(First published in the IAHIP professional journal, Autumn 2023 IAHIP – Inside Out Issue 101 Article 10) by Gayle Williamson Introduction I believe that nothing short of a revolution is needed in how we deal with mental and emotional distress, instead of the stigmatising and increasingly discredited medical model of distress and trauma. This article […]

Please click the link here to access a peer-reviewed article by me on the medicalisation of emotional distress, first published in the journal of the Irish Association of Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy, autumn 2023 edition https://drive.google.com/file/d/11XnL9O_PiR_eX1fbYWX91vyMvPhIikia/view?usp=sharing

Trauma-informed parenting We’re wary of blaming parents for any difficulties that arise with their children; but that means we’re blaming the children instead and escalating the scandal that is the medicating of young people, says psychotherapist Gayle Williamson “I’d just gone in to wake him up ..but again he refused to get out of bed. […]

Internal Family Systems Therapy is a rapidly growing approach that offers real hope over the mental health fallout from Covid, writes psychotherapist Gayle Williamson IMAGINE you are one of the many thousands around the world who have suddenly found themselves in a Covid ward, fighting for their lives. Imagine you’ve been placed face down in […]

(first published in the Sunday Independent, August 16, 2020) It’s a tragedy for mental health that more practitioners are not offering a transformational therapy that can actually heal, rather than just manage, trauma, writes psychotherapist Gayle Williamson Byron (not her real name) is a high-functioning academic in her late 40s. She’s very capable, intelligent and […]

(First published in the Sunday Independent, October 22, 2017) When you last saw your therapist, did he or she demand you hand over your phone, show obvious irritation with you and then aggressively push her own personal biases? Yes? Then you need to find another therapist. Hopefully that’s what Fair City’s Decco and wife Kerri-Ann […]

(first published in the Sunday Independent – August 2, 2015) Just like Freud, psychotherapist Gayle Williamson gets a little help in sessions from a canine co-therapist It happened by accident one afternoon. I had been on a break between appointments, drinking tea in the kitchen as usual, when my next client arrived a bit early. […]

First published in the Sunday Independent, We all struggle to be authentic, but a sadistic inner self could be to blame, writes psychotherapist Gayle Williamson “I don’t know who I am,” was one of the first things Sandra* (not her real name), said to me. An attractive professional woman in her mid-40s, she had become […]

Written for www.independent.ie When Edward Byrne, a member of the 19th Royal Hussars, returned from the front in 1919 after the First World War, his nightmares were so violent they would wake up his family and neighbours on Rialto Street in Dublin. After his time in the trenches, during which he fought at the Battle of […]