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
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Mentalisation and Emotional Fragility: Why Reflection Can Collapse Under Stress
Mentalisation helps us think about feelings and relationships, but this capacity can weaken when stress rises. This article explores emotional fragility, reflective collapse, and how therapy gradually helps emotional experience become more thinkable.
Why Repetition Happens: The Emotional States Behind Repeating Patterns
Repeating patterns often reflect earlier emotional states rather than simple habits. This article explores why repetition develops, how symbolic carriers recreate emotional experience, and how reflective capacity gradually allows those patterns to loosen.
State vs Symbol: Why Some Emotional Experiences Are Hard to Put Into Words
Some emotional experiences are felt long before they can be understood. This article explores the difference between emotional states and symbolic thinking, and how developing reflective capacity gradually allows those experiences to become recognisable and easier to think about.
What Depth-Oriented Therapy Means
Depth-oriented therapy focuses on the emotional processes beneath patterns of anxiety, avoidance, and repeated relationship difficulties. Rather than offering short-term coping strategies alone, it works with the underlying emotional states that shape behaviour and experience.
Why Emotional Change Takes Time
Many people expect emotional change to happen quickly once they understand their patterns. In reality, emotional change usually develops gradually as people build the capacity to experience feelings, anxiety, and relationships differently.
Why Anxiety Appears When Feelings Surface
Strong feelings often bring a wave of anxiety before we are fully aware of the emotion itself. This article explains why anxiety appears when feelings begin to surface and how this reaction shapes avoidance, defence mechanisms, and emotional patterns.
Why People Repeat Relationship Patterns
Many people notice the same emotional patterns appearing in their relationships. This article explores why relationship patterns repeat and how emotional capacity gradually makes different experiences possible.
Why Insight Alone Doesn’t Change Behaviour
Many people understand their emotional patterns clearly yet still feel stuck repeating them. This article explains why insight alone rarely leads to change and how emotional capacity, rather than understanding, often makes lasting change possible.
What Defence Mechanisms Actually Do
Defence mechanisms are often misunderstood as psychological problems. In reality they are protective responses the mind uses to manage emotional pressure. This article explains what defence mechanisms actually do and how they shape avoidance, anxiety, and emotional shutdown.
Emotional Numbness: Why You Can't Feel Your Emotions
Emotional numbness can feel confusing and isolating. Many people assume something is wrong with them when they struggle to feel. In reality, numbness is often the mind’s way of protecting itself from emotions that once felt overwhelming.
Why We Avoid Our Feelings (and What Happens When We Do)
Many people understand their problems but still feel stuck in the same emotional patterns. One common reason is emotional avoidance. This article explores why the mind learns to avoid certain feelings and how those patterns begin to shape anxiety, behaviour, and relationships.
Shame and the Risk of Being Seen
Shame is more than embarrassment, and it often gets confused with guilt. Shame is a bodily contraction linked to withdrawal and fear of rejection. This article explains how shame differs from guilt, how it shows up in the body, and how therapy helps reduce its power through connection.
Core Emotions and the Body
Emotions start as activation in the body. This article explores how anger, grief, guilt, shame and love first show up physiologically, and why tracking posture, breathing, and muscle tension matters in therapy.
Mer de Noms: The Sea of Names and the Problem of Identity
A psychodynamic exploration of Mer de Noms by A Perfect Circle, examining themes of anger, desire, misattunement, and emotional emptiness. The album becomes a lens for understanding projection, repetition, and the struggle to symbolise overwhelming internal states.
Knowing Isn’t the Same as Changing
You can explain your attachment style, trauma responses, and relationship patterns in detail, and still repeat them. Insight alone does not interrupt behaviour. When emotional activation rises beyond your tolerance, the nervous system defaults to familiar strategies for relief. Real change depends on increasing your capacity to stay with difficult feelings without acting on them.
Feeling Better vs Getting Better at Feeling
Many people start therapy hoping to feel better quickly. Lasting change, however, often comes from building the capacity to experience anxiety, sadness, and uncertainty without retreating from them. When emotional tolerance grows, patterns shift in a more stable way.
Capacity Is the Work: Why Therapy Is Not About Eliminating Anxiety
Therapy is often misunderstood as symptom removal. In reality, lasting change comes from building the capacity to tolerate anxiety, grief, anger, and uncertainty without automatic avoidance. When emotional tolerance expands, insight deepens and defensive patterns gradually loosen.
Mentalisation and Fragility: Reflections from a Workshop
When working with emotional fragility, strengthening the capacity to think under pressure often comes before deep emotional work. Mentalisation, understanding behaviour in terms of thoughts and feelings, provides a stabilising foundation for therapy. When affect rises too quickly, reflection can narrow or collapse. Slowing the process and restoring shared thinking allows emotional work to unfold more safely.
What It’s Actually Like to Stand Between Two Ways of Working
What happens when the model that once organised your work no longer feels sufficient? Insight may be present, yet under pressure little changes structurally. This reflection explores the shift from meaning-making to structural thinking, tracking anxiety, understanding defences, and building capacity before integration. For therapists between modalities, this uncertainty can signal development.
When Conspiracy Thinking Becomes Emotional Avoidance
Conspiracy thinking is often treated as a belief issue. In therapy, it can function as emotional avoidance. By understanding the anxiety and vulnerability beneath rigid certainty, people can begin to build the capacity to stay present with uncertainty rather than defending against it.