Welcome to Cork Positive Counselling Centre
We're Here to Listen
Welcome to Cork Positive Counselling Centre
We're Here to Listen
Who We Are
Our Counselling Practice
Our Counselling Practice
Our Counselling Practice
At Cork Positive Counselling Centre our experience enables us to offer effective, individualized, psychological care. We support a number of mental health disorders, and provide a neutral ground to individuals, families, and couples. Our specialist counselling skills include: Anxiety, depression, PTSD, work-related stress, fertility counselling, couples counselling and bereavement .
Our Treatment Focus
Our Counselling Practice
Our Counselling Practice
Our focus is to help individuals heal, energize, and become aware of their inner strengths. We achieve this by providing a neutral safe space, listening to your concerns, and customising a therapy plan.
Our Promise
Our Counselling Practice
Our Promise
We promise to be there for you every step of your journey. Our goal is to help you grow from your struggles, heal from your pain, and move forward to where you want to be in your life.
Our Therapy
Depression & Anxiety
At Cork Positive Counselling Centre we support people who are experiencing a range of emotional difficulties. Work-related stress issues, depression, fear, and anxiety are some of the most common and uncomfortable emotions that we can experience at some point in our lives. Through counseling, we are able to help you recover motivation, perspective, and joy that you once had in your life.
Trauma & PTSD
Many individuals can experience symptoms associated with painful and traumatic circumstances. Anxiety, fear, and hopelessness are a few emotions that can linger post traumatic events. At Cork Positive Counselling Centre, we can help you overcome these symptoms and guide you through the process of grief and healing.
Relationships
Relationship counselling can be beneficial to couples who are looking to strengthen their emotional connection, in all stages of their relationship. At Cork Positive Counselling Centre we ensure therapy sessions are held with both couples and is a supportive place to discuss issues and solutions to better strengthen your relationship.
Work-related Stress
What is work related stress?
Symptoms of work-related stress
Symptoms of work-related stress
Work related stress is defined as " The adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of demand placed on them at work. Stress is not an illness - it is a state. However, if stress becomes too excessive and prolonged, mental and physical illness may develop".
Symptoms of work-related stress
Symptoms of work-related stress
Symptoms of work-related stress
The signs or symptoms of work-related stress can be physical, psychological and behavioural.
These include:
- Fatigue
- Muscular tension
- Headaches
- Mood swings
- Heart palpitations
- Sleeping difficulties
- Gastrointestinal upsets
- Dermatological disorders
How do you identify stress?
Symptoms of work-related stress
What causes stress in the workplace?
These are some of the symptoms that are indicators of too much pressure that can come from yourself, work, home, any combination of, or maybe even all three.
It is sometimes easier for someone else to recognise stress in you but not so easy to recognise it in yourself. it is easy to say that the symptoms will go away but they may not and that is why counselling is very beneficial to support you and assist you to build an 'emotional toolbox' to help you deal with life's demands.
- No time for relaxation or pleasurable activities.
- Prone to accidents, forgetfulness.
- Increased reliance on alcohol, smoking and/or drugs.
- Becoming a workaholic.
- Poor time management and/or poor standards of work.
- Mood swings - irritability, anxiety, depression.
- Absenteeism
What causes stress in the workplace?
Understanding stress and how it affects your workplace
What causes stress in the workplace?
At Cork Positive Counselling Centre we understand that some common causes of stress in the workplace include: excessively high workloads, with unrealistic deadlines making people feel rushed, under pressure and overwhelmed, Insufficient workloads, making people feel that their skills are being underused. A lack of control over work activities.
Take steps to manage work-related stress
Understanding stress and how it affects your workplace
Understanding stress and how it affects your workplace
- Track your stressors.
- Develop healthy responses.
- Establish boundaries.
- Take time to recharge.
- Learn how to relax.
- Talk to your supervisor.
- Get some support.
Understanding stress and how it affects your workplace
Understanding stress and how it affects your workplace
Understanding stress and how it affects your workplace
Stress is normal. Everyone feels stress related to work, family, decisions, your future, and more. Stress is both physical and mental. It is caused by major life events such as illness, the death of a loved one, a change in responsibilities or expectations at work, and job promotions, loss, or changes. Major workplace and personal stress is inevitable.
Smaller, daily events also cause stress. This stress may not be as apparent to you, but the constant and cumulative impact of the small stressors adds up to a big impact. This impact has an effect on your physical and mental sense of well-being.
However, when you are constantly reacting to small or large stressful situations, without making physical, mental, and emotional adjustments to counter their effect, you can experience stress that can hurt your health and well-being. It is essential that you understand both your external and internal stress-causing events, no matter how you perceive those events.
At Cork Positive Counselling Centre we assist you to develop a personal wellness plan to help you deal with stress and to start living a more fulfilling life.
Fertility Counselling
Fertility Counselling
Whether your goal is improving your relationships, decision making or helping your children with disclosure issues, deciding to seek out help is often not an easy decision. At Cork Positive Counselling Centre (Cork & Mallow), we are very aware of the impact decision making choices have on people's daily lives and relationships.
Our approach is interactive, solution focused and committed that with knowledge, and the right support systems, with practical tools one can overcome any challenges in their relationship/marital conflicts, anxiety, depression, and recurring negative thoughts in their daily lives and their infertility and pregnancy loss.
Whether you are at an impasse in your life, have conflicted relationships, or marital problems, unclear about your fertility options, indecisive about using donor gametes or overwhelmed by pregnancy losses; counselling finds tools to address your life conflicts and your family building options.
Our specialties include: fertility journey counselling, relationship conflicts, marital problems and issues with fertility; high risk pregnancy; pregnancy loss; postpartum depression and using donor gametes.
Some frequently asked questions include the following:
- Since we've been trying to have a baby, no one seems to grasp our anguish and despair. Why is this happening to us?
- Infertility is full of unknowns. What if I never get pregnant? What else can go wrong? I feel completely out of control.
- My infertility makes me angry. Everything makes me angry. I am angry with myself for being so angry and yet I can't help it.
If you and your partner are having difficulty getting pregnant, you may be experiencing:
- Waves of unexpected , overwhelming emotions.
- Intense feelings of loneliness and isolation.
- Difficulty being around pregnant women and babies.
- Stress and anxiety from undergoing intrusive medical procedures.
- Tension and more conflict in marital relationships.
- A sense of emptiness, fertility and despair.
- Feeling out of sync.
- Difficulty making additional treatment decisions.
Having a healthy baby is a dream we tend to take for granted. No one plans for the various fertility challenges that interface with the path to parenthood. Scientific studies confirm that stress and distress associated with infertility and its medical treatments are comparable with other serious medical conditions. Such high levels of stress can adversely affect your physical and emotional health as well as your fertility treatment.
We are committed to using fertility counselling to help you to :-
- Decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety .
- Enhance coping skills in the face of adverse and challenging experience.
- Practice self-discovery and reconnect with yourself.
- Enhance the emotional and physical connection with your partner.
- Restore a better sense of balance and well-being.
- Decrease feelings of isolation and alienation.
- Discuss various treatment alternatives.
- Discuss your conflictual feelings about alternative paths to parent.
Contact Cork Positive Counselling Centre at 087 - 1040367 or email edwina@corkpositivetherapy.com for an appointment.
Couples Counselling
Human beings are deeply relational, and we seek intimate bonds not only for our physical survival, but also for our emotional well-being. Much of our satisfaction in life depends on our ability to create and maintain meaningful and mutually satisfying relationships. Committed relationships (with or without marriage) can be our greatest source of love, support and joy. In fact, there is ample research demonstrating that a supportive, loving relationship is the strongest predictor of longevity, health, and overall well-being.
Even though most relationships go well at the start, many develop challenging problems over time. No relationship is perfect. Each person is a unique and a separate individual with her/his own early personal history, models of relationships, insecurities, values and opinions, which not always match their partner's. Our early relationship experiences with caregivers leave a psychological blueprint for not only how we perceive ourselves and others, but also the way we operate in our adult, romantic relationships. Additionally, some couples come from different cultural backgrounds, different understandings of essential aspects of relationships (e.g. expressions of feelings, needs for emotional intimacy, asking for help, non-verbal communication, gender roles). However, despite their differences, most people in a relationship have a reasonable and often unspoken fundamental need to be loved, understood, accepted, seen and supported. There is a crucial, unspoken, mostly unconscious "question" that we need to ask. Can I count on you, my partner, when I need you?
Couples who are able to confidently respond with "yes" to this question, feel secure to seek help, comfort, and support from each other. For the most part, they feel seen, supported and understood by their partners. Those who are unsure about their partner's availability and support typically feel various degrees of insecurity and anxiety that, over time, could affect their quality of their relationships.
Finally, individuals who answer "no" to that question often have little, if any, hope to be seen, supported, and effectively responded to by their partner. They often learn to minimize their need for closeness and divert attention to projects (e.g. work), leading to a gradual development of emotional distance in the relationship. A growing emotional distance, negative feelings, and/or conflicts turn the relationship into a source of pain and tension rather than comfort and nurture.
Lack of recognition of and attendance to one's needs are at the heart of most relationship conflicts and difficulties, though they might be disguised under other presenting problems. In the face of unmet emotional needs and expectations like many people, you may be ignoring or sedating your anger and disappointment, hoping "it's just a phrase" and "it will go away". Unfortunately, left to fester, painful emotions may only worsen leading to despair and thoughts if "wanting out" of the relationship.
You and your partner should consider couples counselling when:
- Feelings of "us" are replaced with feelings of only "you" and "me".
- One or both partners are less invested in spending time together and/or develops a separate lifestyle that excludes the other.
- You both agree you have problems, but don't know how to resolve your difficulties.
- Your communication is filled with fighting, bickering and criticism.
- One or both partners feel alone and that their emotional needs are not being met.
- There is persistent sexual dissatisfaction.
- You and/or your partner are seriously considering having an affair or have been unfaithful.
- You feel you are staying together just "for the sake of the children" .
- Cultural differences became a source of unresolved conflicts.
- One or both partners avoid or withdraw from the other.
- You and your partner begin to feel that your relationship difficulties affect your parenting, job performance, and/or social interactions.
- You and your partner simply wish to strengthen your relationship.
- You wish to iron out difficulties and develop better communication and conflict resolution skills prior to marriage.