Counselling for Women
While there has been an increase in awareness around mental health in recent years, both men and women will often still internalise the difficult and uncomfortable feelings they are experiencing and will often feel some resistance to expressing them.
While men will often shut down and sometimes use drugs and alcohol to cope with problems and difficult feelings (and women can do the same), women generally are more relational and therefore have better social networks in which they can talk about their problems. But for a lot of women, these relationship networks are often not enough to deal with the deep-seated underlying issues that are preventing them from leading the lives they want.
Because women have a greater capacity to talk about their feelings, they will often be more open to seeking out therapy when their lives are not functioning as well as they would like them to be.
What are the main reasons women are open to engage with in therapy?
Issues around perfectionism and high expectations
Whether in the home or professionally, woman will often have high expectations of themselves, which will often play out by way of perfectionism. Often, perfectionism can be driven by issues around poor self esteem, poor self worth, feelings of not being good enough, feelings of ‘less than’ and a preoccupation with comparing themselves to others – and frequently seeing themselves as ‘second best’.
These negative feelings, and an accompanying negative identity, will often have their root cause in early childhood developmental and environmental experience. Without addressing these issues, women’s perfectionism will only lead to higher levels of stress and anxiety, and an increasing fear of failure.
Therapy can give women a greater understanding and awareness of why they are the way they are, process the deeply felt negative emotions taken on in childhood and playing out around perfectionism and high expectations as an adult – and therefore modify their behaviours as adults in order to create more reasonable expectations and goals.
Stress and Anxiety
Women will often experience stress when the daily strains of modern living puts too much pressure on them, and they will therefore experience overwhelm. For some women, they have difficulty putting down boundaries (that is, saying “no”), or being able to be assertive in terms of getting their needs met. Life just becomes too much. Anxiety will often accompany stress, which leads to an increased tendency to worry and imagine negative outcomes in the future.
For women particularly, increased stress and anxiety can lead to interrupted sleep patterns, an inability to focus on tasks, an increased vulnerability to physical issues and sickness, and a general feeling of physical exhaustion.
Again, therapy can be useful in identifying the source of the particular stress points in women’s lives and develop the capacity to manage the difficult emotions that often arise at these times.
Low mood and depression
There is increasing evidence that women are much more likely than men to struggle with issues around low mood and depression. Low mood will often be accompanied by feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and an increasing sense of being alone in the world and that no one really understands them. Such feelings can sometimes lead to thoughts of self-harm or even suicide.
When women are in the grip of depression, their ability to engage in day to day tasks can become a real challenge.
Therapy can be helpful in terms of looking at women’s low mood and depression as either symptom of their struggle with day-to-day living or whether there is an underlying cause driven by an early childhood experience that may also be contributing to their current difficulties in daily living.
Relationship and family issues
Relationship and family issues can be the prime reason that women seek therapy. Intimate relationships can often be the biggest trigger of strong negative emotional responses. Relationships can be the biggest source of hurt and pain.
For many women, communication issues with their partner are one of the main reasons they seek therapy. They may complain that their partner just doesn’t hear them, which can result in feeling isolated in the relationship. Whether as an individual or as a couple, therapy can be helpful in identifying and clarifying communication issues.
If communication is an issue in the relationship, this will often also play out in the sexual lives of the couple. This can often lead to issues around anxiety, embarrassment and anger as these often “white hot” feelings will often arise in the discussion of such a vulnerable issue. Therapy can help navigate this terrain and thus bring the resolution of wider communication issues in the relationship to the sexual context as well.