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 My Vinyl Collection Taught Me About Memory, Regulation, and Meaning
Organising my vinyl collection by psychological function, rather than genre, unexpectedly mirrored key psychodynamic ideas about memory, regulation, and emotional capacity. This reflective piece explores how experiences arrive, settle, carry meaning, and eventually become part of who we are.
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.
The Unseen Battle: What Netflix’s Stranger Things 5 Teaches Us About Trauma, Shame, and the Inner Critic
What if the monsters we fear most are internal? Using Stranger Things as a lens, this piece explores how shame, self-attack, and emotional avoidance show up in popular culture, and what depth therapy can teach us about facing them, building emotional capacity, and reclaiming freedom from the inside out.
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.
Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story: When the “Monster” Speaks
What happens when trauma overwhelms a person’s capacity to feel and integrate experience? Using Netflix’s Monster as a lens, this piece explores emotional fragmentation, failed containment, and why facing shame and emotional avoidance is central to real therapeutic change.
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.