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The Wounded Healer

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The Wounded Healer

Eoin Shanahan

🗣 Counsellor/ Psychotherapist based in Lucan

👦🏻 In-person

💻 Online

🚶🏻‍♂️ Walk & Talk

🏅 Pre-Accredited Member of the IACP

05/09/2025

Let's Therapy!!!

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02/09/2025

Gray matter is the control center of your brain — packed with neurons that handle memory, decision-making, self-control, and emotional balance.

When alcohol shrinks gray matter, it chips away at all of these functions. That’s why heavy drinking is linked to poor focus, higher anxiety, depression, and faster brain aging.

👉 Alcohol shrinks it.
Alcohol is directly neurotoxic. It shrinks the hippocampus (memory) and prefrontal cortex (focus + decision-making), accelerates brain aging, and raises the risk of depression + anxiety.

👉 Sobriety helps it heal.
Quitting alcohol halts the damage. MRI studies show gray matter can rebound within weeks to months. Focus sharpens. Memory strengthens. Emotional balance returns.

👉 Meditation supercharges it.
Meditation doesn’t just protect gray matter — it builds it. Studies show it thickens the hippocampus (memory + learning), strengthens the prefrontal cortex (focus + self-control), slows brain aging, and calms the stress response.

🫶🏻

***de

28/08/2025

Allowing others to really see and know us means that sometimes we will have to disappoint them.

We will disagree with them.

We won’t have space or time or bandwidth for their needs at certain moments in time.

We will mess up, fall short, overreact, or misstep.

We will accidentally or inadvertently touch on their wounds or deep triggers.

We will experience moments of disconnect and have to actively work to figure out how to come back together.

To be in deep relationship with other people, we will have to learn how to navigate our relationship to guilt...
..to be able to separate the emotional discomfort of disappointing or hurting someone from our core values and beliefs...
..to be able to listen to the impact of our behavior without deeply identifying with it...
..to be able to recognise our own humanity and its limits, to embrace our fallibility, and still stay connected to our worth and to this other person.

It’s not easy, especially when this isn’t what relationship looked like in our early lives...
..when we learned that our mistakes/pain/discomfort = disconnection.
..when we learned to hide parts of ourselves so that we could maintain external connection.

But it is possible...
..to hurt, be hurt, and to maintain connection.
..to hold space for multiple things to be true at once, without shutting down or collapsing, or always having to choose between us and them.

Secure relationships involve holding space for nuance — for being able to sit with hurt while trusting in our ability to repair.

🫶🏻

***de

25/08/2025

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24/08/2025

Loss is Loss...there's no rules!!!

20/08/2025

Whether you're behaviour comes from an anxious or avoidant emotional space, you're living in survival...and living in survival means that you're trying to manipulate your external world to make you feel more safe and comfortable...and that's exhausting!

That's why it's important that my clients gain the awareness around the "why" behind this...
..we can't manage or work with something that we can't identify and don't understand.

🫶🏻
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***de

08/08/2025

Children don’t see a parent who lacks emotional capacity.
They see a giant. A god. A mirror.

So when a parent shuts down, lashes out, or can’t connect, the child doesn’t say “they’re overwhelmed”...they say “I’m too much”...and that belief buries itself deep in the body.

This is how unhealed pain gets passed on, not because parents don’t love their kids, but because no one ever taught them how to love with presence. No one taught them how to hold space, feel their emotions, or pause before reacting.

Science now shows what spiritual traditions always knew:
Stress, chaos, and emotional neglect in childhood rewire the brain.

The child’s survival system becomes their personality.
That’s not fate, it’s an adaptation.

Healing is possible...but it starts when one generation decides: “I won’t pass this on.”
the.ego 🫶🏻

***de

07/08/2025

Healing isn't always light and love. Sometimes it's
grief. Sometimes it's silence. Sometimes it's watching your whole identity fall apart...
..but that's not the end. It's the beginning of
something real, a return to the self that's been buried underneath it all.

If you're feeling like something in you is shifting..
You're not broken. You're remembering.

🫶🏻

***de

06/08/2025

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31/07/2025

There’s no emotion that is more stigmatised and cut off from our consciousness than anger.

Anger is a secondary emotion, it's a protector of our more vulnerable parts/emotions.

Allowing anger to exist in a healthy way allows us to be curious about what's behind it, giving us a better emotional understanding of ourselves.

🫶🏻

28/07/2025

Working with my clients in building a better relationship with themselves is so important...

Yes, safety matters, it's the ground floor of nervous system healing...but safety alone doesn’t restore your full humanity. You also need agency. You need the capacity to say no and mean it, to speak up, take risks and move through the world like your body belongs to you.

Your nervous system has evolved past merely avoiding threat, it’s wired for action. If you’ve been doing the breathwork, the somatics, and still feel stuck… ask yourself:

Do I have access to my own power?
Do I trust myself to act on it?

🫶🏻

g

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24/07/2025

Let's do some therapy!

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