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María Agraso Luna-Psychotherapy

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María Agraso Luna-Psychotherapy

Mental health problems are as common as any other physical conditions and they are treatable. I am a CBT therapist offering therapy in Spanish and English.

If you are struggling with anxiety or depression, do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

25/04/2021

When people think about trauma they often think about the worst, however not everyone with complex trauma has been through such situations. Complex trauma can be caused by what did or did not happen to the person as a child, for example physical neglect, deprivation of love, feeling rejected by their peers or parental separation.
Your trauma is only yours and nobody has the right to judge you or the adverse experiences you experienced. Always be kind to yourself and one another.

23/12/2020

Wishing you a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year. Best wishes for 2021 🙂

10/10/2020

Our mental health has a massive impact on our physical wellbeing. We should ensure that we take care of our emotional well-being in order to have a happy and fulfilling life. Today is World Mental Health Day and I would like to encourage you to identify your emotions and ask yourself “What is this emotion telling me?”, “What do I need to feel better?”. In the same way as you would go to the doctor if you have a broken arm, you should look professional help if you are experiencing overwhelming emotions.

28/09/2020

We often tend to be very self-critical of ourselves and try to live up to very high standards. When we can’t satisfy these high standards, we experience negative emotions and we tell ourselves “I am a failure”, “Nobody likes me”. We forget that we are human beings and no-one is perfect. If someone who we love is struggling, we would try to comfort them and have kind words for them. We wouldn’t remind them of all their mistakes and everything they do wrong. We would be happier if we treated ourselves in the same way as we would treat a loved one.

27/07/2020

How often do we take care of our emotional and physical health? We often make excuses for not implementing self-care in our lives. As a consequence of this, we neglect ourselves and we experience negative emotions. This has an impact on our personal and work relationships.
Here are some tips to create a self-care routine:
•Take time to get to know ourselves better for example “What are our limits?”, “What physical symptoms do we experience when we are anxious or sad?”
•Take time to reflect about difficult situations and make a decision about how to confront them.
•Ensure we sleep well and we have a healthy diet.
•Find a way to decompress throughout the day and after a day’s work for example go for a walk, talk to a friend and have a cup of tea.
•Identify activities that gives us a sense of achievement and enjoyment such as mindfulness colouring, go jogging and have a bath.
• Note down all the positive things happening on our lives every day for example "What are we grateful for?", "What have we done well today?" and "What are our strengths?"

29/06/2020

Emotional blackmail occurs in many friendships, romantic and family relationships. It can sometimes lead to abusive relationships. The perpetrator is normally a close person to the victim having low self-esteem. The victim tends to feel responsible for the other’s wellbeing and they try to please others to avoid feeling guilty. Examples of emotional blackmail are a parent saying to their daughter “If you don’t phone me a few times every day, I will be unable to sleep”, or a wife saying to her husband “I will die if you leave me”.
The perpetrator loves the victim but they sometimes don’t realise that they are hurting them. Some situations provoke negative emotions on the perpetrator as they have unaddressed issues and rely on significant others to regulate their emotions. If you are suffering emotional blackmail, you must remind yourself that you are not the cause of the perpetrator´s problems. The perpetrator is projecting their problems on you and they rely on you to feel good. You will only be happy if you change your behaviour in this relationship. If the other person is worthy of your love, they will want the best for you.

18/05/2020

Mental health problems are very common in our society. Approximately, one in four people in the UK will experience mental health problems each year (Mind, 2017). Anxiety and depression are very common due to the daily life pressures. Everyone feels sad and anxious at some point. Don’t feel ashamed of feeling anxious or sad, you are not the only one! Don’t suffer alone, speak with your friends and family. Remember that there is nothing wrong with speaking about your emotions.

25/04/2020

The last month has been very challenging for everybody. Feeling down, anxious or worried is normal because we were not ready for this global pandemic. Our worries can be overwhelming and they may impact on our general well being. Some clients have told me that they sometimes struggle to switch off their thoughts when they go to bed and don’t sleep well during the night. As a consequence of a poor night's sleep, they feel tired and unmotivated the following day.
Unfortunately, we can’t change the current situation but we can learn to deal with it better. There are some things you can do to cope better with worry before going to sleep such as do a relaxing activity for example listen to relaxation music and breathing exercises. Do not watch the news and don’t use social media before going to sleep.
Your worries are not going to disappear but you can choose not to let them control your life. Here is some advice:
• Try to be busy and plan a few activities to do every day.
• Write down every worry at it happens and keep doing the activity you were doing before starting to worry.
• If you are unable to stop worrying, take a break and change the activity to redirect your attention for example workout at home, go for a walk or phone a friend.
• Schedule worry for example from 4:00 pm until 4:30 pm. It shouldn’t last longer than 30 minutes.
• During worry- Read the list of worries you have written and only worry about those worries which are still a concern. Dismiss other worries and postpone the less urgent ones.
• When worrying, you should define the problem and think about different solutions. Also think about the pros and cons of each solution before choosing the best one. Once you find the best solution, write an action plan to carry out your preferred solution.

23/02/2020

We often experience different emotions during the day such as sadness, anxiety, frustration or anger. These emotions are often link to thoughts such as “I do everything wrong”, “Nobody seems to understand me” and “This is unfair”. Jeffrey Young used the word schema mode to refer to these emotional states that we use from time to time. He also pointed that everybody has been in the adult schema mode at some point. Our healthy adult is forgiving with our mistakes and other people’s mistakes. They are proactive and learn from them. Finally, they are able to say no, express our needs and put action plan in place to help us to feel better.

The first step to find our healthy adult is to understand our emotions and triggers. When we are not feeling well, we sometimes avoidance strategies. Avoidance strategies have short-term benefits but they don't solve the problem. If we want to find real SOLUTIONS to our problems and feel better, it is important to ask ourselves the following questions:
• “What thoughts are coming to my mind?”
• “How am I feeling?”
• “How am I behaving?”

After understanding our triggers, we can ask our healthy adult “What am I doing too much?”, “What am I not doing enough?” and “What can I do differently if the same situations happen again?”.

You must always remind yourself that our healthy adult is compassionate and understanding with everybody. They are also non-judgemental and proactive.

You can find more information about schema modes on this website:
https://www.getselfhelp.co.uk/schema.htm

09/01/2020

Anger is a very powerful emotion. It often happens as a result of thinking that we have been disrespected and unfairly treated. Not being able to manage anger properly can have a huge impact on our relationships with others and our general well being. It is helpful to be able to identify our own triggers for anger, understand them and put measures in place to avoid an anger outburst.

The anger traffic light is a useful tool employed in anger management. The traffic light is good visual prompter to de-escalate a situation while preventing from anger emotion to grow. It applies the traffic light colours to our anger:

RED represents stopping. It is useful when we start to lose control of our emotions. This stage can last between a few minutes or a few weeks. While we remind ourselves to be quiet, it is important to employ different strategies to release the emotional energy from our body such as go for a run, breathing exercises or doing household chores.

YELLOW means WAIT. The anger is less intense but we are still very annoyed. This stage offers us an opportunity to think and find an appropriate solution to the problem.

GREEN means GO. We feel calm and we are able to manage the situation without losing our temper. We had also thought about the best way to deal with this situation before and we are ready to express your opinions in an assertive way.

19/11/2019

Depression is a very common illness and it affects 1 in 10 people at some point during their lives. Psychological therapy is considered the most effective treatment for mild to moderate depression, whereas a combination of psychological intervention and medication seems to be the best treatment for moderate to severe depression.
Since I started to work as a therapist, I have worked with a lot of clients from mild to severe depressive symptomatically. The symptoms are easily identified by the clinician as their clients feel hopeless and they don’t have energy to carry out daily life routines. Some of my clients told me that some basic tasks like going for a shower or getting up from bed can be a chore.
Other common symptoms of depression are getting little pleasure in doing things and concentration problems. As a consequence of this, people stop doing certain things in their daily life and they feel bad about themselves.
Many people with depression also have suicidal thoughts such as “What is the point?”, “I am a waste of space”.
If you are struggling with low mood or depression, you should remind yourself that you are not alone. Don’t feel ashamed to tell your close ones that you are feeling down and look for professional help. If you want to manage your depression better, you should be able to acknowledge that you have a problem and look for a solution. You must remind yourself that there is not a quick fix but getting the right treatment is the most important step.

05/11/2019

We often tend to put a lot of demands on ourselves and we tell ourselves “I must not make any mistakes”, “I must have a good job”, “I can’t disappoint friends and family”, “I must be brilliant at something”. When we can’t fulfil all these high expectations or somebody makes a negative comment about something, we think “I do everything wrong” and we forget about all the things we are good at. As a consequence of this negative self-talk, we experience negative emotions such as sadness, anxiety or frustration.
It is important that we remind ourselves about everything we do well and all the positive things happening in our life on daily basis. This is easier said that done but it is an important skill if we want to live a happy life. I often ask my clients to have some time for self-reflection at the end of the day and write a list of all the things they have done well for example make a nice dinner and manage to complete all their list of tasks for the day.
Reading this list will help to improve our mood when we don’t satisfy our unrelenting standard. We should remind ourselves that no one is perfect but we are good enough. There may be certain things we may need to improve but we all do things well.
It is also important to be kind to ourselves and treat ourselves in the same way as we would do with someone that we love.

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