The pain inside

“She’s just doing it for attention.” This is a phrase I have often heard from people trying to understand why a patient, a friend or a loved-one has been deliberately hurting themselves. Self injury goes against all our natural instincts of survival and self-protection. Unfortunately, the assumption often ends up being that a person who does such a thing must be either attention-seeking or “crazy”. But, most often, neither is the case.

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It gets worse before it gets better

There is a common paradox for psychological therapy: many times the strategies we have found to provide us relief from our problems are at the same time perpetuating our problems. Consequently, therapy can at times be very uncomfortable: you make a choice to confront difficult feelings and experiences that you have developed a range of strategies for avoiding.

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Buying your way to happiness, or despair?

Many of us enjoy the buzz a shopping spree creates now and then. But for some people buying becomes very much like an addiction. It is a problem that can have very significant consequences – the most obvious being debt and other financial problems. It can also create friction or breakdown in relationships or be a source of severe guilt and shame.

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