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…
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 piece 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 piece explores why depth without sufficient containment can increase anxiety rather than insight, and why building capacity first is what actually makes deep work possible.
You’re Not Relating. You’re Re-Enacting…
Why do the same painful relationship patterns keep repeating, even when we know better? This piece 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.
When Growth Feels Like Collapse
Change can feel overwhelming, not because something is wrong, but because old ways of coping are loosening. This piece explores why anxiety often rises just as real change begins, and how that uncomfortable phase can signal the emergence of a more authentic, freer way of being.
What Cures in Therapy Is Truth…
Insight can help us understand ourselves, but it rarely changes us on its own. This piece explores why real healing requires facing emotional truth, staying with what’s usually avoided, and allowing unconscious conflict to come into awareness, often through discomfort, anxiety, and courage.
The Psychology of the Inner Critic: How the Voice Inside You Took Power
That harsh inner voice often isn’t random, it’s shaped by shame and long-standing emotional avoidance. This piece explores how self-attack takes hold, why it feels so powerful, and how bringing feelings, anxiety, and defences into awareness can loosen its grip and open the way to genuine emotional freedom.
Why We Repeat What Hurts Us: The Pull of Familiar Pain
Why do the same destructive relationship patterns repeat, even when we desperately want something different? This piece explores how repetition compulsion operates beneath awareness, and how depth work helps people face unconscious conflict, build emotional courage, and create the possibility of real change.
Why Therapy? The Real Question Nobody Asks
The real aim of therapy isn’t to fix feelings, but to build the capacity to stay with them. This piece explores how depth work helps people face difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by anxiety or pushed back into old defences, and why that capacity is what makes lasting change possible.