Caroline Hughes Counselling and Psychotherapy

07/11/2025

I have been reflecting this week after coming across this picture. Summer 2024, I was holding my dissertation after completing the final year at the Sherwood Psychotherapy Training Institute. What a journey the previous three years had been, both personally and professionally.

I went into this profession with a drive to embody my purpose in the world; assisting people in their healing journey to becoming who they truly are. Finally honouring their worth in this world, believing in hope for their futures and living a life they truly deserve.

Understanding your feelings and processing them in a safe and contained environment with someone you can trust invites healing your past, and understanding your present. The power of a therapeutic relationship 🙏🏼🤍

I am truly honoured and grateful to each client who chooses to trust their vulnerabilities with me, allowing me to support them on their life journey.

Thank you 🤍 💫

“When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending”.

Brene Brown

29/10/2025

Do you agree?

29/10/2025

Chronic fatigue is the body’s response to a lifetime of running on survival energy, pushing, performing, and proving your worth long after the threat is gone.

When you were younger, those patterns might have helped you feel safe. Maybe achievement was how you earned love or avoided criticism. Maybe overfunctioning kept your world predictable when everything else felt uncertain. Your nervous system learned that the more you did, the safer you were. And it worked, until it didn’t.

The same drive that once protected you eventually depletes you. The constant release of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline keeps your system in motion when it desperately needs to rest. Your body stops prioritizing repair, digestion, and immunity, rerouting energy toward survival instead. What begins as motivation slowly turns into exhaustion, brain fog, and physical symptoms that no amount of sleep can fix.

Chronic fatigue is a system collapse. It’s what happens when your nervous system has forgotten what safety feels like unless it’s achieving something. The body starts conserving energy not as protection.

Healing asks you to retrain the brain to feel safe in stillness. Through nervous system regulation and brain retraining, you can reprogram the protective pathways keeping your body in conservation mode. As the brain learns safety, energy production returns, and your body can finally shift from survival to restoration.

Your drive isn’t the problem. The problem is that your nervous system never learned that you can be safe without it.

Follow for more science-based insights on healing chronic fatigue, nervous system regulation, and creating safety in rest.

28/10/2025

Today I sit somewhere between caring less and not giving a f**k.
Its very much what I've spent the last year writing about. Each time I open my laptop to finish this book I'm one step closer to shedding the layers of people pleasing and concentrating on other people's opinions of me.

Age is a big player in this process. Women of my age are often bombarded with the rhetoric that decline, ageing and fluctuating hormones must dictate the majority of our experience. But.....what if that's only a tiny part of the story. What if with this period of change we find our fire? What if we understand who we are better than ever which gives us a robustness we've not felt previously. What if that robustness allows us to set better boundaries, take less s**t, live alongside the knowledge that some people might not like us without falling apart?

I'm starting to feel all of it without too much effort. Last week a man made assumptions about me and my life and left a s**tty comment on my feed. Obviously something I've been through countless times before but this time it was different. I blocked him and moved on without feeling shame or concern that a man I've never met and likely never will, doesn't like me. I actually mentally sent him a little (very little because I couldn't be arsed to put that much effort into it) prayer because he is someone in pain.

Are you wanting to care less? Give less f**ks? Move through life in YOUR way regardless of what others think? Is that not entirely exciting, liberating, f**king beautiful...?

If you've already nailed it, or are on the path to it, I salute you. This is all new to me and something I'm loving writing about and feel excited about.

Also read the new book by Malala Yousafzai
as its full of all the encouragement and inspiration needed to do life your way, courageously.

25/09/2025

For all my women out there.
I hope this resonates like it has with me.

❤️💫❤️

- Hannah Fraser Moore

Soundtrack (because Facebook is useless with music) - She Rises and She Glows - Linhy

14/09/2025

Being a woman in a modern world with choices 👏🏼💕💫

“For every woman who worries about the life they’ve missed out on by not having a baby, there’s another who worries that having a baby has made them miss out on life,” writes Eva Wiseman.

07/09/2025

Lewis Capaldi, you are an icon of a human for so many people struggling with their mental health 🤍🤍🤍

Let’s be real. Going through personal struggles is difficult enough and the hurdles we have to overcome, let alone in the public eye. What a humbling example of doing the personal work and returning to yourself, after a two-year hiatus from the spotlight to focus on yourself. I just want to say… Well done 👏🏼 ❤️

Sheffield was in adoration of you last night. We love you for you; no falseness, no masks, no pleasing, or pretending. You were real and human. Never change Lewis 🙏🏼 ♥️ ✨

19/08/2025

Come on guys, let’s make it ok for men and boys to share feelings without shaming them for it. I don’t care if we are male or female, we are h u m a n 🙏🏼❤️

18/08/2025

What if the traits you think define you aren’t actually “you” at all?
What if they’re adaptations, patterns your nervous system created to help you survive?

When you’ve lived through chronic stress, trauma, or repeated emotional wounds, your system learns strategies to keep you safe. If you grew up in chaos, hypervigilance may have felt necessary. If your needs weren’t welcomed, maybe you learned to silence yourself and prioritize everyone else. If expressing emotion led to rejection, shutting down could feel safer than feeling at all.

The tricky part is these patterns become so automatic that they feel like identity. We start to believe we are the anxious one, the people-pleaser, the perfectionist, the overachiever. But these are learned survival responses, not who you truly are. And what’s learned can be unlearned.

Healing means separating who you had to be to stay safe from who you actually are. It means noticing old patterns without judgment, and gently experimenting with new choices that give your nervous system a felt sense of safety. Over time, as your system learns it no longer has to protect you in the same way, more of your authentic self emerges.

The real you, the one before survival took over, is still there. And with the right support, that version of you has space to come back to life.

If you’d like to begin shifting these patterns and addressing the root of chronic symptoms, will be hosting a free masterclass this Tuesday, August 19th at 1pm ET. Go to my stories to sign up and get your roadmap to healing.