Sandra Higgins

Vegan Psychologist

Psychological Assessment & Therapeutic Intervention. Offices are located at Kells, Navan and Slane, Co Meath, and online via zoom.

Sandra has particular experience in:

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Eating Disorders
• Relationship Difficulties
• Work related difficulties
• Trauma (PTSD, Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders)
• Personality Disorders
• Assessment and treatment of Adult Mental Health
• Medico-Legal Reports (Psychological Injury including Trauma)

What can I expect when I contact the service?

You will initially receive an appointment for a consultation to discuss your situation.

If you decide to pursue a course of therapy, undergo a psychological assessment, or to engage in one of the classes or group activities, you will be offered an agreed number of appointments at weekly or fortnightly intervals. You will be asked to sign a therapeutic contract agreeing to the conditions of the service. Your engagement with the service will involve your active participation in decisions and activities that concern your mental health.

The service offers a range of psychotherapeutic services to help with psychological suffering, and to enhance mental health. At all times the aim is to ensure that clients are treated with dignity and respect.

Sandra studied for a degree in pure Psychology at The Open University, and at post-graduate level at Trinity College, Dublin where she obtained a MSc in Counselling Psychology with Distinction. She also trained at The Positive Psychology Centre, University of Pennsylvania, The Human Animal Connection Unit at The University of Denver, Colorado, and The Institute for Humane Education, Maine, United States.

Sandra is a Certified MB-EAT Instructor (Mindfulness Based Eating Awareness Instructor) and Intuitive Eating Instructor and has trained in working with Trauma & Dissociation with the UK ESTD (European Society for Trauma & Dissociation), EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), and Schema Therapy (The Cognitive Therapy Center of NJ & The NJ Institute for Schema Therapy)

Sandra has presented on Neuro-Psycho-Social Model and Neuro-Cognitive Models of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Psychotraumatology & the Challenge to Counselling Psychology, Eating Disorders, Self-Harm & Trauma, Cartesian Dualism, and Compassion Fatigue at HSE Multidisciplinary Medical conference, Australasian Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, the British Psychological Society, and The Fourth Dutch Conference on Psychology and Health. She is vegan and offers psychological assistance to those who are sensitive to Animal Activist issues.

She is the author of  The Power of Compassion in O’Flaherty, E, Pauli, N, Owens, C, Higgins, S, Del Monte, M, Halpin, M and Billings, M (2014) (2nd ed) How to be Happy & Healthy, The Seven Natural Elements of Mental Health, Ashfield Press: Dublin.

Psychological Intervention

Given the right conditions everyone can work through suffering. The role of psychological intervention is to provide those conditions. Furthermore, given the right conditions, everyone can emerge more resilient, and enriched with insight, strength, compassion and sensitivity, regardless of the depth of their suffering.

Many people seek psychological intervention because they experience painful emotions such as sadness, fear, anger, and grief. These emotions are often reactions to distressing life experiences such as rights violations, injustice, and trauma. They may arise in reaction to painful situations such as abuse, poor parenting, bullying, work problems, relationship difficulties, financial problems, family issues, illness, or death.

Some of the difficult conditions that clients seek help for are simply the consequences of painful life events and their attempts to cope with the suffering they experience. They include: unhappiness and depression, anxiety, stress, addiction, self-harm, eating distress, eating disorders and weight issues, compulsive behaviours, lack of confidence and self-esteem. Many people seek psychological intervention because simply staying alive is difficult and painful.

There are evidence based psychological approaches that can help people to resolve painful experiences. Regardless of which psychological approach is used to help you resolve your problem, there are some basic psychotherapeutic factors common to all interventions that, in themselves, facilitate healing. Special emphasis is given to these factors that enhance the therapeutic environment:

• the belief that every life matters equally
• a willingness to listen and support clients regardless of the situations they find themselves in
• a genuine, non-judgmental, therapeutic alliance, that respects and values people for who they are
• an empathic response to clients where they are carefully listened to so that their individual feelings and situations can be accurately perceived
• tolerance and acceptance of the fact that each one of us makes mistakes and each one of us suffers
• the belief that everyone can overcome their difficulties
• supportive facilitation as clients discover their individual path to a meaningful, fulfilling life
• the belief that clients can do more than survive: they can thrive and flourish
• the belief that mental health is a rights issue that we are entitled to, and responsible for, and the willingness to help clients learn the skills necessary to accept this responsibility
• the belief that you are the expert, by experience, of your own life. Therapy is seen as the joint effort of psychological science and your personal experience to secure the best outcome for your future mental health
• the value of striving to live our lives non-violently, for ourselves, others, and the planet on which we depend for survival

A range of evidence-based interventions are offered including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Schema Therapy, Compassion Focussed Therapy, and Trauma treatment including EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing).

Following assessment and discussion of your circumstances, psychological intervention will be tailored to suit your specific needs. I also offer Positive Psychological interventions that can enable you to discover how to function at your best, what makes your life meaningful, what makes you happy and how to be psychologically resilient.

Medico-legal reports available on request.

Compassion Focussed Therapy

Compassion is best understood as the ability to recognize suffering, to feel empathy for those who suffer, and to feel moved to comfort, help or alleviate that suffering.

Many clients who present for psychological help struggle to feel safe or reassured. Many are plagued with feelings of self-doubt, shame, self-criticism, a lack of belonging, and a feeling of never being good enough. It is believed that the system that regulates our emotional sense of safety, reassurance and wellbeing evolved in our attachment relationships with others in our lives. The context of the therapeutic relationship is a safe place where clients can learn this system of emotional self-regulation.

One of the first steps in compassion focussed therapy is to help you to recognize your own feelings so that you are able to cope with them. Many of us endure a plethora of uncomfortable emotions without being able to name our feelings. This can cause overwhelm and the stress of attempting to cope with the unknown can prevent us gaining accurate insight into the causes of our feelings. Compassion Focussed Therapy aims, first of all, to help clients become emotionally self-aware.

Only when we are aware of how we feel can we respond compassionately to our own feelings.

Only when we are aware of our own feelings can we empathise with others in our social worlds.

Only when we are aware of our needs in life, can we do something to ensure that they are met.

Compassion is more easily imagined if you think of yourself as a capable parent and your feelings of discomfort as being those of a young infant or child. This is not to suggest that our emotions are childish, but rather to demonstrate how to cope when we feel vulnerable or distressed. A child’s distress signals are easily recognized by his or her parent; and parents feel moved to respond to their child’s distress.

Furthermore, both parent and child are confident that their actions will bring reassurance and comfort, or increase the child’s tolerance of unavoidable stress, thus restoring the child to a state or equilibrium and safety, and facilitating the child’s passage through life’s inevitable ups and downs.

Some people have very high levels of shame and self-criticism. It is thought that they are more likely to pay attention to and react to threat (both internal and external) and less able to access the mechanism of self-care and reassurance. Compassion Focussed Therapy helps people to become more attuned to and better able to access an internal ability to self-soothe or be compassionate towards oneself.

Compassion Focussed Therapy is not about dismissing the very real causes of threat to our safety, or our feelings of doubt, discomfort, or shame. But it does enable us to tolerate and be compassionate with ourselves at those times in our lives when we experience uncomfortable feelings. Self-compassion also enables us to relinquish unnecessary feelings of shame, unwarranted feelings of threat, and self-critical behaviours.

Compassion Focussed Therapy draws on evolutionary, social, developmental and neuropsychological science, as well as Buddhist psychology, to train people to be able to sooth themselves, create safety in their lives, and learn increased compassion towards self and others. Much of the therapy at The Compassion Foundation draws on the non-violent philosophy of ahimsa inherent in veganism

Online Therapy

Please contact us for details of online therapy conducted via Zoom, telephone or secure mail.