Ordinarily, the child’s developing internal world and sense of himself should be protected, encouraged and nurtured by his primary caretakers. When this does not happen, or when the primary caretakers are infact provocative, attacking and aggressive towards the child, then … Read More
To speak and to feel that you have been heard, listened to without the sense of a judgement coming back. To feel that you have been able to puncture your isolation and tell another person how you feel. To feel … Read More
By way of analogy, imagine the noise if an orchestra played without first tuning up. Discordant results would follow. But if the musicians could recognise the problem, stop playing and tune up before continuing, then the intended melodies and harmonies … Read More
Our moods may be disturbed by chance, by the sudden changing circumstances of external events. The ordinary human events, births, deaths, illnesses, divorces, redundancies, all of these things take time to adapt to. But the harder problem can be when … Read More
Traumatic events can generate lasting complex psychological states in the minds of the traumatised. These are states which persist in the psyche and memory and which are then evoked, triggered, and activated by chance events. Suddenly someone says something out … Read More
By way of explaining Sebastian Vettel’s decision to ignore Team Red Bulls’ instructions, a sports psychologist writes: ‘all the training has produced hard wired neural circuitry… In competition he is trained to overtake a slower car’. Now there may be … Read More
So there’s you, passing the stations from High Wycombe to Marylebone, then going down the escalator to the Bakerloo line. When today, for no particular reason, your rhythm is interrupted,and,perhaps prompted by a story in a throwaway morning paper, you … Read More
Some people, perhaps like David Bowie or Picasso, seem to instinctively know how to renew their lives, how to transform themselves. By doing so they find new ways of working and head for new goals. Other people may lack such … Read More
Why do relationships become complicated? Do I create my own problems? Sometimes in the middle of a settled and constructive phase of life we suddenly lose ourselves. Without warning something has derailed us. It can be hard to know whether … Read More
Here I am taking trauma to refer to the wound created in the psyche caused by the psyche having been overwhelmed by extremely difficult and unbearable experience at a time when the individual was too young to understand what was … Read More