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…
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.
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.
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 piece explores how these different forms of avoidance shape relationships, and how therapy restores emotional capacity so connection becomes possible again.
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.
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.