https://www.psychotherapykuchenna.com/

Sylwia Kuchenna, 4th Floor, Georges Quay House, Georges Quay, Limerick (2026)

10/01/2026

So much of what we struggle with as adults didn’t start in adulthood.

The overthinking.
The fear of being “too much” or “not enough.”
The way we shrink, overgive, or stay silent to keep connection.

These are not flaws.
They are learned responses — shaped in moments when we were younger and needed safety, love, or acceptance.

Your inner child is not a metaphor.
It’s the part of you that learned how relationships work, how emotions are handled, and how much space you’re allowed to take up in the world. It lives in your nervous system, your emotional memory, and your body.

As a psychotherapist and traumatologist, I see this every day in my work. Trauma doesn’t disappear with insight alone. It softens and transforms when the parts of us that learned to survive are finally met with presence, compassion, and safety.

Inner child healing is not about revisiting the past to relive pain.
It’s about gently reconnecting with the parts of you that were never fully seen, held, or supported — and offering them something different now.

This is why I’m hosting a full-day Inner Child Healing Workshop on
🗓 Sunday, 1.02.26
🕰 10:00 – 5:30pm

This will be a deep, guided, and safely held space where we will explore emotional wounds, process stored emotions, and reconnect with the inner child in a way that creates real, lasting shifts — not just temporary relief.

This workshop is for you if you’re ready to stop repeating emotional patterns, feel more grounded in yourself, and begin relating to yourself and others from a place of safety rather than survival.

✨ Places are limited to keep the space intimate and supportive.
If this resonates, trust that pull.

🔗 Book your spot via the link in bio
Your inner child doesn’t need to be fixed — it needs to be met.

09/01/2026

10 Signs You May Be Living in Chronic Stress
From a psychotherapist & traumatologist

Chronic stress is not just “being busy” or “having a lot on your plate.”
It is a physiological state in which your nervous system remains stuck in survival mode for too long. When stress becomes chronic, the body adapts to threat as if it were normal—and that adaptation comes at a cost.

Here’s what I want you to understand clinically and compassionately:

Chronic stress is not a personal failure.
It is the body doing its best to protect you when it has not felt safe enough to rest.

When the stress response (fight / flight / freeze) stays activated over time, it begins to affect nearly every system in the body and mind:

• Persistent exhaustion that rest doesn’t fix
• Sleep disturbances and non-restorative sleep
• Muscle tension, headaches, jaw clenching, chronic pain
• Emotional reactivity—or the opposite: emotional numbness
• Brain fog, forgetfulness, difficulty focusing
• Digestive issues and appetite changes
• Lowered immunity and frequent illness
• Ongoing anxiety, hypervigilance, or a sense of “always being on”
• Changes in coping behaviors (food, alcohol, scrolling, withdrawal)
• Loss of pleasure, motivation, or connection to meaning

From a trauma-informed perspective, many people living with chronic stress are not responding to current danger—but to unresolved past stress, trauma, or prolonged overload. The nervous system has learned that safety is uncertain, so it stays alert.

This is why logic alone (“just relax,” “take a break”) doesn’t work.
The body must experience safety, not be instructed to feel it.

Healing chronic stress involves: – Nervous system regulation
– Restoring a sense of internal and external safety
– Addressing stored stress and trauma in the body
– Learning to recognize limits before collapse
– Rebuilding trust with yourself and your signals

If you recognize yourself in these signs, please know:
Your body is not broken.
It is communicating.

Listening—rather than pushing harder—is often the first step toward real healing.

Your therapist,
Sylwia 🤍

04/01/2026

Carl Jung believed that what we do not heal, we repeat. According to Jungian psychology, addiction is often not about pleasure—but about relief. A wounded inner child carries unmet needs, unexpressed emotions, and unresolved trauma. When these parts of us are pushed into the unconscious, we unconsciously seek something outside ourselves to soothe the pain. Substances, behaviors, or compulsions become substitutes for the love, safety, and connection we didn’t receive.

Addiction, through a Jungian lens, is not a moral failure. It is a signal. A message from the psyche asking to be seen, heard, and integrated. Until the inner child feels safe enough to come forward, the wound continues to speak through self-destructive patterns.

This is exactly what I teach and facilitate in my Inner Child Workshops. Together, we gently reconnect you with the deepest part of yourself—the part that learned to survive instead of feel. Through awareness, compassion, and embodied practices, healing becomes possible. When the inner child is met with presence and care, the need to escape begins to dissolve.

Healing is not about fixing what’s broken. It’s about remembering who you were before the wound.

Your therapist,
Sylwia

03/01/2026

On 01.01.25, I started my gratitude jar.
Deep down, I knew that 2025 wasn’t going to be an easy year. There was an intuitive knowing that challenges and uncertainty would be part of the landscape. And because of that, I wanted something that would anchor me. Something that would gently remind me, even on the hardest days, that goodness still existed in small, ordinary, human moments.

So I began collecting them.

Little notes. Nothing dramatic. Nothing forced. Just truth.
“I’m grateful for this quiet, peaceful evening in front of the fire.”

Reading them now feels almost sacred.

As I unfold each note, I’m not just remembering an event — I’m remembering myself in that moment. The version of me who kept going. Who noticed warmth, safety, relief, courage. Who chose presence over numbness, even when it would have been easier to disconnect.

Gratitude is powerful because it gently directs the nervous system toward safety. It tells the brain: There is something here that did not hurt me. In times of prolonged stress or trauma, our minds naturally scan for threat. Gratitude doesn’t deny pain — it simply balances it. It widens the lens.

What moved me most is realizing how easily these moments could have been forgotten. Pain is loud. Growth is quiet. And without intention, the quiet parts disappear first.

Even in grief — especially in grief — gratitude can feel inaccessible. It’s often not the first emotion we allow ourselves to feel, because it can feel disloyal to the pain, or premature. But gratitude doesn’t erase grief. It coexists with it. It creates a bridge between loss and meaning. It reminds us that while something was broken, something else was still alive.

This jar became more than a ritual.
It became a witness to resilience.
To choice.

I’m setting this as my very personal tradition. I’ve already added notes for 2026 — small truths written by the person I am becoming. And I will read them in 2027, when I will be someone else again. A little wiser. A little softer. Carrying new stories.
This practice is my way of saying to my future self:
You survived more than you remember, and you were never without moments of grace.

01/01/2026

There comes a moment in healing when survival strategies quietly retire.

Not because they were wrong —
but because they are no longer needed.

As a psychotherapist and traumatologist, I see this again and again:
people who are told “you’ve changed” when, in truth, they’ve finally stopped abandoning themselves.

We learn to rescue one-sided relationships because once, being needed felt safer than being alone.
We learn to suppress our dreams and goals to please others because love once felt conditional.
We learn to over-explain, over-function, over-carry emotions that were never ours — because hyper-responsibility once kept us connected, protected, accepted.

These were not flaws.
They were intelligent adaptations to environments that asked too much and gave too little.

But healing is not about becoming “better” for others.
Healing is about coming home to yourself.

Choosing peace often looks like disappointing people who benefited from your silence.
Setting boundaries often looks like “selfishness” to those who crossed them.
Rest often feels uncomfortable when you were taught to earn your worth through exhaustion.

So if someone says, “You’ve changed,”
pause before you doubt yourself.

It may simply mean: you stopped shrinking,
you stopped suppressing your truth,
you stopped surviving — and started living.

And that is not a loss.
That is recovery.

With love,
Sylwia 🤍

28/12/2025

I want you to hear this slowly.

When you say no —
and someone keeps pushing, negotiating, sighing, or guilt-tripping you —
it was never about the cheesecake.

It becomes about access.
About control.
About whether your nervous system is allowed to choose safety over approval.

Many of us were taught, quietly and repeatedly, that love had to be earned by being: • agreeable
• accommodating
• easy
• grateful

So when you finally set a boundary, your body may shake.
Your chest may tighten.
Guilt may rush in and whisper, “You’re selfish. You’re mean. You’re ungrateful.”

That voice isn’t intuition.
It’s memory.

It’s your inner child remembering a time when saying no meant: withdrawal of love
emotional distance
or punishment.

So if boundaries feel hard, confusing, or painful —
nothing is wrong with you.

Your nervous system learned what it needed to survive.

Healing doesn’t mean becoming cold.
It means becoming clear.

Healthy people adjust when you set limits.
Unhealthy people escalate.

And while that can be painful to see, it is also deeply informative.

You don’t lose love by setting boundaries.
You lose the illusion that you had to abandon yourself to keep it.

If this post touched something tender inside you,
I created two spaces to support you:

✨ My FREE Boundary-Setting Masterclass
— where I teach you how to say no without guilt, freezing, or over-explaining

✨ My Inner Child Masterclass
— where we gently heal the part of you that learned love must be earned through self-abandonment

You don’t need to become someone else to be worthy of respect.
You simply need permission to choose yourself.

Both links are waiting for you —
link in bio 🤍

With care,
your therapist,
Sylwia

24/12/2025

As this year comes to an end, I want to invite you to pause — not to evaluate yourself, not to judge how much you healed, achieved, or changed, but to witness what you lived through.

So many people carry quiet survival stories into the end of the year. Things that were never meant to be carried alone. Losses that didn’t have space to be grieved. Moments where you had to choose endurance over ease, protection over authenticity.

If you’re feeling tired, heavy, emotional, or strangely numb right now, there is nothing wrong with you. End-of-year reflections often activate the nervous system — especially when you’ve lived through stress, trauma, or prolonged uncertainty.

Healing is not linear. It doesn’t follow calendars or deadlines. Your nervous system learns safety slowly, through repetition, patience, and compassion — not pressure.

Before stepping into 2026, allow yourself to acknowledge what you survived, how you adapted, and how much strength it took just to keep going. Even coping strategies you’re not proud of were attempts to protect yourself when resources were limited.

You don’t need to enter the new year “fixed.”
You don’t need a better version of yourself.
You don’t need to leave parts of you behind.

You are allowed to move forward while still healing.
You are allowed to rest without guilt.
You are allowed to choose gentleness over self-improvement.

If no one has told you this yet — I’m glad you’re here. Your pace is valid. Your story matters.

With care,
your therapist, Sylwia

22/12/2025

For many people pleasers and perfectionists, Christmas isn’t just a holiday — it’s a relational stress test.

Family gatherings, expectations, traditions, and unspoken rules can activate old survival strategies:
being agreeable to avoid conflict,
over-preparing to prevent criticism,
monitoring everyone’s mood,
suppressing your own needs to keep harmony.

As a psychotherapist, I see how often this is mislabelled as “holiday stress,” when in reality it’s a nervous system response shaped by earlier experiences. For many, safety was learned through being useful, easy, or exceptional — especially in emotionally unpredictable environments.

This is why the pressure to “have a good time” can feel suffocating.
Joy becomes another task.
Rest feels undeserved.
Boundaries bring guilt.

If you notice fatigue, emotional numbness, irritability, or the urge to withdraw after social events, these are not signs that you’re failing the holidays. They’re signs that your system is working hard to protect you.

Healing doesn’t mean forcing yourself to enjoy Christmas.
It means noticing when old patterns are running the show — and gently offering yourself more choice.

You are allowed to participate differently.
You are allowed to disappoint expectations.
You are allowed to be human this season.

Less performance.
More safety.

With love
Sylwia 🤍

🎉

06/12/2025

No one really warns you about this part of healing…

You leave the toxic environment.
You walk away from the relationship that drained you.
You change jobs.
You step into a space that finally feels safe.
And you exhale — maybe for the first time in years.

And then suddenly… your body starts “acting up.”

Migraines.
Stomach issues.
Shaking.
Crying out of nowhere.
Heart palpitations.
Deep exhaustion.
Emotions you didn’t even know you were still holding.

And it feels confusing.
It feels frustrating.
It feels unfair.

You keep thinking:
“Why now? Why when everything is finally better?”

But this is exactly what happens when the nervous system comes out of survival mode.
This is trauma releasing.
This is your body recognizing, maybe for the first time in years:
“I’m safe now. I can finally let go.”

Healing isn’t peaceful at the beginning.
It’s messy.
Physical.
Overwhelming.
It’s your system thawing after years of holding everything together.

Because your body is a walking encyclopedia of your lived experiences.
It holds every moment you survived,
every emotion you pushed aside,
every fear you couldn’t process,
every alarm your mind had to ignore just to keep functioning.

Your mind forgets —
but your body remembers.

Your body reacts first.
Your body protects you before you even understand what’s happening.
It carries the memories your conscious mind didn’t have the safety or capacity to deal with.
It stores everything you had to freeze while you were in survival mode.

And when your life finally becomes quiet enough, gentle enough, safe enough…
your body finally starts to release what it held for so long.

Not because you’re breaking down.
Not because something is wrong.
But because you are healing.

Your body is catching up to the safety your mind has already found.
This is what recovery actually looks like.
This is what it means for the nervous system to complete what it couldn’t finish before.

You’re not going backwards.
You’re not getting worse.
You’re finally becoming free.

Your therapist,
Sylwia 🤍

28/11/2025

The Real Importance of Christmas: A Psychotherapist’s Reflection

As a psychotherapist and traumatologist, I’m reminded every year that the deepest meaning of Christmas has very little to do with perfection—perfect plans, perfect gifts, perfect families, or perfect feelings.
Instead, this season gently invites us back to what the nervous system needs most: connection, safety, compassion, and presence.

Christmas at its core is not about the noise of obligation, but the quiet moments of being with the people we love— truly being with them.
Time spent with loved ones regulates us. The simple acts of sharing a meal, listening, laughing, or even sitting in comfortable silence can soften the tension we’ve carried all year. These are the moments when our hearts remember how to rest.

It’s also a season that calls us toward respect and gratitude. Respect for each person’s story, their boundaries, their humanity. Gratitude for the relationships that hold us, challenge us, or help us grow. Gratitude doesn’t erase the difficulties many feel this time of year, but it can create a gentle space where healing becomes possible.

And at the center of it all is peace in the heart—not the forced “be cheerful” kind, but the authentic, slow-growing peace that comes from acceptance.
Acceptance of who we are right now.
Acceptance of what was, and what wasn’t.
Acceptance of the small but meaningful joys available in the present moment.

So this Christmas, if you find yourself overwhelmed by expectations, return to the essentials:

✨ Presence over perfection
✨ Connection over consumption
✨ Compassion over criticism
✨ Peace over pressure

May this season give you the gift of grounding, the comfort of meaningful relationships, and the courage to welcome peace into the places that need it most.

With love,
Sylwia 🤍

14/11/2025

In psychodynamic work, we often say that the unconscious speaks through action more than intention. The way a patient pays for therapy is not about financial etiquette — it is a live expression of their inner world unfolding in the therapeutic relationship.

Money carries emotional weight. It represents dependence, separation, care, autonomy, guilt, longing, anger, and attachment. When a patient reaches for cash, forgets to bring it, overpays, apologises, hesitates, or becomes irritated, they are not simply performing a transaction. They are expressing something about:

how they experience being held or not held

how safe they feel in needing someone

how they manage closeness and distance

what they learned about giving and receiving in childhood

how they negotiate boundaries and expectations

what they fear, long for, or defend against in intimacy

In this way, payment becomes a microcosm of the patient’s relational patterns. It is never about judgment. There is no “right” or “wrong” way of paying. Instead, each pattern becomes material — a moment rich with information about how the patient relates to others, to themselves, and to the therapeutic space.

When a therapist explores these subtle behaviours with the patient, something important can happen:
awareness deepens, repeated relational cycles become visible, and the possibility for new experience emerges.

Even the smallest rituals — handing over money, asking for change, forgetting the wallet, or hesitating at the door — can reveal profound emotional truths.

Nothing in therapy is just a coincidence.
Everything that happens in the room becomes part of the meaningful dialogue — even the moment of payment.

— your therapist, Sylwia

09/11/2025

The video shows a contrast between the question “How can you tell if someone has a personality disorder?” and the comment section full of aggression, contempt, and mockery.

From a therapeutic perspective, such behavior may reveal certain dysfunctional personality traits that, if persistent and intense, make life difficult and can appear in various personality disorders.

💬 Comments of this kind suggest a low level of empathy and problems with impulse control.
Psychologically, they can indicate:

defensive mechanisms (attack instead of reflection),

projection (attributing one’s own weaknesses to others),

or so-called social hostility, typical for narcissistic or antisocial personality structures.

😐 Comments like those shown in the video may reveal:

low empathy,

problems with emotional control,

projection and defensive mechanisms,

and a tendency to devalue others to maintain one’s own sense of worth.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that those who write such comments have a personality disorder. Although, it also shows how the internet encourages the expression of unprocessed emotions and dysfunctional traits.

Here are types of these comments:

“People like this are pathetic.”

“What nonsense — only idiots believe that.”

“You must have serious problems if you think like that.”

“What a joke, people will believe anything these days.”

“Another example of how soft society has become.”

“This is just laughable — get a grip.”

“Everyone else is so toxic and manipulative.”

“People today are all narcissists, not me.”

👩‍🎓From a psychotherapeutic perspective, such comments often:

✔️act as a defense mechanism against internal discomfort or shame,

✔️show low frustration tolerance and poor emotional regulation,

✔️reflect projection (blaming or criticizing others for traits one dislikes in oneself),

✔️and serve to restore a fragile sense of self-worth through putting others down.

They do not automatically indicate a personality disorder, but they do reveal unprocessed emotions, lack of empathy, and difficulty with reflective thinking — meaning, difficulty pausing to understand one’s own motives or the emotions of others.

Your therapist,
Sylwia

Sylwia Kuchenna

10/01/2026

09/01/2026

04/01/2026

03/01/2026

01/01/2026

28/12/2025

24/12/2025

22/12/2025

06/12/2025

28/11/2025

14/11/2025

09/11/2025

Address

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Contact The Practice

Shortcuts

Featured

Share

Category