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…
The Unseen Battle: What Stranger Things Suggests About Trauma, Shame, and the Inner Critic
Using themes from Stranger Things as metaphor, this article explores how avoidance, shame, and self-criticism can shape internal experience. It looks at the “Upside Down” as a symbol for psychological conflict and explains how therapy helps people approach difficult emotions more steadily.
What Therapists Feel But Rarely Say
Therapists do experience emotional responses during sessions, but those reactions are used carefully as part of the work. This article explains countertransference, why therapists rarely talk openly about their own feelings in sessions, and how emotional awareness helps guide the therapeutic process.
You’re Not Relating. You’re Re-Enacting…
Many people repeat similar relationship patterns without understanding why. This article explores re-enactment and how early emotional dynamics can shape present relationships, and how therapy helps make these patterns visible so that connection becomes less driven by automatic repetition.
The Therapist’s Silence: What It Really Means
Silence in therapy can feel uncomfortable, but it is often intentional. This article explores how therapeutic silence supports emotional awareness, slows automatic responses, and creates space for feelings to become clearer. It explains what therapists are usually doing internally during quiet moments in session.
What Your Therapist Really Thinks About You
Many people worry about being judged in therapy. This article explains what therapists are actually paying attention to during sessions, how self-criticism often shows up in the room, and why the therapeutic focus is usually on emotional patterns rather than personal evaluation.
When the “Monster” Speaks: What True-Crime Stories Reveal About Human Psychology
True-crime stories often reflect themes of isolation, shame, and emotional fragmentation. This article looks at why these narratives are psychologically compelling and how therapy understands containment, emotional regulation, and the quieter forms of internal struggle that many people recognise in themselves.
When Growth Feels Like Collapse
Therapy sometimes feels harder before it feels easier. Anxiety may rise and familiar coping patterns can feel less stable. This article explains why periods of discomfort are common during psychological change and how therapy helps people stay grounded while new ways of responding begin to develop.
What Cures in Therapy Is Truth…
Insight can explain patterns, but change often happens when emotions are experienced rather than analysed. This article explores why understanding alone is rarely enough, how emotional truth shows up in therapy, and why small moments of honest experience can gradually shift long-standing patterns.
The Man in Black: What Johnny Cash (and My Therapy Uniform) Teach Us About Containment
Consistency and steadiness are central to therapeutic work. Reflecting on Johnny Cash’s image and the idea of a therapist’s “uniform,” this article explores containment, how a calm, reliable therapeutic frame helps people approach difficult emotions safely and gradually reduce emotional avoidance.
When Johnny Cash Stopped Performing: Authenticity and Emotional Truth in Therapy
A scene from Walk the Line offers a useful metaphor for therapy: the shift from performance toward authenticity. This article explores why people often “play it safe” emotionally and how therapy helps create the conditions for more honest, manageable emotional expression over time.
The Psychology of the Inner Critic: How the Voice Inside You Took Power
The inner critic often feels like a personal truth, but it usually develops as a way of managing anxiety and emotional risk. This article explores how self-critical patterns form, why they persist, and how therapy helps people change their relationship with that internal voice rather than simply trying to silence it.
Why We Repeat What Hurts Us: The Pull of Familiar Pain
Many people notice the same emotional patterns repeating across relationships and life decisions. This article looks at how repetition develops as a protective strategy, why familiar experiences can feel safer than change, and how therapy helps people notice the cycle in real time and create space for different choices.
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 The Downward Spiral Shows About Being Human
Music can sometimes express emotional experience more clearly than explanation. Using The Downward Spiral as a lens, this article explores themes of shame, emotional avoidance, and disconnection, and how therapy helps people recognise similar patterns in themselves and develop a steadier relationship with difficult feelings.
Why Therapy? The Question People Rarely Ask
Many people start therapy focused on symptoms, but lasting change often involves something deeper: the ability to stay present when emotions feel difficult. This article explores how therapy builds emotional capacity, helping patterns soften over time and allowing people to respond with more flexibility rather than automatic reactions.
Two Types of Emotional Avoidance in Relationships and Why It Hurts
Emotional avoidance often shows up as distance, shutdown, or control inside relationships. This article explains two common patterns of avoidance and how they develop as ways of managing anxiety. It also explores how therapy helps people notice these responses in real time and build emotional capacity for safer, more stable connections.
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.