Psychotherapist London
Thinking & Writing
On psychotherapy, the inner life, and the work of change.
Parentification: The Child Who Was the Parent
Parentification is an inversion: the child takes the parent’s role, and the parent the child’s. It can be practical: the child who runs the household, raises …
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The Fear of Abandonment: Where It Comes From, What It Destroys, and How It Heals
The fear of abandonment is the persistent terror that the people we love will eventually leave us, even when nothing suggests they will. It is almost always …
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The Panic Attack: A False Alarm, and How to Calm It
A panic attack is a sudden surge of intense fear, with violent physical symptoms, in the absence of any real danger. Here is the analogy I give in my consulting …
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The Saviour Complex: Helping Until You Lose Yourself
The saviour complex, sometimes called rescuer syndrome, is a compulsive need to help, fix and save others, on which self-esteem has come to depend. To …
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The Toxic Relationship: Recognising It, Understanding Why You Stay, and the Way Out
If you want to understand toxic relationships, you can open a psychology textbook. You can also open Greek mythology, and everything is already there. Zeus and …
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Borderline Personality Disorder: The Truth, the Difficulty, and the Hope
More than twenty-five years ago, when I was becoming a psychotherapist, one of my supervisors gave me this advice: you should have one borderline patient in …
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Men Need Men: Competition, Initiation and the Boys in Men's Bodies
Men live, most of their lives, in a fear they rarely name: the fear of being discovered less than. Less strong, less clever, less successful, less of a man, …
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Narcissistic Abuse: The Hold, the Victim, and the Way Out
Let me begin with the caution, because it has become necessary. Not every difficult person is a narcissist. I receive many women, and men, who arrive in my …
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The Highly Sensitive Person: An Invaded Strength, and How to Inhabit It
A woman came to see me and said: during COVID, I felt normal. I no longer had to leave my house, to be invaded by sound, to be overwhelmed by emotion. That …
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