What Is A Panic Attack?
Panic attacks can be very frightening. The heart beat accelerates and sweating and panting are common. You may think you’re about to faint - or even that you’re going to die. Though the exact form differs for everyone, there are four repeated characteristics of panic...
How To Be Resilient
Resilient. It's one of those words which pop up all the time in the virtual space. I’ve mentally bracketed it away with other things like ‘confidence’ or ‘self-esteem’, qualities which we imagine more successful people have been born with, but which we ourselves lack....
The Body Speaks
On my bookshelves is an actor’s manual called ‘The Body Speaks’. In this wonderful book, Lorna Marshall explores, through theatre exercises, how the body mediates human experience. As she says, 'it is our body that climbs the mountain, whispers in another’s ear,...
Mental Well-being During The Pandemic
This is an ‘unprecedented’ time, as the newspapers keep reminding us. They use that word because it’s true: nothing in anyone’s lifetime has prepared us for this. Comparisons are with the Spanish Flu after the Great War, or much further back, with the Great Plague or...
Hope in Counselling
Last weekend, a friend gave me a ‘prayer stick’ – though she preferred to call it a ‘hope stick’. It’s a piece of wood, found on a walk and decorated with coloured wool and beads. While she decorated the stick, my friend ‘infused’ it with dreams of happiness, wishes...