I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to you for giving me the opportunity to receive support for my therapy through Clear Minds.
This support came at a crucial time in my therapy and at a time when I was unable to self fund sessions. With the stress of finances removed, and knowing that I had a number of sessions planned, I was able to be guided into a further level of therapy than I had done previously and I felt a huge benefit from this.
Throughout the process – both the organization and the sessions – I have felt totally looked after and valued and I am extremely grateful to Clear Minds.
I am a single parent with adolescent children who has suffered high anxiety and poor self worth for much of my adult life. I have accessed short term support as and when I could, but long term therapy is beyond my financial grasp. After a build up of anxiety and traumatic experiences, I recently experienced an acute mental health breakdown. I was left reeling, confused and overwhelmed by the experience of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act and my resulting stay in psychiatric hospitals. On discharge there was no one-to-one therapy available to me and I could not afford to pay for private long term counselling. I would have been left without any access to this kind of talking therapy, were it not for Clear Minds. To know that I now have weekly, long term sessions with the same therapist is in itself reassuring, calming & empowering. I’m both humbled and immensely grateful to Clear Minds for providing me with this opportunity to know myself, to grow and to feel better, so I can better take care of myself and my family.
M.E.
A letter from a therapist benefiting from Clear Minds
I started working as a therapist over twenty years ago but the journey towards becoming a therapist started long before, when I started seeing a therapist myself. I have no doubt that I would not have been able to put together the fragmented pieces of my life; shattered through the experience of dislocation, grief, homelessness and exile, without the dogged commitment to my recovery shown by my therapist. And I have no doubt that I would not have been able to afford my therapy had it not been for the immense generosity she bestowed upon me, financially and emotionally.
Since I have been practicing as a therapist I have often experienced the pain inflicted by the need of my less well off clients for psychological and emotional support and the dire reality financial limitations impose on those most in need.
When most exposed, the most difficult and shaming emotion is the need to ask for help. Lack of financial safety itself often exacerbates a sense of fear, despair and helplessness.
The support Clear Minds offers cuts through some of the hardest aspects of asking for help. The generosity of the charity means that a client can have peace of mind whilst negotiating some of the most painful paths to recovery without needing also to live with fear and shame of ‘not being able to pay’.
Just the knowledge that such a charity exists is life enhancing and hope producing. That there are a number of people out there who care enough for clients and indeed the therapists to enable such a network to exist is beyond valuable.
I feel immensely grateful for such holding generosity.
G.B.
As a therapist working for Clear Minds I am very grateful for the transformational impact I can have working over a longer period of time with people when this would not have been possible without funding from Clear Minds. The clients I have seen have experienced prolonged periods of abuse and trauma, discrimination, racism, gender- based violence, poverty, isolation and educational disadvantage. This has led to both psychological and practical impoverishment.
Thanks to funding from Clear Minds people who were facing repeated patterns of acute distress, despair and hopelessness and at risk of being misdiagnosed as needing psychiatric services are now much more solid in their own experience with an improved sense of who they are, feeling entitled to be themselves, more aware of their whole experience and the choices they can make.
Their courage, their resourcefulness, their vulnerabilities and their strengths have all had an impact on me as I have been alongside them as they have worked with whatever they have needed to risk, trusting me and being themselves. This is a lifelong journey, as I know for myself, but Clear Minds has helped to set them on a path where they know it is possible to feel worthy and loved, and to learn how to treat themselves accordingly.