DR Caroline Bell
Caroline qualified as a Clinical Psychologist in 2001, completing the Oxford Doctorate in Clinical Psychology course. She has over 20 years’ experience of working in the NHS prior to setting up in private practice, offering therapy to those with a range of concerns including PTSD and the impact of trauma (including complex trauma), eating disorders, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and those with difficulty regulating their emotions.
If you’re feeling confused and overwhelmed with how you’re feeling and thinking, or find yourself repeating patterns of relating to others that don’t feel helpful, Caroline can help you to understand why this happens, as a first step to then making positive changes.
Clinical Psychologists receive training in a range of different therapies in order to develop individual treatment plans with clients based on their own particular situation and experiences. The initial sessions (usually called an assessment) aim to help the therapist understand what you are looking for help with, how you would like your life to be different, and to explore what factors have contributed to your current struggles. An individualised “formulation” or map will be developed with you, outlining how things that have happened in your life have contributed to how you are feeling now. This map then guides the individual treatment plan, that will be specific to your own situation and experiences. This plan might involve one specific therapy or could integrate aspects of different therapies, resulting in a comprehensive plan.
Caroline is accredited with the Health & Care Professions Council (HCPC). She is currently seeing people in person at White Willow Therapies or online via Zoom.
For more information see Caroline’s website at https://eastsussexpsychologyservice.co.uk or contact her at caroline@eastsussexpsychologyservice.co.uk
Sessions for assessment and all therapies usually last 50 minutes to an hour. For EMDR, 90-minute sessions can be helpful when processing memories, but this would be discussed and agreed with you in advance.
For those funding their own therapy, sessions cost £120.
If you have health insurance, Caroline is registered with most of the major companies to provide therapy funded by the company.
COGNITIVE ANALYTIC THERAPY (CAT) - dr Caroline bell
Caroline completed the CAT Practitioner training in 2011 and uses aspects of the model in her therapy work, although is not currently an accredited CAT therapist.
CAT mainly focuses on the way we relate to ourselves and others. It can help with a wide range of difficulties, including depression, low self-esteem, feeling repeatedly let down, hurt or rejected, or acting in ways that are self-defeating or unhelpful e.g. always trying to please others.
It is based on the idea that as children we cope with difficult situations by developing strategies to manage them. These strategies, or patterns of how we think, feel and act, develop to help us cope. However if we continue to use them even when they are no longer needed, these patterns may lead to difficulties and we can become stuck in them. For example if a child grows up in a household where they are often criticised, they may feel as if they are not good enough, and develop a pattern of striving to please others to avoid being criticised. They may develop a tendency to always put others’ needs first and neglect their own, which can lead to feeling taken for granted. The aim of CAT is to help to identify these patterns and find “escape routes” out of them to find new ways of relating to ourselves and others
CBT - COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY - DR Caroline Bell
CBT is a group of therapies, all based on the idea that our thoughts, feelings, what we do, and how our bodies feel, are all connected. If we change one of these we can alter all the others. When we’re low or anxious, we often fall into patterns of thinking and responding which make us feel worse. CBT aims to help us initially notice and then work towards changing unhelpful ways of thinking or behaviour patterns so that we can feel better.
CBT is recommended by the National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE) for a range of difficulties including depression, anxiety, and eating disorders
EMDR - DR CAROLINE BELL
EYE MOVEMENT DESENSITISATION & REPROCESSING
One of the main approaches Caroline draws on is Eye Movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing (EMDR). EMDR is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as an effective treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It can be effective in helping to reduce symptoms such as flashbacks and intrusive memories. EMDR is also increasingly used for the effective treatment of anxiety, panic, depression and loss.
When a person is involved in a traumatic event, they may feel overwhelmed and their brain may be unable to fully process what is going on. If we think of the memory store in our brain as being like a filing cabinet, the memory of the traumatic event can get filed in the wrong ‘drawer’ and can also be filed in a fragmented way. This means that the traumatic memories can be triggered easily and can feel very vivid and leave us feeling as if the traumatic event is happening again now. The person can re-experience what they saw, heard and smelled, and feel the full extent of the distress they felt whenever the memory comes to mind.
EMDR aims to help the brain ‘unstick’ and reprocess the memory properly so that it is no longer so intense and distressing. Using the filing cabinet analogy above, it aims to get the memory into the correct ‘drawer’. It also helps to desensitise the person to the emotional impact of the memory, which means that it becomes less distressing to think about the memory.
During EMDR you will be asked to remember the traumatic event while either moving your eyes from side to side (by following the therapist’s moving fingers) or by hearing noises in one ear then the other, or by tapping on one side of your body then the other. These sensations seem to help the memory become more fully processed in the brain.
The effect may be similar to that which occurs naturally during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, when your eyes move rapidly from side to side as the brain processes the events of the day. The end result is that the memory loses its emotional intensity. EMDR can help reduce the intensity and distress of different kinds of memories, such as what you saw, heard, smelled, tasted, felt or thought at the time of the traumatic event.
INTEGRATIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL THERAPY - DR CAROLINE BELL
INTEGRATIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL THERAPY
Integrative psychological therapy involves developing a treatment plan integrating ideas and techniques from different therapies, with the aim of producing a comprehensive plan.