Joy Trevivian Counselling

20/05/2026

Something I hear often is the belief that when we achieve something then life will be better.

When I meet someone…

When I have more money…

When I move house…

When I lose weight…

But the reality is that contentment starts right here in the life you’re already living.

If you can’t be content now then having £100k in the bank or your dream partner or a new job won’t make the slightest bit of difference.

Because contentment is an inside job.

And lack of it means that we’re constantly hustling and striving and believing that life will be better the other side of a milestone.

But then we reach the milestone and shift the goal post so we never reach the place we’re aiming for. It’s always out of reach.

On to the next thing.

And the next…

What drives this feeling of lack is the unconscious beliefs you have… and beliefs can be updated.

If you didn’t see yourself as lacking, what would be different?

What would you be doing differently?

How would you be seeing things differently?

It all starts inside.

Starting to notice what you already have and who you already are can shift your attention from lack and towards gratitude and contentment.

It might feel uncomfortable at first, but happiness and appreciation aren’t waiting for you after some random goal is achieved in the future.

They’re available to you in this moment here.

Even if life is less than ideal right now.

The way we see things impacts the reality we experience, so if you want to improve life, start with the way you see things.

Changing perspective can change everything.

20/04/2026

Our brains and nervous systems aren’t wired for happiness, but for survival. They are trying to keep you safe and alive, which is great.

Except that the life you’ve built for safety, that worked for you when you were a child is now exhausting and doesn’t work for you anymore.

Staying alive is different from enjoying life and thriving.

The very patterns and default behaviours that used to keep you safe, ironically are now the very things that are stopping you from feeling happy.

Maybe you learnt to please others and put everyone else first. It seems pretty harmless at first.

Until you feel exhausted, resentful and don’t know who you even are anymore.

You lose sight of who you are, what you want and need and can’t make decisions anymore.

You ask others around you what they think, but then your power to choose is scattered all around outside of yourself instead of being within you.

Life feels anxious and unsafe because you’re not in control.

You’re not even in the driver’s seat of your own life - you’re the passenger.

You aren’t making choices that honour who you are and align with who you want to be.

It’s time to learn to feel truly safe.

To reconnect with who you are.

It isn’t selfish to prioritise yourself. Because when you do, you start to thrive and the people around you benefit too.

Prioritising you doesn’t have to be at anyone else’s expense.

It’s time to let go of what used to work and to allow yourself to upgrade the software your brain is running.

It’s time to feel truly safe.

It is time to feel calm and regulated.

It is time to know who you are.

It is time to live a life that works for you.

Your dreams don’t magically come true, but your choices do.

Every tiny daily choice you make is a step towards or away from your dreams or where you see yourself in the future.

If you’re ready for more then I’d love to work with you to make it happen! ☺️

18/06/2025

Credit Sam Reich

15/06/2025

Sending love to anyone who is struggling this Father’s Day.

Maybe your Dad is no longer here to spend time with and you miss him.

Maybe he’s physically still here, but has never been what you’ve needed or wanted him to be.

Maybe you’ve never known your Father.

Maybe he was emotionally unavailable.

Maybe he was scary.

Maybe you don’t really know him.

We can all have father wounds for lots of different reasons.

You deserved to be protected and guided and supported by a loving father. You deserved to be loved unconditionally.

And if you weren’t, it wasn’t your fault.

It wasn’t because you’re hard to love or unlovable.

You deserved more.

Be kind to yourself, especially today 💕

12/06/2025

If you never had lessons, would you expect yourself to be able to drive?

Would you try to get in the driver’s seat and have a go without someone who knows what they’re doing?

The reality is that most of us are navigating things we’ve never been shown how to do, and then wondering why life feels overwhelming or anxiety- provoking.

When we’re little, if our parents have the resources themselves, they can teach us how to recognise our feelings, how to be soothed and calmed, and how to feel secure.

But if they’ve never been taught those things themselves, then they can only do the best they can with what they know.

This isn’t about blame, but about recognising that most of us are navigating things in our every day lives that we don’t have the tools for and don’t feel equipped for.

If we’ve never been taught then how could we expect to know what we’re doing?

And in the same way that we all need driving lessons to know how to handle a car safely, we all need to be shown how to feel secure in the world, how to trust ourselves and how to regulate our emotions and nervous systems.

It’s never too late to learn the tools you need for your everyday wellbeing. There’s no shame in acknowledging that you’ve never been taught what you need to thrive.

You deserve more than just surviving and getting by.

14/05/2025

What if anxiety isn’t a medical problem to be managed, but a symptom of something else? Like a warning light on a car to show you that something in life isn’t working for you and needs addressing?

What if it could be relieved, not with medicine or learning tools to keep it in check, but to feel mastery over it?

Most of the people I work with struggle with anxiety, and make progress and get relief without spending much time at all on anxiety!

Because anxiety isn’t the problem.

In a way it’s a gift - it alerts us to focus on ourselves and what we need. It shows us that we need support.

An anxious mind worries about what could go wrong and makes plans just in case.

What if…

What if…

The solution isn’t to assess the plans for feasibility, but to shift to a place where plans are no longer needed.

When we feel safe on the inside, we trust that we can handle anything that happens to us. Then anxiety starts to dissipate - we don’t need it anymore.

“I know I will be OK”

“I’ve handled hard things before”

“It will work out”

“This is hard but I know it will pass”

This is how we handle things when we feel secure. We know everything will be OK even when it isn’t.

Planning solutions to what could go wrong doesn’t give us security. When we feel insecure on the inside, then anxiety runs the show.

It’s exhausting.

It is so often interlinked with pleasing others, putting ourselves last, not knowing what we want, how to express how we are feeling or to ask for what we need.

It often feels like our 8 year old self is running the show, and so life feels utterly overwhelming. Life can feel hard as an adult, but when a younger part of us is trying to adult for us, then it feels like we’re failing at everything.

The work isn’t about managing anxiety or learning to live with it better. The work is about learning to be the safe place we need so that we can find calm and safety within ourselves whenever we find ourselves not feeling OK.

The work is learning to trust ourselves and our ability to handle whatever could happen to us.

Are you ready to feel safe and secure?

01/04/2025

31/03/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/1EF1Jp2qoK/?mibextid=wwXIfr

WHEN YOU HAVE A DIFFICULT RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR MOTHER...

From the moment we start to grow, we are connected to our mothers.

Joined by a cord - a lifeline - that nourishes us, grows us, nurtures us.

And then we come into this world and the cord is cut, replaced by an unbreakable bond of love between mother and child that continues to nourish and nurture and help us grow.

But what happens if that bond is broken? What happens if it never really forms?

What happens if your mother could not or would not love you in the way you needed and deserved to be loved? The way you realise now you should have been loved.

Well… you grieve.

You grieve in a way that is hard to explain and painful to articulate.

You grieve for someone who is still here.
You grieve for the bond you wish you’d known.

You grieve for the times you were starved of affection or hungry for love.

You grieve whilst clinging to the end of that rope, that cord, that bond which should have been unbreakable. But wasn’t.

And now you are left holding a broken piece of your inner child. Of your heart and of your soul.

The most complicated losses to bear are the whispers of what
should have,
could have
been.

The echoes of
the unfinished,
the unresolved.

So yes, you grieve.

But you also break the cycle.
You build unbreakable bonds with those you love.
You nurture them and you nourish them.
You feed their hearts and souls with love.

And in doing so,
you begin to feed you own soul too.
You learn how it feels to be loved without expectation. Without transaction. Without stipulations and provisos and conditions.

And slowly, you start to heal that child within.

And you start to realise that, whilst it is not what should have been,
this loss is now what has to be.

It is a loss you have to bear,
a loss you have to grieve,
in order to learn how to love yourself

To love yourself the way you always should have been loved,
right from the beginning.

Unconditionally.

*****

Becky Hemsley 2023
Poignant artwork by paigepayne_creations

Ahead of Mother's Day here in the UK - for all those that need this.

12/07/2024

Recently I’ve been trying to get fit. I started wondering to myself why I stopped doing exercise for a few years each time I had a baby. I was thinking about how energising I find exercise (when I do things I like), and wondering why I didn’t do more of it at exhausting periods of my life to support my health and wellbeing.

This week my husband has been away with work, and my son has had croup every night. He gets it quite severely and struggles to breathe so it’s been a week of steroids and lack of sleep.

Everything has been a write-off this week. I’ve cancelled work, changed plans and done no exercise.

It got me thinking about how we look back on things and tell ourselves stories about it, but ultimately, we were doing the best we could with what we knew at the time and who we were at the time.

Being extra tired this week has made me look back on those phases with a new perspective. I’d forgotten how hard those phases were and that I had no energy for anything.

I often talk to clients about this because it’s so easy to judge younger versions of ourselves about what they did or didn’t do or decisions they made. But we’re looking back with hindsight and who we are now. Without those experiences we weren’t yet this version of us.

At every stage of our lives we our doing the best we can with what we know and who we are.

A sleep deprived week has reminded me of how hard it was to get up and keep going every single day for years. I’ll catch up in a day or two this time, but I lived on limited broken sleep for years and I don’t know how I did it. I muddled through and prioritised what was important to me at the time. I did my best. It was hard.

What do you look back on and judge yourself for or tell yourself stories about how things were?

What if you were just doing the best you could at the time?

Can you have compassion to the you back then that was managing the best they could and didn’t know what you know now?