The Therapy Journal
This is where psychotherapy steps out of the session and into conversation. From our defences that shape our daily lives to the emotions that drive our choices, these pieces explore the human mind through a psychodynamic lens.
Whether clinical or cultural, every post asks the same question: what happens when we stop avoiding our feelings?
Where therapy meets everyday life…
Wuthering Heights and the Psychology of Haunting
A new Wuthering Heights soundtrack release prompted this reflection: why does this story still affect people so deeply? Beneath the gothic drama lies something psychologically familiar. Unresolved feelings rarely disappear. They tend to return as patterns, reactions, and relationship dynamics that feel strangely repetitive. Understanding those patterns in therapy is often where change begins.
When Someone Lets Themselves Be Affected, and Then Chooses Not To Live There
In therapy and professional life, being affected doesn’t always lead to integration. Sometimes it leads to consolidation, retreat, or narrowing. This reflection explores what happens when two people reach that divergence point.
Women’s Mental Health Right Now: Why So Many Are Exhausted, Anxious, and Still Telling Themselves They’re Fine
Many women don’t seek therapy because they’re in a legitimate crisis, they actually come to therapy because they’re exhausted from carrying too much for too long. Anxiety and burnout often develop from prolonged emotional strain. Understanding this shift can be the first step toward something more sustainable.
When Care Feels Impossible: Exhaustion, Responsibility, and What Therapy Can (and Can’t) Hold
Some forms of mental distress don’t stay contained inside the person experiencing them. They spill into relationships, exhaust care, and quietly erode connection. This piece explores why that exhaustion is real, why it isn’t a moral failure, and how therapy can help build emotional capacity before care collapses into resentment or withdrawal.
How Abandonment Shows Up in Adulthood: And Why Insight Alone Doesn’t Set You Free
Abandonment in adulthood looks like overthinking, overgiving, pulling away, overachieving, or panicking when things finally feel safe. These aren’t personality flaws. They’re nervous system adaptations formed when connection was inconsistent or conditional. Understanding this can be relieving. But real change begins when insight stops soothing and starts challenging the patterns that still run the show.
What My Vinyl Collection Taught Me About Memory, Regulation, and Meaning
Organising my vinyl collection by psychological function, rather than genre, unexpectedly mirrored key psychodynamic ideas about memory, regulation, and emotional capacity. This reflective post explores how experiences arrive, settle, carry meaning, and eventually become part of who we are.
What BACP Accreditation Means and Why It Matters Right Now
Therapy in the UK is not statutorily regulated, which can make choosing a therapist confusing. This article explains what BACP accreditation means, what it doesn’t mean, and how it can help clients orient themselves in an uncertain landscape. This post is written to inform rather than persuade.
Therapy and the Experience of Being Seen
Therapy is not just about coping strategies or positive thinking. It is about being genuinely seen and understood at an emotional level. This article explores how therapy helps you make sense of your feelings, reduce anxiety, and develop a clearer, more grounded sense of self through a safe therapeutic relationship
From Pattern to Presence: How Early States Shape What We’re Drawn To
Why do certain images, habits, or interests keep catching our attention, even when we don’t seek them out? Often, it has less to do with the thing itself and more to do with early emotional states learned long before words. This reflective post explores how those early states shape adult patterns, and how understanding them can quietly restore choice and energy.
Emotional Fragility and the Need for a Raft in Intensive Therapy
When therapy feels stuck, it’s rarely because anyone isn’t trying hard enough. More often, emotional intensity has moved faster than a person’s capacity to tolerate it. This post explores why depth without sufficient containment can increase anxiety rather than insight, and why building capacity first is what actually makes deep work possible.
What the Latest UK Therapy Data Really Tells Us: and What It Means If You’re Thinking About Therapy
Therapy has quietly become mainstream in the UK, with more than a third of adults having tried it, and most finding it helpful. But beneath anxiety and stress, loneliness is often the real driver. As therapy moves online and into everyday life, this piece explores why human connection still matters, how to choose support wisely, and what actually makes therapy work.
Four Thousand Hours: A Reflection on Depth, Distance, and the Digital Room
After thousands of hours of online psychodynamic work, one thing has become clear: deep emotional change doesn’t depend on setting, but on what two people can stay with together. This post explores how real transformation happens when courage meets containment, and why building the capacity to feel is what ultimately frees us from repeating the past.
What Happens When You Finally Feel the Feeling You’ve Avoided?
Avoiding emotion is often a survival strategy learned when feelings once felt dangerous. Insight can help us understand this, but lasting change comes when we can safely feel what was once avoided. This post explores how turning toward emotion builds capacity, softens old defences, and allows a more authentic sense of self to return.
The Hidden Map of Suffering: How the Three Core Fears Dictate Your Life: And How to Find Freedom…
Anxiety, relationship struggles, and self-sabotage often aren’t random, they’re organised around a few core fears learned early in life. This post explores how fears of feelings, closeness, and self quietly shape adult patterns, and how understanding their emotional mechanics can open a path back to choice and freedom.
The Unseen Battle: What Netflix’s Stranger Things 5 Teaches Us About Trauma, Shame, and the Inner Critic
What if the monsters we fear most are internal? Using Stranger Things as a lens, this post explores how shame, self-attack, and emotional avoidance show up in popular culture, and what depth therapy can teach us about facing them, building emotional capacity, and reclaiming freedom from the inside out.
What Therapists Feel But Rarely Say
What really happens inside a therapy room is often quieter and braver than people expect. This post looks behind the scenes of the therapeutic relationship, exploring countertransference, the courage it takes to face emotional avoidance, and how honest engagement can lead to genuine freedom.
You’re Not Relating. You’re Re-Enacting…
Why do the same painful relationship patterns keep repeating, even when we know better? This post explores how emotional avoidance and repetition compulsion quietly shape intimacy, and how depth therapy helps people recognise these patterns, stay with what’s difficult, and create room for something genuinely different.
The Therapist’s Silence: What It Really Means
Silence in therapy is often misunderstood as awkward or empty. This post explores why silence can be a courageous container, one that holds emotional avoidance long enough for something real to emerge, and why some of the deepest shifts in therapy happen when nothing is being said.
What Your Therapist Really Thinks About You
Many people worry they’ll be judged in therapy. This post looks behind the therapy room to show what therapists actually attend to: courage rather than flaws, the quiet work of softening the inner critic, and how depth work creates the conditions for real emotional change.
Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story: When the “Monster” Speaks
What happens when trauma overwhelms a person’s capacity to feel and integrate experience? Using Netflix’s Monster as a lens, this post explores emotional fragmentation, failed containment, and why facing shame and emotional avoidance is central to real therapeutic change.