I get angry at injustice, incandescent with fury over being unable to find things at home, hysterical if I have to wait for an automated voice. I cannot live the rest of my life with such a dreadful outlook and personality — I have become a termagant.

My husband is the loveliest man you could ever meet and I am driving him insane with my behaviour. He genuinely doesn’t know how to help me, and neither do I. I have been treated in the past for depression but this has not been entirely successful. I don’t want to be stuffed full of antidepressant drugs as this has not resulted in long-term relief. I have seen a counsellor in the past but feel I need more than this.

I have had some rocky times in recent years with a traumatic ousting from a job I loved, financial worries, bereavements and the stress of infertility. We have had four buyers pull out in nine months from purchasing our house.

I am an only child and grew up in a rather fraught household in which I was always on edge. I feel like this again now. I was a cheeky, clever wit not long back. Where can I go from here?

What a difficult place you find yourself in. Emotionally you feel all over the place and you are so aware of your behaviour and how it is affecting others that you are also burdened with huge amounts of guilt. You mention that you have had counselling in the past but I wonder if that is appropriate for your needs. It would certainly be helpful for you to find someone to talk to about what you are thinking and feeling and how that affects your behaviour.

Counselling is usually brief, focused and goal-directed, and extremely effective particularly when there are specific issues to be tackled, such as bereavement. However, you may benefit from a longer-term therapy that enables you to explore the complexity of issues and feelings that you describe. Psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis offer therapeutic approaches that look at early life experiences and relationships and how they have led us, as adults, to replicate destructive patterns in our behaviour and relationships.

Both approaches also explore the way in which we are driven by the conscious and unconscious. The sessions are usually weekly, sometimes more than once a week. and the therapy is longer-term. The therapist will often look at your relationship with them and your fantasies about them as a means of understanding the deep-seated emotional issues that are causing difficulty in your life.

Another therapeutic approach is cognitive behaviour therapy, which explores how what we think affects how we feel and so in turn affects our behaviour. By getting to an understanding of our beliefs about ourselves it is possible to link that back into their impact on our thinking, feelings and behaviour.

So if we have negative beliefs about who we are, regardless of the reality of our lives, we will enter situations and relationships with low self-belief and negative thinking, and so good situations and relationships can turn and feel bad given our perceptions. CBT often comes in packages of ten sessions but the therapist would review that on an individual basis. All these treatments can be accessed within the NHS and privately.

I wish you well and hope you find the right therapy for yourself. I urge you to check the training and qualifications of anyone you approach as there are many who call themselves therapists after having gone through a training course that is not recognised or accredited in this country. Call the organisations below to get recommendations. Good luck.

British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy www.bacp.co.uk.

British Association of Psychotherapists 020-8452 9823 mail@bap-psychotherapy.org

British Psychological Society 0116 2549568 www.bps.org.uk

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E-mail drtanyabyron@thetimes.co.uk or write to her at: times2, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT. Include your name, age, address and telephone number. Dr Byron cannot enter into personal correspondence