Assure Psychology

18/12/2025

12/12/2025

12/12/2025

When all parts of us feel internally connected and held in the loving embrace of the body of which is an aspect, then they will feel safe and nourished at last. The first step is to become curious about this ‘other’ inside whom we do not really know.

15/08/2024

24/07/2024

I will be attending conferences in Aberdeen, Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 and Swansea, Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 over the next 5 weeks but can still be contacted by phone message or email. Be aware that the UK 🇬🇧 is 9 hours behind....

18/07/2024

Shame is deeply embedded in a lot of trauma survivors. It really can be an obstacle to having a full rich life. They are always held back by the beliefs that they’re worthless, the feeling of not wanting to be seen, and the thought of ‘I don’t deserve to feel good about myself’.

From a trauma perspective and an attachment perspective, shame is an adaptation to trauma and attachment failure. I try to make people understand shame as a survival response, rather than tying it to the details of what happened. Usually, people focus on the fact that, when you're treated abusively, you feel shame and that shame lasts and lasts. As opposed to understanding the fact that shame allows you to submit at ages when you're too young to fight back or protest. The shame allows you to comply, adapt, and be the child that allows you to get a few more crumbs of attachment. That is a whole different perspective on shame and much more easily treatable.

20/04/2024

The average therapist sees the animal defences every day in the office. For example, clients who have chronic submission responses tend to present as chronically depressed, hopeless and helpless, ashamed, and feeling less than others, and because we call it depression, we don’t treat it as a trauma symptom. People who chronically have the freeze, deer-in-the-headlights response get an anxiety disorder diagnosis. They’ll report, “I’ve been having panic attacks, I can’t leave the house, I can’t drive the car more than a few blocks.” Those who have chronic fight responses can’t stop fighting, can’t stop being angry, and engage in aggressive behavior including aggression toward their own bodies. Some people with chronic fight responses tend to be violent toward others, some toward themselves, and an even smaller percentage have both. They have aggressive responses toward others and they harm themselves.

We have come to understand – and this is the essence of the body keeping the score – that when something bad happens to us, not just our minds, but our bodies become sensitive to related cues. This is why when people have a car accident, they avoid the place where the accident occurred for months or years afterwards. Or sexual abuse survivors who can’t tolerate being in the company of men of a certain age. The body gets sensitized to anything that vaguely resembles the original event.

20/04/2024

Off to work at the Maclean branch 😊

14/04/2024

02/04/2024

It’s a widely accepted truism that we have to accept ourselves in order to accept others, to love ourselves in order to love others. That often feels like an undertaking beyond the capacity of my traumatized clients or even repulsive to them.

A client of mine once asked me: “Do I have to love myself to get better? Because if I do, I think it’s hopeless.”

I reassured him: "Do you love animals?"

"Of course."

"Do you hate children, or do you feel for them?"

"Of course, I feel for children - what kind of monster would I be if I hated kids?"

"OK, then there is no obstacle to your becoming the person you were meant to be. All you have to do is to be open to the young, wounded children inside you instead of hating them or ignoring them. Are you up for that?"

"Yes" and then there was a pause: "but I don’t have to love myself, do I?"

"No, you don’t - you just have to love the kids inside you."

02/04/2024

How do you nurture your wellbeing?

A pioneer of positive psychology, Professor Martin Seligman, tells us that wellbeing is made up of 5 main factors that contribute to human flourishing.

These ‘building blocks’ of wellbeing are easily remembered as the acronym ‘PERMA’ 👇 and working on each of these factors can help us flourish in all aspects of life.

Learn more 👉 https://bit.ly/3ZTiAfZ