Do I Need to See a Therapist?

Donna Bottomley

Description

Why is the idea of asking for professional help still so taboo?

Why are we afraid of our emotions?

Do I Need to See a Therapist? provides insight into how we can acknowledge and overcome the fear of being thought mad, weak or helpless.

In this empathetic and practical guide, psychotherapist Donna Maria Bottomley examines these anxieties and argues that therapy should be just as acceptable as seeing a GP or booking your car into the garage and needn’t be our last resort.

Sujets

• Médecine
• Spécialités médicales
• Santé et bien-être
• Bien-être émotionnel
• Bien-être émotionnel
• Santé mentale & traumatisme
• Happiness
• Psychology
• Psychotherapy
• Popular psychology
• List of counseling topics
• Counseling
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Personal Growth
• Mental Health

Informations

• Publié par: Legend Press
• Date de parution: 22 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800316850
• Langue: English

Extrait

DO I NEED TO SEE A THERAPIST?

Hero, an imprint of
Legend Times Group Ltd, 51 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6HJ [e-mail] | www.hero-press.com
Donna Maria Bottomley 2021
The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
Print ISBN: 9781800316843
Ebook ISBN: 9781800316850
Set in Times. Printing managed by Jellyfish Solutions Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
CONTENTS
Disclaimer
Acknowledgements
Preface
Foreword
List of Figures and Tables
Introduction
Chapter One
The Fear of Therapy
Chapter Two
The Trouble with Emotions
Chapter Three
Why Am I Upset? Part One
Chapter Four
Why Am I Upset? Part Two
Chapter Five
Will Talking about My Feelings Make Them Worse? And if So, What Can I Do to Make It Easier?
Chapter Six
When Should I See a Therapist?
Chapter Seven
Finding a Therapist
Chapter Eight
What to Expect from Therapy
Chapter Nine
The Trouble with Therapy
Chapter Ten
Cyber Therapy, Blended Therapy and, er Forest Bathing?! Alternatives to Standard Therapy Approaches
Chapter Eleven
Does Therapy Work?
Conclusion
References
Appendix
To my husband Mike and daughter Tilly. Thank you for being so patient over the past year as I stressed about this book! You are my world and I love you very much.
I would also like to acknowledge the clients I have had the honour of sitting with over the years. You may think I have forgotten you but I have not. I often think of you and wonder how you are.
DISCLAIMER
There are many therapies, directories and organizations listed in this book which I hope will help to show that you do have choice when it comes to therapy. I have tested each link as of September 2020 and have provided as much information as possible, but neither I as the author nor the publisher of this book can guarantee the complete accuracy, efficacy or appropriateness of any of these suggestions for you personally.
Without knowing your personal situation, it is impossible to give a guarantee that any of the suggestions described in this book will work for you. If you find that any of the material is triggering for you and makes you feel worse, please leave that part of the book, look at the appendix for the helpline numbers or seek the personal support of your doctor, therapist or someone you trust and who can support you.
For some people the fear of emotions and the fear of bodily sensations can go hand in hand. I want to help you with this, but as with any fear it is important to take a graded approach and not flood yourself with feelings. So only do what feels right for you. Please seek support if you are struggling.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you so very much to Christian M ller, my editor at Hero. If I had to write a wish list of everything I wanted in an editor, it would be you I would use as my model.
To my clinical supervisors, Colin Howard, of Howard Psychology Ltd, and Elizabeth Doggart, of Elizabeth Doggart Associates Ltd, for introducing me to several exciting neurobiological developments in psychotherapy that have given my practice a new dimension. It is an exciting time for therapy as we are increasingly seeing the science behind what we do in practice.
Also, thank you Clare Mackintosh for your words of encouragement about this book when we met at Monty Lit Fest in 2019. Your words reached me at a time when they were most needed.
I also acknowledge - with a mixture of emotions - lockdown, home-schooling, and Zoom, because, despite the struggles, I am heartened to see that the pandemic experience has placed mental health (or emotional health as I prefer to call it) front and centre. It doesn t seem unusual to speak about emotions on TV or social media at the moment and this is a huge step forward from where things have been in the past.
PREFACE
I started writing this book in 2017 as a CBT therapist of seventeen years who had recently qualified as an EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapist and was incorporating this new method into my practice. In EMDR the instruction to notice that an emotion has been activated and to place it somewhere in your body, was the start of a significant change for me in my psychotherapy practice. EMDR threw a light on how unprocessed emotions and negative beliefs about the self could be released and processed through the body, and not just processed cognitively by the thinking brain.
Much has changed since 2017 for me personally, and of course much has changed in the world too. In my therapy work I have now travelled deeper into the science of emotions and the connection between the nervous system and midbrain and its role in emotional health. Polyvagal theory has shown me the key role that the vagal nerve plays in our feeling-states. Heartache and gut feelings are real, and we now have a way to describe how they happen and what they are. When we notice our gut feelings we are in touch with the interoceptive network that travels from body to brain and back again.
I am now a brainspotting therapist as well as an EMDR therapist. Brainspotting is a slightly gimmicky name for an extraordinarily powerful therapy. It was developed by David Grand and grew out of his EMDR practice. It involves not only noticing what is happening in our body when we feel emotionally activated, but also noticing where our gaze falls. The place where our eyes look when we are experiencing a strong emotion is part of that feeling-state and is connected to activity in our midbrain. By combining eye gaze with interoceptive awareness we can gain insight into what is happening in our brain and nervous system and learn how to tolerate and process our feelings. Notice where your eyes look when you are thinking about a memory.
As I used these processes more and more with my clients, I began to see that the reluctance to start therapy and the issues that people described, often coincided with a wariness about emotions themselves and either losing control or being overwhelmed and worrying about not being able to cope. I realized that, in writing this book, there was an opportunity to offer what I had learned to more people than I could see one-to-one in practice. It felt too important to keep to myself. So, in this book I have set out to combine the fear of therapy with the fear of emotion and offer my methods as to how you can understand and master your feeling-states by developing your interoceptive awareness.
Now, my journey along the way has also given me my own parallel process to deal with. Through researching sensations and the processing of information by the brain I started to realize my own sensory processing differences. My spiky profile shows that I am neurodivergent , and many things make sense about my life now that I have discovered this. I have also come to realize the key role that interoceptive awareness plays in my own emotional health, and I am so much better at identifying what I am feeling as a result.
I have learned that my body will give me the pure truth of a feeling if I listen to it, whereas my thinking brain is so busy trying to predict what is happening that it often gets it wrong. By understanding that this thought activity is a prediction, not the truth, and by noticing what my body is doing, I can work out how to soothe and level things out.
This is a blend of meta-cognitive awareness (noticing) and appraising interoceptive/body information in a non-threatening way. It is not the only solution to everything, but it is an important tool for emotional health. I deliberately use the term emotional health rather than mental health , because I believe it more accurately represents the vital two-way connection between brain and body. Mental health as a term still seems to split body and brain. It no longer makes sense to do this.
FOREWORD
I wanted to include the thoughts of my clients as well as those of my clinical supervisors in the foreword of this book. My practice has been and continues to be influenced and informed by them and their perceptions matter to me a great deal.
Two of my clients very kindly agreed to comment and I asked them the following questions. To protect their confidentiality their names have not been published.
* * * *
1. Did you feel anxious about coming to therapy in case it made you feel emotions you didn t want to feel?
Client 1: My understanding before therapy was that my thoughts and feelings needed to be kept under control, shut away. That I could train my brain to think and feel the negative stuff less and that therapy might bring all the bad memories back to the surface. I also thought therapy might help me control my brain. I didn t trust or understand my emotions a lot of the time because they didn t make sense to me and I felt they often worked against me. I felt like therapy would be like letting someone into your mind and I was scared to do that: it didn t feel safe to be vulnerable. At the same time as these worries, I believed therapy could help me with the right therapist.
Client 2: I wasn t so much anxious, rather I felt I d failed, and that accepting I needed to see someone for support was a sign of that failure and the fact I couldn t cope. I also felt embarrassed that maybe people would judge me for needing to see a head doctor .
2. Did you have a sense of what you thought would happen if you let certain emotions come out?
Client 1: I felt so full of anger and sadness that I didn t know ho