Stella OMalley Background
Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist, best-selling author, public speaker, and mother who has worked in counselling and psychotherapy for many years. Stella was born in Dublin but now resides in Birr, Co. She lives in Offaly with her husband and two children and runs her own private practice.
Stella O’Malley has a B.A. An M.A. in Counselling and Psychotherapy in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, as well as diplomas in Youth Studies, Psychometric Testing, and Gender Identity Counseling.
Career
Stella’s work as an integrative counsellor and psychotherapist is primarily based on a psychodynamic perspective that is rooted in a depth modality. Although no framework is perfect, depth psychology is more holistic than other currently popular models in that it examines all aspects of a person’s life, including the relationship between the mind, body, and spirit; attempting to understand and address the ways in which issues in one aspect of a person can lead to concerns in other areas; and exploring both conscious and unconscious thoughts.
This may entail working with the client to understand the source of emotional pain and problematic patterns of behavior or thought. It may be more appealing in the short term to treat the symptoms of our distress without addressing the root causes of our problems, but it is more liberating to address issues that arise within our deepest selves so that we do not revert to dysfunctional patterns of living.
Stella O’Malley’s counselling and teaching work with parents and children is extensive, culminating in the 2015 and 2017 publication of her two best-selling books, ‘Cotton Wool Kids’ and ‘Bully-Proof Kids.’ Stella’s most recent book, Fragile, was published in 2019 and is about overcoming anxiety and stress.
Stella O’Malley is a regular contributor to the Irish Independent and the Sunday Independent, and she also writes comprehensively about mental health issues for newspapers like the Irish Times, Sunday Times, Irish Examiner, Evening Herald, Daily Mail, Irish Tatler, Pregnancy and Parenting magazine, and many others.
Stella O’Malley appears on national and local media in Ireland, including RTE Radio 1, RTE television, TV3, Newstalk, Today FM, and BBC Northern Ireland, to discuss topics such as mental health, mindfulness, conflict resolution in the workplace, communication skills, parenting, and childhood issues.
Stella O’Malley, one of Ireland’s leading voices on what influences people’s behavior today, gives public talks and lectures on a variety of topics for various organizations across the country, including ETB, VTOS, the Department of Education, Merrill Lynch, the Department of Finance, and Grow. She teaches CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and Mindfulness for Laois Offaly ETB, as well as giving talks in libraries and schools across the country on a variety of topics.
Stella O’Malley Books
Cotton Wool Kids
Cotton Wool Kids, O’Malley’s 2015 book, advises parents to be less overprotective of their children. “O’Malley is eager to stress that her book is not a parenting guide, but rather a guide to giving parents the information and confidence to free themselves from the treadmill of after-school activities and over-supervision that has become common today, and to raise their children more in touch with the outdoors and the community around them,” according to the Irish News.
According to O’Malley, “The biggest change that has happened to childhood since I was a child is not that life has become more dangerous – it hasn’t – it is simply that commercial interests have cottoned on to the fact that they can make pots of money by exploiting parental anxiety. Consumerism is often driven by the creation of dissatisfaction and it is this which propels commercial interests to insinuate that parents are neglectful if they don’t buy the latest product for their child.”
Bully-Proof Kids
Her 2017 book Bully-Proof Kids analyzes bullying, which she defines as “meanness from someone with more power than you, repeated over time,” in order to empower children in their social networks. The focus of the book, according to the Irish Times, is “empowering children and teenagers to navigate the sometimes treacherous world of peer networks, both face-to-face and in cyberspace,” and it was written with parents as the primary audience in mind. On March 31, 2022, Swift Press republished Bully-Proof Kids in the United Kingdom. The Guardian suggests that by giving their children this book, parents can “empower them against bullies – and prevent them from becoming one themselves.”
Fragile
Her 2019 book Fragile calls for a “new wave of authentic and appropriate mental health discussions”. O’Malley said: “There’s a power in being fragile now. You get awareness and you get status from it in the way that people once did from their yachts and cars.” In the Irish Independent, O’Malley stated, “Mental health slogans that we see plastered all over social media and on public walls are often inadvertently taken out of context, dumbed down beyond recognition, and assimilated as if they are the answer to everything. Slogans such as ‘listen to your gut’ and ‘focus on your feelings’ might seem great at first glance however, when we consider that the emotional part of the brain is the most powerful, the fastest, and also the stupidest part of any person’s brain, we soon realize that it is often inappropriate to be excessively led by our emotions.”
Film and Television
Her Channel 4 documentary Trans Kids: It’s Time To Talk, which aired in 2018, addressed the topic of gender dysphoria and included her own experience: she had been convinced she was a boy since the age of four, but due to puberty, which she described as a “absolute train wreck,” she stopped identifying as a boy in her early teens. The documentary received both positive and negative feedback. The Financial Times’ Suzi Fei called the film “a step in the right direction” and “where compassion meets controversy.” According to Rosie Kinchen of The Times (UK), “the point that O’Malley wants to make is not that medicine is wrong, but that we need to make sure we’re not causing unnecessary harm.”
iNews’ Sarah Carson criticized the documentary for its uneven coverage, attempting to prove that being transgender can be a phase “with few statistics and not enough concrete evidence,” questioning whether children and adolescents are being “groomed” into believing they’re trans, and O’Malley’s conclusion that transgender children “are lost and are being led.”
She was the resident psychotherapist for two television shows, “Raised by the Village” on Irish TV channel RTÉ1 and Cad Faoi Na Tuismitheoir on TG4.
Podcast
In 2019, Stella O’Malley co-hosted the parenting podcast ‘Secrets of the Mother World’ with Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano.[24] This podcast was created “to help mothers feel less alone,” as mothers were invited to send “their anonymous stories about their own experiences in the Motherworld — experiences that are too intensely private to share anywhere else.”
O’Malley currently co-hosts the ‘Gender: A Wider Lens’ podcast with US therapist Sasha Ayad. “Explore the expanding concept of ‘gender’ from a psychological depth perspective,” according to the podcast’s description.
Net Worth
Stella O’Malley’s exact net worth is unknown, but it is assumed that she must have made a good living from her book sales and professional services.
