Cary McDermott Home Page

Who is this site is for?

This site is for people who want to feel good about themselves and their life and to realise their full potential. Where you are starting from doesn't matter, it only matters that you are willing to look at yourself and your life and to experiment with the specific strategies and processes offered to you.

PLEASE NOTE: Neither the on-line self-reflection exercises nor the on-line individualised process are intended as or should be seen as a substitute for therapy for the recovery from emotional wounds and trauma.

How can I help you?

How can we transform ourselves?
How can you build a life to reflect your deepest self?

Face to face or online, the essential foundation of my practice is that you feel understood and accepted. This is the only basis on which change can happen: that you feel understood and accepted right where you are, right now. It is only by learning to accept where you are right now, that you can move to where you want to be.

My experience over many years has shown that individuals can overcome the personal challenges facing them, even when it seems very difficult to do so. But sometimes you need a therapist, outside your situation, to help you do so.My intention is to help you understand the challenges that you are facing, and to help you navigate and overcome them, so that you can live the life you want to live, and be the person you want to be.

The key to overcoming challenges and/or resolving painful issues is developing emotional wellbeing and resilience. The first step to doing so is self understanding – coming to know and trust yourself and how you work – and self acceptance. This opens up your choices and your sense of what’s possible for you and your life.

A key to greater self-understanding and acceptance and an essential aspect of therapy is self reflection. Increased awareness through self-reflection is the first step to any change. This means observing and getting to know your own thoughts, feelings, behaviours. This includes your recurring patterns, self-talk, beliefs and ways of being in the world that do and don’t work for you.

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I have worked for many years as a therapist and my experience is that self-reflection and self-examination are a force for real personal change. While there is no substitute for a skilled observing witness (therapist) to deepen and guide this process, self-reflection as a process on its own can also be extremely useful.

This kind of observing and noticing also forms the basis of the on-line self-reflection process.

Either through accessing face-to-face counselling or the on-line process of self-reflection, I can help you:

To improve your relationship with yourself. This means helping you develop more understanding and acceptance of yourself, which is the key to changing your life.

To understand the obstacles you experience to reaching your full potential.

To understand the difficulties you are experiencing in your life and how to overcome them.

To understand specifically how you approach difficulties and how you attempt to take care of yourself. That is, the individual solutions that you apply to life's challenges or painful situations.

To look at whether and how this is working for you, or why it is not working.

In face to face counselling we will also then work together to develop alternative and more constructive strategies for approaching your life. These strategies will help you overcome obstacles to fulfilling your potential and building the life you want.

These strategies will be more effective, because they will be based on who you are and what will work for you.

When should I get help?

Please note: If you are feeling in pain or overwhelmed, or if you are in crisis, it is essential that you find face to face help now.

But you may also benefit from therapy if you are:

Feeling unhappy or dissatisfied with yourself or your life and none of the solutions that you have tried to improve your life are working.
If you feel that your life or relationship isn't working, or you feel stuck and don't know how to change things for the better.
If you feel stressed and the stress seems never ending.
If you are being bullied at work, unhappy at home, undergoing a big change or loss in your life, or are afraid of and avoid conflict to the detriment of yourself or your life.
If you avoid difficult situations to manage anxiety which keeps your life on hold.
Or if there are behaviour patterns or triggered reactions you want to change.

How to understand the counselling process

This is at the heart of how I work: that you are doing the best you can. You just need to find more constructive ways of taking care of yourself and responding to the difficulties you are having, or to the obstacles you find in your way.

The key to understanding your current feelings and behaviours and even your thoughts and unhelpful beliefs is that they are adaptive. That is, they are your best attempt to take care of yourself right now. They are a solution to some difficulty you are experiencing now, or experienced in the past.

It's also important to acknowledge that your solutions worked for you some time in the past, possibly when you were very young with limited options. It is still true that you are attempting to take the best care of yourself possible and we would always work from that premise. But, strategies learned in childhood are often not appropriate for adult life. They are often no longer working or helpful. They are not the best response to your situation, and will not resolve the problems you are having, and can be making them worse.

Even so, anxiety, depression, feeling stuck and even responses to trauma, are your best attempts to take care of yourself and need to be treated as such. Even self-destructive behaviours can be an attempt to adapt and solve difficulties.You need to understand how you are trying to take care of yourself. Then you can find other ways to do so that don't cause you pain and difficulty.

How will Counselling Help You

It's important to know that we all have a strong sense of self-preservation, even though this may have been damaged or misdirected. You have resources you may not realise you have. They have enabled you to survive. We will discover these and work with them. We will re-direct them to build the life you want.

Face-to-face counselling will help you reflect on how you are trying to solve the problems or difficulties in your life and what's working and what isn't. This will enable you to build self-understanding and in face-to-face therapy to develop alternative strategies, so you can fulfil your potential and make the life you want.

Face to face therapy includes a process of questions and reflection, reflecting on beliefs, behaviours, thoughts and feelings to make sense of them. Then taking action, and reflecting again. The therapeutic process tailored indeividually to you to deepen your understanding of yourself and your experience.