Dialectical Behaviour Therapy is a highly effective treatment for borderline personality disorder, suicidal behaviour, self-harm, substance use, post-traumatic stress, depression and eating disorders. Mindfulness and distress tolerance skills are combined with emotional regulation and interpersonal skills to bring about positive change. The term dialectical means working with opposites. Interestingly, DBT uses the two opposites of acceptance and change strategies to bring about change.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing. This process is effective for the release of ‘stuck’ memories and emotions or negative beliefs. After a thorough assessment and preparation process, EMDR involves mindful focus on thoughts and emotions and the body sensations while moving the eyes left to right. This assists the brain to go through its natural healing process (much like we do during REM sleep) and heal old limited neural networks that have been ‘frozen’ in time.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is based on mindfulness and values based approach to change. It teaches psychological skills to effectively deal with painful thoughts and feelings, and clarify what is truly important and meaningful to a person. This knowledge guides, inspires, and motivates goal-setting and life-enriching action. The aim of ACT is to maximise human potential and can be helpful for a range of concerns such as adjustment, anxiety, depression, conflict, grief and loss to name a few.

A person whose essential emotional needs were not met during childhood may develop self-defeating life patterns, these are called schemas. An example of this is abandonment or instability, or social isolation, or defectiveness patterns that get acted out by the person. Schema therapy helps to identify these patterns and to find healthy ways to meet their specific emotional needs. It combines cognitive behavioural, experiential, interpersonal and psychoanalytic therapies.

Motivational interviewing helps people gain greater awareness of the consequences and risks of problematic behaviour, and instead focuses on a person’s personal values and goals. It is based on the therapist utilising important skills such as expressing and showing empathy, being supportive and identifying discrepancy in the clients thoughts and values. During motivational interviewing, clients are assisted to deal with resistance, and they are supported in self-efficacy and to develop autonomy.

Autism is a developmental condition that affects how a person communicates and interacts with others, as well as how they make sense of the world. People with autism typically have restricted interests, repetitive behaviours and/or sensory sensitivities. A thorough assessment will be able to distinguish the autism diagnosis from other behavioural or emotional concerns. A cognitive assessment can help get access to funding, assist teachers provide effective support, and help a child and their caregivers understand their needs.

A person can become addicted to a temporarily pleasurable activity, like gambling, gaming or drug/alcohol intake. It can begin from what felt initially like harmless fun, or a distraction from underlying unhappiness and pain. People who are addicted will spend a lot of time thinking about and engaging in the activity and find it hard to stop, to the detriment of their job, relationships, finances, self-esteem, physical and mental health. It is important to seek assistance if you have any concerns that you may be addicted.

Anger management involves knowing the triggers and warning signs of anger, as well as learning calming strategies before acting in overtly aggressive or destructive ways. Anger can be a very healthy part of maintaining our personal and emotional boundaries and will often let us know when someone has crossed our line. Very often however skewed interpretations of other people’s intentions and destructive aggression patterns can lead to a breakdown of significant relationships and lost opportunities.

Anxiety is different from stress. Stress is usually related to a pressing situation and often passes when the situation is over. Anxiety on the other hand may have no particular reason other than the one internally generated through negative thoughts. Anxiety often feels harder to control and makes it difficult to cope with daily life. Common negative thoughts that lead to anxiety are what if, catastrophising, and beliefs around not being able to cope or manage the imagined situation.  Anxiety brings up feelings of fear and panic.

A person experiencing bipolar disorder can have episodes of extremely high mood to the point of being euphoric or manic and can have episodes of low mood, feelings of hopelessness and extreme sadness, and a loss of interest and pleasure in life, as well as and activity. These episodes can include agitation, racing thoughts, rapid speech and poor sleep. A person with bipolar can also have delusions and hallucinations. It is important to seek assistance if you have concerns you may have this disorder.

Because many of us spend so much of our time in the workplace, finding the right match in terms of job and company is very important. Ideally whatever we choose to do is fulfilling, purposeful, exciting or interesting and somehow uplifting. It is important that the career we choose allows us to express and explore our particular gifts and unique interests and matches our values. It may be worth spending some time talking about this with a trained professional to explore the path to a fulfilling career.

Depression can feel like a big black hole and can be hard to see past sometimes. This can occur due to intense isolation or a very harsh inner critic that doesn’t leave you room to engage freely in life. It is linked to feelings of hopelessness or helplessness, loss of interest in life, negative thoughts about the self and feeling very low. By it’s very nature depression urges a person to isolate themselves and retreat from the world. Unfortunately, this can feed the intensity of the depression. Seek help if these low feeling do not pass.

The pressures of body image, acceptance, belonging and value, combined with distortions in self-perception can lead some people to struggles with eating, binging, purging, or limiting food. Some people use also laxatives to prevent weight gain. The two most common eating disorders are anorexia and bulimia. Both of these disorders can be very serious for the health of the body and is important that it is addressed as soon as possible. If you have concerns seek professional help as soon as possible.

Family relationships are critical to an individual’s mental health.  Family counselling involves engaging with the whole family system.  Family counselling can assist the family to change unhelpful relationship habits, misunderstandings, clear up old history, and improve communication. In family counselling you can develop strategies for a more fulfilling relationships that take into account the individual needs, interests, and quirks of each of the family members.

It can feel deeply sad and disorienting to loss someone that you love. Loss often comes with a variety of confusing emotions such as fear, anger, hurt. How big or important a role this person, animal, object or role was in your life very much influences your experience of loss. Any previous loss can also have a major impact. Everyone’s journey of loss is unique and has no set process or time line. It can be helpful to talk to a trained professional about your experience of loss to assist in your natural grieving and adjustment process.

Some people cants get to sleep while others get to sleep easily and wake up regularly and have very broken sleep. Some people wake up very early and cant get back to sleep. This can be very distressing, and it is easy to build frustration and negative sleep habits. It is important that you talk to your doctor about your concerns with sleep and seek the necessary support to overcome this. You GP may refer you to counselling to assist you to gain strategies and skills to give you the optimal opportunity breaking the habit of insomnia.

Everyone struggles with issues in life. It can feel challenging to navigate relationships, loss, change, stress and the pressures of life. Sometimes longstanding issues catch up with you and usual old defenses and coping strategies don’t work. Sometime the last situation that happened, while it doesn’t seem very significant, tipped off all the previous experiences. – the straw the broke the camel’s back so to speak. Many people come along to counselling to discuss, strategise, and build skills in many different areas of life.

It seems like stress has become a socially accepted part of day to day life. Stress is when we feel like we are always switched on and under pressured to achieve, perform or complete tasks. It can keep the brain churning over, even when it is time to relax with family, friends or time to sleep and wind down. Long term stress can also cause chronic health problems and general unhappiness. It can lead to more severe conditions such as depression and anxiety.

It seems like stress has become a socially accepted part of day to day life. Stress is when we feel like we are always switched on and under pressured to achieve, perform or complete tasks. It can keep the brain churning over, even when it is time to relax with family, friends or time to sleep and wind down. Long term stress can also cause chronic health problems and general unhappiness. It can lead to more severe conditions such as depression and anxiety.

Facing end of life can be very challenging on many levels for the person going through this and their families, friends and broader circle of associates. There is extensive support available for families and individuals going through this. Managing mental health and wellbeing through this process is as important as managing the physical needs. Having the support of a psychologist through this time can assist in the letting go and grieving process and navigate the challenges and complications of this journey.

Sexual harassment is unwelcome sexual behaviour. It may be unwelcome pursuit of a relationship or simply unwelcome sexualised conversation or behaviour. Sexual harassment is unlawful in various settings including employment, goods and services and education, particularly where there is a power imbalance between the parties. Women and men can experience sexual harassment. It is important to protect your personal and emotional safety and talk to a professional if you find you are unable to stop unwanted sexual behaviour.

Sex and sexuality can be a challenging topic and many find it difficult to come to peace with their own need to explore and understand their sexuality. For some that may be an interest in same gender or simple wanting to explore a more fulling sex life or managing impotence and hormonal changes that effect sex drive. It may bring up many issues around self-image, self-esteem, safety and trust. Discussing your particular concerns can assist exploring the beautiful, loving, or pleasurable part of sexuality between consenting people.

The most important relationship you have is with yourself. How you make yourself feel and how you think about yourself affects you 24 hours of the day. Given thoughts and emotional habits are changeable, there is no reason to live life with negative thoughts about yourself. It can be helpful to understand the context in which the low self-esteem and with the assistance of a psychologist you can work through these thoughts and feelings to rescript the old history to a new, more positive and fun relationship with yourself and life.

Relationships are complex and we each bring differences in upbringing, attitudes, values, expectations and communication styles.  Relationships give us the opportunity to grow and evolve as people. The nature and quality of our relationships often reflect how we feel about ourselves and what we believe we deserve. As we grow and change, our relationship needs to continue to grow and develop too. This often requires a lot of communication and exploring and having new agreements with each other over time.

There are a variety of personality disorders according to the DSM IV. One of the personality disorders is called borderline personality disorder which often includes struggles with emotional regulation, relationships and includes self harming or risk taking behavior. Other personality disorders are antisocial PD , histrionic PD, narcissistic PD, paranoid PD , schizoid PD and schizotypal PD. If you are unsure if you or someone you care about has a personality disorder consult with a GP or psychiatrist.

Post-natal depression is longer lasting low mood and different from baby blues which can typically last a few days.  Having a baby challenges a woman and parent on many levels. There are huge hormonal and bodily changes happening, as well as life adjustment and managing the pressures of what being a parent means. The adjustment can feel overwhelming for many. It is important if you are feeling very low, sad, unable to attach to your baby or isolated that you let your maternal health nurse and GP know.

Chronic pain can feel like it takes away all pleasure in life. We now know that chronic pain largely occurs in the brain and not in the body. It is important to have a team of specialists who manage medication and can assist you to retrain the ‘pain’ neural pathways in the brain. Pain causes the body to go into a stress reaction, which in turn cause the body to experience more pain. This can become a vicious cycle and can be assisted by bringing on positive emotions that retrain the pain centres of the brain.

A relationship can bring out the best and the worst in us. The very difference that we were attracted to when we first met our partners, becomes annoying or hard to tolerate later. Relationships give us the opportunity to grow and evolve as people. It is ideal to be able to stand securely on our own two feet and have a partnership that complements our values, life direction, health and happiness. Improving understanding, communication, and clear agreements can assist greatly in creating a happy and fulfilling marriage or partnership.

It can be very tricky to manage weight as we need to eat to survive and yet only a small inclination toward eating for pleasure can tip the calorie intake over the edge.  Some of the keys to finding success in this area include finding a good balance between food intake, exercise, and self-care. If you have been struggle with this for some time it may be worth exploring any underlying self-esteem, and empowerment, self-love and control issues with a psychologist.

Being fulfilled and happy in the workplace is fundamental to meeting need of value, respect, autonomy, community, safety, connection and interest to name a few. The workplace is where we are challenged to explore our true interests, passions and skills and also develop communication skills and confidence. It can be challenging to understand and navigate the complexity of workplace hierarchy, relationships, and where we fit into this bigger picture and the role. Discussing with a professional can be very helpful to navigate concerns.