Hello, my name is Gaye and I want to welcome you to Cbt2grow. I have a background in a variety of social care settings. I started off working in a Women’s Refuge in Dublin in the 1990s. I then moved on to the Homeless Sector. Both experiences gave me a big insight into how people manage stressful situations under extreme circumstances. I learned about the damage that violence and homelessness has on people and society. In short, it leads to a great deal of stress management which can go on for a long time after the initial threat has been resolved. This in turn can affect the children of the family who in turn may go on to replicate that learned behaviours into their future relationships. It was through this learning that I realised that patterns of coping are laid down by the behaviours we witness often as young people. These patterns or reactions can go unquestioned and be completely seen as “normal”. This can become very problematic later when those same young people are entering relationships with other people who haven’t had those same experiences in their lives.