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Monday 10:30am - 4pm Tuesday 9am - 4pm Thursday 8am - 4pm Friday 9:30am - 4pm

Alice Tew Counselling and Psychotherapy, Davenham (2026)

06/02/2026

Your inner critic got its instruction manual when you were 7 years old 👧🏻
It is trying to protect you, but it needs an update...

Here’s a therapist’s perspective…

The most common mistake people make when trying to heal self-loathing: Attacking themselves for attacking themselves.
You catch yourself being harsh and think: “Why do I do this? What’s wrong with me? Everyone else seems fine. I’m so broken.”

Sound familiar?
Here’s what’s happening: You’re using the exact tool that created the problem to try to solve it. You can’t hate yourself into feeling good about yourself.

Here’s why we do it...
You learned that harsh criticism keeps you safe by keeping you small.
If you’re hard on yourself first, others can’t hurt you. If you identify the “problem”, you can fix it. If you criticise yourself enough, you’ll finally be good enough.

But you can’t hate yourself into becoming a version of yourself you love.
If your strategy is shaming yourself, you will end up feeling ashamed.
All. The. Time.

What actually works: Curiosity instead of criticism.
When you notice self-criticism: Pause.
Name it without judgment: “This is the critical part of me.
Get curious: “What triggered this? What am I afraid of?”
Offer compassion: “This makes sense given what happened.”

The difference:
✖️ “I’m being so harsh, what’s wrong with me?”
✔️ “I notice I’m being harsh. I wonder what I’m afraid of?”

When you stop fighting your inner critic and start understanding it.
And then the volume turns down.
Not because you forced it, but because you finally heard what it was trying to tell you, so it doesn’t need to shout.

Self-compassion isn’t about wishy washy positive thinking.
It’s about meeting yourself with curiosity and kindness - especially when you least feel like you deserve it.

Hello, Im Alice... 👩🏻
I’m a therapist who helps emotionally
overwhelmed adults who are stuck in survival mode to make sense of their emotions, quieten their inner critic and build healthy relationships.
Find my booking link in my bio

03/02/2026

If you’re a deeply feeling introvert who grew up with emotionally immature parents and now struggle with self-loathing, self-doubt or a relentless inner critic, you’re in the right place.

Many of the people who find their way here are intelligent, capable and high-achieving, yet feel overwhelmed by emotions, paralysed by perfectionism or stuck in people-pleasing patterns. On the outside, life looks fine. On the inside, it feels exhausting.

Growing up with emotionally unavailable, critical or emotionally fragile parents often means you didn’t learn how to feel safe with your emotions. Instead, you learned to manage yourself. To overfunction. To be good. To stay small or invisible. To keep going, even when it hurt.

That doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. It means your nervous system adapted to survive.

I’m Alice, a BACP-accredited psychotherapist specialising in relational, trauma-informed therapy for sensitive, introverted adults. I work with people struggling with low self-esteem, perfectionism, people-pleasing, burnout and a harsh inner critic. I also support clients exploring late-identified autism, ADHD or AuDHD in a non-pathologising way.

Therapy with me is about building self-trust, emotional regulation and compassion with accountability. We work gently and honestly to understand your patterns, make sense of your feelings and help you live a life that feels authentic rather than performative.

You don’t need to be at breaking point to start therapy. You don’t need to justify your pain. And you don’t need to fix yourself before asking for support.

You’re allowed to take up space. Find my calendar in my bio and my podcast

16/10/2025

At 29, I was surviving, not living. Thriving on being called “superwoman.” Believing busyness proved my worth. Running on empty and calling it dedication.

Here’s what I wish I’d known:
🦸‍♀️ I used to thrive on being called superwoman. I didn’t realise how much it was hurting me. Being capable doesn’t mean you have to carry everything alone. Your worth isn’t measured by how much you can handle.

🧘🏻‍♀️ Slower is faster. When I finally stopped forcing productivity and allowed space to breathe, I found the clarity I’d been frantically chasing. Sometimes stopping is the most productive thing you can do.

❤️‍🩹 I got better when I started believing my feelings. When I stopped telling myself I was crazy. When I stopped looking outside myself for approval. Your emotions aren’t problems, they’re information.

🧠 Understanding alone won’t heal it. I thought if I just read enough, understood enough, analyzed enough - I’d be healed. But you can’t think your way out of what you felt your way into. It takes processing (EMDR), reparenting, and support.

👵🏻 It’s not your job to live up to your parents’ expectations. Especially when those expectations mean abandoning yourself. You can love them AND set boundaries. You can honour them AND choose differently.

💗 Love you have to earn is not real love. I was so afraid of being average. Now I’m building an ordinary life full of joy and it feels more meaningful than any achievement ever did. You’re worthy simply because you exist.

😕 Changing your behavior can feel wrong at first. It’s normal to feel guilty or lazy when you start being kinder to yourself. Getting healthy can feel like arrogance when you’ve been passive. That discomfort is part of the process.

💓 Self-compassion is like a crash mat, a safety net. It doesn’t make you soft. It gives you security to take risks, to fail, to try again. Harsh criticism might move you short-term, but compassion sustains you long-term.

13/08/2025

Tried shutting up your inner critic… and it just got louder? Try this instead.

✨ Give it a character name (mine’s “Little My” from The Moomins because that’s how I picture her, but you can call yours anything) so you can recognise when it’s talking vs. when you’re talking
✨ Ask it how old it it. It sounds a little crazy but often behind the inner critic is a scared little child who is trying to avoid shame
✨ Find it in your body. Notice where you feel a body sensation when your inner critic is active. Put your hand on it. Ask it what it wants from you.
✨ Thank your inner critic before dismissing it - “Thanks for trying to protect me but that’s not helpful right now”
✨ Set an internal boundary Respond to it by saying “I don’t speak to myself like that anymore, it’s not kind”
✨ Keep your wins. Make a note on your phone to track the small wins - got dressed? Win. Reached out to a friend? Win. Did the thing you were scared of? Win!
✨ Create a supportive mantra. Not a lame affirmation but a short reminder for when times get hard like “It feels hard because it is hard”
✨ Plan to rest because your to-do list will never be finished and your critic won’t let you stop til it is, so add a 5 minute rest to your to do list and gradually increase over time
Helpful? Follow for more like this and come and join my new project

01/08/2025

Stuck being your own worst enemy again? 😖

✨ The first thing is to recognise that while it seems like the truth and you can point to so many things that “prove” how useless or worthless you are, this isn’t accurate insight. It’s your nervous system’s survival conclusion from years of emotional unsafety...

✨ Your brain looked at the criticism, the emotional unavailability, the conditional love and decided: “I am the problem. If I hate myself first, maybe it will hurt less when others do.
You tell yourself you can use the self hatred to propel yourself towards a version of you that can be loved...

✨ The reason self-loathing feels so real is because it was real - it was your best attempt at surviving an environment where being yourself felt completely unacceptable, maybe even dangerous - and I don’t just mean physical danger but silent treatment, mocking, belittling and sarcasm too. All of these things can be traumatic.

✨ Recognising self-loathing as a trauma response, not a character flaw, is the first step toward healing. You’re not broken. Your brain needed to see you that way to survive the environment you’re in.

✨ Healing self-loathing requires rewiring the nervous system that learned you were emotionally unsafe. That’s the deep work we do together.
I have just a couple of spaces available if you’d like to learn how we can work together to help you to start growing instead of tearing yourself apart

Hello, Im Alice 👩🏻
I’m a therapist who helps emotionally overwhelmed adults who are stuck in survival mode to make sense of their emotions, quieten their inner critic and build healthy relationships.
Book online through the link in my bio.

17/04/2025

Save this for when you’re feeling bad 💛

✨ First I want to acknowledge how agonisingly painful it is to be back in this place again.
I’ll explain more in a moment but what I want you to hear before that is that these feelings are not happening because there is something fundamentally wrong with you or because you’re broken.

✨ Those intense waves of shame aren’t random. They’re like echoes from times when you weren’t protected or supported or were told outright that you (not just your behaviour or choices) were bad or wrong.
Your body remembers those moments, even when your mind tries to move forward.

✨ That voice telling you you’re worthless? It’s not the truth about you.
I think of it like an old recording that your brain plays when something in your present feel similar to old hurts from your past.
Maybe it sounds like “not good enough”, “too much”, “so dramatic”, “sensitive baby”.

✨ Put a hand where you feel the hurt most in your body and say something gentle, like you would to a scared child: ‘I know this feels awful. I’m right here with you. We’re going to get through this together.’
Maybe you don’t know how yet but there is help out there. You don’t have to figure it out on your own.

✨ These overwhelming feelings can become more manageable when you receive the care you didn’t get and learn how to be that caring, steady presence for yourself.

✨ I have just a couple of spaces available if you’d like to learn how we can work together to help you find solid ground when these waves come.

10/04/2025

😢 Feel like you’re drowning in your emotions?

✨ Your emotions aren’t “too much” - they’re intelligent messengers that have been shouting because they weren’t heard when they whispered.

As a deeply feeling introvert, your emotional intensity is likely a natural part of who you are combined with being taught to tune into others’ needs while disconnecting from your own.

✨ When your emotions weren’t validated growing up, you learned to suppress them rather than understand them.

This created a pattern where emotions build up until they become overwhelming. Your emotional intensity isn’t a flaw - it’s what happens when feelings haven’t been given the attention they need.

✨ Your body holds the emotions your mind was taught to ignore. Those knots in your stomach, tension headaches, and that bouncing between feeling flooded and numb?

These are clues your body uses to signal that emotions need more attention. Learning to notice physical sensations gives you early access to emotions before they become overwhelming.

✨ Many deeply feeling introverts were taught - directly or otherwise - to be “fine” rather than authentic.

Together we’ll expand beyond “stressed” or “anxious” to understand the full spectrum of your emotional experience. This naming process is the first step away from intellectualising why you feel bad, and starting to really feel your feelings.

✨ Through our work, you’ll learn how to deeply care for yourself in a way that feels good - recognising, validating, and responding to your feelings with curiosity and compassion.

This reparenting process creates a secure inner foundation where all emotions are welcome, not just the
“acceptable” ones. When you stop pushing them away, they no longer need to shout to be heard.

✨ Your emotional depth truly is a gift, not just a burden. As you learn to trust what your emotions are telling you, that overwhelm naturally decreases.

💛 Your sensitivity becomes your guide when you can trust that the feelings will pass, have the tools to navigate them effectively and are able to really make space for what you’re experiencing.

18/02/2025

Ever wonder why that voice of self-hatred feels so impossible to shake?

Self-loathing isn’t a sign that there’s something fundamentally wrong with you - it’s carrying messages about old hurts and unmet needs. Understanding these patterns can transform how you respond to them which will transform how you feel.

Picture understanding your self-hatred so well that it loses its power over you. Imagine knowing exactly what’s happening when shame hits, and having tools to respond.

Save these slides for when you need clarity. Want to go deeper? Download my Inner Critic Workbook by commenting CALM to start understanding your patterns better 🫶

Alice Tew Counselling and Psychotherapy

06/02/2026

03/02/2026

16/10/2025

13/08/2025

01/08/2025

17/04/2025

10/04/2025

18/02/2025

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Monday	10:30am - 4pm
Tuesday	9am - 4pm
Thursday	8am - 4pm
Friday	9:30am - 4pm