Welcome to Our Blog
What is perfectionism?
Perfectionism is not just about ‘being perfect’ or ‘doing things perfectly’. It’s more about striving for extremely high standards or even holding others to such high standards. Surely the idea of working really hard to achieve a high standard in our workplace,...
Support needs of Siblings
For the majority of us our relationships with our brother and sisters are some of the most important in our lives. Sibling relationships can be a great source of meaning, enjoyment and mutual support, but they can also be challenging at times. When one person in a...
Self-Care in a Caring Role
Who are carers? When we talk about ‘carers’ this month, we are referring to people who provide unpaid care and support to someone with a mental health condition, typically a family member or a friend. This may include help with everyday tasks, such as administering...
Using Exposure therapy to help child anxiety
Childhood anxiety can be debilitating and cause significant distress for children and parents alike. A primary maintaining factor of anxiety is avoidance of a feared situation, event, or object (i.e., stimulus). A child may avoid being alone, speaking in front their...
Helping your anxious child to be BRAVE
To help children to overcome anxiety we can teach them to be BRAVE. Using the letters form the word brave, we can teach children simple steps to approach rather than avoid things that make them anxious. Watch the video to find out more or head over the BRAVE online...
Tips for caring for someone with a mental health condition
One in five Australians will experience an episode of mental illness in their lifetime. In many of these situations their friends and relatives will care for them on a daily basis, whether this is for a brief period of recovery or over the long term. Carers need...
Could you be causing your child’s anxiety by accident?
All parents naturally want to soothe their children and protect them from pain and suffering. However, in doing so parents may be unwittingly causing children to develop anxiety disorders. It is important for parents to consider their role in the child’s anxiety and...
Helping children to be brave.
What is being brave? For children to cope with feeling anxious, they must understand the importance of being brave. They must understand the power of courage. But most importantly, they must understand that being brave does not mean an absence of feeling scared or...
Why do psychologist use different treatments?
Ever wondered why psychologists use different treatment approaches? Some use cognitive behavioural, psychoanalytic, emotions focused, just to name a few. Find out why in this video from Psychologist Elizabeth Ang.
Understanding child anxiety
What is anxiety? Anxiety is a normal part of living. Anxiety is part of our survival instinct and it kicks in when we feel that we are under threat. When under the threat our amygdala fires up and prepares our body to survive the danger ahead. The trouble with anxiety...
What is ACT?
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is commonly referred to as ACT, which is said as one word “Act” rather than the individual letters. It is an evidence-based cognitive and behavioural intervention. ACT is designed to create greater psychological flexibility, which...
What is EFT?
Emotion focused therapy (EFT) in its most simplistic form is a type of therapy that is focused on emotions. It is sometimes called “Process Experiential Therapy”. The core tenet of EFT is that our emotions are the key in helping us understand what is important to us...
What is CBT?
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is based on the principles that our emotions and behaviours are influenced by our thoughts. Often these are unhelpful automatic thoughts, meaning that they occur in our mind without consciousness, leading us to feel overwhelmed,...
Understanding the process of therapy
When people commence working with a psychologists, whether for the first time or if you have engaged with a psychologist before, it can be a daunting prospect; What’s it going to be like? What are they going to ask me? Will I like it? These are all nature and...
5 ways to be more self compassionate
In most cases we are not taught to be kind to ourselves. In fact, quite the opposite. Our society often expects that we chastised ourselves, put ourselves down and beat ourselves up for our mistakes. But as research shows us, this can have a big impact on our mental...
Why is being kind to yourself important?
Many people are good are caring for others but not themselves. But caring for ourselves (Self-compassion) is an essential part of maintaining health and wellbeing. We have described self-compassion elsewhere in greater detail but as a reminder, self-compassion is a...
How self compassionate are you?
Whilst it is perhaps not possible to be too kind to ourselves, there are certainly those out there that could benefit from an injection of self-compassion. Perhaps you are wondering if you are kind enough to yourself. Or perhaps you are thinking that you do not need...
Pain in children
Unfortunately children also experience pain. As adults, we often want to do what we can to help them avoid pain, but this is not always possible. As psychologists there are may things we can do to help children cope with pain. To find out more watch this video from...