Dr Rachel M Allan

Dr Rachel M Allan Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Dr Rachel M Allan, Psychologist, Alloa.

From crisis to turning point❤️‍🩹
Chartered Counselling Psychologist🧠
EMDR Accredited Practitioner💡
ONLINE THERAPY 🛋️
https://www.rachelallanconsultancy.com/contact/
FREE GUIDE: https://go.rachelallanconsultancy.com/reallygoingon

Self-compassion is widely recommended in psychology.Yet for many people, it feels inaccessible or even distressing.When ...
05/02/2026

Self-compassion is widely recommended in psychology.

Yet for many people, it feels inaccessible or even distressing.

When someone holds a strongly binary moral identity, self-criticism can function as a way of maintaining safety, belonging, and control. Shame tends to create global negative identity beliefs, while guilt usually remains linked to behaviour. When these become fused, compassion toward the self can feel morally unsafe.

This is particularly relevant in individuals shaped by rigid moral or cultural frameworks where emotional expression, accountability, or personal responsibility are tightly regulated.

Therapeutic work often involves carefully expanding identity beyond binary categories, allowing accountability and self-respect to coexist with compassion.

Self-criticism rarely appears without history, meaning, or function. When these are understood, change becomes more possible and more stable.

If you recognise yourself here, you are not alone in this experience.

Comment GUIDE for my free guide “What’s Really Going On?” A Psychologist’s Guide to the Patterns Behind Your Pain.

And if you are ready to start your therapy journey, get in touch via the link in bio to enquire about therapy with a Counselling Psychologist in my practice. We would love to hear from you.

22/01/2026

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We often talk about childhood trauma in terms of symptoms. We talk about anxiety, hyper vigilance, perfectionism, withdr...
19/01/2026

We often talk about childhood trauma in terms of symptoms. We talk about anxiety, hyper vigilance, perfectionism, withdrawal. But many adults I work with are not struggling because they don’t know how to cope. They are struggling because shame has quietly shaped how they relate to themselves.

Shame is not just an emotion; it is fundamentally linked to a belief about who you are. This belief is often formed early, in environments where being visible, needy or imperfect didn’t feel safe. Over time, that belief becomes the organising principle. You learn to manage yourself carefully, to compare, to perform competence. All just to stay acceptable, and to avoid the pain of further judgement.

From the outside this can look like strength. But it has a different emotional quality.

When shame sits at the centre of trauma, part of healing is about understanding why certain patterns make sense. Good psychological understanding generates compassion, which is something often lacking when shame is running the show.

If this resonates, I have created a free guide that gently explores what might really be going on beneath long-standing anxiety, people-pleasing and self-monitoring.

The link is in my profile. ⬆️

Jumping on the trend. I shared a post from earlier about how 2016 may not have been great for everybody. I wasn’t going...
16/01/2026

Jumping on the trend. I shared a post from earlier about how 2016 may not have been great for everybody. I wasn’t going to share my pics because in some ways it was not a great year for me. But it was also a year that completely transformed how I see myself, my career, work and the future. The lessons were painful but very valuable.

It was also the year we bought our first house together, got married and got Trudy. So actually, it was also a pretty brilliant year. Thank you 2016!

When you’ve spent years anticipating criticism, peace doesn’t come easily. It begins with noticing how much of your self...
16/01/2026

When you’ve spent years anticipating criticism, peace doesn’t come easily. It begins with noticing how much of your self-doubt was shaped by the absence of steady warmth, and how early relationships taught you to read every silence as threat.

When you are hyper-tuned to criticism, any kind of feedback, evaluation or disagreement feels devastating. Your emotional response ends up being disproportionate to the situation in front of you, and a reliving of past experiences.

Healing that pattern takes time. Here are some of the ways I have seen it successfully tackled in therapy. What would you add to the list?

1️⃣ Questioning the evidence: realising that someone else’s mood is not reliable proof you have done something wrong.
2️⃣ Recognising outdated inner commentary and choosing to distance from it: it is a thought, not a fact.
3️⃣ Knowing the signs that shame is rising, and sitting with it when it arrives.
4️⃣ Speaking to yourself with the fairness and respect you show others.
5️⃣ Pausing before automatically shrinking, surrendering or apologising.
6️⃣ Identifying the key memories being triggered and working through them with EMDR.
7️⃣ Keeping at it. Change like this takes patience, determination and repetition!

These can be the building blocks of peace after a lifetime of monitoring, explaining, and over-correcting. Your relationship with yourself can hold its shape in the face of external forces.

If you’d like to understand that process more deeply, comment GUIDE for your copy of my free guide “What’s Really Going On?” or enquire about therapy through the link in bio.

I hear this all the time. It wasn’t that bad. Other people had it worse. I have had a nice life. That can all be true, a...
10/01/2026

I hear this all the time. It wasn’t that bad. Other people had it worse. I have had a nice life. That can all be true, and still you struggle with shame, guilt, fear and feeling stuck.

Trauma is not always a big and dramatic event. Relational trauma can take place in small, repeated moments where no harm was intended. It can be in lack of safety, in a relational tone that was judgemental, critical, or unforgiving. It can be in witnessing the harsh judgement of others. It can be transmitted through generations as attitudes, through culture, and through behaviours that go unchallenged.

So the next time you dismiss your own suffering, remember thee are many roots to these moments where you question yourself, compare, fear the worst, or feel shame wash over you yet again.

The good news is you can be the one to break the pattern.

⭐️ Get my FREE GUIDE What’s Really Going On? A Psychologists’s Guide to the Patterns Behind Your Pain ⭐️
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