A colleague described beautifully to me the other day the power of unspoken communication in families. You know…the looks. The sighs. The eye rolls. The silences. The walking away. Or crowding in. The body postures. The facial expressions. Many of us grow up in one family of origin, others move through several families in the course of their childhhod. Either way, in each family with time we learn the unconscious rules by which we are expected to live, and the consequ

Anger is an unpopular emotion, and frankly it gets quite a bad press. The caricature of an angry person is red faced, steam coming out of the ears, an unattractive figure that people feel comfortable judging and looking down on. Anger is actually a very normal and important emotion. Anger is what we feel when we are wronged and when our boundaries are ignored or trampled over. It's the natural emotion we feel when we see injustice. Anger energises. It mobilises us to defe

We’re not always in touch with all of the capability, wisdom and resourcefulness we have inside. While we are all multi-faceted, it's easy to get disconnected from our own sense of perspective, humour and groundedness. When this happens, you might not feel at your best, you might get stuck in repeating patterns that you know don’t do you any good, you might even feel like you go round and round in circles. When simple grounding isn’t quite doing it, another way of getting ba

Discovering unconscious patterns I was teaching at Bishop Auckland College last week, introducing some concepts from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (#NLP) to their Counselling Degree students. I wanted to share one of the unusual techniques we talked about, it can be fun to do, and also be illuminating. Judith DeLozier, an early NLP exponent, articulated many techniques designed to access unconscious wisdom, going beyond what we know and think to what is held intuitively in ou

“Trauma represents a profound compression of “survival” energy, energy that has not been able to complete its meaningful course of action.” Peter Levine We think of trauma responses as a problem, a dysfunction, an indication that something has gone wrong. I love this quote from Peter Levine, which so effectively captures the truth that the trauma response was an attempt at defence, a way to survive and to maintain our integrity as a living being. Getting rid of or pushing a

“Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates” from the Hermetic Kybalion, quoted by Peter Levine in In An Unspoken Voice. I find this quotation profoundly helpful. Health is a state of flow, a natural rhythm. Healing calls for flow, for rhythm, for movement and grace. When we are flowing we are

As you prepare for 2022, it’s a good time to reflect on both the year past and the year to come. Here’s an article I wrote for #UKCP with some prompts to help you do just that: https://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/news/how-can-we-reflect-on-the-last-year-to-live-more-happily-the-next/ #2022 #newyear #newyearsresolution #nlp #psychotherapy

Sometimes it is easy to lose trust in what you are experiencing. It may be that someone else somehow undermines you, convincing you that you can't trust your own sense of things, or that you have had an illness or mental health issue that has left you doubting what your intuition is telling you. Perhaps rumination has become dominant and you can't feel yourself for all the thoughts that are obscuring the here and now. At times like these, dropping down into your body, and con

When people come into therapy to talk about relationship problems, they often feel that there must be something wrong with them. This is particularly the case when it is not the first time that they have had the problem they are encountering. It may feel like a pattern is repeating over and over, and this can be frustrating and upsetting. Whoever and however we are, we naturally, unconsciously repeat the patterns of our childhood relationship experiences through our life.

There are two key questions that many clients want to address when they come for an initial session of psychotherapy, and they are questions that they sometimes hesitate to say out loud, perhaps for fear of sounding silly, or for fear of what my answer may be. First, am I mad? It is a very common experience to have symptoms that are distressing, and that leave us questioning whether we are normal, or sane, or functioning. The more we think about our symptoms, the worse they

When we think of being in danger, the fight/flight response is perhaps the response that most readily comes to mind. Our sympathetic nervous system is activated and we spring into action, neutralising the threat and restoring safety. You may also have heard of the freeze, or immobilisation response, a more ancient reaction in evolutionary terms. This dorsal-vagal response causes us to shut down and feel frozen, it’s a response to perceptions of extreme danger. What is less s

I had the pleasure of delivering a workshop recently with some Counselling degree students at Bishop Auckland College. I went to talk to them about being an Integrative Psychotherapist, which gave me the opportunity to reflect on who I am as a therapist, and what it is that felt important to impart. One of the themes of our dialogue was about presence and authenticity. Most people know that therapists don’t talk about themselves and the biographical details of their lives,

Often, what brings clients into therapy is a reticence to experience their feelings. This can show up in all sorts of ways, in low mood and depression, in anxiety, in disordered eating, addictions, obsessions and compulsions…there are many mental health conditions that have an aspect of emotional avoidance embedded within them. Andrew Seubert has a simple initialism that provides a process for emotional containment. It succinctly describes the skills that clients may learn,

The opposite of repression and suppression is not expression, its awareness. I heard Andrew Seubert make this excellent observation in a training seminar recently. Oftentimes I hear clients reflect that they would rather not experience what they feel and honestly think, because to do so would be dangerous. If we see the opposite of repression as expression, then indeed, expressing things that challenge others may well at times feel inadvisable or even threatening. It’s impo

I was invited recently to be playful with my elbows, to explore what it’s like to really put them out and take up some space. I confess I was a little taken aback to notice quite how liberating it was...all of a sudden I felt like my personal space had doubled and I had a lot more room to move around in. It’s good to play physically, to do things we don’t normally do with our body. We all have defaults and habits, and they become grooves in which we can get stuck. Patterns

“We don’t perceive the world as it is, we perceive it as it is useful for us to do so.” Anil Seth in Being You Seth’s recent exploration of what consciousness may be in Being You is a thought provoking one. He suggests we perceive things, both in the outside world, and in our own body, in order to maintain life, to continue to exist. His view of consciousness is that it arises from our living beings, and it enables us to sustain ourselves. The usefulness of perception is t

I was listening to Andrew Seubert recently talking about The Courage To Feel. I liked the way he described feelings, as embodied emotional energy. The physicality of this is important, feelings happen in the body, they are visceral. They are also energy, and by definition are continuously changing. Anil Deth points out that we perceive our feelings, we think about them, and we develop beliefs on the basis of them. For example, if your shoulders are tense, you may experie

Every now and again I put together a short digest of the posts that have seemed to resonate with people, and send it out to my subscriber list on my website. Here is my most recent one: https://shoutout.wix.com/so/c1NmosPxi?languageTag=en If you’d like to subscribe, check out the very bottom of my homepage here: https://www.ferobinsonpsychotherapy.co.uk/ #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #psychotherapy #counselling #wellbeing

I often blog about self-help techniques and approaches those interested can use to support their well-being and emotional health. I like people to have as many tools as they need in their hands, to give choice, and to recognise that one size does not fit all, each situation and person is different after all. Techniques and approaches are important, in the therapy room just as in self-help blogging. Therapists need to know how to help a client make sense of their experience,

I first consciously came across the phenomenon of my body moving without my deliberate control when I trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Being invited into an altered state of consciousness would often result in tremors, shakes, and movements that were frankly a bit odd, but also hugely relieving and meaningful. I came to value and enjoy them. Peter Levine’s eloquently explains the important role of shaking, quivering and trembling in releasing trauma from our bodies.