How can I help?

Who gets depression and anxiety?

In general‚ about 1 out of every 6 adults will have depression at some time in their life. Depression affects about 20% of Australian adults every year. Anyone can get depressed, and depression can happen at any age and in any type of person. 

Anxiety disorders most often start when people are teenagers. Anyone can get one, but they are more common among women and girls. They are also more common in people who were neglected/abused as children, or who are neglected/abused as adults.

Many people who experience depression also have other mental health conditions and anxiety disorders often go hand in hand with depression. People who have anxiety disorders struggle with intense and uncontrollable feelings of anxiety, fear, worry, and/or panic. These feelings can interfere with daily activities and may last for a long time.

How can Inner Sydney Counselling help me?

Using her skills as a Counselor and accredited Mental Health Social Worker, Laura will work with you to identify your strengths and vulnerabilities and to create trauma-sensitive and achievable goals using her skills and knowledge in Internal Family Systems, Poly Vagal Theory, ACT and EMDR. 

Sessions will include visualisations, skill building, activities to settle your nervous system, some talking, and some trauma-processing using bilateral stimulation or EMDR (see here for more information; link to emdr page).

You can expect to feel more confident in understanding your self, your anxious habits, and ways to settle your nervous system within just a few sessions. 

Effective treatment of anxiety and depression can take anything from 10-30 sessions, depending on your response to treatment and the level of past adverse experiences you have lived through. Many clients enjoy working on goals and then taking a therapeutic break from sessions. We can tailor sessions and timings to your individual needs.cription text goes here

Many people do not understand the link between poor adult mental health and childhood trauma. People who have experienced ongoing traumatic experiences  during childhood may warrant a diagnosis of “Complex-PTSD”.

Complex PTSD is a mental health problem that can affect people who have experienced prolonged or repeated trauma. It causes a range of symptoms, such as re-experiencing the trauma, memory loss, difficulty controlling emotions, self-harm, feelings of being in a dream,  and having an unclear sense of ‘Self’.

Complex PTSD can cause difficulty trusting others and forming healthy relationships. It may result from any type of long-term trauma, such as child abuse, parental mental ill health, emotional neglect, military stressors impacting parenting, being in a warzone or experiencing torture. Complex PTSD can be treated with psychological therapies and sometimes medicines.

How can Inner Sydney Counselling help me?

Many people who have experienced Complex PTSD do not understand the link between their childhood experiences and how they feel in the world now. Psychoeducation about understanding the link between adverse events and triggered nervous systems (causing you to act in ways you don’t want or enjoy) is essential to begin with. Using her skills and experience as a Counsellor and accredited Mental Health Social Worker, Laura will work with you to identify your strengths and vulnerabilities. Laura will not spend much time talking about the ‘bad things’ you experienced; she does not need to know the details in order to help you heal. 

Using Poly Vagal Theory, Attachment Theory and a Psychodynamic Approach, Laura will teach you skills to settle your nervous system, create a ‘safe space’ and work to understand any dissociation patterns in order for you to heal from trauma. Once you are ready to begin processing Laura will use the EMDR protocol.

Research has shown that EMDR can be very effective, very quickly in treating PTSD and C-PTSD and the symptoms they bring. 

Several studies have looked at the effectiveness of EMDR for both PTSD and C-PTSD:

• One study showed up to 90% of single-trauma victims no longer have PTSD after only 3 90-minute sessions. 

• Another study, found that 100% of the single-trauma victims and 77% of multiple trauma victims no longer were diagnosed with PTSD after only six 50-minute sessions.

In another study, 77% of combat veterans were free of PTSD in 12 sessions. text goes here

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is condition that some people develop after experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event. It’s estimated that 50% of people will experience a trauma at some point in their life and although the majority of people exposed to traumatic events only experience some short-term distress, around 20% of people who experience a trauma go on to develop PTSD (so around 1 in 10 people at some point in their lives). 

The defining characteristic of a traumatic event is its capacity to cause fear, helplessness, or horror as a response to the threat of injury or death, and therefore can affect anyone.

What causes PTSD?

PTSD is essentially a memory filing error caused by a traumatic event. When you experience something really traumatic your body suspends ‘normal operations’ and so temporarily shuts down some bodily functions such as digestion, skin repair and crucially, memory processing.

During trauma, your brain thinks ‘processing and understanding what is going on right now is not important! Getting your legs ready to run, your heart rate up, and your arms ready to fight this danger is what’s important right now, I’ll get back to the processing later.’

As such, until the danger passes, the mind does not produce a memory for this traumatic event in the normal way. So, when your brain eventually does go back to try to process the trauma, and the mind presents the situation as a memory for filing, if finds it ‘does not exist’ in your memory yet, so it sees it as a situation in the current timeline, and so it can be very distressing.

The distress comes from the fact that the brain is unable to recognise this as a ‘memory’, because it hasn’t been processed as one. As such, the facts of what happened, the emotions associated with the trauma and the sensations touch, taste, sound, vision, movement, and smell can be presented by the mind in the form of flashbacks – as if they are happening right now. The distress during the traumatic event, and this continued distress is what causes that changes in the brain, and the subsequent symptoms of PTSD. 

How can Inner Sydney Counselling help me?

Using her skills and training and extensive experience working with current-serving and ex-serving members of the Australian Defence Force, Laura will work with you to identify your strengths and vulnerabilities and to create trauma-sensitive and achievable goals using Attachment Theory, Poly Vagal Theory, CBT, mindfulness and EMDR. 

Sessions will include visualisations, skill building, activities to settle your nervous system, some talking, and some trauma-processing using bilateral stimulation or EMDR.

"The stress level for infertility is comparable to the stress level of being diagnosed with cancer,"

In other words, the trauma of not being able to have children is very real and very powerful for both women and men.

Many couples around the world struggle with the heartbreak of infertility. In fact, roughly 10-15% of couples will experience infertility. It's a fairly common issue, but it's one that is not often talked about. One reason for this is that infertility is a difficult issue to face, one that is closely associated with depression and other mental health issues.

EMDR treatment can help by giving you tools and resources to reduce your emotional distress, shift from negative core beliefs, and help empower you through the your healing journey.

As a trained EMDR therapist who previously worked as a Fertility Nurse at Genea IVF Laura has a special interest in supporting women and men with this issue and knows that healing can happen when you get the right support. 

Using her skills as a Counselor and accredited Mental Health Social Worker, Laura will work with you to identify your strengths and vulnerabilities and to create trauma-sensitive and achievable goals to improve your resilience and positive core beliefs in order to engage with Fertility Treatment using her skills and knowledge in ATtachment Theory, Internal Family Systems, Poly Vagal Theory, ACT and EMDR. 

Sessions will include visualisations, skill building, activities to settle your nervous system, some talking, and some trauma-processing using bilateral stimulation or EMDR.

When a person starts to demonstrate an excessive and unreasonable fear of certain objects or situations that in reality are not dangerous, it is likely that the person fulfils the criteria for specific phobia as stated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (“DSM-5”).

The DSM-5 distinguishes the following five main categories or subtypes of specific phobia: 

• Animal type (phobias of spiders, insects, dogs, cats, rodents, snakes, birds, fish, etc.) 

• Natural environment type (phobias of heights, water, storms, etc.) • Situational type (phobias of enclosed spaces, driving, flying, elevators, bridges, etc.) 

• Blood, injury, injection type (phobias of getting an injection, seeing blood, watching surgery, etc.) 

• Other types (choking, vomiting, contracting an illness, etc.)

How can Inner Sydney Counselling help me?

The classic approach to treat a phobia is to do Exposure treatment. Laura believes a more trauma-informed approach centered around EMDR is more supportive to the client. Clients with specific phobias display commonalities with PTSD in that they often experience vivid and disturbing memories of earlier events associated with the beginning of their fears. Activation of these mental representations plays an important role not only in the symptomatology of fears and phobias, but also in the process contributing to the maintenance and aggravation of clients’ symptoms. 

EMDR Therapy has been shown to be capable of resolving such memories, alleviating clients’ fears, and successfully reducing clients’ avoidance tendencies.

EMDR Therapy may be particularly useful for phobic conditions with high levels of anxiety, with a traumatic origin or with a clear beginning, and for which it is understandable that resolving the memories of the conditioning events would positively influence its severity.