Chronic Illness
Dr Catherine Sykes has spent a large part of her career researching and teaching in the field of health psychology. She has published numerous books and scientific journal articles in this field.
Illness
When a person becomes ill, it is not just a biological and medical experience. The whole person and his/her world are affected by an illness. Sometimes people forget who they are and focus on being the sick person. Life becomes the illness, Catherine helps people to see the illness as part of life.
Healthier Eating
When someone wants to lose weight, they commonly turn their attention to diet and exercise patterns. Catherine helps clients understand about the cause of unhealthy eating patterns before setting goals to change eating patterns.
Stopping Smoking
In tackling smoking the common assumption is that only nicotine substitutes are needed when actually the aim should be to remove the need for nicotine. Without tackling the causes of undesired behaviours, the use of willpower or substitutes to refrain from eating or smoking soon becomes ineffective. Catherine helps clients to understand the psychological nature of smoking and teaches clients to break the psychological addiction.
Heart Disease
When you have been told that you have heart disease, it may seem logical that you have to stop smoking, take more exercise and eat healthier but you may face barriers that prevent you making these changes. For example if you have just had heart surgery, you may think that you might damage your heart by doing too much. You may feel sad about the diagnosis and lost on where to start making changes. You may think you are too old to change. Catherine helps you to identity the reasons stopping you from making changes to your lifestyle.
Psychological therapies for health look at health and illness from a different perspective, focusing on the whole person. Catherine has experience of using psychological therapies to help people with:
- Healthier eating
- Stopping smoking
- Headaches
- Heart Disease
- Looking after someone with an illness
- Irritable Bowel Syndrome
- Coping with an illness
- Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
"My life feels incredibly better, more connected, more real, more effective, more hopeful, than it has been for many years. I am so glad that it was with you that I started out on this path to living a much more fulfilling and freed up life, because it was clear to me very early on that you are not only very strong 'technically' in your profession, but that your approach is based on respect, understanding, and non-judgement of others."
— Client with IBS
"You put me on the road to recovery"
— Client after heart surgery
"Your approach really worked for me. I always looked forward to our meetings, always thought they were beneficial even if I knew that expressing thoughts and feelings would inevitably bring up some temporary pain. Happily, once something is said, and out there, and handled in the way you handled it, it changes into something else - something that can be understood, seen differently, and something that just 'is', that doesn''t need to have a particular force or influence on the present."
— Client with IBS
"You took me out of the medical mode. I was so use to seeing myself as being sick that I forgot about the other aspects of me."
— Client with heart failure
"I talked about things with you that I had never dared express with anyone else. You helped me face my fears in such a caring manner."
— Client with heart failure