Matthew Heatley-Swaine. CBT Therapy

25/02/2026

👇👇
When you feel the constant need to make sure everyone else is ok. You feel like all you do is monitor how other people are and if you see them feeling negatively, it feels like your problem to fix.

It’s not nice to see someone else upset but here’s the catch, is it always your responsibility to fix it?

The problem isn’t necessarily what they’re feeling, it’s the belief that it is your responsibility to keep them happy.

Do you wish you didn’t apologise so much, over explain or try to smooth things over all the time. Therapy can help you to feel more comfortable in the presence of other people’s distress without it feeling like your fault or your responsibility to fix.

DM me if you resonated with this and want to make a change in how you are in your relationships. 💙

13/02/2026

Hypervigilance in relationships doesn’t often look like fear. It can instead look like attunement to others, being extra considerate. But if tracking shifts in tone, noticing how loud a sigh is or reading between the lines of message causes you to feel anxious, I bet being around people doesn’t always feel comfortable.

You might take responsibility for other people’s emotions and needs?
You over explain or over apologise
You seek reassurance that everything is ok

You stay alert, you stay anxious

I’d love to hear from you if you want to stop looking out for all the signs that you could have upset someone and fearing what could happen as a result.

10/02/2026

👥 Being ‘easy going’ isn’t a superpower if it costs you your needs. Over adapting can be an anxiety response. Real connection shouldn’t feel like your walking around on egg shells or ask you to disappear. If you related to this, you are not alone.

I am a trauma focused CBT therapist and here for you if these are patterns you want to change. ☺️

05/02/2026

👋🏻 Welcome to some new followers that have found me recently. I wanted to introduce myself (and reintroduce to those who already follow).

Here’s a bit about me…

25/01/2026

Unpredictability can often create anxiety, especially in relationships.

Growing up in unpredictability is like living with a smoke alarm that went off randomly.

There isn’t always a fire but you stay alert…just in case. The alarm isn’t broken, it’s just got too used to trying to protect you. But that protection in itself makes relationships harder than they already are.

The alarm can be recalibrated in trauma focused CBT.

23/01/2026

Trauma isn’t just a horrible accident, a horror like scene from a film. Trauma can be what didn’t happen, the silent moments, the dismissal, the feeling invisible.

Struggling to share your emotions with others, staying quiet and not asking for what you need don’t come from no where.

Your childhood or early experiences may have looked ‘fine’ but it didn’t feel it.

If you felt emotionally safer, what difference would it make to your relationships?

12/12/2025

‘The stress bucket’

Stress is a normal human experience but if you don’t have helpful ways of coping with it, your naturally going to overflow and become overwhelmed

The bucket is you and water represents stressful things in life. There is only so much capacity for stress that any one person has. To manage the flow of water:

👥 See a friend
💐 Get out in nature
🏃‍♂️ Exercise
🍎 Eat well
😌 Rest

Self care means something different to everyone so that list might not be for you. But the point is, if you have enough helpful self care habits, stress will be less likely to spill over

28/11/2025

27/11/2025

🍱🍣 Imagine the sushi chef as your mind and the plates as your thoughts. Our mind creates many thoughts throughout everyday. Like the sushi in this picture, some are quite appealing, some are quite neutral looking and others look very unappealing.

This is similar to our thoughts, some good, some neutral and some very negative. It can be easy for us to grab hold of the negative thoughts /unappealing dishes and place them right in front of us. The more we do this, the worse our dining experience is. If we then consume these gone off dishes, we can become quite unwell.

Think about it a different way…why do you have to grab onto the dish? Why not just observe it? Acknowledge it’s there but allow it to pass. It’s just a dish, it doesn’t have to determine your meal. You sometimes might want to take it off the conveyor belt, just to look at it a bit more, but maybe you can decide to put it back rather than eating it.

20/11/2025

‘Your such an idiot’
‘Your never going to succeed’
‘No one likes you’

I’d put my money on that this is not the way you talk to your friends? Yet, this is the way you talk to yourself.

The way you talk to and about yourself can have such a negative impact on how you feel and your general wellbeing.

If you’d like to learn how to talk to yourself the same way you talk to your friends, get in touch