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 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 Man in Black: How Johnny Cash (and My Therapy Uniform) Teach Us About Containment
What creates a sense of safety in therapy often has less to do with words and more to do with presence. This piece explores how containment is communicated through steadiness, consistency, and tone, and why feeling held in this way makes it possible to face anxiety and move beyond emotional avoidance.
The Song That Saves You: What Johnny Cash Can Teach Us About Authenticity in Therapy
What makes an expression feel real rather than performed? Using a scene from Walk the Line as a lens, this piece explores why authenticity has a transformative effect, and how therapy helps people move past emotional avoidance to access what genuinely changes them.
The Therapy FAD? Rethinking our Feelings, Anxiety and Defences Across Modalities
Most struggles follow a simple human sequence: feelings stir anxiety, and anxiety brings defences online. This piece reframes that pattern as survival instead of pathology, and explores how therapy becomes transformative when anxiety is regulated and defences are read as signals, instead of obstacles.
From Pain to Possibility: What Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral Teaches Us About Being Human
Why do shame and trauma so often drive us toward emotional avoidance rather than healing? Using The Downward Spiral as a lens, this piece explores how unprocessed emotion shapes inner experience, and why facing what’s avoided is central to integration and real psychological freedom.
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.
The Power of Coming Back: Lewis Capaldi, Vulnerability, and the Quiet Strength of Resilience
Resilience doesn’t usually arrive with drama or fanfare. It grows quietly, through honesty, support, and the courage to keep showing up. Using Lewis Capaldi’s return to the stage as a reflection point, this piece explores why the same qualities that heal us in therapy, connection, patience, and self-belief also sustain us in life.