Anxiety and Depression

Anxiety and Depression Counselling in Clondalkin, Online and by Phone

Anxiety and depression are classed as mood disorders.
A person can have both together. In many ways, deciding if a client has anxiety or depression is a matter of opinion.

Depression is mostly associated with sadness and feeling unmotivated in life. Anxiety is more so when a person is physically or mentally agitated and can not settle to complete tasks.

Both can lead to suicidal ideation when the person feels continuously overwhelmed by them and sees no end to the pain.

Mood disorders generally come from two sources. Lived experience from the life the client grew up with or the client’s brain chemistry.

Brain chemistry-based mood disorder requires medical intervention. This issue is discussed under the “Specific Aspects …” heading below on this page.

What Approaches are used in Anxiety and Depression Therapy?

Person Centered Therapy highlights the role of unconditionally accepting the client’s story.
Such positive acceptance of the client struggling with low mood and anxiety helps them to develop trust with the counsellor.
This is the basis of a therapeutic relationship with a client.

Through this relationship, the client can regain a sense of significance and hope.
The therapist offers these attributes to the client in their working relationship. It is the client’s choice to accept them or not.
To learn more about Person Centred Therapy, click here.

The client may respond well to a cognitive approach such as choice theory.
Choice theory highlights that a client’s mood is influenced by the choices they make. We may directly or indirectly make choices that mean our basic needs in life are unmet.
This lack of fulfilment is what choice theory would claim is the cause of anxiety and depression.

The positive aspect of choice theory is that the client can choose to make decisions that can help them fulfil their needs and regain their hope for future progress.
To learn more about choice theory, click here.

How can Counselling help Anxiety or Depression?

Therapy helps the depressed client to have a space to openly share their negative experiences and beliefs about life.
As they share, they are not judged for this. Such acceptance helps them to regain their self-esteem.
They begin to believe that their life has meaning because the therapist directly and indirectly tells them their life has meaning.

In counselling, the client will loosen the hold their false beliefs have over their mood. False beliefs based on misperceptions of reality.

These misperceptions may be from many years ago. Believing such misperceptions for many years makes it seem like a part of the client’s personality that can’t be helped.

Overcoming the lies of mispreception can help restore the truth to the client of how they can cope with general life stress.

Specific Aspects of Mood Disorder Counselling

Medication is a frequent discussion with clients struggling with anxiety or depression. As someone with a background in psychiatric nursing, I am comfortable with people being on mood-stabilising medication during counselling.

Any medication regimen a client is on is entirely between the client and their doctor.
Generally, mood stabilisers should be given about a month to work.
This allows negative side effects to be properly assessed and any improvement in mood to be noticed.

The argument to combine medication with counselling is that it enables the client to be able to engage in therapy without the intrusion of severe mood swings.

It needs to be acknowledged that some mood disorders are based on brain chemistry issues.
If the client is deficient in serotonin, dopamine, or other neurotransmitters, talk therapy will not change their mood.
It may help the client learn to manage their underlying mood “illness”, however.

The argument against medication, and what causes clients’ most concern, is dependency.
Drug dependency should not be an issue if the prescription is properly monitored by a doctor.

Please note that mood stabilisers are usually prescribed for a few months at a time and then reviewed.
This is normal.

If the doctor assesses that you need a long-term prescription and you disagree, discuss this with him or her.
Make a plan together. Do not come off your medications on your own. This is dangerous.

The most common side effect that clients complain of is feeling nothing. They seem to be unable to have any depth of emotion; happy, sad or anxious. If this persists, it is possible the doctor may change the prescription.
There are numerous choices of mood stabilisers available.

Prevail Blogs Related to Anxiety and Depression

Coping skills for emotional pain Working with thoughts, emotions, behaviours and sensations of the body (TEBS) is the approach I use in therapy. The client is encouraged to identify how thoughts drive our emotions and physical sensations.

Reducing or learning to live with our emotional stress is done by practising alternative, positive thoughts. These thoughts have to be supported by associated behaviours.

Anxiety and fear Anxiety is one of the most common topics raised in therapy. It is a debilitating condition that prevents a person from engaging with life.
It is closely associated with depression and often co-exists.
There is a strong medical connection with anxiety; medication is often the first stage of treatment.

Medication, however, can become a near-permanent part of a person’s life. Many people do not want this and will prefer to resolve their anxiety through psychological work.
Such work identifies the triggers and helps to develop coping mechanisms to lessen their impact.

Supporting people with low mood How do we support our loved ones when their mood is low and their behaviour is very negative? We should not be afraid to engage with them and just sit with them in their space.

We do not have to cheer them up or help solve their problems. If they want company, they mostly just want you to be there.
This may be enough for them to share with you what pain they are dealing with and start to heal.

Managing the fear of failure The fear of failure is one of the greatest draws holding a man back in life. The fear of failing at risky things like a new job or at passing exams, etc., is perfectly normal.
The problem is when you begin to identify yourself as a failure at life just because you have had failures in your life.

Self-identifying yourself as a failure is devastating. It destroys your confidence in social situations, professionally, and in your role in your family. Simply put, you don’t want others to know about your failures,s and you hide.
The way to shake off the failure mantra is to teach yourself, first and foremost, that failing is normal. Everyone fails.
Repeat to yourself “I am not afailure, just because somethings in my life failed”.

Eventually, you will then be able to develop ways to manage failure as it happens and to learn from it so as to decrease its risk of recurrence.

Trauma Trauma is the emotional experience of hurtful events in our past. We can respond to trauma over the years by trying to ignore it or even forgetting about it. This is a common response to trauma that happened to us as children.

Burial of pain can result in the person experiencing unexplainable, negative, cognitive, emotional and behavioural experiences in later years. Trauma from earlier in life can be healed in the present day through the work of a therapeutic relationship with a counsellor.

Words of comfort Positive quotes about our ability to overcome adversity.
While such quotes can seem overly simplistic, they can still spur us on to better things.

Frequently Asked Questions about Anxiety and Depression Counselling

Book with Prevail for Anxiety or Depression Counselling

To book a session for anxiety or depression counselling with James, click here: