A NORTHWICH woman is helping heal hearts and minds in mid Cheshire with the launch of her new therapy business.

Julie Forrest, founder of Compassionate CBT is pursuing her passion to help others by offering cognitive behavioural therapy and compassion focussed therapy for people struggling with mental health problems.

And it’s the latter of these therapies that the 38-year-old, who runs her business at Northwich Business Centre on Chesterway, feels makes her business unique.

The former Hartford High School pupil explained: “Compassion focused therapy aims to help promote mental and emotional healing by encouraging people to be compassionate toward themselves, their experiences and hardships. Compassion is an essential aspect of well-being.

“It’s currently not as widely known as cognitive behavioural therapy but given a few years I believe it will become as well known and important as mindfulness.”

According to Julie, who studied counselling at the University of Leeds, it’s a successful way of helping people who have long standing depression, low self-esteem, are highly self-critical and experience difficult and challenging things in their lives.

She explained: “Often people are not aware of the impact these events may have had on their wellbeing. They tend to feel hopeless, worthless, like a failure, faulty or like there is something wrong with them.

“Compassion focussed therapy helps people develop and work with experiences of inner warmth, safeness and soothing.”

A practicing Buddhist, Julie added: “I’m not business minded at all. What I get out of this is that moment when people put together their experience and their journey to recover. That’s the reward.

“I am passionate about helping people who are struggling with their inner world. I am open and compassionate in my approach.

“I love working together with people to help them to see and deeply understand why their problems developed and how we can change this so that they can live the lives they want to live. I feel so fortunate to work with people in this way.”

For more details visit compassionatecbt.co.uk