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…
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.
What Cures in Therapy Is Truth…
Insight can help us understand ourselves, but it rarely changes us on its own. This post 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: What 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 post 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 post explores why authenticity has a transformative effect, and how therapy helps people move past emotional avoidance to access what genuinely changes them.
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 post 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 post 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 post 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 post 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 post 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 post 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
Using Lewis Capaldi’s return to the stage as a reflection point, this post explores why the same qualities that heal us in therapy, connection, patience, and self-belief also sustain us in life. Resilience grows quietly, through honesty, support, and the courage to keep showing up.
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.