Self-Esteem and Confidence Counselling in Milton Keynes

The Thing You Stopped Doing

Think about what you have quietly dropped. The instrument. The running. The thing you used to be halfway good at and have not touched in four years.

Most people explain it as time. No time, too busy, other priorities. And sometimes that is all it is.

But when someone has cut out everything that was only ever for them, and kept everything that was for other people, the pattern is usually saying something. If you are not investing in yourself, ask what that would mean coming from anyone else. We do not put money, time or effort into things we do not rate. So if you have stopped putting any into yourself, that is a message you have been sending yourself, under the surface, for a long time.

Does that land? Most people know within a few seconds whether it does.

You Are Not Your Thinking

The other half of this is the commentary. The running voice that gets in before you do.

Here is the thing I say to almost everyone about that: you are not your thinking. Thinking is what you do, not who you are. Which sounds like a slogan until you notice how much of your day is spent going over something you already said, or rehearsing something you have not said yet.

There is a term for what happens when it gets stuck to you. Fusion, meaning your thought and the thing you are thinking about become welded together, and you start taking the commentary as a straight report on reality. I like to think of it as becoming overly attached to my own thoughts, which is where I end up with what I call stinking thinking.

The way out of it is smaller than people expect, and it is one question. Not "is this thought true", which invites you to build a case. Instead: is this thought helpful? Is paying attention to this going to help me get the life I actually want?

I should say plainly that I still have stinking thinking on a regular basis. This is not a thing I have finished and you have not.

Guilt Anchors

There is a version of this sitting in your house right now.

The exercise equipment nobody uses. The art supplies still in their packets. The self-help books on the shelf, hoping to transmit into you without being read. My bass guitar, which is looking at me while I write this.

These things are not just taking up space. Every time you see them, something quietly says: you don't follow through, you start things and you don't finish them. They become guilt anchors, and they whisper the same line every time you walk past.

Getting rid of them is not giving up. It is making room for who you actually are now, rather than who you once thought you were going to be. I love the bass. I love listening to bass players. I am not going to pick it up, and all it is doing is reminding me of that. Somebody else should have it and play it properly.

Have a look around and count yours. It is usually more than you think, and clearing two of them does more for how you feel about yourself than most of the advice you will read this week.

Where It Usually Started, and Why That Is Good News

Almost nobody arrives at this on their own. As children we learn quickly what earns approval and what risks it, and that learning does not always update. You end up running a set of rules written by a much younger person with far less information. For some people the rules were written on top of something else again, a brain that was wired differently and was told for thirty years it was not trying hard enough; my ADHD and neurodiversity page is about that version.

Two things follow from that. The first is that it is not your personality, so "it is just how I am" is not the last word on it. The second is that it takes work, in the way any long habit takes work, and I am not going to promise you otherwise.

Worth naming one obstacle people do not expect. Some of the people around you will not want you to change, because your staying put is what makes their own situation feel reasonable. That is not a reason to stay put. As I put it on the radio once, a lot of us are living in prisons we built ourselves and then forgot we built.

Counselling or Coaching

People ask me for both, using the same words, meaning different things.

If the difficulty has a history to it, and the way you speak to yourself goes back a long way, that is counselling and it is what this page is about.

If what you actually want is to be more effective in a specific situation, a role you have grown into, a decision, a team, then that is closer to coaching, and it moves faster because there is less to unpick.

Plenty of people need some of each, and you do not have to work out which before you contact me. That is my job in the first session, and I would rather tell you honestly which I think it is than book whichever one you offered me.

What Working With Me Is Like

No reception, no team and nobody else in the building. You send a message, I am the person who replies, and I am the person you sit down with.

I have been in practice since 2013. I am an integrative therapist, which means I trained across several approaches rather than one, and I do not try to fit every person into the same model. I also tutor counselling and hypnotherapy students at RQF levels 3 to 6.

What we would actually do early on is work out what the pattern is costing you and where it came from, rather than starting with techniques. The techniques matter, but they land better once you can see what they are for. If low self-worth has been sitting under something else, low mood or a temper that keeps surprising you, we would look at that too, because the thing people book about is often the symptom rather than the driver.

I will not tell you how many sessions this takes. Anyone giving you a number before meeting you is guessing.

In person in Wolverton, or online wherever you are.