby and Mother.

Here at Counselling Connections this week we have been reviewing how we communicate with you and ways in which we can reach out and explain counselling better. It seems to us that there are barriers which may stop you from coming to counselling. Our strategy is to explain counselling as best we can in plain English and also with the website and all of that to make getting in touch as simple as possible. Lots of you make your first contact with us through our website and send us an email with some of your questions. Practical matters like the cost of sessions and availability of suitable appointments are normally secondary issues. Understanding what counselling might do for you seems to be the top question. Not only is it the most difficult question to answer but it also seems to be the most difficult one to ask.
There may be lots of different reasons for this. Let’s give you an example: while walking up to the town recently we met a friend who asked how we were getting on. When we said that we are doing well and that we are quite busy he said ‘oh, oh dear that’s terrible’. This made us laugh but we knew what he meant. We are glad to be able to say that a busy counselling practice, far from being a terrible thing, is in fact a very positive one. It means that lots of people have come to a point where they decide they want to change things and are slowly going through a process of transforming their lives. Rather than add to any unhappiness that might be around we like to think that we reduce it. In fact, with the help of our clients, we are sure this is the case.
So, how do you go about making that first contact? And how do you know what to say? Well, it’s not unusual for someone when they come to see us first to say ‘I don’t know what is wrong with me’. And that’s as good a place as any to start a counselling relationship. It gives us a beginning, something to talk about. Sometimes people can be upset because they’ve never asked for help before and they see coming to counselling as a sort of failure of their coping skills. It’s fair to say that people quickly get over this once they become engaged in the counselling process and start talking about their lives.
There may also be an element of stigma. You hear some funny, well actually not so funny, things said about counselling by people who’ve never been. Labels are without doubt a big part of this and are perhaps the biggest barrier to starting counselling. There is a natural fear of ‘mental illness’ or being considered mad or crazy and people often joke about this nervously when they come to see us first. That nervous laughter is a good way to bring up a difficult subject and we are glad to take the time to explain that we don’t diagnose and we don’t attach labels. Our concern is simply to hear you talking about what is affecting your life and begin a process of exploring things and imagining changes.
One of the things about counselling is the idea of ‘not knowing’. You may not know how to get in touch. That’s okay; we’ll try to make that as straightforward for you as we can. You may not know what is wrong. And that’s okay too; it gives us a starting point, somewhere to begin. For our part we will not know any of the details of your life or the ways in which they have impacted on you. You are the expert on these things and you can fill us in as time goes on. I suppose that ‘not knowing’ is something which makes us all feel uncomfortable and that to some extent counselling is about looking into the unknown and trying to get to know it. In that way we hope that together we can relieve the discomfort of not knowing and facilitate a change to a more confident, secure way of being.
Counselling Connections, Dundalk.

Here at Counselling Connections we stood for a few minutes this morning looking out over the garden. We are lucky to have a large green garden with trees and shrubs and secret nooks and crannies. The lawn, however, is, to be honest, a little mossy and in need of some gardening expertise. This latter point causes a slight shudder when thoughts turn to firing up to old lawn mower again one more time. This act is the renewal of an annual rivalry now entering its eighteenth year. The lawn mower, you see, has developed a personality; a wilfulness which will only submit to a knowing adversary and only after testing that adversary’s resolve to the limit. It may need a little attention with an oily rag, perhaps a new spark plug; definitely a fresh drop of oil and then and only then will it cough and splutter into life raising it’s objections in clouds of grey and white smoke which take ten minutes to clear. Once these preliminaries are dispensed with it will work but only on condition that it is not asked to do too much. Wet and long grass is for young mowers and ours is seventeen which in lawnmower years is about a hundred and nineteen years old.
The thing about this relationship of course is that it is with an inanimate object. Albeit that anything that has an internal combustion engine can appear to take on human, often feminine, characteristics it is still only a machine. But we grow fond of them; think of a relationship with an old car. There is tremendous satisfaction to be got from the annual ritual of starting up a cantankerous old lawn mower for the first time. And for all that it would only cost a few hundred to replace this would seem like an act of disloyalty to an old comrade with whom many campaigns have been endured. This is perhaps an example of projecting human characteristics into different situations where we then master them and become secure in our position with the outside world. How this works with family pets is the subject of a whole different discussion which we’ll save for another day.
A wider look at the fun we have in our relationship with our lawnmower has us thinking about ways in which we adapt to our environments. Sometimes these can be enriching but it has to be said that perhaps also they can be maladaptive and facilitate unhealthy behaviour. For example, replace the cantankerous lawnmower with an equally contrary relation, say a grandparent. This fictional relation may live in the family home and may have been present when the children of the family are quite young. These children will learn to adapt to the vagaries of mood of the older person. This could be a vey positive addition to the child’s life growing up as they forge a relationship with an older person outside of their parents. Children make allowances for and learn to help the other to cope and lean how to be in a relationship with another.
The same ability to adapt which is a natural part of living in a family group is also brought to bear in situations where the other person, whoever that may be, is a malign or negative influence. For whatever reason this person may be jealous or nasty and the people around them can be forced into to trying to placate their moods. When this happens on an ongoing basis it can leave unhealthy coping or adaptive strategies in place in the minds of individual family members. This is something which we have to be careful of in relationships. It can create patterns of bad relationships which are repeated and which often cause people to seek therapy to learn how to change. It is possible to track back through old relationships to see where adapting to others may have caused us to allow respect for ourselves to be shelved. Becoming aware of this in ourselves is the first step on the path towards a new assertiveness which, though it can be difficult to practice to begin with, can lead to fuller more respectful and enriching relationships.
Counselling Connections, Dundalk.

Here at Counselling connections this week our minds have turned to matters of the heart. The industry that surrounds Saint Valentine’s Day is well in motion with an array of cards and chocolates, not to mention flowers available to young lovers. Our sympathies are with the young men and women who are at the stage where these things are all important and where there is so much pressure to meet the expectations of peers. Love is not a new phenomenon and young lovers have always been expected to display the extent of their love for each other. In these times this may mean helium balloons and a slap up meal but in different times the challenge was the same only the manner of the display has changed.
So much of our work here is about love. So much of the difficulties which people can experience in life have to do with love. It strikes us, talking about it here this morning, that there are so many variations of love. How one kind of love can almost become a prison is in stark contrast to the freedom of a facilitating kind of love. Whereas we see the ill effects on someone’s life of growing up without love we also see the transformative effects that love can have.
It is probably fair to say that each of us has a slightly different way of loving, our own individual style of love. We learn to love and be loved from our first childhood experiences, initially mostly with mother and then with father too. Our levels of trust in the world are built up from our experiences and from how we are held and facilitated by our parents when we are infants. We feel free to experiment and test the world if our efforts, whether successful or not are met with understanding, patience and above all with love.
Love facilitates our becoming as a person; it is a life enhancing force as powerful and important perhaps as the sun is to plants. And it is complicated too because the love of a parent is not about always saying yes. Sometimes a loving mother or father has to say no to the demands of their child and maintain a loving understanding if their gentle admonishments are not met with acquiescence. Indeed they might be met with a tantrum and here again our adult way of loving is greatly influenced by how this is negotiated. Some adults may huff and brood if they don’t get their way just as they did as infants.
It is probably also fair to say that none of us is completely free from the effects of our childhood ways of loving. When we meet a new friend for the fist time we may feel a stirring of the heart; a hope for a future filled with our childhood expectations may emerge. This is probably a natural process learned with evolution. Then things will settle down and more realistic, adult expectations of a relationship will emerge. Here too we have to be careful to maintain a spark of the initial attraction. In all too many cases a marriage will begin to flounder when two people just take things too much for granted and fall into ways of behaving which are just about settling into a routine and are absent of any richness or real love.
On other occasions we find that someone has a poor ability to stop loving someone once they have started. I suppose we are all familiar with examples of a person maintaining a relationship when friends and family can plainly see that it may even be harmful for the person. This may be due to patterns around addiction or violence. We can learn about how our own style of love influences how we behave in these situations and we can learn to change the way we love. If we didn’t develop the ability to take risks with love, to get it wrong and start over or if fear stops us from loving to begin with we will find relationships and intimacy difficult. It is good to explore these things in ourselves and to learn about aspects of our selves which may serve to block love.
Love can be transformative; to learn how to receive the love of another can lead to a wonderful experience of growing into the potential of your own full self. And to give a facilitating love, free from jealousy or rivalry can fill the giver with a great deal of warmth and feelings of living a full and purposeful life. To be in a relationship, whether that is as a romantic partner, a parent or child or as a friend where real love is present is to facilitate seeing the flowering of the best of what is in us.
Dundalk, Counselling Connections.

Bereavement is part of the human experience. Every day people die in different circumstances and at different ages. Yet it is something that is always difficult and can have devastating effects on those ‘left behind’. Although there are feelings and behaviours which come under the umbrella of ‘normal grief reactions’, it is still individual to the person and will be influenced by a number of factors. Our relationship to the deceased, whether that relationship was a good or difficult one, how the person died and at what age, will all impact on our reaction to the death. Our own previous history of losses and also concurrent stresses in a short space of time, will be difficult for the strongest of people.
The amount of support available to us from family and friends will also influence how we deal with death. Research has shown that if we feel supported, the amount of stress we feel post bereavement can be reduced. However one of the difficulties with social support like this is that it is often around the time of the bereavement and not so much later on, when the person really needs it. There is a general sense that as people move on with their lives, the bereaved person is encouraged to do the same. If you have lost someone close to you, you will know it is not that simple.
In order to fully understand why death is so difficult for us, it is important to look at the bonds we make with other people. As human beings we naturally make affectionate bonds as a way to survive and enjoy our experience of this world. This is known as Attachment. When someone close to us is dying, this bond is threatened and when death occurs it feels like this bond is broken. This has a huge impact on us at every level, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Being attached to others is what makes us feel safe and not so alone in the world, so when someone close dies those feelings of security are shook and we can be left questioning our place in the world and what our lives are about. It can be a very lonely time.
Normal grief reactions can be described in terms of the range of feelings, the physical sensations in our bodies, the way it can affect our thinking and the things we do in order to cope. Sadness is the most common feeling and is not necessarily expressed through tears. Crying helps some people feel a sense of relief but it is not for everyone. What matters is that the sadness is expressed in some way and not held in. Anger is often felt after someone dies and can be rooted in being angry that you could do nothing to prevent the death and also the pain of that bond being broken. It is quite normal to feel angry at the person who has died for leaving you to cope alone. There can be feelings of guilt around possibly not calling an ambulance sooner or not having been the best partner or parent in the world. Anxiety and loneliness, particularly for those who lose someone who was in their everyday lives. There can be feelings of helplessness especially with those who have lost a spouse, where the deceased took control of all household affairs. There may be shock, even with deaths that are not so sudden. Where there has been a long illness, relief may be predominant. Numbness is often experienced in the early days and can be a way of defending against overwhelming emotion. All of the above are part of the normal grieving process.
There are many potential physical symptoms which play a significant role in the grieving process. Lack of energy, sleeplessness, breathlessness, tightness in the chest or throat, emptiness in the stomach are all symptoms reported by people who have suffered the death of a close person.
Our thinking can become confused and we can have difficulty concentrating on ordinary tasks. There may be preoccupation with thoughts of the deceased and through the experience of yearning, a sense that the person is still with us. It is not unusual for people to report having seen the dead person, which may be attributable to hallucinations, showing that there can be a profound effect on all aspects of our person through the process of grieving.
With good support from family and friends many people can come through the trauma of bereavement without professional help. There are support groups in most local towns to help communities help each other get through. Where grief is complicated or where social support is lacking, bereavement counselling can help people to come to terms with their loss. Counselling looks at helping the person come to terms with the reality of their loss, acceptance being the key part of this. Working through the pain of the grief is a necessary part of mourning. The level of pain experienced differs from person to person but it is not possible to avoid feeling the emotional pain of losing someone you were greatly attached to. Adjusting to one’s environment without the person can be difficult and learning how to be in the world without that connection. Death will have an impact on one’s external environment, if the person was in your everyday life but equally there are inner adjustments to come to terms with like being a single person again and how this may affect your sense of yourself. Our sense of the world can be turned upside-down and it can be hard to find a sense of direction especially with sudden and untimely deaths. Our beliefs can be challenged in this way. The final task in dealing with death is to emotionally relocate the deceased and be able to move on with life. This can be a scary thought and can evoke huge anxiety. We are talking about finding a way to continue to be connected to the person but not in a way that prevents the bereaved from continuing his/her life in this world as this is necessary for him/her to do. The timing of this is loosely defined. There are many variables that will influence how a person deals with the mourning process.
When there comes a time when the person who is left can think about the person who has died without feeling huge pain, we can conclude that they have dealt with their loss. A rough guide of two years can be expected though for some this is shorter and for others longer. For those who are going through this process as you read this, the intensity of the pain of loss is hard to explain. Accept whatever help you can get, to get through this time. The pain will pass, you will feel more hopeful and you will adjust to life without your loved one as you work through your unavoidable pain.

Here at Counselling Connections we love the opportunity to take a coffee break and have a few minutes to chat and check with each other how things are going. Today there was only one topic of conversation because this morning’s was the coffee break that nearly never happened. This is because the trip up the street for takeaway coffee nearly ended badly when our intrepid volunteer distractedly stepped off the pavement onto the road without first checking to see if there was any traffic coming. And there was. A large cement truck was trundling along and gave a loud blast of its deep and ominous horn. Well, our coffee volunteer displayed nimbleness and slight of foot not seen in years and hastily jumped to safety.
This fright and its after effects were the subject of the coffee break chat when he got safely back to the office with the coffees. We got to talking about those well known responses to stress; the fight or flight response. Fight or flight is a natural response to an environmental treat. Our bodies are adapted to give us every chance of escape when faced with danger. We evolved to respond to threats which initially were real dangers in our environment and which nowadays with modern lifestyles can be more subtle and psychological. Whereas a stress response in the body leaves us with a good chance of escaping a danger which we can outrun or face down it is not always helpful with the more modern threats which we experience.
The fight or flight response is a natural physiological reaction. It places our bodies in a state of hyperarousal with changes in the heart, lungs, stomach and muscles. It influences the bladder and bowels as well as hearing and sight. Modern studies of this response have added a third choice also, which is to freeze. The freeze response is something which we can all observe in nature documentaries when an animal facing a threat either hides or plays dead in the hope of escaping the danger. In the freeze response a bleat or attempt to call out to mother would give away the animal’s hiding place so a loss of voice is part of the body’s reaction. This is true too in the case of humans caught in a freeze response to danger and can cause distress afterwards when someone recalling the event struggles with why they didn’t call out or scream. Unfortunately the silence is part of the natural response in the hope that we won’t provoke the aggressor and risk making the situation worse.
This also brings up the aspect of recall. There are a couple of points to say about this. Firstly our experience of our senses, our perception, plays like a cinema screen in our heads and our reactions are to these perceptions. When we try to recall an event our memory plays in the same way like a cinema in our head. We are capable of having a similar physiological reaction to a memory of an event as to the original event itself. That is why we are very careful with recalling an event in therapy. It is important to take things slowly and concentrate on the safely of the therapeutic environment.
Our bodies can react with the stress response to a phone call, to a demand from a boss or a loved one or to a traffic jam. We may feel an inclination to get angry or aggressive. More subtle modern stressors can be financial worry, relationships and loss or bereavement. A threat to our job security or a pending move whether that is a career move or moving house can be stresses that can create a build up in our bodies. There are ways to learn how to manage and control these stressors. One of the ways an animal discharges a stress build up is by shaking and we sometimes experience shaking after a sudden shock. Getting some exercise like for example a brisk walk can also bring about the discharge of a build up of stress.
Sometimes people live with high levels of stress because of ever present dangers in their environment. This can be because of an unsafe family situation and may continue for years. This constant or chronic stress can leave a person in a prolonged state of hyperarousal which can then be difficult to turn off after they have moved on to a safer place. Time and understanding and working with your body are techniques which can help towards reducing these over time.
So, we see lots of different kinds of stress presenting in our bodies. There are many different causes some sudden and dramatic, some less so and some prolonged over time. There are different techniques to successfully manage and control these responses in our bodies. They are natural reactions designed to help us and by getting an understanding of them and learning to control them we can learn to cope well with the different situations and challenges that we face in life.

Counselling Connections, Dundalk.

Here at Counselling Connections we have been noticing that there’s a lot of anxiety about lately. It seems to be spreading like wildfire, fuelled by thoughts about the Economy, the Government and the state of the country. This has a ripple effect as we all know on personal circumstances like unemployment, financial difficulties and worries about the uncertainty of one’s future. This is turn can generate huge anxiety and can impact heavily on us and our relationships.
In an internet café in Drogheda yesterday I listened as a fellow customer conveyed her view of the current political situation. In summary it was her view that we are all doomed …. I was in good form, my mood lightened by the bright wintery sunshine, a crisp cold day. But as if without warning I started to feel anxiety creep up on me, feeling the impact of what she was saying and wondering if I should feel more concerned about these things…. Her anxiety about her future and that of this country was beginning to find a home with me…I decided at that point to make my exit and leave her with her Anxiety. I wasn’t going to take it on. I walked outside the shop and felt the cool air on my face reconnecting with the good feeling the bright winter sun had facilitated prior to entering the shop.
Anxiety can affect the way we think, feel and behave. It can also have a very physical impact on our body. The above example shows how our thoughts, feelings and behaviours all interact within a matter of minutes. It also shows how we have the power to monitor and control our thoughts. Cognitive (Thinking) Behavioural Therapy is a type of counselling that helps you to do this.
My thought as the woman in the cafe was speaking was “maybe I should be more worried….maybe she’s right…” This led me to start feeling anxious. I quickly made a decision not to give this thought fuel by taking it a step further. Instead I saw it as her anxiety and left it with her, which led to a positive behaviour of leaving the shop and feeling the good feelings I had felt earlier.
Anxiety is something we all experience from time to time. It is important to understand it is a normal response to any threat to our person. Being slightly nervous can help us to perform better or can help us to deal with danger. The body reacts to a threat by producing adrenaline, a hormone which prepares us for ‘fight or flight’ e.g. if you feel you are being followed on a dark evening in a lonely street, it is normal for you to feel your heart beating faster and your breathing becoming faster. These symptoms are caused by the adrenaline and is your body’s way of preparing, in the event that you need to run. When the emergency is over and you are safely in your car/ home or you realise it wasn’t someone following you, you experience relief but may feel shaken. This is a true reaction of your body; it is not imagined and is a direct result of adrenaline production.
Although it is normal to feel anxious when threatened or under pressure, some people feel anxious quite a lot of the time when they are not really under threat. Although the feelings anxiety produces are unpleasant, they are not dangerous. Anxiety can become a problem when it is severe and prolonged and when it interferes with what we want to do in our daily lives. In anxiety it is usual that a vicious circle is maintained between thinking and feeling (including bodily responses) and behaviour. The type of thinking fuelling your anxiety can be very immediate and even transient. You may not even be aware of those thoughts as you are so used to them. These thoughts are referred to as negative, automatic thoughts and the aim would be to identify what they are, so that you can challenge what truth they hold. The aim is to become good at hi jacking those thoughts before they take hold of you and send you spiralling into anxiety.
It is common for people who suffer from anxiety to avoid situations that make them feel anxious. This can become very problematic as the more you avoid something, the more difficult it will seem to overcome, which in turn will make you more anxious. It is necessary therefore, to keep trying to do things even if they make you feel anxious so that you can prove to yourself that nothing disastrous will happen. Continuing to practice this will eventually allay your anxiety.
There are many reasons for people to feel anxious in the times we live in. Stressful life events like coping with a death, separation/ divorce, losing a job, family problems and financial stress are all understandably worrying. Taking control starts with recognising what’s going on in your mind and body and follows through with taking positive steps to manage this anxiety. In this way anxiety can be seen as a normal response to life changing events but one that does not take over your life.