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.
How to develop better mental habits
'Prevention is better than cure', so the old saying goes. People tend to be proactive when it comes to physical health. We make sure we eat properly and exercise regularly because we're taught to do so as children. Keeping ourselves mentally healthy doesn't come as easily. We're not taught how to think and often we don't learn to emotionally regulate either. Sometimes that's because it's culturally unacceptable to show our emotions (or we're taught that "boys don't cry"). Or we're taught that some feelings are bad and we shouldn't have them (anger for example), but we're not taught how to channel them properly.
Developing better mental and emotional habits when we're adults is much harder to do. If you're saying to yourself 'I don't have time for that' or 'how am I going to remember?' ask yourself how you learned your good physical hygiene habits. Your parents nagged you ('For goodness sake go and clean your teeth') and/or you learned it in school. As for not having time, it only takes a minute here and there. Practice ...
'A little and often'
As grown-ups, we need to make an extra effort because that effort is up to us. We need to be pro-active. Initially, being pro-active can be a little stressful. You're the one who has to do the nagging but do it gently and be persistent. Here are some things to do and ways to remember how to do it.