Psychotherapist London
Thinking & Writing
On psychotherapy, the inner life, and the work of change.
Love Bombing: When It Is Not Your Fear of Intimacy
People rarely arrive asking about love bombing. They arrive worried about themselves. The sentence I hear is some version of this: I think there might be …
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Trauma Bonding: Why It Feels Like Love, and Why It Is Not
It feels like love. That is the whole difficulty. People arrive in my consulting room able to describe, in detail, what someone has done to them, and in the …
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Ambition or Entitlement
A man sits in my consulting room and tells me he has been out of work for eight months. I ask him what he has been doing about it. He says he is manifesting his …
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Limerence: Handing Someone the Remote Control of Your Inner World
A person sits down in my consulting room and describes a silence. Not a fight, not a betrayal. A silence. A message that took four hours to come rather than …
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The Goal Loses Its Luminosity
There is one sentence you can say to almost nobody. Not to the board. Not to the people who work for you. Not to the friends who envy you, and often not to the …
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The Walls Belong to the Building
There is a sentence that anyone who has worked in residential treatment has heard many times, usually somewhere around week three, usually with some surprise …
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The Line Between a Therapist and a Guru
When I walk into a supervision group for the first time, something arrives before I have said anything. The group hands me their wisdom. They have decided, on …
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The Container That Was Taken Away
This follows on from an account of why recovery is so hard to sustain, the part of a person that never comes to the session, and the state it leaves them in: …
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The Part That Waits Outside
Something happens in this work that I have never entirely got used to. A man sits in front of me for fifty minutes. He is honest, he is intelligent, he can see …
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