https://www.psychotherapykuchenna.com/

Sylwia Kuchenna, 4th Floor, Georges Quay House, Georges Quay, Limerick (2026)

06/02/2026

Psychodynamic therapy is built on safety, curiosity, and the therapeutic relationship. When those foundations feel shaky, it’s important to notice.

Here are additional red flags to be aware of:

There’s little curiosity about your past or relational patterns

Interpretations feel imposed rather than discovered together

You don’t feel emotionally held, even when challenged

The therapist avoids talking about the therapeutic relationship itself

Sessions constantly feel repetitive without deepening understanding

The therapist becomes defensive when you give feedback

You feel consistently unseen or misunderstood

Therapy doesn’t have to be perfect — repair, misunderstanding, and difficulty are part of the process. But you deserve a space where you feel safe enough to explore your inner world with someone who is present, thoughtful, and attuned.

04/02/2026

From Iahip Chair Jacky Grainger.

03/02/2026

💙 We believe everyone deserves access to the best mental health care.
🌿 Offering 1:1 psychotherapy & wellbeing support
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Adults • Adolescents • Children
✨ Supporting authentic, meaningful & mindful living
🌐 horizonmentalhealthclinic.ie

Marta Majewska Psychotherapy

Sinead Fahy Psychotherapy

03/02/2026

💙 We believe everyone deserves access to the best mental health care.
🌿 Offering 1:1 psychotherapy & wellbeing support
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Adults • Adolescents • Children
✨ Supporting authentic, meaningful & mindful living
🌐 horizonmentalhealthclinic.ie

01/02/2026

(PART 1) From a psychodynamic perspective, səx without commitment can reflect very different internal dynamics. In its more integrated form, it expresses autonomy and clear ego boundaries: the person can enjoy pleasure without confusing sexual closeness with emotional fusion or permanence. Here, casual səx is chosen freely, without anxiety or avoidance, and does not serve to defend against intimacy.

In other cases, however, casual səx may function as a defense against attachment—a way to experience closeness while warding off dependency, vulnerability, or the risk of loss rooted in earlier relational disappointments.

Casual səx may also serve as a means of regulating self-esteem, where being desired temporarily shores up a fragile sense of worth or counters feelings of emptiness and shame.

Finally, in avoidant or dissociative patterns, səx becomes a way to manage overwhelming affect: bodily stimulation replaces emotional experience, and action substitutes for reflection. In these cases, the sexual encounter is less about the other person and more about maintaining psychic equilibrium by keeping painful feelings out of awareness.

I will soon post more about it in the context of power, control, and validation.

Share your thoughts in the comments 👇

28/01/2026

Which one do you resonate with the most? Or do you recognize anything in yourself? Let me know in the comments.

Many of the behaviors we carry into adulthood were once protective strategies. People-pleasing, emotional withdrawal, perfectionism, fear of abandonment—these patterns didn’t come from nowhere. They were learned when your nervous system was still developing and trying to make sense of the world. What once kept you safe may now be keeping you stuck.

Becoming aware of these patterns isn’t about labeling yourself as “broken.” It’s about understanding why certain situations trigger you, why relationships can feel so intense, or why you’re so hard on yourself. Awareness creates choice—and choice is where healing begins.

Your inner child doesn’t need criticism. They need curiosity, patience, and reassurance. Each moment of self-reflection is a step toward re-parenting yourself with the care you deserved all along.

— your therapist,
Sylwia

23/01/2026

Childhood trauma doesn’t just hurt then—it teaches lessons that follow us quietly into adulthood. Lessons about self-reliance, silence, vigilance, and survival. For many of us, these weren’t conscious choices; they were adaptations. The nervous system learned what it had to in order to stay alive.

I had to unlearn beliefs that once protected me. That needing no one meant strength. That my worth was tied to how useful, calm, or resilient I could be. That chaos felt familiar, and familiarity felt like home—even when it wasn’t safe. I learned to shrink my emotions, to stay alert, to move through the world braced for impact.

From a trauma perspective, these patterns are not flaws. They are intelligent responses to environments that asked too much of a child. But what keeps us alive then can limit us later. Healing asks us to gently challenge what once kept us safe and to teach the body something new: that the danger has passed.

This work is slow. It happens in moments when my body reacts before my mind can reassure it. It happens when I choose rest over proving, connection over isolation, boundaries over endurance. Integration doesn’t mean forgetting—it means remembering without reliving.

As a traumatologist, I know this truth deeply: the body holds the story until it feels safe enough to let it go. And safety is not a concept—it is an experience, built through patience, compassion, and repeated moments of being met.

I am not defined by what happened to me. I am defined by my willingness to face it, to feel it, and to heal—one nervous system response at a time.

Observe for more:
Observe for more:
Observe for more:

Your therapist,
Sylwia 🤍

22/01/2026

☝️What Your Survival Taught You — And What Healing Is Asking Now 👇

💔 Trauma changes the way we listen to the world.
Not because we are broken, but because our nervous system learned to protect us when safety was uncertain.

What many people call overreacting is often a body remembering a time when it had to respond quickly, instinctively, without support. Those responses were not flaws — they were intelligence shaped by necessity. 🫣

📃 Healing is not about rewriting your past or forcing yourself to “move on.” It’s about gently renegotiating your relationship with what happened. The memories may remain, but they no longer need to hold the steering wheel.

💡Real progress often looks subtle from the outside. It’s the moment you pause instead of abandoning yourself. The moment you recognize a trigger without shaming it. The moment pain shows up and you no longer assume it means something is wrong with you.

👑 Trauma recovery is not linear, and it is not loud. It happens in quiet choices — choosing awareness over self-blame, curiosity over judgment, compassion over control.

If parts of you still feel guarded, reactive, or tired, let that be met with understanding. Those parts were once responsible for your survival. And now, they are slowly learning that they no longer have to do that job alone. 🥰

Healing is not becoming someone new.
It is finally allowing yourself to be safe while being who you already are. 🤍

Your therapist,
Sylwia 🤍

17/01/2026

As a psychotherapist and traumatologist, I want to say this clearly and gently:
many behaviors we now call self-care began as adaptive survival strategies.

📢Avoidance is not a personal failure.
It is often the nervous system doing its best to protect you.
☝️There is an important clinical distinction between self-care that restores capacity and self-care language that masks avoidance. The difference matters—not morally, but therapeutically.

Trauma teaches the nervous system a core lesson: safety comes from reducing threat, it can be:

✔️emotional exposure
✔️conflict
✔️uncertainty
✔️responsibility
✔️attachment
✔️failure
✔️success

So the body learns strategies to reduce activation quickly. Many of these strategies are socially acceptable, even praised:

“Protecting my peace”
“Listening to my body”
“Resting”
“Choosing myself”
“Healing”

The issue arises when these behaviors:
reduce distress short-term but shrink life long-term
That is the hallmark of avoidance.

From a clinical lens, avoidance-based “self-care” often includes:

🔹️Chronic isolation labeled as boundaries

🔹️Excessive rest that delays engagement with life

🔹️Over-exercising to discharge emotion instead of processing it

🔹️Binge eating to numb or dissociate

🔹️Over-sleeping to avoid consciousness

🔹️Constant distraction disguised as breaks

🔹️Endless self-reflection without behavior change

🔹️Spiritual or wellness practices used to bypass grief, anger, or fear

🔹️Cutting people off instead of repairing relationships

🔹️Staying in “healing mode” indefinitely to avoid risk

Again—these are not character flaws.
They are regulated survival responses.

✨️Clinically, avoidance is often a sign of:

unresolved trauma

high threat sensitivity

fear of dysregulation

intoleranc of emotional intensity

learned helplessness

shame-based self-protection

Avoidance says:

> “I cannot handle what will happen if I engage.”

So the system chooses relief over growth.

With love
Sylwia 🤍

10/01/2026

So much of what we struggle with as adults didn’t start in adulthood.

The overthinking.
The fear of being “too much” or “not enough.”
The way we shrink, overgive, or stay silent to keep connection.

These are not flaws.
They are learned responses — shaped in moments when we were younger and needed safety, love, or acceptance.

Your inner child is not a metaphor.
It’s the part of you that learned how relationships work, how emotions are handled, and how much space you’re allowed to take up in the world. It lives in your nervous system, your emotional memory, and your body.

As a psychotherapist and traumatologist, I see this every day in my work. Trauma doesn’t disappear with insight alone. It softens and transforms when the parts of us that learned to survive are finally met with presence, compassion, and safety.

Inner child healing is not about revisiting the past to relive pain.
It’s about gently reconnecting with the parts of you that were never fully seen, held, or supported — and offering them something different now.

This is why I’m hosting a full-day Inner Child Healing Workshop on
🗓 Sunday, 1.02.26
🕰 10:00 – 5:30pm

This will be a deep, guided, and safely held space where we will explore emotional wounds, process stored emotions, and reconnect with the inner child in a way that creates real, lasting shifts — not just temporary relief.

This workshop is for you if you’re ready to stop repeating emotional patterns, feel more grounded in yourself, and begin relating to yourself and others from a place of safety rather than survival.

✨ Places are limited to keep the space intimate and supportive.
If this resonates, trust that pull.

🔗 Book your spot via the link in bio
Your inner child doesn’t need to be fixed — it needs to be met.

09/01/2026

10 Signs You May Be Living in Chronic Stress
From a psychotherapist & traumatologist

Chronic stress is not just “being busy” or “having a lot on your plate.”
It is a physiological state in which your nervous system remains stuck in survival mode for too long. When stress becomes chronic, the body adapts to threat as if it were normal—and that adaptation comes at a cost.

Here’s what I want you to understand clinically and compassionately:

Chronic stress is not a personal failure.
It is the body doing its best to protect you when it has not felt safe enough to rest.

When the stress response (fight / flight / freeze) stays activated over time, it begins to affect nearly every system in the body and mind:

• Persistent exhaustion that rest doesn’t fix
• Sleep disturbances and non-restorative sleep
• Muscle tension, headaches, jaw clenching, chronic pain
• Emotional reactivity—or the opposite: emotional numbness
• Brain fog, forgetfulness, difficulty focusing
• Digestive issues and appetite changes
• Lowered immunity and frequent illness
• Ongoing anxiety, hypervigilance, or a sense of “always being on”
• Changes in coping behaviors (food, alcohol, scrolling, withdrawal)
• Loss of pleasure, motivation, or connection to meaning

From a trauma-informed perspective, many people living with chronic stress are not responding to current danger—but to unresolved past stress, trauma, or prolonged overload. The nervous system has learned that safety is uncertain, so it stays alert.

This is why logic alone (“just relax,” “take a break”) doesn’t work.
The body must experience safety, not be instructed to feel it.

Healing chronic stress involves: – Nervous system regulation
– Restoring a sense of internal and external safety
– Addressing stored stress and trauma in the body
– Learning to recognize limits before collapse
– Rebuilding trust with yourself and your signals

If you recognize yourself in these signs, please know:
Your body is not broken.
It is communicating.

Listening—rather than pushing harder—is often the first step toward real healing.

Your therapist,
Sylwia 🤍

04/01/2026

Carl Jung believed that what we do not heal, we repeat. According to Jungian psychology, addiction is often not about pleasure—but about relief. A wounded inner child carries unmet needs, unexpressed emotions, and unresolved trauma. When these parts of us are pushed into the unconscious, we unconsciously seek something outside ourselves to soothe the pain. Substances, behaviors, or compulsions become substitutes for the love, safety, and connection we didn’t receive.

Addiction, through a Jungian lens, is not a moral failure. It is a signal. A message from the psyche asking to be seen, heard, and integrated. Until the inner child feels safe enough to come forward, the wound continues to speak through self-destructive patterns.

This is exactly what I teach and facilitate in my Inner Child Workshops. Together, we gently reconnect you with the deepest part of yourself—the part that learned to survive instead of feel. Through awareness, compassion, and embodied practices, healing becomes possible. When the inner child is met with presence and care, the need to escape begins to dissolve.

Healing is not about fixing what’s broken. It’s about remembering who you were before the wound.

Your therapist,
Sylwia

Sylwia Kuchenna

06/02/2026

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