It might be a cliché: the psychotherapist who says ‘tell me about your dreams’. However, dreams are a useful tool many psychotherapists welcome into therapeutic work, inviting the unconscious mind of the client to step forward. Dreams can provide powerful and impactful material as part of the therapeutic process. Dreams in psychoanalysis In the early…
Sometimes we can get pulled into relationships that are confusing and painful, and yet at the same time we are drawn to stay in them, almost in an addictive way. These relationships often follow a cycle of pain and hurt, which is followed by periods of kindness and loving attention. This cycle of pain and…
When emotions feel disproportionately intense People often come to therapy because something in the present feels unexpectedly intense and unsafe. A wave of anxiety engulfs us. Shame flares up where none seems warranted. A familiar sense of collapse, anger, or fear takes hold before there is time to think. Cognitively, many people can see that…
The rise of one-sided relationships is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. We are seeing it it in the growing phenomenon of intimate relationships with chatbots. We are seeing it in the rise of misogyny, more recently exposed in Louis Theroux’s latest documentary on the manosphere where men who want relationships with women entirely on their…
Why the “perfect other” is never a person, and never love. Back in 2014 I wrote a piece entitled Porn addiction: the crack cocaine of sex addiction. And whilst I stand by what I wrote, the landscape has since changed considerably. Pornography, particularly in its modern forms, can hijack arousal, hollow out desire, and train…
We often speak about ‘moving on’ as if the past were another country that we might simply depart. But we can no more exit our history then we can escape our own shadow; if only it were that easy. We act out our past in the present with varying degrees of conscious awareness over and…
Clinical supervision is a requirement for both trainee and experienced psychotherapists and counsellors. Beyond its regulatory function, it is a central pillar of ethical practice, professional development, and ongoing learning. At its core, supervision is a relational process that supports clinicians in thinking more deeply about their work and about the emotional worlds of their…
Do you often find yourself with a familiar sense that you are getting it wrong? If so, you are far from alone. This chronic feeling of being wrong, or of being in the wrong, can undermine our relationships with others, our work, quality of life, and creativity. It can impact how we experience ourselves when…
A common reason that some people come to therapy is because of difficulties in managing their emotions. We all experience emotions and it is part of being human, but sometimes our emotions can become dysregulated and feel overwhelming, unpredictable, or out of control. We might feel that our emotional response is somewhat out of proportion…
If narcissism has become the cultural diagnosis of our time, psychotherapy remains one of the few places where the concept can be approached without hysteria. In popular culture, narcissism is often treated as a category of person, the narcissist, as though a character style were identical with the whole human being. In clinical work, this…
Narcissism has become a cultural obsession. It is discussed as though it were a new epidemic, a modern pathology spreading through society like a virus. The phrase “age of narcissism” is now so common that it is rarely questioned. Yet when we look closely, a more accurate formulation emerges. It is not that narcissism is…
Narcissism is one of those clinical terms that has escaped the consulting room and taken on a life of its own. Like many borrowed psychological ideas, it has been flattened. In popular culture, narcissism is routinely used as a moral verdict, a convenient label for a certain kind of person who is selfish, callous, entitled,…