I just wanted to quickly explain one of the main reasons why I’ve made this website and am writing these blog posts.

You may have noticed that I start a lot of these blogs by saying something like ‘many clients come to me saying…’ or ‘a lot of clients have asked…’. This is because the reason I wanted to write these blogs was to highlight the fact that pretty much all human beings have similar struggles! No one will ever be exactly the same as you but lots of us struggle with the same things.

In my work I am in the really privileged position of witnessing many people’s innermost thoughts and feelings. Sadly, a lot of the time, the person who is sat with me thinks that they are weird, abnormal or crazy because of the way they are feeling, or the thoughts they are having. This feeling can often lead to them being highly critical of themselves and impacting their self-worth. Having spent time with hundreds of clients, and also through my own experiences, it is my belief that low self-worth is one of the underlying factors of all emotional distress. It’s hard to be happy and healthy if you don’t like yourself.

However, because I have sat with hundreds of clients, I know that these thoughts and feelings are usually ‘normal’ given the situation the person is in or given their past experiences. So this is what I try to explain. In counselling we call this ‘normalising’. Often, if someone has a learned behaviour of keeping all their thoughts and feelings to themselves, they will never have said any of these things out loud to others. This will mean they won’t have experienced the people around them saying things like “I’ve had thoughts like that too” or “I’ve felt that way too”. This can lead to them thinking that no one else thinks or feels the way they do and they ‘shouldn’t’ be thinking or feeling this way. Therefore normalising is a very large part of a lot of therapeutic interactions.

So this is part of the reason I have created this website and am writing these blogs. I’m hoping that people will read them and, if they have been feeling that they are different, abnormal or crazy, they might start to realise that this is not true. That they may start to be less critical of themselves and learn to accept themselves as a human being with both strengths and weaknesses.

It’s a big goal but I really hope I can go some way towards achieving it because I feel it’s important.

Thank you for reading.