Her Starting Point
Alison was exhausted. She worked six days a week in her husband’s business while also home-schooling two of her children. One child had additional needs requiring considerable emotional support. With barely an hour off each week, she wanted space for meditation, physical activity and exploring spirituality.
She rated her life satisfaction at 5 out of 10. Making time for herself felt difficult because she believed she should remain productive and available to others. In her initial questionnaire, she described a “dark cloud” of thoughts she was afraid to explore in case they became overwhelming.
Understanding the Inner Critic and Making Room for Self-Care
During our first five sessions, we explored Alison’s current circumstances and the expectations she placed on herself. A strong inner critic and beliefs about constant productivity were making rest feel unacceptable.
We used cognitive-behavioural coaching techniques to help her recognise and question those thoughts. An energy inventory helped her distinguish activities that depleted her from those that restored her. She then developed a self-care plan shaped around her own needs and began putting self-care and play into her schedule.
A daily meditation practice, supported by a recommended app, became another way of noticing fear-based thinking without being carried along by it.
Understanding Emotions and Expressing Needs
In sessions six to ten, we focused on Alison’s relationship with anger and her emotional awareness. Years of putting her needs aside, combined with a fear of expressing anger destructively, had contributed to resentment and occasional outbursts that left her feeling out of control.
She used an app to track her emotions and recognise patterns. We explored how anger could communicate a need or boundary, and how she could express it constructively. This helped her develop a different relationship with the emotion rather than feeling at its mercy.
Exploring her core values also helped Alison reconnect with what mattered to her and the way she wanted to show up for herself and her family.
Building Compassionate Emotional Self-Care
Later personal challenges brought a renewed focus on emotional self-care. In sessions twenty-two to thirty-two, we developed self-compassion skills and a wider range of tools for responding to difficult feelings.
These included a four-step process for working through difficult emotions, emotional regulation tools and self-compassion exercises. Alison recorded the practices she found useful in a personal “What Worked for Me” list so she could return to them in daily life.
Towards the end of our work, we also explored beliefs that had kept her from creative activities. She gave herself permission to pursue an interest she had previously dismissed because she felt she was not good enough at it.
Changes Alison Reported
By the end of the engagement, Alison described making an hour each day for self-care. She felt happier and more at peace, and reported putting her assertiveness skills into practice in difficult real-life conversations. Having previously avoided conflict, she felt proud of facing situations she had found intimidating.
She had also developed ways to support herself through uncomfortable emotions. Rather than expecting to feel happy all the time, she described greater confidence in comforting herself and responding to difficult moments. Gratitude and attention to what was going well helped her recognise her progress and achievements.
Her beliefs about always needing to be busy had shifted. Within family life, she began modelling self-care and involving her children in household tasks, rather than feeling she had to do everything herself.