What does manipulation look like? What does it actually mean? The dictionary says: ‘to influence skilfully, especially in an unfair manner’. In my experience manipulation can be either consciously or unconsciously done. Either way being manipulated does not feel great and can anger us greatly.

The 4 F’s are fight, flight, freeze and fawn. Its how to nervous system behaves in response to a crisis. Whilst its a necessary system to keep us safe, the nervous system can get stuck causing trauma, distress and illness. It can also be activated by remembering a stressful event. In cases of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) or CPTSD (complex traumatic stress disorder) noises, smells, images or feelings can trigger this response.

What is reparenting? This question often comes up with my clients. Many adults look back at their childhood and can see clearly that they were subjected to abuse that has significantly affected them negatively as an adult.

How good are you at practising boundaries? Or are you still learning the importance of how necessary meeting your own needs is? Our childhood often reflects how good or less so the boundaries we hold are. For example: as a child you may have learned that having needs equalled you being made to feel like you wanted too much. So you became ignorant to your own needs in a bid to be ‘low maintenance’. Or easy going for other people. Maybe in order to feel you were loved you had to take on other peoples problems as your own and resolve them even when the person was entirely capable themselves? Sound familiar?

The way in which we think can have a massive impact on the quality of our life. Rigid thinking or ‘inflexible’ thinking occurs in a person whom thinks their point of view is most important and therefore must be correct. They reject the ideas of others and become easily offended when others disagree or do not meet their expectations. They will only listen to have their own ideas validated and have no interest in listening to other ideas or beliefs that contradict their own.

It’s become a bit of a buzz word, but what does self care look like really? When I used to think of self care, I thought of facials, spa days and mostly what the media and those that want to sell us something have bombarded us with over the past 5-10 years. It’s become a very effective marketing tactic to fleece consumers, especially women, making them believe that self care is something you do that costs money. Is this the truth though? Whilst facials and spa days are relaxing. They are aspects of self care that last briefly and we want self care to be something that can be drawn upon and done at any time day or night, whether you have 5 minutes or 5 hours free.

If you want the circumstances of your life to be different, then you are going to have to be the one to change them. Change is tough, real change rarely happens. We can get used to living within a certain amount of sadness, scared to move on through fear. Fear of change, fear of losing our equilibrium, fear of losing what we have invested. We have to take a leap of faith that what is beyond the fear is bigger and better than we could imagine.

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