Our Favourite…Insta-Therapists (Part 1)
Leading therapists are now sharing their wisdom and knowledge with millions of people on Instagram. Here, we share some of our tried and trusted sources…
Healing from past events, and learning to understand yourself better, is a lifelong pursuit. In the past few years, Instagram has become an incredible source of knowledge for anyone who is on this path.
Nothing can replace individual therapy but the therapists who are gifting their knowledge to the masses on Instagram are helping to open up conversations about mental health, and providing tools and strategies that really work.
Best for…Self-Healing
Nicole Le Pera
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With 8million followers on Instagram Nicole Le Pera AKA The Holistic Psychologist is teaching people to ‘heal and consciously create a new version of yourself’. She focuses a lot on unhealthy family relationships, and the damage they can do in early life.
What we love about Nicole are her clear insights into the ways in which our family history shapes us (often delivered through role play videos). She brings her own experiences into her content, making it relatable for anyone who has struggled with family ‘stuff’ (who hasn’t?!). She also offers great tools for regulating your nervous system, and support for establishing healthier boundaries with family members.
Best for…Grief + Loss
Julia Samuel
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Julia Samuel is one of the world’s leading voices on grief and loss. With decades of clinical practice under her belt, and two bestselling books on the subject, Julia also hosts a brilliant podcast called Therapy Works with her two daughters.
What we love about Julia is her incredible wisdom and compassion and her ability to normalise the intense and painful experience of grief – both in terms of bereavement and what she calls ‘living losses’ like the end of a relationship. Her insights have provided comfort to thousands of people during the darkest and most difficult times in their lives.
Best for…Learning to Love Yourself
Tasha Bailey
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Tasha Bailey AKA Real Talk Therapist is all about the self-love. She helps people to ‘have real talk with themselves so they can heal and grow’. Her feed offers bite-sized tutorials on a whole host of useful topics like people pleasing, silencing your inner critic and healing your inner child. What we love about Tasha is the balance she strikes between sharing her own vulnerability and offering no nonsense wisdom on learning to love yourself. Her tone is always one of compassion and acceptance, and she brings fun and play to her posts too (her Reel on toxic parenting in the TV show Succession is on point!).
Best for…Creating Healthy Relationships
Esther Perel
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Esther Perel is always our go-to for relationship advice. Her groundbreaking podcast Where Should We Begin offered a never-before-seen window into the clinical practice of a couples therapist. By listening in on a different session each week, our take-away was that every relationship is different, but the challenges we all have to work through with our partners are often the same.
Esther has done incredible work moving us away from the Hollywood version of romance and towards the reality that creating healthy, loving and lasting relationships takes hard work and vulnerability. We love what she has to say about turning conflict into connection.
Best for…Understanding Your Shadow Side
Xavier Dagba
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Xavier is a trauma-informed transformational life coach and shadow work facilitator. In analytical psychology, the shadow is an unconscious aspect of the personality that doesn’t correspond with the ego. In short, our shadows are made up of the parts of ourselves in our ’emotional blind spot’ – the parts we don’t want to acknowledge.
Xavier’s feed offers great insights into how these shadow traits show up in our lives, why we shouldn’t fear them, and how we can befriend them to live fuller, happier lives where we are no longer hiding parts of ourselves. We love Xavier’s ability to distill this complex subject into golden nuggets of wisdom.
About Exhale Festival
Exhale is a new mental wellbeing festival helping people to navigate life’s challenges and changes with newfound strength and wisdom.
Taking place on October 5th and 6th 2024, our programme of 25 virtual events will present a vast range of insights, tools and strategies for you to explore.
You will learn from world leading experts in the fields of mental and emotional wellbeing including therapists, behavioural scientists, best-selling authors, TED speakers, neuroscience experts, podcasters and academic researchers.
We will support you to grow through what you go through…so you can live life to its fullest!