Self-Knowledge
Living Long Term With Mental Illness
We would – of course – want to get rid of this thing forever and heaven knows we will have…
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Self-Knowledge
Living Long Term With Mental Illness
The more time passes, the more we have to take on board a bleaker, unavoidable reality: this thing is here for the long term. In the one life we’ll ever have, this is us.
Calm
Might I Be Feeling Lonely Rather Than Worried?
Might I principally, at heart, be lonely rather than worried?
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
The Impulse to Sink Our Own Mood – and Return to Sadness and Worry
We may have grown up to associate a low fearful mood with safety. Sadness means you don’t get attacked; it keeps you out of trouble.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
How ‘Mad’ People Make a Lot of Sense
If we look with sufficient rigour at the behaviour the mentally unwell exhibit, we almost always find a logic within it that can be decoded, listened to and in many cases dealt with.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
Why We Keep Repeating Patterns of Unhappiness
We aren’t here again by coincidence. We are – in an unconscious part of our minds – steering ourselves to a place of pain with hidden intent.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
Your Self-Esteem is a Record of Your History
What we expect of ourselves is a reflection of what others expected from us in childhood. What we think the future will bring is shaped by what the past brought us.
Read ArticleRelationships
People Not to Fall in Love With
Those who are good at love are those who know – first and foremost – who not to fall in love with.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Need for Honesty on Early Dates
Striving to appear ‘normal’ while actually being – below the surface – infinitely more complicated is a catastrophe waiting to unfurl.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Difficulties of Impotence
Seldom do we need the insights of psychotherapy as urgently as when it comes to cases of impotence. What might be going on?
Read ArticleRelationships
How to Break Logjams in Relationships
The things that most upset us in our partners are typically the things that are simultaneously most unresolved in our minds.
Read ArticleCalm
The Ecstatic Joy We Deny Ourselves
What if we didn’t always have to be as sad and as anxious as we usually are? What if we could more properly appreciate the beauty all around us? What if we surrendered to loving and to being loved?
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
Intergenerational Trauma
The way to arrest intergenerational trauma is to begin – in the back of one’s mind – with a solemn commitment: the difficulties must stop with me.
Read ArticleRelationships
Getting Better at Picking Lovers
Whatever we tell ourselves, it may be that we have for a long time been picking characters who – we must somewhere inside us know – would not allow matters to flourish.
Read ArticleSociability
The Boring Person
The boring person isn’t really boring; they are in manic flight from what is profoundly and agonisingly interesting in themselves.
Read ArticleRelationships
Picking Partners Who Won’t Understand Us
When it comes to what we get up to in love, we should on the whole pay much less attention to common sense and surface intentions, and much more to our urge to repeat dynamics that we have known in childhood.
Read ArticleRelationships
Those Who Cannot Feel Love Until It Is Over
There is a kind of lover who is never more skilled and determined than when they have just been rejected. They finds reserves of extraordinary eloquence, tenderness and maturity just as it seemed as if all was lost.
Read ArticleRelationships
How Even Very ‘Nice’ Parents Can Mess Up Their Children
There has been a huge improvement in the quality of parenting. And, as we may slowly be starting to realise, it’s not been enough.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
Work Outs For Our Minds
We’re used to the idea that gyms are places we might go to do exercises to improve our bodies. What’s less familiar is that certain of these exercises might be performed in a spirit that can address distinct problems in our minds.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Parents We Would Love To Have Had: An Exercise
We can be so taken up with the problems handed down to us by inadequate or frustrating parents that we forget to ask ourselves a question with an immense power to inspire and heal us: what would properly lovely parents have been like?
Read ArticleRelationships
How Do Emotionally Healthy People Behave In Relationships?
We can get so caught up in the problems of love that we forget to ask ourselves a basic-sounding but hugely revealing and crucial question: what are emotionally healthy people like in relationships?
Read ArticleWork
How Does An Emotionally Healthy Person Relate To Their Career?
It’s unusual to think that the state of our emotional health might have a role to play in deciding what job we are attracted to. But when it comes to work, we aren’t ever just dealing with concerns for money and opportunities, but also always with that more acute subject: emotional maturity.
Read ArticleRelationships
Fatherless Boys
There is a particular category of human for whom life is never going to be easy but who has much to teach us and who can be an especially tender companion and friend: the fatherless boy.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
Interviewing Our Bodies
It sounds very odd indeed that we might be able – let alone need – to interview our bodies. Surely if our bodies have anything urgent to tell us, they will do so in direct ways through the standard pains and pleasures.
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Suffering From A Snobery That Isn’t Ours
Some of us belong to a particular cohort who were given – from a young age, almost certainly by our parents – a powerful sense of the importance of knowing the right sort of people.
Read ArticleRelationships
What Are We Lying To Our Partners About?
A truly adult perspective on human nature tells us both good and bad news. People are a lot more complicated in their minds than they make out in their conversations or behaviours.
Read ArticleCalm
On Being Gaslit In Our Childhoods
We know the term gaslighting well enough from relationships: where a partner does something hurtful or deceitful to their lover while simultaneously artfully persuading them that they must be ‘mad’ whenever they get close to working out what this might be – and mounting a complaint.
Read ArticleCalm
A Place for Despair
There is a good deal of pride in our societies about how broad minded we all are, at least compared with previous generations. Yet how stubbornly intolerant we remain in one particular area: in relation to the despair that is locked inside us and that struggles ever to be properly seen or explored.
Read ArticleLeisure
What We Might Learn From The Dandies of The Congo
To belong to the Sapeurs is to undertake an enormous commitment, almost akin to joining a religion: to invest in the most beautiful shirts, ties, blazers, dresses available and to wear these with pride as often as possible, both on special occasions and in the modest moments of life; to join – as it were – a religion of beauty.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
The Top Dog – Under Dog Exercise
For some of us, one of the great inner tussles lies in knowing how much to push against people who hurt, frustrate or offend us – and how much simply to go along with what they are doing in the name of keeping the peace.
Read ArticleLeisure
What Should A Good Therapist Do For Us?
We hear a lot of background noise about the benefits of psychotherapy. But it can be hard to get a clear sense of how therapy actually works and what we would ideally gain from it.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
We All Need Our North Pole
How banal life gets if we only ever aim for what we are sure to attain; and how sad it is if we long only for what we know we can never have. We need, instead, the promise of a North Pole, somewhere far above us, a long way from where we stand now, bathed in mists and attainable only through struggle, barely discernible, but definitely and beautifully real, waiting for our cour
Read ArticleCalm
Ostracism Anxiety
It can take a very long time indeed to properly notice something fundamental about ourselves: that we are extremely anxious people.
Read ArticleRelationships
How We May Be Creating The Lovers We Fear
Whatever our suspicion of ourselves, we should leave room for a hugely unfamiliar but beautiful possibility: that we have met someone who deserves our trust. The past was painful; once it has been understood and mourned, the future doesn’t need to be.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Avoidant Partner With The Power To Drive You Mad
Many relationships will help to keep you sane; a few varieties have the power – and we’re not being hyperbolic – to make you lose your sanity.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Miseries of Push-Pull Relationships
There is a kind of relationship proverbially known as the push-pull relationship, in which an ostensibly loving couple constantly ends up mired in conflict and, despite their sincerely held belief that they want to be together, cannot seem to last any length of time before descending into new rounds of anger and bitterness that makes both of them doubt that this can ever last.
Read ArticleRelationships
On Picking a Socially Unsuitable Partner
For most of human history, the idea of picking a socially suitable partner was at the forefront of our considerations at the time of marriage.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
How the Unfinished Business of Childhood is Played Out in Relationships
One of the strangest, most potentially depressing but important realisations we can ever make about relationships is that, without any awareness of the fact and with no directly mean intent, a great many people play out in them what we can usefully call the ‘unfinished business of childhood.’
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The Stages of Development – And What If We Miss Out on One…
Whenever we see a child or teenager and hear them described as ‘old for their years’ or ‘already so grown up,’ we should worry – and if this happened to be us, we should mourn.
Read ArticleRelationships
A Way To Break Logjams In A Couple
At moments of particular fury and despair with our partners, there’s an exercise we might perform that stands a chance of breaking through some of our impasses and perhaps of introducing a new more imaginative and compassionate atmosphere into the couple.
Read ArticleRelationships
How to Sustain Love: A Tool
Our situation is highly poignant. We try so hard to be good partners, yet experience so much that we believe will tear us apart – and then suppress the truth to a point where we lose the ability to feel. And then – to add to the irony – we both do this while convinced we are the only ones to do so.
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A Guide For The Recovering Avoidant
‘Avoidant’ is the term usefully coined by attachment theorists to define those of us who, through no fault of our own but with full responsibility for our condition, have grave difficulties around intimate relationships.
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Who Might I Have Been If…
We might at times have played a game in relation to money and career: what if I had won the lottery, what if I had been school buddies with a tech titan, what if I had been the third employee at…? Equally interesting might – for some of us – be an emotional version of this game of good fortune.
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Where Are Humanity’s Problems Really Located?
In many moods, under the urging of politicians and the media, it becomes tempting to look at the world as if its fundamental problems were all economic and political.
Read ArticleSelf Knowledge
On Feeling Obliged
For some of us, our lives are guided – and hemmed in – by one overwhelming imperative: we must never let people down.
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Yes, Maybe They Are Just Envious…
There’s a particular flaw to which modest, kind, self-punishing people are especially prone: an inability to believe that other people might be envious of them – and by consequence, an acute difficulty in making sense of certain forms of behaviour, let alone in knowing how to respond effectively to them.
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How to Recover the Plot
On a regular basis, as often as every few days, we are prone to lose the plot of our lives. We are not talking, here, of insanity, rather of a very understandable and reasonable tendency to forget quite why we do what we do, what matters, where we are headed and – to put it at its grandest – who we are.
Read ArticleLeisure
The Usefulness of Speaking Your Feelings to An Empty Chair
One of the simplest and most useful exercises that psychotherapy has gifted to us is known as the Empty Chair Technique.
Read ArticleRelationships
Questions To Ask Ourselves About Someone We Are Thinking Of Committing Ourselves To
Imagine that we are wondering whether someone is right for us or not. Certain feelings pull us towards them; others leave us unsure. In order to try to solidify our impressions, here are a range of questions we might ask ourselves about a prospective partner for the long term.
Leisure
The Beauty of Komorebi
It is one of the most charming aspects of Japanese culture that it offers up a specific word for what we would in most languages have to try to express with a whole clumsy sentence: komorebi.
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On Those Ruined by Success
We may complain a lot about our present situation and appear to want so much to move on. The reality – which we should acknowledge in order to overcome it – is that we might also secretly prefer the safety of habitual unhappiness to the novelties and awe of joy.
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Why We Have Trouble Getting Back To Sleep
For those of us who have a lot to run away from – and that frightens us – in our own minds, there is a period of the night that presents particular problems and powers the worst of our insomnia.
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We Are All Lonely – Now Can We Be Friends?
It’s in the very confession of our sense of isolation that we can find redemption. Once someone has said ‘I’m lonely’, there is never any further reason to believe in our singularity; it’s probably the most generous utterance of which anyone is capable.
Read ArticleLeisure
On Flying Too Close to the Sun – And Not Flying Close Enough
We shouldn’t allow ourselves to forget that, whatever the fate of poor Icarus, there are always equally potent risks bound up with never pushing ourselves a bit closer to our sun’s vital and warming rays.
Read ArticleSociability
The Need for Processing
If we are feeling tetchy and out of sorts, if work or love seem to have lost their flavour, it may not be anything greater, but then again nor anything lesser, than that we have not had sufficient chance to explain ourselves and to hear small echoes of our cries and joys.
Read ArticleCalm
The Need For A Modern Monastery
For too much of our own lives and for too long in the course of human history, we have left calm to chance. We owe it to ourselves to start more consciously to build the calm lives we so deeply crave and could so richly benefit from.
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How to Raise a Successful Person
A question not just for parents but for anyone reflecting on the constituents of a good life and on their own path through the world must be: how can one produce that most essential of things, a motivated child?
Read ArticleCalm
How to Make It Through
We can’t know how much a simple bowl of lemons may come to mean to us until life has shown us its properly difficult sides.
Read ArticleCalm
Why Illusions Are Necessary to Achieve Anything
What if we had to lie to ourselves to have any chance of leading the lives we admire? Here might be some of the blind spots necessary to our flourishing.
Read ArticleSociability
The Loveliest People in the World
These are the kinds of people we need so many more of in our lives — and should try so hard to be for others.
Self-Knowledge
12 Signs That You Are Mature in the Eyes of Psychotherapy
Here are twelve elements of an adult identity as seen through the lens of psychotherapy.
Leisure
Eight Rules to Create Nicer Cities
Here are eight rules required to create the sort of cities we all love and deserve.
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We Need to Change the Movie We Are In
It takes a lot of talent to make a quiet film; it arguably takes a far greater talent to live as if we might be in one.
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Can Childhoods Really Matter So Much?
We can’t change our childhoods, but we can – with effort – alter their legacies.
Read ArticleLeisure
The Past Was Not in Black and White
They lived in a world as fresh and brightly coloured as ours – and were as worthy of pity and love as we are.
Read ArticleLeisure
You Are Living in the Greatest Museum in the World
We should not have to wait till our world has been lost to see its beauty.
Read ArticleLeisure
When Something is Beautiful
Nowadays, what we mostly do in the presence of beauty is – of course – take a photo. What if we were to try something else next time?
Read ArticleSociability
The Life Saving Role of Small Chats
We are creatures that need – far more than we typically realise – to chit-chat our way through the agonies of being human.
Read ArticleRelationships
When Your Partner Loves You – but Does Their Best to Drive You Away…
There are relationships which begin with great enthusiasm and love on both sides – but where after a while, one partner starts to act in ways that appear deeply puzzling and hurtful to the other.
Read ArticleLeisure
What’s the Bit of Therapy That Heals You?
It’s widely assumed that there is something about psychotherapy that has the power to heal. But exactly what this might be is not always necessarily very clear.
Read ArticleRelationships
A Rule to Help Your Relationship
A basic principle to guarantee the health of any relationship is that we should try always to stick as close as possible to the truth of what we’re really feeling – and to convey this to the partner in a way that they will understand.
Read ArticleRelationship
The Heroism of Leaving a Relationship
There are grave difficulties involved in realising that someone with whom one shares a bed might actually pose a vicious threat.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Problems of Miniature Adults
Children who lean on the sophisticated behaviours of grown-ups aren’t generally doing so for their own sakes, they are resorting to them as a defence against the immaturity of adults in the vicinity.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
What Some Childhoods Don’t Allow You to Think
There are circumstances in which we cannot think the truth – because the truth would break our minds.
Read ArticleRelationships
Those Who Have to Wait for a War to Say ‘I Love You’
That it should require the prospect of death before we can surrender to someone gives us an indication of exactly how frightening emotional unclothing can be.
Read ArticleRelationships
Exquisite Agony in Love
The intensity of the pain is directly related to the intensity of the loveliness. We find it hard to get away precisely because we adore being there.
Read ArticleRelationships
Why It Should Not Have to Last Forever…
We labour under an invisible societal edict dictating that things must last until we expire – or else cannot have had a jot of value to begin with.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
A Test to Measure How Nice You Are
A basic shame appears to hold us back from acknowledging the building blocks of our lives, as if we couldn’t bear to see ourselves as we are in all our sublime pettiness and ordinariness.
Read ArticleLeisure
It Isn’t About the Length of a Life…
One of the things which makes life worth living is that we are not continually terrified of its end.
Read ArticleCalm
Four Ways of Coping With Anxiety
There are pills that may help contain the anxiety but there are also ideas and therapies that aim, as ambitiously, to understand it.
Read ArticleRelationships
What Celebrity Stalkers Can Teach Us About Love
In the extremity of their position, celebrity stalkers shed light on an important phenomenon: how very frightening the idea of reciprocated love can be.
Read ArticleLeisure
The Drawer of Odd Things
How impoverished our lives will end up being if we leave room in them only for those things we presently know how to understand, use or love.
Read ArticleCalm
When Our Battery is Running Low…
What will kill us in the end will not be one big obvious thing but many decades of invisible minor aggravations and low grade frictions.
Read ArticleCalm
Preparing for a Decent Night’s Sleep
Given how much we value nights of good sleep, it is striking how seldom we ever make shrewd or thorough plans to heighten our chances of having one.
Read ArticleRelationship
What If the People We Could Love Are Here Already; We Just Can’t See Them?
We may find there are far more candidates at large once we have the courage and capacity to receive them into our hearts.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
The Legacy of an Unloving Childhood
What happens to a child who is not loved properly? They become filled with shame.
Calm
Returning Anger to Where It Belongs
Frustrating things will occur every day. Few of them will ever need to make us furious
Read ArticleRelationships
Mothers and Daughters
There are women who have put little girls on the earth who at some level do not entirely want them to thrive – at least not in any uncomplicated way.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
When, and Why, Do We Pick up Our Phones?
We don’t pick up our phones to find out what’s going on. We pick them up to ensure that we are in no danger of finding out anything more about ourselves.
Read ArticleCalm
The Many Moods We Pass Through
Our spirits are constantly in motion, like the restless procession of weather fronts across a temperamental sky.
Read ArticleSociability
Why Losers Make the Best Friends
Of course it’s theoretically possible to be one of life’s winners, and also be reflexive, humble and attuned to the tender frequencies of existence. It’s just not – in practice – very likely.
Sociability
The Subtle Art of Not Listening to People Too Closely
Sometimes, to properly honour a relationship, we may need to do something that sounds very peculiar indeed: not listen to them at all.
Read ArticleSociability
The Origins of Shifty People
We’ll learn to forgive the shifty when we understand that they are principally scared; they’ll outgrow their shiftiness when they accept that the truth well-delivered can be borne.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
Why You Don’t Need a Very Bad Childhood to Have a Complicated Adulthood
We can be knocked from our optimal path by a breath of wind, we’re marked by the brush of a feather, we’re shattered by a sound at a certain frequency.
Read ArticleSociability
Our Very Best Friends
They don’t in any way try to ‘solve’ our problems; they manage simply to listen to them.
Read ArticleArticles
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Calm
Might I Be Feeling Lonely Rather Than Worried?
We may be no strangers to worried moods. Something awful often feels like it is about to happen. We fret…
View
Self-Knowledge
The Impulse to Sink Our Own Mood – and Return to Sadness and Worry
For some of us, happiness and excitement never seem to last for very long. Every time we finally take pride…
View
Self-Knowledge
How ‘Mad’ People Make a Lot of Sense
We like to draw a firm line between the people we casually call ‘mad’ and the rest of us. The…
View
Self-Knowledge
Why We Keep Repeating Patterns of Unhappiness
Many of us dimly sense that, despite ourselves, unfortunately and mysteriously, we keep ending up in some very similar dark…
View
Self-Knowledge
Your Self-Esteem is a Record of Your History
It’s a feature of the way we’re built that we don’t generally go around asking why we feel as we…
View
Relationships
People Not to Fall in Love With
It may sound ungenerous to throw the emphasis on the negative but we can fairly say that people who are…
View
Relationships
The Need for Honesty on Early Dates
One of the first priorities for any suitor on an early dinner date is – typically – to strive to…
View
Relationships
The Difficulties of Impotence
Seldom do we need the insights of psychotherapy as urgently as when it comes to cases of male heterosexual impotence.…
View
Select themes
Calm
Might I Be Feeling Lonely Rather Than Worried?
We may be no strangers to worried moods. Something awful often feels like it is about to happen. We fret…
View
Self-Knowledge
The Impulse to Sink Our Own Mood – and Return to Sadness and Worry
For some of us, happiness and excitement never seem to last for very long. Every time we finally take pride…
View
Self-Knowledge
How ‘Mad’ People Make a Lot of Sense
We like to draw a firm line between the people we casually call ‘mad’ and the rest of us. The…
View
Self-Knowledge
Why We Keep Repeating Patterns of Unhappiness
Many of us dimly sense that, despite ourselves, unfortunately and mysteriously, we keep ending up in some very similar dark…
View
Self-Knowledge
Your Self-Esteem is a Record of Your History
It’s a feature of the way we’re built that we don’t generally go around asking why we feel as we…
View
Relationships
People Not to Fall in Love With
It may sound ungenerous to throw the emphasis on the negative but we can fairly say that people who are…
View
Relationships
The Need for Honesty on Early Dates
One of the first priorities for any suitor on an early dinner date is – typically – to strive to…
View
Relationships
The Difficulties of Impotence
Seldom do we need the insights of psychotherapy as urgently as when it comes to cases of male heterosexual impotence.…
View
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