Our Services

Here are the services I offer. If you feel you could benefit from any of them please don't hesitate to get in touch.

• Walking and talking therapy

  Walk and talk therapy is a therapy engaged outdoors. Instead of the therapy being conducted within four clinical walls, the therapy is taken out of the therapy room and into nature with the psychotherapist.

  Benefits of walking and talking therapy

  Walking and talking therapy gets you moving – both mentally and physically. Here are just some of the reasons why walk talk therapy is a great approach to choose:-

  • Walk talk therapy is outdoors; being surrounded by nature can be very therapeutic, relaxing and mindful.
  • Walking releases endorphins through physical movement which can lift your mood and create different ways of thinking. Physical activity has also been shown to reduce levels of depression and anxiety and can help to prevent depressive symptoms.
  • You may find yourself anxious when confronting and talking about difficult issues in the traditional seated, face-to-face interaction. Walking beside your therapist can be more relaxing and enable more thoughts and insights to come along.

  
  

  Julie offers this mode of therapy as an alternative option to the therapy room. You should not expect a strenuous workout as walk talk therapy will match your pace.

  If the weather is bad, we can still meet up in the therapy room instead, or you may just change your mind. Either way, it is always your choice whether we conduct walk talk therapy or use the therapy room.

  Julie is familiar with the walks in the area and how long they take. The sessions can be anything from 30 minutes to 60 minutes long. Again this is up to you. This therapy is suitable for people of all fitness levels.

  In a study supporting the mental health benefits of using physical activity for therapeutic purposes, physical exercise was the most common type of self-care strategy (Hansson et al., 2005). Self-care strategies have been shown to improve individuals’ well being and to help with milder forms of depression.

• Compassion focused therapy

  Compassion focused therapy, as the name suggests, involves the use of approaches intended to bolster self-compassion.

  Shame and self-criticism are associated with a range of psychological difficulties, including depression, social anxiety, eating disorders, various personality disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Compassionate mind training helps transform problematic patterns of cognition and emotion related to depression, anxiety, anger, shame and self-criticism. Humans have evolved with at least three primal emotion regulation systems:

  • the threat (protection) system
  • the drive (resource-seeking) system
  • the soothing system

  CFT emphasises the links between cognitive patterns and these three emotion regulation systems, teaching you how to manage each system more effectively and respond more appropriately to situations.

• Eye Movement Desensitization And Reprocessing (EMDR)

  What is EMDR?

  The mind can often heal itself naturally, in the same way as the body does. Much of this natural coping mechanism occurs during sleep, particularly during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Francine Shapiro developed eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) in 1987, utilising this natural process in order to successfully treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Since then, EMDR has been used to effectively treat a wide range of mental health problems.

  EMDR can help with the following difficulties:

  • PTSD
  • anxiety and panic attacks
  • depression
  • stress
  • phobias
  • personality disorders
  • eating disorders
  • dissociative disorders
  • sleep problems
  • complicated grief
  • body dysmorphic disorders
  • addictions
  • pain relief, phantom limb pain
  • self-esteem and performance anxiety
  • physical and/or sexual abuse

  
  

  The Psychology

  What happens when you are traumatised?
  Most of the time your body routinely manages new information and experiences without you being aware of it. However, when something out of the ordinary occurs and you are traumatised by an overwhelming event (e.g. a car accident) or by being repeatedly subjected to distress (e.g. childhood neglect), your natural coping mechanism can become overloaded.

  Disturbing experiences (memories and feelings) remain frozen in your limbic brain ‘unprocessedʼ in a ‘rawʼ and emotional form, rather than in a verbal ‘story in our long-term memory bank. Past painful feelings can be continually triggered in the present.
  EMDR helps create the connections between your brainʼs memory networks, enabling your brain to process the traumatic memory in a very natural way. Bringing disturbing memories to mind and adding bilateral stimulation (eye movements, tapping with touch or audio cues) can change thoughts, images and feelings. Memories tend to lose their painful intensity.

• Mindfulness

  Mindfulness is an ancient Buddhist practice which is very relevant to life today. Mindfulness is a very simple concept. Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgementally. This increases awareness, clarity and acceptance of our present-moment reality.

  Animals and young children are very good at being mindful of this present moment. I might go out into the garden and as I look around, I think "that grass really needs cutting and that vegetable patch looks very untidy". Children, on the other hand, will notice the ants or other crawlies.

  Being mindful helps us to train our attention. Our minds wander about 50% of the time, but every time we practise being mindful, we are exercising our attention "muscle" and becoming mentally fitter. We can take more control over our focus of attention, and choose what we focus on, rather than passively allowing our attention to be dominated by that which distresses us and takes us away from the present moment. Mindfulness might simply be described as choosing and learning to control our focus of attention, and being open, curious and flexible.