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.
The power of placebo – making it work for you
How can I make myself feel better now? It's a question that's been suggested in therapy for eons. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and many other therapies are all variations on a simple recipe.
- I accept that I feel bad.
- I accept the feelings that go along with feeling bad.
- In spite of feeling bad, I can cope.
- But what can I do to make myself feel better now?
The last step is important. It's the action part of the formula. If we just accept feeling bad and then don't do anything about it, it prolongs our misery and disempowers us. Taking action though, can come in a variety of ways.
For example thinking differently; re-focusing the brain on something else (action and distraction); learning to regulate distress and negative emotions (the six-second breath is good for this); addressing poor relationships; and paying attention to sleep, diet and exercise.
Sometimes though, taking action might be to try something new. A new doctor who seems to understand us better, a new medication, or a new remedy we see on the internet. We want to try it and hope it will help, so we look it up, only to find there is no scientific basis behind the action, the substance or the medication. It's only a placebo, we're told. It doesn't really work, so we don't try it.
But is that true? That we shouldn't try things just because they're thought to be a placebo or science hasn't proven it?