Human relationships are fundamental to your well being and an instrumental source of nourishment, fulfilment and growth. Relationships can provide shelter, warmth and security, as well as comradeship, identity and belonging. Relationships can bring joy and pleasure, freedom and responsibility, friendship, kinship and love. Your relationships reflect who you are and how you feel about yourself. For some people it can seem straightforward, and for others, relationships can be difficult, a myriad of confusing disappointments, loneliness and hurt. At times it can feel like good relationships are for other people, while you are only coming up against relationship difficulties.

• Are you confused about the relationships that you keep choosing?
• Do your relationships seem to choose you?
• Do you suffer from a lack of significant, nurturing relationships?
• Do you repeat destructive relationship patterns?
• Is it difficult to relate to people?
• Do your relationships leave you feeling unhappy and dissatisfied usually?
• Is it difficult to stay in a relationship/s?
• Does everyone else’s relationships seem better than yours?
• Is there always something not quite right in your relationship?

Therapy is a strong and solid place to begin contemplating and experiencing the complexities of your relationships. It is through the therapeutic relationship that you can come to learn more about yourself and what you do in relationship, both with yourself and with others. As the therapeutic relationship develops you will be able to see and experience how you typically behave in relationships and what your expectations are.

In order to live you need to eat and drink. But sometimes eating can become an overwhelming daily ordeal where it can feel like food needs to be negotiated and feared. If you feel this way you could be suffering from an eating disorder.

• Do you have a difficult, uncomfortable, stressful relationship with food/food preparation/ mealtime?
• Do you have obsessive thoughts about food?
• Do you get anxious about having to eat with other people/ in front of other people/ socialising with food?
• Do you binge and starve?
• Do you do extreme exercise after eating?
• Do you make yourself vomit after eating?
• Do you eat without control?
• Do you control your eating in order to be in control?
• Do you eat for comfort?

Your relationship with food, and your feelings about your body can be linked to your early experiences of how you were cared for and how that has left you feeling about yourself. The therapeutic relationship can provide the opportunity for in-depth exploration of your deepest insecurities and anxieties, and can help you to a more balanced, healthier and stronger relationship with your body and your relationship with food.

Illness, loss, stress, and change can trigger a state of depression where your experience of living is flat and meaningless.

• Does your life feel worthless?
• Are you unable to sleep?
• Do you want to sleep all day as well as all night?
• Are you exhausted, for no apparent reason?
• Is it difficult to make life feel meaningful?
• Has your appetite changed significantly?
• Do you cry?
• Do you feel empty?

There can be times in your life when significant events can have the power to alter how you see the world, and how you experience yourself. It can be helpful to have the opportunity to share your most bleak feelings in a safe, secure environment with an independent thinker. The therapeutic relationship can be the place to begin to concentrate on the difficulties in your life.

Most of us will have had moments in our lives where we have felt uneasy or tense in response to a situation that we fear will be dangerous, unhappy or disturbing . This sense of unease is known as anxiety and is most often a normal response to an abnormal situation. If, however, you feel apprehensive and tense most or all of the time you could be suffering from anxiety.

Physical symptoms of anxiety: dry mouth, breathlessness, lightheadness, racing heart, body trembling, tingling in fingers and back of your neck, sense of paralysis, hyperventilation, panic attacks.

Emotional and psychological symptoms: unexplainable fear and panic, a sense of dread and doom, an intense desire to flee the scene and get to a safe place.

The therapeutic relationship offers a safe and secure environment to talk about and reflect on anxiety-inducing experiences. It is with time and thought that the origins and triggers of anxiety can be understood and their impact reduced so that it becomes possible to live more fully, more freely.

There are many reasons why you might have learned to have negative feelings about yourself. Often these feelings can stem from your earliest experiences, which can leave you with a deeply engrained self loathing or low self esteem.

• Do your negative feelings about yourself inhibit you from living your life in the way that you would like to?
• Do you struggle to accept yourself?
• Do negative feelings about yourself affect your performance at work?
• Do negative feelings about yourself affect your ability to make and keep relationships?
• Do you suffer with negative feelings about your body?

While therapy cannot alter past experiences or change your history, therapy is an opportunity for experiences from the past to be thought about in a safe, supportive and confidential way. This can help you to free yourself from the confines and limitations of your past and help you to come to terms with and make the most of your present.

Your identity is created by the family that you are born into and their expectations and needs of you, and also, by the social, cultural, political, economic and educational environment you grow up in. For some people these circumstances of birth can seem at odds with a deeper sense of self. When your sense of yourself does not connect with how you are living it can lead to an identity crisis that is overwhelming and isolating.

• Are you who you want to be?
• Do you know who you want to be?
• Are you true to yourself?

The therapeutic relationship provides a safe, secure environment in which to explore the most difficult and troubling pain and distress without you having to be concerned about how your feelings might affect significant others. Therapy can help you begin to live, for yourself.

If one of your parents is a Holocaust survivor, then you are a second generation Holocaust survivor, and you may bear scars from the trauma that your parent suffered over 50 years ago. But it can be extremely difficult to feel entitled to call yourself a ‘second generation Holocaust survivor’ because you are not a survivor in the most literal of meanings. However, reality is complex, with shades of experiences and meanings that might not seem obvious at first glance.

Second generation Holocaust survivors may experience one or several painful issue/s such as relationship difficulties, eating disorders, depression, anxiety, low self esteem, identity difficulties, as a result of the trauma and pain that is passed down from one generation to the next, not just through what is said, but also through what is not possible to say. The therapeutic relationship focuses on you, while at the same time considers your experience in the particular and specific historical context that you are part of, one generation removed. The therapeutic relationship can help you to unravel the intertwined personal and historical experience of persecution, terror and trauma so that you can come to see yourself in the present as a product of the past, both yours and your survivor parent.

The way that we relate to people does not only affect our personal relationships. Our work environments are complex, complicated, intricate networks made up of individuals and groups negotiating and depending on one another. Success, failure, and authority are the currency of these exchanges. If you are suffering with issues such as anxiety, low self esteem, depression, self- identity, relationship difficulties, health-related issues, or trauma, then your ability to manage conflict, deal with stress, communicate effectively, and achieve your full potential can be severely compromised. A short-term focussed counselling (6-20 sessions) can help you to deal with problems like stress, conflict, and under-performance and can enable you to make the most of your professional life.