Personal well-being

Personal and psychological well-being is our natural state, our default, but things happen that disconcert; things can sometimes go wrong, in our lives, in the world, in our families, even a generation ago, that impact us so heavily -as children but also as adults- that our stance psychologically is changed and sometimes determined by these experiences of stress, and trauma. Therapy is a formal way of addressing these core personal stories and traumas that we carry and the symptoms that they manifest.

• Anxiety attacks: The feeling of anxiety is associated with the fight or flight (and freeze, as well as now in new research from 2020: the friendly) reflex we have in response to danger and threat; it's automatic and happens faster than our eyes can show us the threat; adrenaline is released before we are conscious we have registered something is a threat. This is also called the hyphothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, and this HPA axis can be chronically activated in anxiety sufferers. In treating anxiety resolving and talking through and discussing the concerns and crises, conflicts that sit beneath anxiety feelings with someone you trust can help to address these symptoms.

• Signs of depression: In coping with depression, one may conider Sigmund Freud, originator of modern psychotherapy who said depression was the psyche or our whole psychological and emotional mind, finding itself hitting a dead-end, a level of stuckness, and so when we feel depressed we can understand it as our unconscious minds giving us a sense of hopelessness and bleakness, and a message that this path or state of affairs is not feeling good, in our lives, that we can't keep doing the same thing, this thing. Depression is dangerous, to our psychological health and physiological health, and constitutes a fundamental challenge to the self to grapple with that's complex and that needs to be taken seriously. Signs of depression include at its core; hopelessness, thoughts of death, despair, dysphoria, indecision, low concentration, insomnia, weight changes, loss of interest in activities previously enjoyed and sadness most simply that is imovable, saturating.