Our moods are like psychic staging posts, we are drawn back to them. They are the points where our lives took particular turns. They are our personal truths, the events that shaped us, the memories and feelings that we return … Read More
Feeling you have to keep your true feelings to yourself, when you are in the company of others, can be exhausting, depressing and dispiriting. With family it can feel like there is no possibility of speaking your mind openly, that … Read More
Why are boundaries in counselling important? One of the key values of the psychodynamic approach is the clear focus on the importance of boundaries in counselling. It may not be necessary to say too much about the importance of boundaries … Read More
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