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Tracey Murray BACP Accredited Counsellor, & CBT Therapist

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Tracey Murray BACP Accredited Counsellor, & CBT Therapist

Hello, I am a BACP Accredited Counsellor, Cognitive Behavioural Therapist, and Clinical Supervisor, and practice in Hull.

I offer a non-judgmental, friendly, space where you can explore any difficulties you might be experiencing, in a confidential environment. Counselling can help you deal with, and overcome issues that are causing pain or making you feel uncomfortable. I can provide a safe and regular space for you to talk and explore difficult feelings, and help you understand yourself more. My role is to listen to you, support you, and respect your views. I can help you work through your thoughts and feelings, and find your way forward. I can help you to accept what you can’t change, and change what you can. After exploring their thoughts and feelings, many of my clients have said that counselling was literally a life changing experience.

15/09/2021

People with perfectionism hold themselves to impossibly high standards. They think what they do is never good enough.
Some people mistakenly believe that perfectionism is a healthy motivator, but that’s not the case. Perfectionism can make you feel unhappy with your life. It can lead to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and self-harm. Eventually, it can also lead you to stop trying to succeed.

To lessen perfectionism, it may help to:
💜set realistic, attainable goals
💜break up overwhelming tasks into small steps
💜focus on one activity or task at a time
💜acknowledge that everyone makes mistakes
💜recognise that most mistakes present learning opportunities
💜confront fears of failure by remaining realistic about possible outcomes

If you’re still struggling with perfectionism and it’s affecting your life therapy, especially cognitive-behavioral therapy, may help you learn new ways of thinking about your goals and achievements. www.traceymurraycounselling.com Photo credit to Septian Simon

13/09/2021

Monday motivation:
We have witnessed many great people in the past like Steven Spielberg, Walt Disney, Michael Jordan, Mahatma Gandhi, and many other successful people who choose to rise up despite their failed attempts and odds they faced in their lives. This is because they achieved success because they took their failure as a challenge to success and didn’t feel guilty that they didn’t achieve what they wanted in their first attempt. The key to success isn’t to give up on ourselves. Everyone fails at some point in their life, but it’s not the end of life.

Often, valuable insights come only after a failure. Accepting and learning from those insights is key to success in life.
Believe in yourself!
Nobody can move your inner strength except for you, yourself!

Believe in yourself and keep striving.

Remember- " IT IS ONLY A FAILURE IN LIFE, NOT A FAILED LIFE" ! www.traceymurraycounselling.com

11/09/2021

When we accept ourselves we're able to embrace all facets of ourselves—not just the positive. Self-acceptance is unconditional. It means we can recognise our weaknesses or limitations, but this awareness doesn’t interfere with our ability to fully accept ourselves. I regularly tell my clients that if they genuinely want to improve their self-esteem, they need to explore what parts of themselves they're not yet able to accept.
For, ultimately, liking ourselves is to do with self-acceptance. It's only when we stop judging ourselves that we can secure a more positive sense of who we are. Which is why I believe self-esteem rises naturally as soon as we stop being so hard on ourselves. www.traceymurraycounselling.com photo credit to Guilherme Stecanella

10/09/2021

You know that old saying: what you dislike about others is what you dislike about yourself? In the heat of the moment, this might be the most irritating thing someone can say to you. Yet, it's often true. In projection, we take an unacceptable part of ourself, such as our feelings, thoughts, tendencies, and fears, disown it, and place it onto someone else. Projections contain our blind spots. Although almost everyone has engaged in projection at some point in their lives, it's often difficult to know when we’re doing it. Projection can cloud our vision and skew our perception of reality. This makes it hard to see a situation for what it is, and instead, morphs a person or situation into something it’s not. When we engage in projection, we become susceptible to self-victimisation and blaming other people for something we need to address within ourself. To help you identify if you’re projecting, ask yourself :
💜What part of my past is this person triggering?
💜What types of stories am I telling myself about this person/situation?
💜Who or what does this person or situation remind me of?
💜In what ways do I act like this person? Is there any area in my life where I also show up in this way?
💜In what ways do I not act like this person? Why is that?
💜Am I afraid that I might be like this person, or that others might think of me in this way? If yes, what's at the core of this fear?
💜What do I need to do to take care of myself right now?
💜How can I be compassionate while also setting a healthy boundary.
To let go of projections and shift into a more objective, compassionate mindset:
💙Take 10 slow, deep belly breaths to relax the body and quiet the mind.
💙As you breathe, imagine all disowned parts of yourself (your projections) coming back to you.
💙Visualise compassion as a colour or symbol that surrounds your entire body.
💙Take 10 deep breaths to release other people's projections you may have taken on.
💙Set the intention to implement at least one new boundary.
💙Take 10 deep breaths to integrate and digest this experience.
💙Write down your insights and how you feel. Follow through with the intentions and boundaries you identified.

08/09/2021

As a therapist, anxiety disorders are one of the most common problems I work with. When people step into my office or even when working online, I'm confident that a little hard work and a willingness to step outside of their comfort zone can help them conquer their anxiety.

Whether you’re terrified of making a mistake at work, or the thought of public speaking makes you weak at the knees, it’s possible to overcome your fear. If your situation is mild—perhaps you take the stairs because you’re terrified of elevators—you may be able to conquer your fear without the help of a therapist.

The key to overcoming a debilitating fear is to start by doing something that is only slightly anxiety-provoking. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 meaning no anxiety and 10 being equal to sheer terror, look for something that would raise your anxiety to level 4. Then, keep doing that activity until your anxiety decreases.

The intention of exposure therapy is to keep working slowly and steadily until you reach your ultimate goal. For someone with a fear of public speaking, the ultimate goal might be to offer one comment each week during a meeting. For someone else, it might be giving a presentation in front of an audience of thousands. But either way, it’s important to define what success looks like to you.

One step at a time, and you’ll get there 💜 www,traceymurraycounselling.com photo credit to Ruffa Jane Reyes

07/09/2021

People, experience grief, with joy, or anger. Most of us are taught from an early age to manage these emotions by sharing and reveling in the positive ones, while repressing or apologising for the negative ones. Either way, we learn not to probe our feelings too deeply. People sometimes say things like, “just be positive and things will be fine”.

What is guaranteed in life is that it will not go well sometimes. You’re healthy, until you’re not healthy. You’re with the person you love, until you’re not with the person you love. You enjoy your job, until you don’t.

We will find ourselves in situations where we will feel anger, sadness and grief and so on. Unless we can process, navigate and be comfortable with the full range of our emotions, we won’t learn to be resilient.

Emotions like sadness, guilt, grief and anger are beacons for our values. We don’t get angry, sad, or feel guilty about things we don’t care about. If we push these emotions away, we are choosing not to learn about ourselves and ignoring our values and what’s important to us.
When we tell ourselves to “think positive” and to push negative or difficult emotions aside, It doesn’t work. Emotional resilience builds our capacity to engage our inner world in a way that is courageous, curious and compassionate.
It’s the ability to recognise when you’re feeling stressed, angry, sad, etc and be able to step out of your those emotions, and then decide how to act in a way that is congruent with your personal values and aligned with your goals that will create resilience. www.traceymurraycounselling.com photo credit Luis Galvez

04/09/2021

Being yourself can feel risky, and it is. There may be people in your life who have bought into the idea that being a certain way and presenting a certain image is all that matters. If you start showing your true self, these people may indeed treat you differently, and that’s a risk. But if you have to hide who you really are to be around these people, you can end up feeling lost, lonely or even shame, because you are basically telling yourself that who you really are isn’t OK. And other people don’t ever get to know who you really are, so you don’t feel as strongly connected to them either. So rather than letting fear drive our self-expression, we need to learn how to accept ourselves, so we can truly be who we are. Here's what you could try:

💜Accept yourself.
Media (and social media) can make us feel unattractive. Models and actors are attractive, of course, but now even our friends on social media have photoshopped their pictures to perfection, often making us feel unattractive in comparison. Not comparing ourselves will help.

💜 Identify negative self talk.
One of the ways we can better accept ourselves is to identify and challenge our negativity. We always have these inner monologues chirping away at us, interpreting the events happening all around us. For many of us, this self-talk is mostly negative. For example, we might think, "I’m ugly" or "My life is rubbish ," when we watch TV shows or look at our social media.

💜Celebrate your strengths.
In addition to negative self-talk, we can also easily slide into the habit of focusing on our weaknesses instead of celebrating our strengths.

💜Express yourself.
What else stops us from being ourselves? Mostly, it’s our fear of what other people might think about us if we showed our true selves. For example, maybe our friends all have the same opinion about a political topic, so we decide not to share our different point of view.

💜 Show your vulnerability.
We can’t just pick and choose the parts that we like; we can’t just show the manicured, photoshopped version of ourselves. So we have to be vulnerable from time to time. Hope you find time for you. Have a lovely weekend 💜

03/09/2021

Many people have grown up in environments where their parents, siblings, family members, teachers, peers, and similarly significant people told them that they are not good enough. Some of these messages are explicit, while others are very subtle, sometimes to the degree where the child is not even aware something wrong is happening.

Most people don’t recognise their childhood adversity and their inner pain as such. Letting go of old defense mechanisms and roles can be very challenging.

I have worked with many clients who have wanted to overcome the affects of their painful upbringing, and have seen the rewards by feeling an authentic sense of self happiness after therapy sessions 💙

www.traceymurraycounselling.com

02/09/2021

While I don’t think social media is bad for you, I do believe you need to use it in moderation – like chocolate and coffee! So I took a break from social media while I was on holiday.

I’ve had a lovely break, relaxed and spent lots of quality time with friends and family. I’ve recharged my batteries and it’s good to be back working with my clients and back on social media again.

While I was on my break, I reached 1000 followers! I just wanted to say a heartfelt thank you for the follows, likes and comments on my page! Words aren’t enough to express my gratitude. It’s a difficult balance coming from a counselling page, trying not to ‘tell people’ what to do or to put a positive slant on things when that might be the last thing people want to see. With this in mind, I try to post what might be informative, helpful, hopeful or inspiring. Hopefully I have achieved some of this?! 🙏 I have also got so much inspiration from other peoples pages and posts too, so thank you too! 💜
#1000 www.traceymurraycounselling.com

16/08/2021

I love this quote because it sums it up perfectly 💙

So that’s exactly what I’m going to do! I’m unplugging and taking a break from counselling and social media for a few days.

I’m looking forward to putting some self care in place, relaxing and spending some time with family.

Thank you all for your support, see you all in a few days 💙

15/08/2021

If you feel breathless due to anxiety, there are breathing techniques you can try to alleviate symptoms and start feeling better.
When deep breathing is focused and slow, it can help reduce anxiety. You can do this technique by sitting or lying down in a quiet, comfortable location.

💙Notice how it feels when you inhale and exhale normally. Mentally scan your body. You might feel tension in your body that you never noticed.
💙Take a slow, deep breath through your nose.
💙Notice your belly and upper body expanding.
💙Exhale in whatever way is most comfortable for you, sighing if you wish.
💙Do this for several minutes, paying attention to the rise and fall of your belly.
💙Choose a word to focus on and vocalize during your exhale. Words like “safe” and “calm” can be effective.
💙Imagine your inhale washing over you like a gentle wave.
💙Imagine your exhale carrying negative and upsetting thoughts and energy away from you.
💙When you get distracted, gently bring your attention back to your breath and your words.

Practice this technique for up to 20 minutes daily when you can. www.traceymurraycounselling.com Photo credit to Le Minh Phuong

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