Mark Bailey
Registered Psychotherapist
Personalised, comprehensive & compassionate therapy in central London & online
Help for anxiety
​Anxiety is a common human experience: if you sit in an average train carriage remember that about 1 in 5 of the people around you will have or have had some anxiety in the last 12 months. Anxiety will fluxuate throughout our lives or when our circumstances change it can often recede. However some of us need help to reduce it so that we can get on with our lives.
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Anxiety is caused by many things and it is an all too real physical feeling as well as psychological phenomena. The good news is many things can significantly reduce anxiety and good quality, focussed psychological therapy is one of them.
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I help people change things from a number of angles: Together we will help you examine the causes of your anxiety and some of the thoughts, responses and processes (which we are not always aware of) that might be sustaining them. Week-by-week we will work on gradually introducing changes so that your body and brain can adjust and learn new ways of being with life. Every one is different and so I am very keen to help you with what matters most in your life not someone else's.
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Case Study - Jason*
(*Any indentifying details including names are changed in case studies to protect identity. Permission has been sought from the person to provide this overview of therapy)
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Jason* came to see me reporting anxiety, together with low self-esteem. As we got to know each other in the first few sessions we were able to plot out what was contributing to his symptoms.
As we worked together Principles of relational field and cognitive diffusion were only of limited value so we then integrated some cognitive restructuring from CBT and he became more able to see that his comparison with others was based on fabrications and that his continual upward social comparison was adversely affecting his mood: by limiting this and paying more attention over the weeks to what he was in control of proximally (including his thinking) he felt more autonomy in life and could also see that he spent less time worrying about what other people were doing.
As therapy drew to a close he also brought in evidence that other people where he worked had been suffering in the same he had and he was able to see the workplace was quite toxic and some of the problems were in the company culture rather than in him. Organically the final session we cried with a relegation of "I've realised I actually like myself".
On discharge we worked on a plan that summarised the key themes of our work and what could maintain his good progress.