Unearthing and meeting the root causes that underlie your addiction can free you from not only from your current addiction, but from the risk of jumping to a replacement addiction. It begins to heal the thoughts, feelings, wounds, trauma, grief or unmet childhood needs too. Counselling can prevent unresolved parts of you from showing up in other areas of your life in other damaging or limiting ways.

Sometimes addiction can be an attempt to have a relationship. If you have experienced wounding in relationships at a young age, it can feel psychologically unsafe to enter into relationships now. Addiction can be an attempt to meet relationship needs in a psychologically ‘safer’ way because you can avoid being vulnerable with another your pseudo-relationship with substance or process.

You may have developed an addiction in an attempt to cope with – or avoid coping with – trauma, stress or low self-esteem. It may have started because you didn’t have any other way at the time to deal with big emotions, and this was the best way you knew at the time to get through (consciously or unconsciously).

Genes are often talked about in addiction, and we now know it isn’t nature ‘or’ nurture; it is both. Understanding more about genes and how trauma can switch on certain genes can be useful to explore.

There will be no judgement or expectation for you to stop your addiction (or way to cope) as we explore the underlying causes. Instead, alongside the deeper work we will look at stress management and emotional regulation, alternative coping strategies, ways to interrupt the impulse / behaviour process and more practical, social aspects too that could support you.

Frustration, shame, hopelessness and self-judgement can creep in, especially if in your mind you are desperate to be free from addiction, but you feel helpless to come away from it. We will look at these aspects together because you can overcome this. I have heard ‘what’s the point’ many times in working with addiction. It seems to be part of the journey and with support, it does not have to end your attempt to change. Fear of failure can also hold people back from freeing themselves from addiction. If this is true for you, please bring this into the session as talking this through can alleviate a lot of this self-made pressure and lighten the weight of carrying this around.

Other issues may come to the fore as you move through your journey from addiction to autonomy. These can be challenging and can include feeling emotions you may have been avoiding. You will only feel what you are ready to and feel safe enough to so pacing might be decided by your unconscious and at times can be slower than that part of you that wants change to be a quick process. Frustration can fester around this too. It’s all normal and you can get through this.

Unresolved grief can sit beneath addiction at the core. This isn’t grief in the sense of a bereavement, but from getting in touch with needs you may have switched off in childhood. As a child having a need, for example to be loved by an emotionally unavailable parent, but believing there is something wrong with you and that you can never have this, can be too painful. It can be easier to bury and deny the need. Through addiction recovery, it is possible you will get in touch with needs of this nature which can create a grief process. Addiction counselling here will include holding this process should it arise.

Counselling can help you with all aspects of addiction, including anxiety, shame, depression, PTSD, CPTSD or other mental health conditions.

On a more practical level, counselling can help you to understand your triggers, slow down and replace automated reactions to stressors. It can unearth unhealthy thought patterns and help you to create a healthier relationship with yourself. This is critical for coming away from addiction and can be a challenge as you revisit old, buried beliefs and create healthier ones.

As you journey through this process, support with building trust back in relationships and learning to turn towards others can be explored. This may include strengthening social support networks or discussing joining groups.

You can also learn to recognise early signs of relapse, maintain accountability and motivation and develop a ‘new normal’ that works for you and honours all of your parts and needs.

If you are reading this but do not feel ready to enter therapy, please take away from this that you are not alone and you are capable of change despite the belief you may have that you are not. That thought is likely trying to keep your world familiar and is invested in keeping you stuck where you are. Get to know it, what is it saying? Know that you do not have to blindly believe it and it does not have to decide the outcome. Only you can do that.

I don’t see addiction counselling as a journey, I see it as many journeys folded into one and I look forward to being alongside you on yours.

Counselling can help you to understand your strengths and weaknesses and explore practical solutions to help you through the challenges you are facing. Creating ways to cope can increase your resilience and confidence as well as having a positive impact on your life.

Help with communication and conflict resolution, dealing with overwhelming frustration and emotion, creating structure in chaos, addressing and reframing self-critical thoughts, exploring potential shame or feelings of being different are all areas that can be explored in counselling in a safe and non-judgemental space.

Your counselling sessions are yours. They do not have to be centred around ADHD / AuDHD at all, and you will always be seen as you in the room, not as your symptoms. You are free to explore any aspects of your life that are helpful to you.

Responding – Anger can be an appropriate response to a real-life threat. It can also be the response to perception of threat that isn’t there but feels real to you.

Masking – In Transactional Analysis (my main modality of psychotherapy) we call this a racket feeling. It still feels juts as real however it is masking a feeling beneath such as hurt, fear or sadness. Feeling anger instead means you do not have to feel these more vulnerable feelings. Feeling anger in place of sadness can develop if in childhood you weren’t allowed to feel sad. Messages such as ‘stop crying’, ‘don’t be a baby’ and ‘boys don’t cry’ can leave us not knowing how to deal with being sad. Yet if being angry gets us the attention and support that being sad didn’t we can learn to go straight to anger and become unaware that it is masking another feeling beneath it.

Protecting – Emotional wounds from childhood can reside in the body. They will do anything to not feel ‘that way’ again. Abandonment and humiliation are examples of a deep wound. Another part of your body will learn how to protect this wound and sometimes that looks like anger. One part is defending another internally but from the outside it can look like an angry outburst disproportionate to the situation.

Counselling can help you to understand what lies behind your anger and help you to control it. By understanding it, you can begin to act in ways you want to, not in ways you feel compelled to. Expressing your anger healthily is one of the aims, as is learning what is going on beneath and increasing emotional regulation.

Depending on the deeper causes of your anger, creating safety in your inner world may become part of your counselling journey. Getting to know and be able to tolerate your inner state before an outburst of anger can help you to regulate and be more in control of your behavioural response to it.

It can be difficult to seek help if you are judging yourself for your anger issues or feel shame. Rest assured there is no judgement here and you do not have to disclose anything you do not wish to. Cultivating self-awareness and self-acceptance are key to working with anger issues but can be challenging without support. I create a supportive, non-judgemental space for us to explore anger and help you to feel more regulated, aligned and in control.

This may sound like a simple process, however, there can be barriers, beliefs and habitual thought patterns to meet and process along the way. Like learning any new skill, this will take patience, kindness and letting go of any perfectionist processes that might creep into the journey. It also can require learning to be kinder to yourself which can be a process in itself.
Exploration of personal triggers, patterns of behaviours, self-judgements and fears can deepen your understanding of yourself and your needs and create safety and acceptance within your body.

Sometimes links back to childhood experiences are unearthed. Often a conditional worth element sits beneath the root cause of anxiety.

If in childhood you learned you are only OK / have worth if you are helpful and put others first, anxiety can come from constant pressure to maintain this people pleasing role. It can come both from doing it and ignoring your needs, and from not doing it because in order to feel OK / have worth, you need to keep people pleasing.

As well as people pleasing, conditional worth can show up as ‘I’m only OK / have worth if I:
• Do everything perfectly
• Do everything quickly
• Try hard – but never actually make it
• Be strong (and carry on)

This comes from the Transactional Analysis modality by Eric Berne and Taibi Kahler. In sessions I share a great diagram by Adrien Lee to give a visual representation of this modal. It can help you to identify what messages led to your conditional OKness, and how you attempt to feel OK.

We may also look at low self-esteem, learned patterns from childhood, past loss or trauma, lack of support at a young age can all factor into the root causes of anxiety.

Grounding techniques can be experienced in session and used outside of sessions that can help prevent panic / anxiety attacks, overwhelm and worsening states, or bring you back from these states more quickly. Embedding these techniques and learning to notice much smaller signs that anxiety is building or is likely to build can be useful while the longer-term work addresses the deeper causes.

Self-sabotage can crop up while trying to reduce anxiety. While you might be desperate to get your anxiety under control on one level, your body may crave to stay with what is familiar. It can do this even if what is familiar isn’t making you happy. Out of awareness, this process can win-out and sabotage your attempts to change. In awareness, unconscious self-sabotage (or an attempt to stay with what is familiar) is just a normal part of change and growth that can be overcome.

I specialise in anxiety reduction and have taken many people through the process of turning anxiety from something fearful and debilitating, to a normal emotion they can meet and keep small enough to deal with in a healthy, empowering way. If you would like to know more about face-to-face or online sessions, please visit the contact page and I will get back to you to arrange to have an informal chat.

I trained in bereavement counselling with St Catherines Hospice in bereavement counselling. I also worked with people who had lost loved ones during the pandemic and didn’t have access to the usual rituals or routines that may have supported them through this time. My experience extends to providing support to those who lost a loved one by suicide and I currently provide counselling when asked by Homicide, Victim Support, for those who have lost loved ones through violence.

Not only is grief different for everybody, but it is different per loss by the same person. Loss of a loved one can trigger past losses and feelings of regret. While there is no right way or timeline, it is possible to get stuck in the grief process which can prevent you from reaching a place of acceptance.

Simply expressing grief can bring relief and help prevent emotions from becoming either overwhelming or suppressed.
You may have people in your life you feel you have to be strong for. In your counselling sessions you can leave that role at the door and simply be with your emotions.

Bereavement counselling helps to encourage healthy mourning while you integrate into the reality of what your loss means to you rather than avoiding it. While you may always miss your loved one, life can build around your grief helping you find a place of acceptance and peace.

As your roles and routines change, your meaningful connection to your loved one can be maintained which can help the thought of change feel less daunting and less like you are leaving them behind. Exploring the ways you would like to keep your loved one’s memory alive or sharing your favourite memories of them can be comforting.

Rediscovering purpose, connection and pleasure in life may seem far away right now if you have recently lost an important person to you. In time, and at your own pace, you can regain these qualities as part of your life. Right now, however, it can be useful to only look as far ahead as you need to. Check in with your immediate needs as they may change quickly. In one moment, you may need to be alone, the next, around people. One moment you may need to be with reminders of your loved one and talk about them, the next you may need distraction. Getting through, moment-by-moment may be the way through right now without looking too far ahead.

Caring for a loved one can be rewarding yet it can also be isolating and emotionally exhausting. It can bring up your own unmet childhood needs and these can play a part in some of the difficulties of being a carer. Sometimes unhealthy coping mechanisms develop or worsen for carers and the role can bring stress, guilt, burnout, depression and resentment.

Grief and sadness over the loss of how the relationship used to be, or of the future that isn’t to be, can be present yet go unseen. Expressing your own experiences in a non-judgemental space can help release tension and allow you to explore coping strategies.

If you are ignoring your own emotional needs, we can explore the barriers – internal and external – to meeting your own emotional needs. Feeling heard and understood can help you to acknowledge the weight of being a carer and this in itself can be a relief.

Exploring ways to switch off and enter a restorative state can be useful and can slowly begin to replace any unhealthy coping mechanisms that you may be clinging to currently.

You are not invisible, you do matter. Help is here.

If you suffer from CPTSD you may benefit from longer-term therapy that includes counselling, psychotherapy and working somatically with the body. I take a gentle, trauma-informed approach that aims to:

• Help you feel safe again – in your body, in your environment and in your relationships
• Process traumatic memories safely, when you feel grounded and resoucred, and at your own pace
• Process intense feelings of shame, guilt, anger and hopelessness
• Understand and manage trauma symptoms such as anger, rage, emotional flashbacks, emotional numbness, hypervigilance and unwanted self-protections such as pushing others away or withdrawing
• Integrate your parts – your protector parts and your hurt, vulnerable parts. This can help you rebuild your self-esteem, sense of identity and help you to feel more whole
• Focus on healthier relationships, starting with the relationship you have with yourself and expanding out to others.
The stages of counselling for CPTSD are:
• Safety and stabilisation
• Integration of past trauma, protector parts and hurt or vulnerable parts
• Growth and reconnection

Safety always comes first in counselling for CPTSD. Your body needs to feel safe in order to bring forth unresolved trauma and emotion. This may include grounding techniques and self-soothing skills to manage any nightmares, emotional flashbacks or extreme anxiety. I may offer conscious connected breathwork when the time is right, but this is purely invitational. CCB can help your body feel safe enough to allow what is unresolved to begin to emerge and heal. It is a gentle yet powerful practice.

Integration is the stage after safety and stabilisation has been established. Integration of your trauma decreases the emotional charge and can help you move through life with more peace and autonomy. Getting your protector and vulnerable parts communicating and understanding what they need also helps you to integrate and less fragmented.

Growth and reconnection are the final aims of counselling. What does life look like after trauma? What do you want it to look like? A part of you may resist this and want what is familiar over what is new. This can be a normal part of change, and I take people through this gently if this becomes part of your journey. Simply becoming aware of this can reduce its power and ensure that it doesn’t undermine your growth.

Developing self-trust and worth, and confidence and boundaries can help bring a sense of empowerment and peace in place of the stuckness and hopelessness that often accompanies CPTSD.

It is important to note that healing from CPTSD isn’t a linear, straight line. There are troughs and setbacks. These are a normal part of healing, and they do not mean you are back at square one.

If you are in immediate crisis and need immediate help please contact your G.P, the NHS Crisis helpline or The Samaritans.
To arrange a chat and your first counselling session, please visit my contact page to arrange an informal chat and to arrange your first session.

Looking at the relationship between your critical thoughts and the impact on that to your emotions and motivation can start to create understanding and shifts out of the sense of ‘stuckness’ that can often be felt when suffering from depression.

Beliefs that were created at a young age then buried can maintain a state of depressions so exploring these can be useful. TA helps to unearth, process and replace these beliefs, creating change at the core of you instead of just managing symptoms.

In some cases, depression can come from supressed feelings towards parents or primary caregivers or ‘anger turned inwards’.

If a child experiences abandonment, emotional neglect or conditional love they are likely to believe there is something wrong with them, that it must be their fault. For survival, children will adapt to the parent because they need that relationship in order to survive. As a result, this can lead to the anger turned inwards which can manifest in adulthood as depression.

TA can help challenge distorting thinking and clinging to familiar patterns while fostering a sense of hope, control and autonomy. It can help you change decisions and beliefs formed in your early years from the messages you received back then about yourself and others. Reducing helplessness and motivating action can help begin to lift you out of depression, no matter how long you have had it.

There are many models and diagrams in TA. One of which is the functional ego-state model. This model allows us to see what is going on in the CRITICAL PARENT ego state and the ADAPTED CHILD ego state. These are the two ego states that contain the thoughts and feelings that sit beneath many food related issues.

For example:

CRITICAL PARENT – “You shouldn’t eat, you don’t deserve to. You’ll be bad if you eat that.”

This harsh inner critic can lead to attempting to restrict food and succeeding. It can also lead to attempting to restrict food then ‘failing’. In turn, this can lead to guilt after eating, bingeing or bingeing and purging.

ADAPTED CHILD –  “If I eat then I’m useless and I’ve failed. If I eat I’ll feel terrible, and my Critical Parent will be even more harsh with me.”

The Adapted Child part of the self may attempt to appease, please and comply with the Critical Parent. Often shame and perfectionism forms.

As you can see, the relationships between these two ego states need addressing. Once awareness and noticing (non-judgementally) has increased around this inner relationship, we can start to bring the other ego states into the mix:

ADULT

NURTURING PARENT

FREE CHILD

ADULT – “I’m hungry and I need to nourish my body.”

This is a here-and-now rational decision after noticing hunger. It is important to note that thinking in the ADULT can be contaminated with the PARENT and CHILD ego state fears and beliefs. For this reason, it isn’t as simple as just ‘getting into your ADULT’. At the right time, you can begin increasing and encouraging Adult thinking. In addition to this we can begin to  decontaminate the ADULT thinking so that it isn’t confused by PARENT and CHILD content. As a result, you can learn to respond to feelings of hunger rather than react to them.

NURTURING PARENT – “You deserve to care about yourself and nourish your body. You are okay no matter what you eat, no matter what you do or do not do.”

Alongside these components, we can also begin to cultivating a NURTURING PARENT voice. This can decrease the volume and amount of time you spend listening to your inner CRITICAL PARENT.  As a result, this can create healthy self-compassion along with space for your inner FREE CHILD to feel safe and seen. Altogether, this encourages balance and recovery. It can also benefit many areas of your life alongside your relationship with food.

FREE CHILD “I love food! I can enjoy eating. I love eating with my friends.”

Balanced enjoyment of food can begin in the FREE CHILD ego state.

Your relationship with your inner ego states is key. Bringing all of them on board can help you to find balance between want and need and have more autonomy over your current issues with food.

Childhood and your relationship with food

A growing body of research indicates that childhood experiences play a significant role in the development of eating disorders in adulthood. Early attachment disruptions, emotional neglect, and inconsistent caregiving can interfere with a child’s ability to regulate emotions.

These early relational patterns often persist into adulthood, where food and body control may become maladaptive strategies to:

• Manage distress, stress, or difficult emotions
• Regain a sense of control when life feels unpredictable
• Restore a sense of safety
• Numb or distract from painful feelings or past trauma
• Seek approval or validation through appearance

Studies in developmental psychology suggest that understanding these formative dynamics is essential for effective treatment. This allows you, in therapy, to address the underlying emotional and relational factors and not just the behavioural symptoms of disordered eating.

Early decisions can be explored in counselling, for example:

“I am unlovable as I am so I must make myself perfect.”

“I’m not good enough so I must be punished.”

“If I can control everything, I get to feel safe.”

You can create an unhealthy pattern of using food to attempt to cope with unmet emotional needs from childhood. Equally, it can become a way of coping with a role you have acquired in the family. For example, becoming the helpful child who doesn’t bother people with their needs. If you have an inner child who feels unseen, unsafe, unloved, overcontrolled or emotionally neglected, reconnected with this hurt part of yourself is key to being able to move on from an eating issue or disorder.

When you bring awareness to this, you can create a grief process as you get in touch with needs that you’d long switched off from. As a result, you can begin to feel what you always deserved to feel in childhood but didn’t. Beyond this lies the ability to love yourself, allow others in, and to feel safe and in control of your eating habits.

As an LGBTQ+ affirmative counsellor, I understand the importance of validating your lived experience. Consequently, I can help you explore your identity, expression, and social or medical transition choices at your own pace. It is not about deciding who you are. It is about helping you feel confident, secure, and supported within your truth. By being heard and accepted, you can begin to strengthen self-esteem.

In addition, counselling can also help you manage the emotional impact of social and family responses to your gender identity. Together, we explore coping strategies for rejection, discrimination, or misunderstanding while nurturing resilience and self-acceptance. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes a model for acceptance and equality, helping you internalise a kinder, more supportive view of yourself.

Over time, therapy can help reduce distress, increase confidence, and build a sense of inner harmony. Altogether this can help you to live more authentically. It can help you to create boundaries that protect your wellbeing, and to connect with others who affirm your identity.

Another example is if the parent relies on the older child to help with the younger children and doesn’t see or meet the older child’s emotional needs. This can lead to the belief that you are only OK with others if you ignore your needs and put theirs first. This may be more commonly known as ‘people pleasing’.

Together, we can explore:

• Messages you may have received in childhood
• How you adapted to cope with those messages
• How they show up in your thoughts, feelings or behaviours and patterns today
• How they continue to impact your confidence, sense of self, relationships and choices today
• What potential barriers are keeping you stuck in your low self-esteem

I invite you to read the ‘Counselling for Unresolved Grief’ section on this page if you are considering exploring the causes of low self-esteem. The reason being, this journey can unearth needs you may have locked away. In turn you can get in touch with the realisation that you didn’t get what you needed in childhood. This can result in a grief process as you begin to heal and feel what you deserved but didn’t get. These feelings are often too big and children are not resourced enough to connect with this grief. Instead, they will adapt and try to please others or do everything perfectly. These are just two examples of many ways children may adapt to messages of conditional love.

These messages often come from the unresolved parts of the parents as they too had a childhood that may have resulted in similar messages.

Counselling encourages you to find and connect with all your parts, especially those you may have ignored from childhood but also your protector and defence parts too, and your resourced, nurturing parts. Through this process of healing, you can learn to treat yourself with kindness, set healthy boundaries, and move forward with a stronger sense of self-belief.

Many of my LGBTQ+ clients come for unrelated issues and feel safe knowing that I am an ally. Counselling does not have to be for LGBTQ+ issues, but it can be.

You may be carrying the effects of growing up or schooling in an environment where acceptance was conditional or absent. As a result, you may have felt pressure to hide parts of yourself or to conform to expectations that didn’t fit you.

Over time, this can lead to anxiety, shame, or difficulties in trusting others. Counselling helps you explore how those early experiences affected your sense of self. Together, we can explore how they may still influence your confidence, relationships, and emotional wellbeing today.

In therapy, you can begin to unpack the messages you received about your identity.  Whether from family, culture, religion, or society. Understanding how those messages shaped your inner beliefs about yourself allows you to challenge internalised shame. Additionally, it can help you to reconnect with your authentic self. Counselling provides the space to question old narratives, redefine what acceptance means to you, and build pride in who you are.

In our sessions I can support you through the unique challenges you may face in life. These include relationships, coming out, transitioning, or navigating community and family dynamics.

Counselling sessions can also help you to process experiences of discrimination, rejection, or fear while developing self-compassion and emotional resilience.

I offer you a place to be seen, understood, and supported exactly as you are.

Counselling can also be valuable if you feel uncertain or confused about aspects of your identity. The process isn’t about labels or decisions; it’s about creating understanding and connection with yourself. Exploring identity in a supportive environment allows you to develop greater self-awareness, confidence, and peace.

Over time, LGBTQ+ counselling can help you build stronger boundaries, healthier relationships, and a more grounded sense of belonging. You can learn to celebrate who you are without apology and to live authentically, with clarity and self-respect. Healing begins when you are allowed to be yourself — fully, safely, and without condition.

In counselling, we begin to identify the different parts of yourself involved in people-pleasing. This includes the caring, fearful, and critical parts of you. We work to strengthen your inner resources so you can make conscious choices rather than automatic ones. Alongside this, we can begin to heal those younger parts of you that are holding onto the belief that you must put others first to be OK or to maintain a relationship.

What if I know I people-please but I still can’t stop?

You may be aware that you are people-pleasing but feel so anxious when you try to come away from it that you’ve given up trying. That anxiety is a normal part of the process of coming away from people-pleasing but with mor explanation it can reduce. Together, we can look at the barriers and anxieties around changing people-pleasing behaviours. Remember, you learned this is the only safe way to be. So, it stands to reason that coming away from people pleasing will feel unsafe to begin with. I will support and guide you through this process until being more autonomous feels safe and less anxiety provoking.

What is the aim of counselling for people pleasing?

As you become more aware of these patterns, you can begin to find balance between kindness and self-respect. Counselling supports you in setting healthy boundaries, expressing your true needs, and building relationships based on equality rather than obligation.

Here at Milton Minds, I offer a safe space to explore this invisible pain and begin to heal the wounds left by unmet childhood needs.

Unresolved childhood grief can appear in many ways. For example, through low self-esteem, people-pleasing, perfectionism, or struggles in relationships. You may feel a constant sense of emptiness, sadness, or emotional hunger that never seems to go away. Sometimes, you may even minimise your own pain by thinking “others had it worse.” But the truth is, the absence of love, safety, or nurturing can be just as painful as the loss of something tangible. Counselling helps you validate that pain instead of ignoring it.

Unhealthy methods of self-soothing and addictions can bring people into counselling and often the roots lie in unresolved grief.

Through the counselling process, you can begin to identify what you longed for but didn’t receive. Perhaps it was emotional warmth, consistent care, or freedom to express feelings without fear. Talking about these experiences allows you to acknowledge the grief that has been buried for years. This awareness can be deeply healing, as it gives permission to mourn the childhood you wish you had and the needs that went unmet.

Working through this kind of grief involves both compassion and patience. I can help you understand how these early deprivations still affect your adult life. Together we can explore how they influence your self-worth, boundaries, and relationships. In time, you can begin to nurture the parts of yourself that were left unseen or unheard. I will support you in building emotional safety, self-acceptance, and trust in your own feelings.

Healing doesn’t mean rewriting the past or blaming caregivers. Instead, it’s about acknowledging your emotional truth and creating a sense of inner security in your life today.

Unresolved childhood grief can quietly influence every aspect of life. That being said, it doesn’t have to define you. Counselling provides a space to transform old pain into growth and self-awareness. By giving your younger self the voice and care they never received, you can finally begin to release the sadness and move forward with clarity, compassion, and strength.