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…
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 piece 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 piece 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.
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.
Your Defence Mechanisms: A Self Discovery Quiz
When we think about emotional defences, we often imagine walls or barriers, but they’re actually more like an emotional immune system. This piece explores how everyday habits like humour, busyness, or people-pleasing are clever ways the mind protects us from difficult feelings, and why understanding them with curiosity (rather than judgement) can be the start of real change.