about me
Hi! I’m Orla and I can help you learn how to use your own mind differently.
Do you feel like anxiety is controlling your life? Is your mind always flitting from one thing to another — always half-thinking lots of things at once? Is your brain always in overdrive? Do you feel stressed out or under pressure more often than not? Do you feel like you are often second-guessing yourself, overthinking your own actions, overthinking the actions of others? Do certain situations or triggers make you inexplicably, irrationally fearful or anxious? Do you avoid a lot of things, people or situations that you’ve previously associated with anxiety, panic attacks or negative thoughts or experiences? Or have to really fight to force yourself not to avoid stuff?
Do you frequently experience panic attacks and/or very high level anxiety?
Do you experience repeating thought patterns that are associated with distress, fear, or any other intense negative emotion, and that feel hard to distract yourself from, or to move away from in your mind?
Do you sometimes, or perhaps often, feel an intense sense of guilt, shame or unworthiness, or experience a thought or idea that you are a terrible, awful person, a bad person, and that people are going to find out?
If you are currently experiencing high-level, severe Anxiety and/or OCD, I’d love for you to learn a little about the therapy process I’ve put together specifically to help people make a really radical and transformative move away from this experience.
You can read about this therapy process, Imagination versus Anxiety, here.
I put this 6 month therapy process together because I found that, over time, I was working with more and more people where their starting point was that of very problematic and severe Anxiety and / or OCD, and I wanted to put together something that could help these people, who were enduring such dreadful internal experiences, to make a really big change relatively quickly, and at a deep and powerful level.
When I completed my NLP training, I saw that in combining the NLP and Time Line Therapy techniques methods and processes with elements from Solution Focused Hypnotherapy, and putting this together with certain creativity-led approaches and practices, I had a great opportunity to create something that would work in this way. It’s early days, but so far the process is playing out amazingly, and people I am engaging with in this way are shifting themselves away from Anxiety and OCD in a profound way more quickly than I would previously have thought possible. This fills me with excitement and joy and I feel honoured to be part of people’s journey in this way.
Do any of these statements resonate with you?
I’d like to be in a calmer and quieter state of mind.
I’d like to feel a bit more in control of myself.
I’d like to be more in the present.
I want to feel good again. I want to feel ok.
I’d like to have more confidence.
I want to feel more focused and positive.
I’d like to develop the ability to be a more full, genuine version of myself.
I would like to have the confidence to say ‘No’ to things that I don’t want to do or to tell people when I think they are behaving unacceptably.
I would like to feel positive about myself.
I’d like to stop ‘beating myself up’ about things.
I’d like to be more open to new experiences.
I want to rewire and retrain my brain.
I want to feel I am reaching my full potential.
I’d like to be more rational — to stop feeling afraid when there’s no reason to be.
I’d like to develop emotional resilience.
I’d like to be able to relax properly.
I’d like to be free.
These are some of the kinds of things I often hear clients say they would like to achieve at the start of their therapy process, when we imagine together what a life without severe Anxiety or OCD might look like, feel like, be like…..
My ‘Imagination versus Anxiety’ therapy program is truly an excellent process for moving yourself forwards towards your goals, your plans and dreams, towards where you’d like to be in life and the kind of person you’d like to become, or perhaps, to rediscover you are. It is a true honour for me as a practitioner to accompany people on this journey for a little while, and to witness people making amazing changes in their lives.
Because I was in such a bad way at the time I started sessions, I wasn’t sure particularly how much hypnotherapy could help me. My anxiety and depression were very bad at that point, and I was so often preoccupied with very negative thoughts, that it was difficult to imagine anything making it any better…. Now, having come to hypnotherapy session for around a year, I am in a much more positive place, and feel, for the first time in a long time, genuinely hopeful about my future…. I have ways to deal with my anxiety when it is getting too much – I know what I have to say to myself and what I have to do to feel differently. And it’s helped me look at things in a different way – I look on the positive side of things lot more now, and I really appreciate it when positive things happen. Plus I have a lot of practical knowledge and information about the brain and how it works, so I know what’s actually going on if I feel anxious or down – I can see through the emotion of it, to an extent, and see what’s really happening.
I first discovered hypnotherapy because of doing HypnoBirthing for the birth of our two daughters. I had lovely, calm, peaceful births, with very low-level pain, and also felt amazing throughout both pregnancies — I was happier and calmer more continuously than I ever would have thought possible previously.
Before having children, I think I would have thought about moods or emotions as being pretty similar to the weather — if a bad mood or a fit of anger or anxiety comes along, the best thing to do is to simply ride it out, try hard not to take it out on anyone around you, and remind yourself that you will no doubt be feeling better in the morning, or later on that day.
Through HypnoBirthing, however, I discovered techniques and approaches I could use to take a different tack, and actually shift myself out of states of anger, anxiety or low mood, and into different mental states of happiness and calm. This was not about covering anything up, or hiding anything, but rather about genuinely shifting what’s occurring in your mind.
This was such a huge shift for me, and I feel passionately about spreading awareness about the possibility of this, and about helping people to learn the techniques and approaches necessary to gain this kind of agency and power in navigating, influencing and choosing their own thoughts, emotions and actions.
I had undergone my own experiences of mental health difficulties in my teens and early twenties, and while the therapy I had at that point in my life helped me move away from the depression I had experienced, I would still sometimes have periods of being in a bad mood for a few days continuously and not feeling like there was much I could do about that other than put up with it. And there were certain tasks and experiences I would shy away from because of a lack of confidence or a slight anxiety that seemed easier to avoid than to experience. In these respects, I certainly feel that I gained hugely from the work I did in HypnoBirthing, and later hypnotherapy. I now feel much more confident, much more able to make decisions easily and follow through on those decisions, and generally I feel able to take charge of my own thoughts, moods and actions in a way I would previously have considered impossible.
I have established two important beliefs as a result of my personal work in HypnoBirthing and hypnotherapy, my training in Solution Focused Hypnotherapy, NLP and Time Line Therapy, and my work with clients.
I believe that people shouldn’t have to put up with poor mental health, that they shouldn’t have to tolerate, live with or ‘manage’ ongoing anxiety, depression or fear.
And I believe that the human mind has a huge capacity for healing, renewal and change, and that the techniques for tapping into this capacity are teachable and can be learned by anyone.
The principles of the way I work now revolve around three core concepts or areas of development:
Imagination – Learning to fully develop your imagination so that you can make those amazing shifts I first learned about doing hypnobirthing – so that you can shift yourself in a genine way, based on what you are actually creating in the present moment inside of you, into a state of calm, or excitement, or unencumbered joy, or whatever you want to create.
Self Communication – Learning to be able to check in with yourself and your own needs, wants, desires, preferences. What is meaningful for you, powerful to you? What works well for you? What do you know helps, always, or almost always? Learning to be more aware of yourself in a hundred different ways – from how your brain works, to what your learning style is to what your true values are, what your ultimate and importnat goals and dreams are for this life. And then learning to do the daily back and forth self communicating to nurture yourself, encourange and coach yourself, so that you can stay connected with all of this, and taking steps to act on it – on what your true self wants.
Release – Learning how to release and let go of stored negative emotions from the past, and of negative limiting belief and limiting decisions. Learning to forgive others and to forgive ourselves, not just in a ‘lip service’ way, not even in a ‘I’m trying to be good and this is what I’m supposed to do’ way. And not in a ‘Yeah I’ve moved on from that, I never think about it’ way either. But in a deep, transformative, totally liberating and thrilling way that makes the possibilities in life open up and seem endless, boundless in a way they didn’t before. Because we’re no longer lugging around that ‘stuff’ from the past.
I’d been having problems over the course of a year or so with anxiety and recurring negative thought patterns. I’d also been finding my emotions really hard to manage and had been dealing as well with intrusive thoughts about a past trauma which I’d never had the courage to fully deal with.
Working with Orla led me to develop a totally new mindset, more confident, more sure of myself and with a different perspective on certain things that have happened in the past. I definitely feel that I’ve come away with some really practical tools that I can go on using to maintain this new mental state. I feel like I have a lot more choice in terms of what I am feeling and thinking. I definitely have a more peaceful and positive internal landscape.
I’ve developed a totally different and much more positive mentality. I’m much more aware of when I start to think negatively, and I have a range of techniques and methods I can use to guide myself away from this. I’m not dwelling on stuff anymore and I feel like I have much more control over what I am thinking about and how I am feeling.
I’ve also started fitting in a lot more — yoga, sport, regular Skype conversations with close friends who’ve moved to different countries, biweekly music composition sessions with a good friend here in Bristol, all things which as a busy father of 3 young children, had somewhat fallen by the wayside. And I’ve started playing piano, something I’ve always wanted to do, ever since I was a child.
Most astonishingly, perhaps, I’ve completely given up smoking, which at the start of the sessions wasn’t even an intention of mine! I was a pretty dedicated smoker, and had kept at it despite time spent in hospital with pneumonia where I had been told that my lungs were scarred from it….
I have definitely created a more healthy rhythm in my life and I’m making more healthy decisions. I’m spending a lot less time fretting about things and switching off a lot more.
Life was very structured before for me. I did everything on a timetable! There wasn’t much room to breathe, activities were so crammed in, and even pleasure and relaxation were very much planned and scheduled. Now I feel lot more natural and spontaneous about things.
I’m able to decide what’s best at any given time – whether I should work or rest, whether I should spend time with others or need to be on my own – without feeling pressured or stressed or like I might choose the wrong thing. Like, sometimes I just want to go home, or I just want to go off by myself for a bit, and that’s fine. I feel a lot calmer and slower, and interestingly, this shift seems to have had an impact on my partner too, and he is also noticeably calmer and slower himself as well, which is wonderful.
For a long old while I’d been stuck in a pattern of just working very hard and focusing on other people’s needs – my clients, my children (aged 2 and 4), and I had kind of lost track of who I actually am as a person – who John is, and what he might want or like or need. There’d been a breakdown in the relationship between myself and the mother of our kids, and I didn’t have much support from her in terms of childcare or household stuff. So pretty much all the time I wasn’t working in my full-time job, I was looking after the kids or doing stuff around the house. And although I’m quite a positive person, and there were still a lot of elements of my life I was enjoying – I love my work and I love spending time with my kids, and I have friends I enjoy seeing and spending time with, and hobbies that I love like camping and climbing – I did feel a bit lost, and a bit fed up at times. There was a generally sense of frustration definitely, and I really wanted to learn how to become more productive and to set achievable goals, and used to listen to podcasts to try and learn about this sort of thing, because it seemed like there was just never enough time….
The whole process of hypnotherapy has helped me to build a framework to approach my life differently. There’s a lot I can’t change about the way things are right now – there just is a lot of pressure, in terms of work, in terms of the kids. That’s not going to change particularly for the next few years at least. But this structure I’ve now built for myself is extremely useful. It includes for example short periods of a minute or two minutes of breathing and visualising distributed evenly throughout my day, and different, more assertive and specific methods of planning what I’m going to do tomorrow or next Wednesday. And this structure has allowed me to approach life differently, with a renewed sense of vigour and purpose. I’m also just being a lot kinder to myself. I’m more able to take a break when I need to, and also to not worry about doing this.
If you are struggling with severe Anxiety and/or OCD, and would like to get to a place where you are feeling deeply calm, positive, confident and fully and authentically yourself on a really regular basis, I would love to support you and work with you in my 6 month Imagination versus Anxiety therapy process.
If you like what you are seeing, hearing and feeling here, then the next step is to set up a phone call to see if we are a good fit for each other and to learn more about how I can help you move towards your preferred future. You can find the link for this on the Imagination versus Anxiety page.
You can also find out about all the different ways to work with me here.