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
media depth emotion anxiety betterhelp reflections quizzes
When the World Cup Does Not Feel Safe at Home
For many people, the World Cup means excitement, noise and celebration. For others, it means watching someone’s mood, monitoring alcohol, trying to keep the peace, and waiting for the atmosphere at home to change. Football is never the primary cause of domestic abuse. But major tournaments can intensify danger where fear, control or violence are already present.
The Backrooms: When Life Starts To Feel Like A Corridor
The Backrooms is unsettling because it turns emotional stuckness into a place. Endless rooms, artificial light, movement without progress. This post explores why that image resonates, and how therapy can help when life starts to feel like the same corridor again and again.
Boards of Canada’s Inferno: Memory, Meaning, and the Signals We Inherit
Boards of Canada’s Inferno feels like a state to enter. Through images of childhood, religion, desert light, damaged memory and inherited meaning, it evokes the way old signals can live on inside us. This reflection explores what the album suggests about family transmission, anxiety, belief, memory, and the past that is still active in the present.
What Changes When You Stop Avoiding Feelings
Stopping avoidance does not usually make anxiety disappear straight away. What often changes first is the relationship to feeling, anxiety, and internal pressure. Over time, this can create more clarity, more space, and less need to move away from what is being felt.
Why Anxiety Feels Random (But Isn’t)
Anxiety can feel as though it comes out of nowhere, especially when the trigger is not fully in awareness. Often, what feels random has a sequence behind it that has not yet become clear. Understanding hidden triggers can make anxiety feel less mysterious over time.
How Anxiety and Avoidance Work Together
Anxiety and avoidance often do not happen separately. A feeling begins to surface, anxiety rises, and avoidance brings relief by moving attention away from what is being felt. Seeing this loop more clearly can help explain why anxiety keeps returning over time.
Why You Avoid What You Feel (Without Realising It)
Avoiding feelings is often less deliberate than people think. Emotional avoidance can happen automatically, as the mind and body move away from what feels too much to hold. Understanding this process can make familiar patterns feel clearer, and more possible to change over time.
Why Anxiety Rises When You Try to Feel
Anxiety can feel like it appears out of nowhere. But often it begins at the moment a feeling starts to come into awareness. Understanding this process can change how anxiety is experienced, and how it begins to shift over time.
Why Emotional Change Feels Slow
Emotional change often feels slow. This article explains why change takes time, how emotional capacity develops gradually, and how patterns begin to shift as feelings become easier to tolerate.
How Therapy Gradually Builds Emotional Capacity
Emotional capacity can develop over time. This article explains how therapy supports this process by helping people stay with emotional experience in a manageable way, allowing feelings to become easier to tolerate and understand.
How Defences Protect Emotional Capacity
Defences are ways of managing emotional experience that feels difficult to tolerate. This article explains how defensive responses work, why they appear, and how they help regulate feelings when emotional capacity is exceeded.
The Role of Anxiety in Emotional Tolerance
Anxiety often rises when feelings begin to exceed emotional capacity. This article explains how anxiety affects emotional tolerance, why it appears, and what happens when emotional experience becomes difficult to manage.
Why Some Feelings Feel Overwhelming
Some feelings can feel overwhelming, confusing, or difficult to manage. This often happens when emotional experience exceeds current capacity. This article explains why feelings can feel intense and what is happening in those moments.
What Emotional Capacity Means
Emotional capacity describes how much feeling a person can tolerate, stay with, and make sense of. When capacity is limited, emotions can feel overwhelming or distant. This article explains how emotional capacity works and why it matters.
Structural Thinking in Psychotherapy
Structural thinking in psychotherapy shifts attention away from content and toward process. By observing how feelings, anxiety, and defences operate in real time, therapy begins to support deeper change through increased capacity rather than insight alone.
Beneath the Noise Around Masculinity: What I Actually See in Therapy
Public debates about masculinity often focus on ideology and cultural conflict. In therapy, the picture is usually different. Many men are not driven by hostility or dominance, but by loneliness, shame, and uncertainty about how to talk about vulnerability.
From Repetition to Integration: How Emotional Patterns Gradually Change
Emotional patterns often repeat until the underlying state becomes more recognisable and tolerable. This article explores how repetition softens, how reflective capacity grows, and how integration gradually becomes possible over time.
Mentalisation and Emotional Fragility: Why Reflection Can Collapse Under Stress
Mentalisation helps us think about feelings and relationships, but this capacity can weaken when stress rises. This article explores emotional fragility, reflective collapse, and how therapy gradually helps emotional experience become more thinkable.
Why Repetition Happens: The Emotional States Behind Repeating Patterns
Repeating patterns often reflect earlier emotional states rather than simple habits. This article explores why repetition develops, how symbolic carriers recreate emotional experience, and how reflective capacity gradually allows those patterns to loosen.
State vs Symbol: Why Some Emotional Experiences Are Hard to Put Into Words
Some emotional experiences are felt long before they can be understood. This article explores the difference between emotional states and symbolic thinking, and how developing reflective capacity gradually allows those experiences to become recognisable and easier to think about.