Muriel Cooper, Psychologist
I'm Muriel Cooper, a fully registered psychologist in Mornington, specialising in Stress, Anxiety and Depression.
The Talking Room serves clients on Melbourne's Mornington Peninsula.
About my therapy. I specialise in Stress, Anxiety and Depression (the SAD cycle), but I also deal with most psychological and emotional problems.
I use Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Psychotherapy, Hypnotherapy, and psycho-education (knowledge is power!). Presently I'm most interested in Mindfulness and brain-based therapy - teaching you techniques based on using your mind to train your brain. I'm also interested in Meditation and Relaxation.
I regularly write articles and newsletters on these subjects, I run workshops and classes on 'Mindfulness and Brain Training' and I'm also available as a public speaker. If you are interested in these areas of mental health, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter. Subscription is free, there is no obligation, you can unsubscribe at any time, your privacy is protected and I do not include any advertisments for any products or services in my newsletters.
Contact me to make an appointment. Here are my fees and services, and here is information on Medicare rebates. Call your fund for details of health insurance rebates.
I welcome your input into this web site and invite you to contact me by email or make a comment on the site. All comments are hosted only on this site and are not broadcast or distributed to any other comment stream. All your contributions are valued as long as they're relevant to the point and aren't aggressive (please). We can all learn from each other.
Thanks for visiting. I hope you find the material on this site helpful.
Break the "I'm not good enough" cycle
Tackling negative core beliefs
How many times do you not only actually say to yourself 'I'm not good enough', but demonstrably show it through shooting yourself in the foot; self-defeating behaviours and attitudes; self-sabotage or whatever else you would like to call it? Every time the cycle goes around, you feel worse about yourself.
Everyone does this just a little, but when it becomes a continuous destructive cycle that drags you down, ruins your life and keeps you away from happiness, it's time to act.
We're talking about the following things and they might seem a bit harsh (usually the kind of things you might complain about in other people), but if you admit any of these are a bit like you, good for you – it's time to start doing something about it:
- Being overly responsible. "I'm responsible for everything and everyone feeling good and being okay. Oh, and they have to like and approve of me all of the time. Otherwise, it's terrible and awful."
- Self-blaming and self-judgement. "It's all my fault", "I'm such a klutz", "I can never get it right."
- Being overly defensive. Here are a few synonyms from Webster's Dictionary for defensive: aggressive, bellicose, belligerent, combative, contentious, in-your-face, militant, pugnacious, quarrelsome, scrappy, truculent, and warlike. Enough said?
- Blaming. "It's not my fault, they did it. It had nothing to do with me."
- Being passive/aggressive. Complaining about people to others, sending a snarky email or text and then avoiding the person, or relying on others to help you or stick up for you.