trauma

‘Meet your authentic self’- 4 week online art therapy group

A group of courageous souls came together in my first online art therapy group ‘Meet your authentic self’ — exploring creativity, connection, and self-discovery through the gentle power of art therapy.

They created and reflected in ways that helped them peel back the layers of “shoulds” and “expectations,” making space for the truest parts of themselves to shine. They pushed through any uncertainty they were feeling and bravely shared their honest emotions and how they viewed themselves throughout this therapeutic experience and in general.

Group art therapy offers significant benefits, including improved mental health outcomes, enhanced social connections, and increased self-esteem. It provides a safe space for individuals to explore emotions, develop coping mechanisms, and build a sense of community.

Benefits of Group Art Therapy:

Emotional Expression and Processing: Art therapy provides a non-verbal outlet for expressing and processing emotions, which can be particularly helpful for individuals who struggle with verbal communication or have experienced trauma.
Social Connection and Support: Group settings foster a sense of community and belonging, reducing feelings of isolation and providing a supportive network for emotional healing.
Increased Self-Esteem and Self-Awareness: Creative activities can lead to self-discovery, enhancing self-esteem and promoting a more positive self-image.
Reduced Anxiety and Stress: Engaging in art therapy can be calming and relaxing, helping to reduce anxiety and stress levels.
Development of Coping Mechanisms: Art therapy techniques can help individuals develop healthier coping mechanisms for managing difficult emotions and situations.
Improved Communication and Interpersonal Skills: Collaborative art projects and group interactions can enhance communication and build stronger relationships among participants.
Enhanced Creativity and Self-Expression: Art therapy encourages individuals to explore their creative potential and express themselves in new and meaningful ways.

I’m so grateful for each participant’s openness and presence. Thank you for trusting me on this journey! Here’s to carrying these insights forward — and to continuing to meet yourselves with curiosity, compassion, and courage.

If you are interested in joining future online art therapy groups, or one to one art therapy sessions at a discounted price, please leave a comment below!

I will be announcing new dates for online art therapy groups starting in October 2025. If you would like to explore the benefits of one to one art therapy sessions, then I am offering these immediately at only 48euros per session.

You can of course join me from anywhere in the world and I am happy to accommodate your time zone as much as this is possible. I am currently in the CEST time zone.

Love Athina

Grieving a parent who is still alive

When a parent is emotionally immature, abusive, or neglectful, it can be incredibly painful and confusing for the adult child. These patterns often make it difficult—sometimes even impossible—to maintain a healthy or meaningful relationship with that parent. The adult child may find themselves caught between loyalty and self-preservation, longing for love or validation while also needing to protect their emotional wellbeing.

Over time, repeated invalidation, manipulation, or emotional absence can erode trust, leaving the adult child to grieve the parent they never truly had—not because the parent is gone, but because the relationship cannot meet the basic needs of safety, respect, or mutual care.

Setting boundaries or choosing distance in these cases is not a sign of failure or selfishness—it’s often an act of deep inner strength, rooted in a desire to heal, grow, and break cycles of emotional harm.

If you relate to the above, then my newest video below might be just the right thing for you!

Love Athina

Creating safety – Living with CPTSD

When you grew up in a home with dysfunction, chaos and unpredictable emotional outbursts, your mind and body is constantly thrown into a state of emotional dysregulation. Home didn’t feel safe, so you also didn’t feel safe. When unpredictable and unfair demands were placed on you as a child, this will have caused long term problems with hyper vigilance, low self-worth, shame, anxiety and depression. CPTSD will be the end result of growing up with emotionally immature and/or toxic parents.

As an adult, you will struggle with certain very basic every day things. Normal changes that are very much a part of life, may feel huge for someone with CPTSD. A sudden change in plans, a packed train, an illness or a delayed flight can all create immense anxiety in someone with a history of trauma.

When you live with CPTSD, over-preparing and knowing the details of things in advance, can ease your anxiety and help you feel more comfortable.

Creating safety as much as possible, helps trauma survivors feel better.

Creating regular routines and predictable outcomes can also be very helpful.

It is of course impossible to control everything in your environment, but being prepared can very much help.

When things don’t go as planned, having a back-up plan can create a safety net. Having certain objects with you that provide comfort, can also be extremely helpful.

What is your experience with this? I would love to know in the comments below!

Love Athina

Cognitive Bypassing & trauma

Cognitive Bypassing is the practice of avoiding feelings by detouring into cognitive ideas or beliefs. It means that we tend to overthink in order to avoid uncomfortable emotions such as grief, fear or anger.

There is nothing wrong with using cognitive strategies as part of your emotional well-being. However, when every negative emotion must be analysed, changed or explained cognitively, this is counterproductive. Compulsively adding cognition to emotion means that you don’t ever allow your traumas to fully heal. The uncomfortable truth is that there is a component of painful emotions that simply must be felt, as hard as that may be to hear.

Healing trauma has more to do with embracing the feeling in the body than holding on to the thoughts of the mind. Somatic healing is crucial in recovery from trauma when you live with CPTSD. Allowing yourself to grieve the losses of your childhood is also a huge part of the healing process. Throwing CBT techniques at clients who suffer with trauma just isn’t enough!

Different therapies that enable us to somatically process trauma are very important in healing childhood trauma. Art therapy, dance therapy, drama therapy, play therapy as well as somatic healing, EMDR, sensorimotor therapy and accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy are all very important.

Most of us who have experienced trauma, find ways to constantly avoid our emotions by overthinking but also by comfort eating, doing drugs or drinking alcohol, being compulsive, dissociating and so much more.

How many of us actually just sit with our uncomfortable emotions and allow ourselves to self soothe, allow ourselves to have a good cry and share what we are actually feeling? Do we actually allow ourselves to feel our sadness or fear and just give it the space to be present without analysing it? This isn’t easy for many of us. As much as it isn’t easy, we have to find ways to make room for it and really feel whatever comes up.

The spotlight effect – A result of narcissistic parenting

If you hate being the center of attention and constantly worry about what people are saying about you, then you may have what is known as the spotlight effect, a term coined by social psychologists.

The spotlight effect is a cognitive bias and it refers to the tendency to overestimate how much other people notice about us.

If you have social anxiety, then you most likely also struggle with the spotlight effect.

The spotlight effect can be detrimental to living your life fully, as it holds you back from allowing yourself to be ‘seen’ by others.

Watch the video to find out more and please feel free to share your experiences in the comments.

For one to one coaching, please feel free to email me at: courageisallyouneed@gmail.com

Love Athina

Echoism – A result of narcissistic abuse

Have you heard of echoism? Echoism isn’t commonly talked about but is very real and a lot of individuals who have suffered narcissistic abuse in childhood actually live with it.

Echoism is very common with individuals who live with Avoidant Personality Disorder or who have many avoidant traits. Echoists find it extremely uncomfortable being the centre of attention.

Watch the video to find out more.

Love Athina

Carrying your parents’ shame

Growing up in abuse means that you may have carried feelings of shame for the way you witnessed your parents acting or treating others.

Growing up in a dysfunctional family may mean that you witnessed your parents use, manipulate and control other people, just to get certain needs met. The people that these things were done to, were people that you genuinely liked and couldn’t believe had been treated in such a selfish and immoral way.

Growing up in a dysfunctional family, where one or both your parents had NPD, you will most likely have witnessed aggressive behaviour, socially inappropriate behaviour, victim playing, scapegoating, lying, manipulation and so much more. There will have been many times, where you felt ashamed that you were the son or daughter of such a parent. You would have literally felt like you were ‘bad’ or ‘toxic’ just by association. You would have felt like you had to constantly apologise for your parents’ awful behaviour. This was never your fault or ‘burden’ to carry however.

When dysfunction like this had always been your ‘normal’, you may have found yourself over-compensating somehow in adulthood. You may have noticed how much you are always trying to be kind, selfless and helpful to others. You may have noticed how much you people-please because you don’t want to be thought of as ‘bad’.

Your inner child took on your parents’ shame and this shame wasn’t yours to carry.

Your inner child may still need healing in regards to the abuse it witnessed and experienced.

Self-awareness is so important when trying to heal the trauma you experienced as a child.

You may not have awareness of certain behaviours you carry or even certain behaviours you still repeat because of what you were taught in your childhood.

To start healing, it is crucial to observe your emotions and pay attention to the intensity of your reactions in your body. What things trigger you and why? Why do some things upset you a lot? Why do you have low confidence in some areas but not in others? What things happened in your childhood that may remind you of the present?

Childhood trauma caused from abuse creates a lot of shame and emotional dysregulation.

If you want to start healing or figure out where things may be going wrong in your life, book an introductory call with me by emailing me at courageisallyouneed@gmail.com

Love Athina

How covert narcissistic mothers create shame

In this video, I discuss how narcissistic mothers and particularly covert narcissistic mothers create shame in their children.

Sadly these feelings of shame, follow these children into adulthood and contribute to the trauma these individuals live with.

Watch the video to find out more.

Love Athina

https://youtube.com/watch?v=j4h7Vcpcb_I%3Fsi%3DuK-PQWTllFVw5uDL

You are the light that refused to surrender

‘You are the light that refused to surrender’ is a wonderful way to look at your healing journey after experiencing trauma.

If you, like me, have a history of trauma, you will be very familiar with the ups and downs of living with CPTSD. For me personally, having hope in my lowest moments, was the 1 thing that kept me going when things truly felt hopeless.

Having hope means that you allow yourself to believe that the day WILL come where you WILL feel better, where things will feel less scary, less isolating and less depressing.

It’s important to never stop hoping when things get tough and to allow yourself to embrace that feeling wholeheartedly.

Practicing gratitude is also extremely important for improving mental health. Be grateful for any tiny steps of progress you make, even if you managed to do 1 additional thing today that you didn’t manage to do the day before.

Living with mental illness is never easy but it can be manageable. Living with mental illness means that you might have to constantly make adjustments to the way you live your life, in order to feel better. These adjustments may look like the following: Changing your diet, adding more exercise to your daily routine, cutting out sugar, moving to the countryside, ending a relationship, leaving a stressful job, practicing meditation, seeking out support from a specialised therapist, going on a retreat, taking supplements and/or using medication. Each journey with mental illness is unique so what might work for one person may not necessarily work for another. Try things out, see what works and go from there.

Darkness may have been a big part of your past and may still creep up on you in the present. This is realistic as life can be tough even when you don’t live with a mental illness.The only way through this darkness however is to find the light. The light could be anything: a therapist, a close friend, a partner, a beloved pet, being in nature, a safe space, art, music or anything else that brings you comfort.

Most importantly however, you must try and find the light within yourself, within your heart and soul.

In those moments of relentless anxiety, depression or emotional flashbacks, love yourself unconditionally. Take yourself by the hand, like you would a small child and tell yourself ‘ I’ve got you, you are not alone’… ‘ I am there for you, unconditionally’.

If you are having a tough day, then I hope this post helps a little.

Keep going..keep living..you’ve got this!

Love Athina x

Narcissists and boundaries

Boundaries protect us. Boundaries tell others what we are not comfortable with and what we don’t want. Boundaries remind others to respect us. What happens when you are dealing with a narcissist? Do they understand boundaries?

This is my latest video on the topic: