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 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.
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.
When Growth Feels Like Collapse
Change can feel overwhelming, not because something is wrong, but because old ways of coping are loosening. This post 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.
Two Types of Emotional Avoidance in Relationships and Why It Hurts So Much
Emotional avoidance doesn’t always look the same. Sometimes it’s quiet and rooted in early trauma; other times it’s active, driven by control or forced positivity. This post explores how these different forms of avoidance shape relationships, and how therapy restores emotional capacity so connection becomes possible again.