Explore Your Mind

Explore Your Mind Integrative Psychotherapy

Online Psychotherapist specialising in CPTSD, emotional abuse and helping people from dysfunctional families and with histories of abuse feel better about themselves.

10/12/2025

If you are, you are doing too much. It’s exhausting, unfair and reinforces the idea that if you try hard enough you can fix everything for everyone.

RIP to my grape pencil (it also had little pictures of grapes on it too).
03/12/2025

RIP to my grape pencil (it also had little pictures of grapes on it too).

01/12/2025

You’ve tried therapy before and it was… nice. If you wanted more than nice watch this and see what you might have missed

I know a lot of you are not a fan of Christmas, so if you’re starting to worry that people can see what you’re thinking,...
28/11/2025

I know a lot of you are not a fan of Christmas, so if you’re starting to worry that people can see what you’re thinking, I hope this helps you to feel a little less alone. 🎄

Many people come into therapy feeling stuck.Often they’ve had therapy before and already know the problem. They tell me ...
26/11/2025

Many people come into therapy feeling stuck.

Often they’ve had therapy before and already know the problem. They tell me things like:

* “I know things weren’t always great at home”
* “Our family was complicated”
* “My childhood was a bit sh*t”

…But they’re stuck on insight.

The truth is: insight is only the first step.
You can understand exactly what happened, map the trauma, quote attachment theory, spot the patterns in real time and STILL feel like nothing changes.

Not because you’re broken.
Not because therapy failed.
But because you were only given one part of the process.

Here’s the full cycle most people never learn:
Insight: You understand what happened and why.
Translation: You decode flashbacks, emotional time-travel, and body clues: the “Why am I overreacting? One minute I was fine and the next I wasn’t. Why do we always have the same argument? Why does that one word feel like flicking a switch?” moments.
Release: You feel and release the emotions stuck in your nervous system. You don’t carry them around anymore, and they stop contaminating your present.
Practice: You rehearse new patterns with support and feedback. We troubleshoot (kindly), see what worked and what didn’t, and figure out why, so that next time, you’re better prepared.

This is where change actually happens.

This is where people finally feel different, not just understand differently.

If you’ve been stuck in the “insight only” loop, it’s not your fault.

You were missing the roadmap.

This is the work I do with clients: guiding them through the rest of the cycle so change doesn’t just make sense… it becomes real.

Interested in getting the changes you want? DM me Change to start.

Can you relate?
25/11/2025

Can you relate?

So many people tell themselves that they were loved so what happened to them didn’t matter.But love isn’t a free pass to...
16/06/2025

So many people tell themselves that they were loved so what happened to them didn’t matter.

But love isn’t a free pass to behave however you like.

Even when bad things didn’t happen, good things didn’t always happen either. Children need to know that they’re safe and loved. And being told you’re loved doesn’t always make sense when you’re ignored or shouted at on a regular basis.

“The older I get the less I care what other people think of me. Therefore the older I get the more I enjoy life.”— Oscar...
09/06/2025

“The older I get the less I care what other people think of me. Therefore the older I get the more I enjoy life.”
— Oscar Auliq-Ice

Sometimes I think therapy is about learning the rules and then breaking them, and the longer I work as a therapist the more I trust how I work.

And it’s ok if you want something different from therapy, or if you’re a therapist who does things differently 🤷🏻‍♀️

Anything you wish your therapist (past or present) didn’t do?

I became a therapist partly because I couldn’t actually find the therapy that helped and I was stubborn enough to believ...
05/06/2025

I became a therapist partly because I couldn’t actually find the therapy that helped and I was stubborn enough to believe someone must have an answer (they did).

Because I always felt like something was wrong with me without knowing what. I wanted to ‘fix myself’.

So many therapists become therapists for the same reasons.

And many of us learned long ago that we were not ok the way we were.

So hiding under a professional hat is a pretty attractive excuse. How can people dislike you if they don’t know who you are?

It also helped that I’d worked for big companies who told me how to dress, behave, when I could speak and when I couldn’t even down to my email sign offs and punctuation usage (it was kind regards only and yup, that boss was a nightmare).

All this leads to a reasonable poker face but is pretty unhelpful for clients trying to find someone who really gets them.

After all who wants to confess their deepest, darkest secrets to someone they chose because they’re close to work, had a car park and availability to start in the next week?

Me, neither 🤷🏻‍♀️

And something that I’ve learned is when clients accept me for who I am, not only do I feel more comfortable, but it becomes a feedback loop. Where they do too because I’m not trying to be someone I’m not. And since they all grew up being told they were difficult, everyone wins.

People say weird sh*t.Like ‘time’s a healer’. Probably because ‘yeah that sounds fcked up, good luck with that one’ soun...
03/06/2025

People say weird sh*t.

Like ‘time’s a healer’.

Probably because ‘yeah that sounds fcked up, good luck with that one’ sounds kinda awkward and most people don’t like to be that blunt.

You’ve rearranged your family situation in your head more times than you can count, trying to just figure out why it’s such a mess. Why you feel so bad around them and why you can’t just get it to work.

It’s like a puzzle with half the pieces missing and it’s all consuming.

But what if it’s not you? What if you aren’t the problem and there’s another way? What if you can heal?

Don’t believe it? You’re still here, you’re still looking (and hoping things can change).

If you’re ready to stop pretending time actually heals? DM me ‘Start’ for the link.

Not sure if you even have childhood trauma? Take my free quiz and get my professional opinion in less than 5 mins.

After working with childhood trauma survivors for 15 years I started to notice a theme when people talked about childhoo...
24/04/2025

After working with childhood trauma survivors for 15 years I started to notice a theme when people talked about childhood trauma.

People were reluctant to say they even had childhood trauma and it prevented them from getting help.

In consult calls when they were considering therapy and sometimes even in therapy people would apologise for wasting my time.

‘I know people have worse problems’ they would say.

Or ‘we had dinner every night, I had birthday parties and my parents didn’t beat me, I don’t know why I can’t move on’.

So recently I launched a short course to save you time, energy and money.

Instead of spending three sessions of therapy wondering if what happened to you was even significant, you can cut to the chase and spend therapy on finding answers and healing.

Arguing with yourself about why you’re not quite traumatised enough to seek help keeps you feeling stuck. In some weird purgatory where Brené Brown doesn’t quite cut it but your parents never broke any laws 🤷🏻‍♀️

Questions? Let me know. Or DM me ‘start’ to get the link.

Address

Manchester

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 3pm
Wednesday 9am - 1pm
Friday 9am - 3pm

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