BEREAVEMENT AND GRIEF

It is normal and common to experience a fearful situation, which causes feelings of panic, fear and anxiety. Mostly these feelings occur at only specific circumstances.

However, for individuals suffering from anxiety disorders, these feelings occur all or at frequent times leaving them distressed, powerless, etc. Anxiety can be defined as a complex emotional state where an individual anticipates future events as distressing, uncontrollable or harmful. While experiencing anxiety, one can experience increased heartbeat, tension, sweating, and avoidance behaviour amongst others. If left untreated, it can bring great distress to ones life causing disturbances in our personal and professional lives. Anxiety is one of the most common reasons for counselling and psychotherapy. It can be presented in many forms but the most common ones include Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Social Anxiety, Health Anxiety, Panic Disorder, Phobias, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

Counselling and psychotherapy therefore focuses on exploring both the cause, triggers, precipitating and maintaining factors for these anxiety feelings. With the help of various cognitive behavioural techniques, it concentrates on normalising ones thoughts, reducing fears, challenging unhelpful thoughts and beliefs and instead offers alternative perspectives to deal with these anxiety provoking situations. It also offers various cognitive relaxation techniques, which helps one cope and manage these situations better.