Most people read this as a painting about light. Munch doesn’t give you a sunrise so much as an event: colour and line radiating out until they take over the whole canvas, with barely a corner left for the eye to rest. It’s a reasonable picture of sensory flooding, painted a century before anyone had the language for it.

Ask anyone why they feel dreadful at the moment and you’ll get the same answer: “It’s the heat.” England has just lived through an unusually hot run of months, and most of the country is short on sleep and even shorter on patience.

Over the past two weeks, though, a number of my autistic and ADHD clients have described something more particular going on for them. It goes further than general heat fatigue, and it comes up often enough that it deserves its own explanation.

These clients describe feeling as though insects are crawling under their skin. Showering doesn’t help: the water now feels prickly and almost painful on contact. ADHD medication they have taken safely for years is suddenly leaving them shaky and wrung out. They’ve all described the same thing, in more or less the same terms, without comparing notes with one another first.

Several have mentioned it almost apologetically, as though needing more water this summer or a different shower routine is a personal failing rather than a physiological one. One was told by someone close to her that she was making a fuss. Neither response is right. None of what follows is a character flaw.

The easy narrative is that everyone’s just hot and tired, and neurodivergent people are simply feeling it more because they feel everything more. That framing quietly puts the problem back inside the person. It isn’t accurate. What’s actually happening is a mismatch: bodies with different sensory and interoceptive wiring, medication with genuine thermoregulatory effects, and a summer that is, by the official record, longer and hotter than anything most of us have lived through.

The advice assumes a neurotypical nervous system

Standard hot-weather advice rests on two assumptions: that your body will reliably tell you when you’re thirsty, and that feeling hot and sticky will prompt you to slow down. For a lot of autistic people, neither assumption holds.

Why “drink when you’re thirsty” doesn’t work

Interoception is the brain’s ability to read internal signals such as thirst, hunger and temperature, and it’s a well-studied area of difference in autism. Autistic people frequently show differences in interoception, meaning their brains read these signals differently from neurotypical people’s, and in relation to heat this can go two ways. Some feel heat far more intensely than the thermometer would suggest. Others barely register it at all until they’re dizzy or light-headed – already heading towards heat exhaustion, not simply feeling a bit warm. Either way, “just drink water when you’re thirsty” assumes an internal alarm that may not be firing correctly. That’s a difference in wiring, not a failure of self-awareness.

Why “slow down when you’re hot and sticky” doesn’t work

The significant majority of autistic people experience atypical sensory processing: altered responses to touch, sound, texture and vibration, not only temperature. The same client who finds a seam or a clothing label unbearable in October will find a heatwave unbearable for related reasons in July.

Heat intolerance is a well-documented example. Some people describe a specific sensation of insects crawling on or beneath the skin, known as formication, from the Latin formica, meaning ant. Formication is a recognised phenomenon in its own right and isn’t unique to autism – it also occurs as a symptom of cocaine use, during alcohol withdrawal or as a result of neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis. What it comes down to, in plain terms, is a lower baseline tactile threshold: the point at which touch registers as uncomfortable is lower to begin with. When that baseline is already lower, the ordinary skin sensations of a heatwave – sweat pooling, fabric clinging, water pressure on overheated skin – can tip into that territory far more easily than they would for someone with typical sensory processing.

The medication problem

ADHD medications raise dopamine and noradrenaline, the same neurotransmitters involved in attention. In stimulant pharmacology research, these same chemical systems are also implicated in disrupting the hypothalamus’s control of body temperature – the mechanism behind stimulant-related hyperthermia. In practice, this can delay the onset of sweating, because your body’s definition of “too hot” is a little higher than normal, and it can dull your sense of thirst, which increases heat-related risk..

Tremor and shakiness are fairly common side effects of stimulant medication in their own right, heatwave or not. What changes in hot weather isn’t the side effect itself but its intensity: appetite suppression, another well-documented effect, combined with the extra fluid loss of a heatwave, tends to sharpen a shakiness that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

The largest real-world dataset I could find, a 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry, actually found a lower rate of heat-related illness in medicated ADHD patients compared with unmedicated patients. That doesn’t cancel out what clients are feeling. Lived sensation and measured clinical risk of heatstroke are two different things, and a person can feel shaky and destabilised without being in medical danger. I’m not willing to tell clients their medication is unsafe in heat on the strength of a mechanism alone. What I will say is that if shakiness is new, marked or alongside other symptoms, that’s a conversation for their prescriber, not something to push through.

Environments, routines and healthcare advice built around a “normal” summer and a “normal” nervous system simply aren’t built for this. That’s a design problem, and it’s one we’re likely to see more of as UK summers continue to shift.

What actually helps

A few adjustments clients have found useful this summer.

1. Hydrate on a schedule, not on thirst. If you can’t rely on your body to tell you when it’s thirsty, build in fixed hydration breaks – on the hour, or after finishing a task – rather than waiting to feel it.

2. Treat showers as a sensory decision, not a given. Lower water pressure, a slightly cooler temperature or switching to a bath or flannel wash can remove the prickling sensation without sacrificing the cooling benefit.

3. Flag new or worsening medication side effects to your GP or psychiatrist rather than adjusting the dose yourself. Shakiness in a heatwave has several possible causes, including dehydration, low food intake and the medication itself. It’s worth working out which before changing anything.

4. Reduce sensory load on hot days generally. If skin and temperature regulation are already working overtime, this isn’t the day for scratchy fabric, background noise or a packed schedule, if you can help it.

5. Build in recovery time after heat exposure, not just during it. Several clients describe the crash arriving hours after they’ve come inside and cooled down, not during the heat itself.

None of this fixes a summer that is genuinely, measurably hotter than the ones before it. Understanding why your body is responding the way it is, rather than assuming you’re simply not coping, is itself a useful step. It turns “Why am I like this?” into “What does my body actually need right now?” – a much more answerable question.

Dr Anindita

Consultant Clinical Psychologist | Founder, Affiniti+

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📍 Royal Arsenal, London

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The foreground in this picture is bright and light. The house is white; the dry grass is a vibrant yellow. In the centre of the painting, the dog’s white ruff attracts the eye.

But not everything is bright and light in Cape Cod Evening, painted by Edward Hopper in 1939. At the left-hand side of the painting, the trees loom dark and foreboding, offsetting the brightness. You can wade into the grass, the woods seem to be saying. You can stand by the house and play with the dog. But we are always here, on the periphery.

This is what our past does: it encroaches on the present moment, framing it and shaping it. The woods are not an add-on to the picture. They are part of it.

In this series, Mind the Gap, we’ve been looking at how our mind can sometimes work in ways that frustrate and limit us. For example, we can be given five pieces of praise and one piece of criticism – and the criticism will loom larger in our mind than the praise.

Similarly, we can tell ourselves that our past is no longer relevant – that we need to focus on the present moment – and our mind will have other ideas.

Wading knee-deep in our past

Our desire not to allow the past to dominate our lives is embedded in popular culture. “What’s done is done,” we say. “Don’t dwell. Move on.”

The most famous advocate of this particular philosophy is probably Elsa, the princess-heroine of Frozen. Standing in her newly erected ice palace, she belts it out: “The past is in the past. Let it go.”

But, as we discussed last week, really, really wanting something is not enough to make it happen. You cannot wish yourself out of a bad habit – and you cannot wish your past away.

Even Elsa knew this, eventually. “I’ve let my past go!” she proclaims, all alone on her mountain top. “This is how I want to live now.” But Elsa has not let her past go at all, because her past is precisely what has driven her to run away from home and build an ice palace on the side of a mountain. Elsa’s past – the anxiety that built up throughout her childhood and into adolescence and young adulthood – is swirling all around her, made manifest as a neverending snowstorm. She cannot step outside without being whipped in the face by it. She is wading knee-deep in her metaphorical past.

Most of us don’t hold on to our past through the medium of unseasonable weather systems. But we do carry it with us, all the same.

As children, we all have core emotional needs. These include: secure attachment to others; autonomy, competence and sense of identity; freedom to express needs and emotions; spontaneity and play; and realistic limits and self-control. When these needs are not met, we develop cognitive patterns to help us cope.

In their 2003 book, Schema Therapy, three US psychologists described these cognitive patterns as maladaptive schemas. These are essentially stories that we tell ourselves as children, in order to make sense of our reality and its unmet needs. So, for example, if a girl’s parents are constantly critical, she may conclude: “I’m defective and unlovable.” If a boy’s parents are unreliable, he may think: “I’m doomed never to get the things I really want.” A baby whose needs are ignored and overridden may learn: “My needs don’t matter.”

These aren’t conscious conclusions. They are a way of making sense of a reality that doesn’t otherwise make sense. On an unconscious level, the little girl thinks: “Why are my parents constantly finding fault with me? They’re my all-knowing parents, so it must be because I’m faulty.” Similarly, the little boy lacks the maturity to see that his parents are flaky and unreliable. Instead, he assumes that if his father promises him a lollipop and then fails to bring one home, it must be because of something intrinsic to him, rather than to his father.

A filter on life

These schemas are not simply explanations for an inadequate childhood: they become filters through which we see the rest of our lives. The little girl who thinks she is defective will continue to think that as an adult. “I know why I can’t find a boyfriend,” she may think. “It’s because I’m fundamentally unlovable.” Or: “I know why I was passed over for promotion at work. It’s because I’m not good enough, and everyone can see it.”

Every experience – no matter how benign and innocuous – is then tinted by this filter. Take, for example, the boy with the unreliable parents, now grown to adulthood. He goes for coffee with a friend, and they arrive just as the café is closing for the day. The friend thinks, “Bad luck – let’s try somewhere else.” The boy with unreliable parents, however, thinks, “I wanted to go to that particular café. Any time I want something, it slips through my grasp. I’m doomed never to get what I want.” In both cases, the underlying event is exactly the same: the café is closed and can’t serve them. But the schema imposes a new meaning on to it.

The schemas also influence what we notice and what we pay attention to. Previously in this series, we discussed how one piece of bad feedback can occupy our thoughts far more than repeated praise. Similarly, we are far more inclined to notice experiences that reinforce an existing schema. The baby who learnt that her needs don’t matter has now grown up, and is waiting with a friend for a table at a restaurant. The maître d’ is busy and can’t attend to them immediately, so they’re left standing for a while. The person who believes her needs don’t matter notices that the maître d’ caught her eye for a second, and then swiftly looked away in order to finish another task. She notices him chat for a moment with another member of staff – laughing together at something – rather than hurrying to seat them. She carries that sense of being ignored with her all evening. Her friend, meanwhile, notices none of this. She’s vaguely aware that they’re kept waiting a little while, but she forgets about it as soon as they sit down to eat.

Schemas also influence our behaviour. Imagine that the person who believes her needs don’t matter had sustained a minor running injury the day before going to the restaurant. Nothing visible or serious – just enough to make standing at the end of a long day slightly painful. But she has learnt that her needs don’t matter, so she bears it stoically, waiting for the moment when she can finally sit down. She comes away thinking, “I was right – my needs don’t matter to anyone” – even though the maître d’ was entirely unaware of her specific needs in that moment.

Some time later, her friend also sustains a running injury, shortly before going to a popular restaurant with a no-reservations policy. Standing in the queue is slightly painful, so she goes to the maître d’ and explains about her injury. Immediately, he notes down her name and place in the queue, and then invites her to sit in the bar area. She comes away thinking, “People are so kind, and they’ll do their best to accommodate my needs.” She continues to express her needs; her friend continues to hide them.

Our schemas also affect how we respond emotionally to other people. The girl who thought she was defective grows up to become a young woman who assumes that her boyfriend dumped her because she’s fundamentally unlovable. After that, she approaches every first date with the assumption that the man in question will think she’s unlovable. Perhaps he’ll see it right away; perhaps it will take him some time to work it out. The upshot is always the same: she’ll end up alone. This may not be a conscious thought process, but it is deep-seated belief, underpinning her interactions with potential partners: she is defensive and guarded with them, and even slightly spiky. As a result, men find her awkward and prickly, and they decide not to see her again – thus reinforcing her belief that she is unlovable.

Living with a schema

This is what the schema’s filter does: it reinforces the precise narrative that the schema is telling us in the first place. It is the emotional equivalent of Elsa from Frozen believing that she’s a danger to other people – and then shooting ice spears at people so they don’t come near her and get hurt.

But schemas do not always reveal themselves directly. The authors of Schema Therapy identified three ways that people adapt to living with an unhelpful schema. The first of these is surrender: people accept the absolute truth of their schema and adapt their behaviour accordingly. Think of Elsa at the start of Frozen: she accepts that her ability to make ice and snow makes her dangerous to those around her. So she starts wearing gloves and refusing to play with her sister. Similarly, the woman from our example earlier whose needs were never met as a baby could end up in a relationship with a self-absorbed, narcissistic partner who ignores her needs – because she has no expectation that her own needs would ever be met in a relationship.

The second coping mechanism is avoidance, which means ordering your life in a way that avoids triggering the schema. Elsa wants to escape feeling like she’s a danger to other people – so she retreats to an isolated mountain top, where she never has to encounter anyone. Similarly, the woman who believes herself unlovable might become a commitment-phobe, breaking up with someone the minute she feels herself becoming attached, so that she rejects them before they reject her. This is not conscious: she doesn’t think to herself, “I’m starting to really like him – I need to break this off.” Instead, her mind will start coming up with reasons why it could never work: he’s a workaholic; he’s more introverted than I am; he doesn’t share my love of Mongolian throat-singing.

The third coping mechanism is overcompensation – in other words, you behave as though the opposite of the schema were true. The woman who feels unlovable believes herself to be irrevocably flawed as a human being – and thus she carries with her a deep and abiding sense of shame. This type of shame can be buried under narcissism and grandiosity: the person acts as though they are special, and superior to the rest of the world. They expect the world to pay court to them. This carapace of narcissism protects them from the vulnerability underneath – but can also leave them feeling isolated and unhappy.

How to really let it go

Schemas, as we’ve seen, are remarkably persistent and self-reinforcing. But they can be updated: the brain is more plastic than we once believed.

The first step towards updating a schema is simply to recognise it. Understand what’s going on and name it. Say, for example, you send an innocuous email to a colleague. The content is work-related, but then you also add a line asking your colleague if she’d like to go for lunch one day – the two of you always have nice chats in the kitchen, so it doesn’t feel inappropriate. When your colleague doesn’t reply, you immediately think: “I shouldn’t have pushed the bounds of the relationship. What if she’s horrified? Of course she doesn’t want to have lunch with me. She may even secretly hate me.”

This is not a rational response to an unanswered email – and the intensity of emotion is far greater than the situation actually warrants. The first step, therefore, is to recognise this: I am not reacting to the situation I’m experiencing right now – I’m reacting to something in my past.

It may be helpful to keep a note every time you experience a disproportionately strong emotional reaction. This provides you with an overview – which may help you spot recurring patterns.

Recognising a schema when it is activated also allows you to put some psychological distance between yourself and it. Instead of thinking, “She hasn’t replied to my email – she clearly can’t stand the idea of having lunch with me,” you can think, “This is my schema at work here.” And this, in turn, may enable you to step back and think: “My colleague is probably just a bit busy right now.”

There is a shift in perspective here. The schema does not reflect who you are – the schema is not you. Instead, it’s a condition that affects you, like a chronic health condition.

Significantly, you have then also identified a behaviour that perpetuates the schema: you default to assuming that you’re being rejected by other people. Now you’ve identified this pattern, you may be able to seek out evidence that contradicts it. Think about your interactions with your colleague to date: she’s always been very friendly. She makes time to chat. She initiates conversations with you. These are not the actions of someone who wants to reject you.

The next step, then, is to test the schema. So, you tell yourself: “The next time I’m chatting to my colleague in the office kitchen, I’ll ask her again if she’d like to go for lunch one day.” Potentially, she will reject your suggestion – but, given that you are already anticipating rejection, you’ll be no worse off than you are right now. And there’s always the possibility that she’ll accept.

This experiment works best if you go into it as a dispassionate observer. If you’re looking for proof that the schema is valid, then you will set yourself up to perpetuate it by filtering your colleague’s response through the schema: “She said yes, but not until she’s finished this big project she’s working on right now. That’s the kind of thing people say when they mean ‘No’ but don’t want to hurt your feelings.” So it’s important to go into the experiment as neutrally and open-mindedly as possible.

This is how you really let the past go: not by giving into it, but by testing its blueprints and then redrawing them as needed. This, too, is the lesson from Frozen: only once Elsa has genuinely learnt to give up the schemas of her past – to accept who she really is, without shame or fear, and acknowledge that she is worthy of love – is she actually able to move on. The past is in the past. Let it go.

Reframe Your Mind

Over the last six weeks, we’ve examined why the mind works in the way it does. The patterns we’ve discussed – negativity bias, rumination, avoidance, self-criticism, ambivalence and schema – are not operational flaws. Rather, they’re the features of a mind doing its best to adjust to the circumstances around it. Understanding these patterns is the first step towards recognising where they’re holding you back – and then redrawing them to serve you better.

But recognising bad habits is just the beginning. Transforming them into good habits requires cognitive tools and exercises.

These tools are what we’re offering in our new evidence-based CBT workshop, Reframe Your Mind, which launches in September. This is where the practice begins.

Coming up: Over the summer, we’ll be introducing our clinical services at Affiniti+, as well as our organisational work, our learning hub and us, through a series of short films. This is an opportunity to explore what else Affiniti+ has to offer, beyond the An Affiniti for Psychology newsletter.

Then, in September, we will launch Reframe Your Mind, our evidence-based CBT workshop.

The newsletter will return in October with a new series. We would love to hear from you. If there are topics you would like us to explore in the autumn and winter series, please do get in touch at connect@affinitiplus.com or comment below or join the conversation in our free Substack community chat at affinitiplus.substack.com

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We all recognise the feeling: the morning sun is shining and you are in bed. The day has begun – with every minute, it is slowly slipping away – and yet here you remain, comfortable in bed. You should get up. You want to get up. But you don’t.

In his 1952 painting Morning Sun, Edward Hopper illustrates that feeling. The woman in the painting faces – literally – the day. But she does not leave. She wants to go, she really does. But she’s also comfortable right here, and that comfort is a counterbalancing force, compelling her to stay. Those two competing desires – the day ahead and the comfort of bed – are both exerting equal pressure on her: an internal tug of war. And so she waits, immobile, for one of them to win.

In this series, Mind the Gap, we’re looking at how our mind can sometimes work in ways that frustrate and limit us. For example, we’ve previously examined how our mind places far greater value on criticism than on praise. And we’ve looked at how our mind thinks bad habits – such as drink, drugs and binge-eating – are good for us.

In addition, our mind can be remarkably resistant to change – even when we know that change means walking in the sunlight with the cool breeze on our limbs.

I want, I want, I want

Contemporary culture has led us to believe that anything we want is within our grasp. The Instagram-friendly practice of manifesting essentially amounts to really, really wanting something, and focusing very hard on the fact that you really want it, in the belief that this will guarantee it. Equally, there are those who believe that if new graduates earning £28,000 a year really, really wanted to get on the property ladder (average property price £270,000, or double that in London), they would just forego daily lattes and save up a deposit in no time.

In other words: if you don’t get what you want, clearly you are to blame. You lack focus or discipline – or possibly both. It’s there in expressions such as “No pain, no gain”, “Mind over matter” or “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have” – as though turning up at McDonald’s in suit and tie will automatically propel you to a management position, rather than simply to the dry cleaner.

This emphasis on focus and discipline is particularly strong when it comes to personal change. Want to be fitter, slimmer, healthier or better-read? Then make a new year’s resolution and keep it – because the only thing standing between old you and new you is sufficient willpower.

Even public-health campaigns – which harangue the public far less than Instagram influencers do – tend to assume that change relies primarily on the twin sources of information and willpower. There is a common assumption in public health that information drives change. This is linked to the belief that people act rationally when presented with the facts. So, for example, if you tell people that smoking causes heart disease, or that poor diet is linked to ill health and obesity, then people will automatically decide to give up cigarettes and ready meals.

This is patently not true: the health effects of cigarettes have been known for decades now, and yet people still smoke. If a host offers guests fruit and chocolate at dessert, it is extremely unlikely that the chocolate will remain untouched. People don’t smoke, drink or eat sugar because they are ignorant – they do it for a range of complex reasons, which can often feel entirely rational in the context of their own lives. For example, a harassed mother, holding down two jobs to support her family, may see her five-minute cigarette break as the only time in the day when she can do something purely for herself.

People who are unable to give up cigarettes, alcohol or cake do not lack either information or willpower. If changing our behaviour were as simple as making informed, common-sensical choices, then there would be no need for new year’s resolutions, diet plans and rehab centres. Instead, we would all be able to make whatever changes we wanted, whenever we wanted.

And yet this is not what happens.

Crossing the ravine

Often, we know that we want to change, and we know exactly why we want to change, and yet we still fail to follow through with action. This is because willpower is not a switch that we turn on: one minute, you’re desperate for a cigarette; flick the switch and you’re tossing the packet in the bin and never looking back. Neither does it turn off other desires: if you’re slavering over a piece of chocolate cake but decide to eat a carrot instead, this doesn’t automatically mean that you’re oblivious to the appeal of the cake, or that you won’t still be thinking about it when you’ve finished the carrot.

Rather, willpower is a desire that functions alongside other – often competing – desires. For example, you may think, “I really want to fit into my evening dress for my friend’s wedding next month” at the same time as you think, “That piece of millionaire’s shortbread looks really, really delicious, and I’m tired, so I could do with a blood-sugar hit.” Similarly, you might think, “I should drink less” and “I know this is bad for my health” at the same time as you think, “A bottle of wine helps me relax at the end of the day” and “If I stop drinking, what will happen to my social life?”

More subtly – as we discussed in an article earlier in this series – developing bad habits can be our mind’s way of avoiding an emotion that we find genuinely terrifying. For example, if you feel bored and undervalued in your current job, you may really, really want to apply for a new job – but you may also be terrified of rejection and the shame that comes with it. And so you procrastinate over a job application until you’ve missed the deadline, thus avoiding ever having to put yourself in a position where you can be rejected.

Once again, there is no shortage of willpower here: you really, really do want a better job. But you want it in the way that a person standing on one side of a deep ravine really, really wants to be on the other side. As much as you would like to leap across the chasm, you are also extremely keen not to get hurt.

Feeling ambivalent

This tug of war between competing desires is known as ambivalence. Ambivalence is when you recognise strong reasons for change – but also strong reasons not to change. You desperately want to change at the same time as you desperately want everything to stay the same.

Ambivalence is an uncomfortable place to be, your nose pressed up against two window panes simultaneously. US clinical psychologist William Miller and UK psychologist Stephen Rollnick describe it as a committee in your mind, whose members disagree on the proper course of action – and thus nothing gets done. (To Miller and Rollnick’s credit, they came up with this analogy two years before Pixar’s Inside Out was released.)

Almost all the choices we face in life involve a degree of ambivalence, usually because there is both risk of loss and opportunity for gain. Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman offers the example of a coin toss: if the coin shows heads, you win $150; if it shows tails, you lose $100. Do you take the gamble? Most people are loss averse: they won’t take the gamble, because they feel the risk of loss outweighs the potential gain. You know you will survive without an additional $150, because you are surviving in that reality right now. But the version of reality in which you are $100 poorer feels more challenging, because it is unknown – there will be things that you can afford right now that you will not be able to afford then.

In other words, losses loom larger than gains. We see the potential drawbacks for change in three-foot-high letters, surrounded by sparkly lights, as on a theatre marquee – and the benefits are like the free cast sheet: there for the taking, but only if you’re actively looking for it. So, for example, the person who drinks to manage anxiety knows that drinking is bad for their health – what they don’t know is how they will cope with their anxiety if they give up alcohol. And the person putting off applying for a new job feels viscerally the risk of rejection – this unknown risk terrifies them into inaction. The risk of staying stagnant in an unchallenging job, however, feels less terrifying – they are living that reality right now, so they know it can be borne.

Even when we know change is worthwhile – it will be good for our health, or our wellbeing, or our financial stability – it can still feel like taking an unbearable risk. Change means giving up our sense of security and stepping out into the unknown.

Pavlov’s humans

At the same time, another factor is working against desire to change: the force of habit. Our mind creates habit loops, made up of three stages. First there’s the cue: a trigger that tells the mind to initiate a behaviour. Then there’s the routine: the behaviour itself. And finally there’s the reward: the benefit that reinforces the behaviour. Essentially, our mind is like one of Pavlov’s dogs, given a dog biscuit each time it hears a bell ring, until eventually it starts drooling in anticipation at the mere sound of a bell.

This may sound like a hyperbolic analogy, but it isn’t particularly. Imagine, for example, that you decide that you spend too much time scrolling on your phone, and therefore want to cut down. You wake up in the morning and think, “Today, I will spend less time on my phone. I will look at Facebook once at lunchtime and once when I finish work, and that’s it – the rest of the time, I will give my full attention to whatever it is I’m doing, and my life will be the better for it.”

But then you’re on the sofa in the evening, and the programme you’re watching finishes, and you reach for your phone without even realising. Your finger possibly wavers over the Facebook icon, but at that point your body is already anticipating the dopamine hit of social media. It’s craving it on a visceral level, as surely as if Professor Pavlov had rung his bell. The cue-routine-reward cycle has been set into motion without any conscious thought – and, in fact, despite your conscious decision to avoid it. What you want is irrelevant; your context has become the emotional trigger for action.

Breaking the impasse

The image of an internal committee meeting in your mind (Pixar colours optional) is instructive here. Imagine that the committee has been tasked with setting up a fundraising activity. One half of its members want a bake sale; the other half wants a sponsored bike ride. Because they can’t agree, they simply shout “Bake sale!” and “Bike ride!” at one another, and no money is ever raised.

Ambivalence sets up a dichotomy: you want to achieve two incompatible goals, so something has to give. One side has to concede to the other. Immediately, therefore, both sides of the inner committee dig their heels in: why should they be the ones to give in? A bake sale is better than a bike ride. Comforting behaviour patterns are better than change.

There is, however, a way to break this impasse: reframing how we view it. Reframing how we view difficult situations is very much at the core of Reframe Your Mind, our CBT workshop launching in September. There, we will be using evidence-based techniques to help you break your mind’s bad habits.

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is one such technique, used when we feel ourselves frozen by ambivalence. ACT does not insist that one side or the other needs to give in – it does not force you to choose between your ambitions for change and the advantages of your current behaviour patterns. Instead of asking “Bake sale or bike ride?”, ACT asks a different question: “What matters to me?”

This shifts the focus of the committee from “How do I avoid ending up with a sponsored bike ride?” to “I want to raise money for a good cause.“ The broader disagreement may still be there: you are not attempting to solve it immediately. Instead, you are simply redirecting your focus back to the reason you’re having the committee meeting in the first place.

The key is the differentiation between goals and values. A goal is “I want to run a half-marathon.” The underlying value is: “I love hiking in the mountains, and want to be able to continue to do that as I grow older.” Then, instead of thinking, “I should go for a run in the rain – but my sofa is so comfortable right now,” you think: “I don’t really want to go for a run in the rain, but if I know that regular exercise will allow me to live the life I want.”

And then you ask yourself the next question: “What is the smallest possible action I can take today to move towards what really matters to me?” You don’t need to go for a 10km run in the rain – but how about a 2km run, just to get your heart rate going?

Rather than forcing a choice, you acknowledge the ambivalence – and then focus on the bigger picture. The question, therefore, is not: “How can I stop feeling anxious?” Instead, it is: “How I still continue to do what matters to me, despite my anxiety?”

Trying to eliminate anxiety before taking any action requires dramatic change – which can feel impossible. Instead, nod politely to your anxiety, raise your hat, wish it good day and then work around it. Allow your values, rather than your need for comfort, to dictate your behaviour. Subtle change is change nonetheless.

Coming up: Reframe Your Mind – our evidence-based CBT workshop – launches in September. This is where the practice begins.

Next week: Why your past keeps showing up in your present

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A shadow is passing over the woman in this picture. It is a literal shadow: the sun is behind her, obscuring her face. But it is also a metaphorical shadow: she is on the bed, alone, her thoughts dark.

In Hotel Room, artist Edward Hopper painted the oppressiveness of the woman’s thoughts into her posture, and into the breath-holding stillness of the room.

We have all experienced the kinds of thoughts that cast us into darkness. Some herald sadness or loneliness. Others beat and harangue us in our solitude: “Idiot. Loser. Stupid. Why did you do that?” These thoughts are never spoken out loud, so they cannot be modified or mitigated by anyone else. Instead, we hunch, like the woman in Hotel Room, under their weight.

The inner school bully

“Hey, loser. When was the last time you actually exercised? Lifting a Big Mac to your face doesn’t count.”

If a friend spoke to us like this, we’d be very quick to label them toxic and cut them off. If a schoolmate spoke to our child like this, we’d report them for bullying. And yet apparently it’s not only acceptable, but actively desirable, to speak to ourselves that way.

In this series, Mind the Gap, we’re looking at how our mind works – and how sometimes it doesn’t work in the ways that we’d expect. For example, we’ve looked at why our mind thinks that ruminating about a problem is a route to a solution – even as it goes around and around in endless circles.

But, equally, sometimes we misjudge what our mind needs. For example, people often assume that our mind needs to be bullied into recognising failure and accepting change.

Take, for example, US athlete and motivational speaker David Goggins. In his 2018 book, Can’t Hurt Me, he argues that people benefit from confronting their own inadequacies. His “accountability mirror” exercise involves writing self-criticism on Post-It notes and sticking them to the mirror, thus bringing the full gulag experience to your very own bathroom.

The premise is that being hard on yourself – or “brutally honest”, as advocates of the technique would style it – drives improvement. Self-criticism thus becomes a way of letting yourself know that you’re not living up to your own standards, and of encouraging yourself to do better.

Like many extreme ideas, the notion that a regime of self-flagellation is good for you begins with a kernel of truth. Making mistakes does indeed offer an opportunity to learn; recognising your weaknesses is often the first step towards improving on them. But the gulf between “Ouch. My head hurts. I should probably limit myself to two glasses of wine on a weeknight” and “You’re nothing but an embarrassing lush with no sense of self-control” is wide and psychologically significant.

Bludgeoned by criticism

In 2010, UK clinical psychologist Paul Gilbert proposed that there are three systems that affect how we regulate our emotions: the threat system, the drive system and the soothing system. The drive system helps us to pursue goals; the soothing system comforts us.

And the threat system is designed to detect danger; it also triggers anxiety and shame. This is our dominant system: it is the reason why one piece of negative feedback always rings louder than the five compliments that preceded it – as discussed in an article earlier in this series.

We can be threatened by external objects: a hungry lion blocking the exit to the living room, for example. But we can also be threatened by our own emotions: if you’re worried there might be a hungry lion in the living room, that worry can activate your threat system, raising your heart rate and blood pressure, and releasing stress hormones.

As humans, we’re social beings. We therefore feel threat particularly keenly when it risks undermining our social status. We need to belong; we need to believe that we are attractive to other people. Social judgement leads to shame, embarrassment and, above all, fear of rejection. Therefore, if you tell yourself, “You’re a useless coward. You should be preparing to fight the lion in the living room with your bare hands, not cowering in the corner like a baby,” your mind will hear that criticism as a threat. Someone is attacking you; someone is undermining your social status. The fact that this someone is you makes no difference whatsoever: as far as your mind is concerned, criticism is a threat, regardless of its source.

This fear is reflected physiologically. When we believe that we are being judged by others, our levels of cortisol – the stress hormone – rise. When we tell ourselves that we are a useless coward, we are reflecting how we assume others see us. And thus our cortisol levels rise, whether the criticism comes from an internal or an external source.

This stress affects our decision-making processes. The brain acts as though it is processing pain. It reduces exploratory behaviour: learning, creativity and risk-taking are all impaired, and instead the mind focuses all its energy on surviving.

Leaving self-flagellatory notes on the bathroom mirror, therefore, will not motivate you to go out, meet the day head on and generally become your best self. Instead, bludgeoning yourself over the head with criticism has the same effect as any other form of bludgeoning: it leaves you abject, cowering and unable to function effectively.

A compassionate friend

Imagine that a friend is floundering. Perhaps she’s been made redundant and is struggling to find a new job. She’s sent off application after application, but has yet to be invited for an interview. Would you say to her, “You’re just a useless good-for-nothing. Why didn’t you notice that spelling mistake in your last application? It’s like you don’t even want to find a job. At this rate, you’ll never work again”?

Of course you wouldn’t. Instead, you’d sit your friend down with a cup of tea and a slice of cake. “It’s tough out there right now,” you’d say. “And it’s stressful applying for a job when you don’t already have one. You’re under a lot of pressure. You need to be ultra-assiduous about checking for errors – though it can be hard to spot them when you’ve read through a document too many times. Would you like me to cast an eye over any applications before you send them off?”

In other words, you would show a friend compassion. And if it’s the right way to treat a friend, then surely it’s the right way to treat yourself, too.

Self-compassion involves sitting with your own pain, as you would with a friend’s. Instead of trying to chivvy or bully yourself out of a feeling of failure or inadequacy, take a more understanding, supportive approach. Self-compassion can be tender or nurturing, but it can also be fierce and powerful, aimed at meeting our needs, protecting our interests and motivating change.

What is self-compassion?

US psychologist Kristin Neff breaks self-compassion down into three constituent parts: self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness.

Self-kindness involves acknowledging our shortcomings, but not allowing them to affect our sense of self-worth. It’s about looking after ourselves through any distress we experience, and taking steps to ease our discomfort – not because we feel inadequate, but because we care. We validate, support and encourage ourselves.

Common humanity is about remembering that we are not uniquely incompetent. It can be tempting, when we fail, to think that we’re the only ones who are struggling – that we’re malfunctioning, while everyone else is in perfect working order. We worry that we’re somehow abnormal – and worry exacerbates the original sense of failure. In fact, being human means facing challenges and being vulnerable. We are all imperfect.

In order to have compassion for ourselves, we also need to be willing to recognise our own pain. Mindfulness – the third strand of self-compassion – is a balanced awareness that neither avoids nor exaggerates the discomfort we’re experiencing. Unless we acknowledge our pain, we can’t respond compassionately to it. But, equally, if we become too absorbed by our pain, we’re not able to step outside it and achieve the perspective needed to care for ourselves.

Beyond mollycoddling

For some, this all sounds very sensible in principle, but no more scientific than a L’Oréal advert (“Because I’m worth it”). Others are more sceptical: isn’t it just mollycoddling and self-indulgence? And surely it undermines motivation: if you spend all your time patting yourself on the head and murmuring “There, there. It’s not so bad,” what will you actually achieve in life?

But self-indulgence is very different from self-compassion. Eating ice cream three times a day is self-indulgent. Self-compassion is recognising that you’re upset and you like ice cream, so having ice cream for dessert today might make you feel better.

In fact, self-indulgence is the opposite of self-compassion: eating ice cream three times a day will cause you harm. So will smoking or drinking to excess. Self-compassion, meanwhile, is associated with smoking less, eating healthily, exercising regularly and having safe sex. As a result, people who practise self-compassion tend to have better physical health than those who don’t. They sleep better and have stronger immune systems and lower cortisol levels. If you care about yourself, you’re more likely to take care of yourself.

Similarly, far from encouraging laziness, self-compassion enhances motivation. Self-compassion motivates people to work on weaknesses and improve performance. If you acknowledge and own your mistakes, it is much easier to examine where you went wrong, apologise where appropriate, modify your actions and try again. Removing shame and self-recrimination makes change and renewed attempts much easier.

Far more than self-criticism, self-compassion is a strong starting point for improvement. It is much easier to accept and acknowledge your mistakes when you view them as an inevitable part of being human, rather than proof of personal inadequacy. When a mistake is just that – a mistake you made because you’re human – then there is no need for defensiveness, denial or shame. Nor is there a need to castigate yourself or ruminate over your unique bad luck. Instead, you simply examine your actions, learn from what went wrong and try again.

Feeling safe and at peace

Self-compassion also activates the soothing system, one of the three regulatory systems defined by Paul Gilbert, as laid out above. When a baby or infant is distressed because of hunger, cold or pain, they can be regulated by their parent’s touch. This reduces stress, enabling the child to relax and sleep. The parent stimulates the child’s soothing system, reducing any sense of threat. These are the emotional memories activated by self-compassion: they make us feel safe and at peace. This is a far more effective place from which to motivate yourself to improve than one of attack and threat.

Your mind is not a recalcitrant mule, that needs to be yanked, beaten and cajoled into pastures new. Neither is it an army recruit, to be broken down with criticism in order to be malleable. A mind under threat cannot adapt: it can only cower in fear and shame.

Instead, think of your mind as a plant, that needs nourishment and care. If you beat it and neglect it, it will wither and shrink. But if you feed it, water it and tend to it, then it will flourish. Given the right conditions, your mind will grow and grow. Which is a sentiment worth writing on a Post-It note and sticking to your mirror.

Coming up: Reframe Your Mind – our evidence-based CBT workshop – launches in September. This is where the practice begins.

Next week: Why change is so hard – and why self-discipline is not the answer

A note from the community

Our free Substack community chat is open to everyone – whether you are watching the Podnotes So You Want To Be A Psychologist series, available in full across YouTube, Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music, exploring the ideas in our An Affiniti for Psychology articles or are simply curious about psychology and what it means to do this work well. It’s free – and we read everything and respond.

The conversation is already happening. Come and find us at: affinitiplus.substack.com

Sometimes fear limits us.

In Gas, the 1940 painting by Edward Hopper, an attendant stands at a petrol station. On the other side of the road is a dark forest. The earth of the forest floor is softer underfoot than the tarmac of the forecourt. The forest teems with life unseen; birds and animals thrive in its depths. At the petrol station, there is only the single attendant, alone with his pumps.

Does the attendant prefer the tarmac and artificial lights of the petrol station to the abundant wildlife of the woods? No: he’d love to walk barefoot in the woods. But the forest is dark and unknown; entering requires courage and a willingness to confront fear. So the attendant stays on the forecourt.

This may feel like a self-defeating decision. But the human mind specialises in such decisions.: we smoke, we drink too much, we doom scroll and we stay in unsatisfying jobs.

In this series, Mind the Gap, we’re looking at how our mind works – and how sometimes it can work in ways that frustrate and limit us. For example, we’ve previously examined how our mind will focus on the negative – whether an insult, a piece of feedback or an honest mistake – at the expense of the positive. Similarly, our mind exerts control through behaviours that show all the hallmarks of a lack of control: eating a tub of ice cream in one sitting, binge drinking every evening or procrastinating endlessly, so that nothing gets done.

These are not, however, behaviours that reflect a lack of discipline or willpower. They are the mind reacting logically to threat.

Experiential avoidance

When life presents us with hazards, we take steps to mitigate them. If you know that taking the train to work during a heatwave will be uncomfortable and potentially dangerous, you may well make the decision to work from home if you can. If you’re building a school and want to make sure you keep the children safe, you ensure that the upper-storey windows only open a small amount. You know that watching horror films gives you nightmares, so you choose not to watch horror films. These are all entirely logical avoidance strategies.

But what if there’s not a tangible danger, just a sense of fear? People who are claustrophobic may know, rationally, that taking the lift doesn’t pose any real danger to them. And yet they still choose to avoid their fear and take the stairs. Someone who is scared of dogs may know beyond a shadow of doubt that their friend’s cockapoo is not going to maul them. But they still choose not to let it into their home, so as to avoid having to confront their own fear.

Fear is not the only emotion we prefer to avoid. If the idea of having to rush through an airport to catch a plane makes you anxious, you may make a point of arriving at the airport three hours before your flight, to minimise your anxiety. If you’re lonely, you put the TV on – or, better, make plans to go out – to avoid sitting with your sense of loneliness.

This strategy appears even more logical when we look at how emotions are modelled to us, from early childhood onwards. The squalling baby is picked up and jiggled until she stops crying. The toddler who is in tears because she scraped her knee is offered an ice cream to distract her from her distress. We are taught from infancy to suppress our emotional responses, rather than to sit with them and experience them.

When the parent says to the toddler, “Calm down – you’re fine. Would you like an ice cream?” what the toddler learns is that she should be fine. Sadness is not okay; it needs to disappear. She internalises that need to eliminate pain: “I should not be feeling this.”

Decades later, that toddler is an adult who has been passed over for promotion at work. She has forced a rictus smile and congratulated her more successful colleague. But still she feels an overwhelming sadness and disappointment – and a creeping sense that she just isn’t good enough. Since childhood, she has internalised the idea that sadness is shameful. It’s not enough not to show disappointment; she mustn’t feel it, either. And so she goes out after work and knocks back a succession of happy-hour cocktails, until she can no longer remember what sadness feels like. She knows that she will wake up in the morning with a monster headache. She knows that she will struggle to meet her deadlines the next day. She doesn’t even particularly like cocktails. But, in the moment, none of these concerns is enough to counter the desperate, primal need not to feel sad.

In psychological terms, this is known as experiential avoidance: taking steps to avoid experiencing uncomfortable emotions, such as sadness, anxiety, shame or loneliness. Rather than sitting with the emotion – however uncomfortable – and allowing it to run its course, you try to escape it.

The danger that isn’t

But avoiding an unwelcome emotion is not so easily done. Last week, we looked at how trying to avoid thinking about something only makes you think about it more often. If you tell yourself not to think about how disappointed you are, for example, all you’ll be able to think about is how disappointed you are.

Instead, therefore, people seek distraction from the unwanted emotion: their own version of the ice cream offered to the distressed toddler. Food is as effective for adults as it is for children: there is a reason that sitting on the sofa with a tub of ice cream is a cliché of onscreen break-ups. Equally, someone wanting to escape the loneliness of a life without meaningful friendships may spend evening after evening scrolling on social media or having sex with strangers. A person trying to shake off the profound shame of feeling unwanted by his parents may find relief in drugs or alcohol. The behaviours may differ, but the psychological aim is the same: avoiding an unwanted internal experience.

Avoidance is the mind’s most efficient short-term response to anxiety and discomfort, because it leads to instant relief: “If I have a glass of wine when I’m feeling anxious, I immediately feel more relaxed.” That relief then reinforces the effectiveness of the strategy: the next time you feel the stirrings of the unwelcome emotion, you immediately reach for a bottle of wine – or a tub of ice cream, or social media, or Tinder, or heroin – and feel the same relief.

It’s worth noting that there are reasons other than experiential avoidance for doing things that are bad for us. Someone who eats an entire packet of biscuits in one sitting may simply be very hungry. Someone who spends an evening on social media may – as we explored in an article earlier this year – be addicted to the dopamine spike it provides. Drinking too much wine can be a social experience or a way of regulating emotion at the end of a difficult day. Experiential avoidance is one of the risk factors for addiction, but there are several possible routes there.

Behaviours that facilitate experiential avoidance can be far more damaging than the original emotion being avoided. At its most extreme, it can be like a person with a fear of dogs jumping into shark-infested water to escape their friend’s cockapoo. The pain of being eaten by sharks is only hypothetical at this point; the pain of confronting your fear of dogs is active and real.

This may seem irrational, but it isn’t. As far as your mind is concerned, it faces a mortal danger, in the form of the emotion it does not want to confront. Thus the avoidant behaviour becomes either a lifejacket – something you wear to anticipate and protect yourself from this mortal danger – or a lifebelt: something you cling to, in order to survive the danger. Because you believe that the floatation device is the only thing keeping you alive, you cling on ever tighter.

But here’s the twist: the water isn’t actually that deep. If you were to stand up, you’d discover that it only comes up to your chest. You were never in any real danger to begin with.

Confronting discomfort

This is the conundrum: you believe that the avoidant behaviour is protecting you from danger. But it’s actually preventing you from testing whether or not you are at risk. In other words: you continue to believe that you need a lifejacket because of your continued belief that you need a life jacket. You’re caught in an endless doom loop in which your fear of anticipated danger becomes more terrifying than the danger itself.

For example, imagine that your fear of rejection is preventing you from applying for any new jobs. Friends and former colleagues send you adverts for relevant jobs that they believe you’re qualified for. But your fear of rejection means that you procrastinate and procrastinate until – oops – the application deadline has passed. And, meanwhile, you’re stagnating in a job that no longer stretches you, and where your line manager doesn’t appreciate your skills.

But, in reality, what’s the worst that could happen? Yes, you could be rejected without an interview, and you’d have to deal with the resulting pain – but you’re already anticipating that already. It’s very unlikely that the reality will be worse than your worst fears. In addition, the fact that real-life rejection is less painful than you’d anticipated would make it much easier for you to apply for another job, and then another and another – until, finally, someone offers you a job. The supposed cure for the pain of rejection – procrastination – is the very thing that’s preventing you from healing.

The problem is not that you don’t know what you need to do. We all know that applying for a new job is the way to escape a job we don’t enjoy. We all know that eating a tub of ice cream a night, drinking to excess or taking hard drugs is bad for us. The problem is that facing up to an emotion you would rather avoid is very, very uncomfortable. So we avoid the discomfort – because rational people will always choose comfort over discomfort.

Exposure therapy

An effective way of treating a specific phobia – such as fear of spiders or of snakes – is to expose the phobic person to the object of their fear. This activates their fear response – but also shows the person with the phobia that they can survive the encounter. They no longer need to do everything they can to escape from the snake or the spider.

A similar technique of exposure can help people modify their relationship to their own emotions. Exposure is one of the evidence-based techniques that we will be exploring in Reframe Your Mind, our CBT workshop launching in September.

Exposure therapy is a particularly powerful technique, because it harnesses a person’s own experience to change their relationship to the emotion they’ve been avoiding. Say, for example, you never speak in company-wide meetings, because you’re worried that you will blush and stutter, and then everyone in the company will think you’re incompetent. No amount of reassurance will be as effective as the experience of raising your hand in the next company-wide meeting, blushing and stuttering your way through the point you want to make, and finding that nobody appears to notice your awkwardness. In fact, a couple of people come over to you afterwards and compliment you on the point you made.

And, most importantly, you have survived. You stayed with your fear and anxiety in the moment, rather than avoiding it, and you survived.

The underlying emotion – the fear, anxiety or loneliness – may not disappear. But, over time, you learn that it is bearable. Gradually, this weakens the link between discomfort and avoidance, so that your behaviour is no longer dictated by a need for avoidance. You learn to live with the emotion, rather than treating it as something that needs to be escaped from – and then organising your behaviour around the need to make that escape.

The goal is not to feel better immediately: the emotion will be uncomfortable, and staying with it in the moment will cause you discomfort. Rather, the goal is to learn that you can tolerate the emotion. Despite the discomfort, you can feel the emotion – and you can survive.

Next week: Why self-criticism isn’t self-motivation – and what being hard on yourself actually does.

Coming up: In September, we’ll be launching Reframe Your Mind, our evidence-based CBT workshop, designed to help you tackle negative thinking. This is where the practice begins.

A note from the community

Our free Substack community chat is open to everyone – whether you are viewing the Podnotes So You Want To Be A Psychologist series, exploring the ideas in our An Affiniti for Psychology articles or are simply curious about psychology and what it means to do this work well. It’s free – and we read everything and respond.

The conversation is already happening. Come and find us at: affinitiplus.substack.com

Edward Hopper’s 1932 painting Room in New York invites the viewer to look through an open window, to the domestic scene within. Our eye is drawn inwards, through the window to the brightly lit interior.

But something similar is happening to the two people we are viewing, too. Just as our eye is drawn inwards, so the people in the painting are being pulled inwards. They are sitting in a room together, but they appear entirely unaware of one another. Each is in their own world – their thoughts drawn away from the present moment and into the interior of their own mind.

In this series, Mind the Gap, we’re looking at how our mind works – and why it doesn’t always work the way you want it to. For example, we can be sitting in a pleasant room with a person we love, and yet our mind will be drawn irresistibly away, ruminating over a source of past upset or regret. This rumination is often at the expense of the present and our mental health – and yet we can’t stop.

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Staring at an apple

Imagine you live near an orchard of apple trees. On the tree closest to your home, there is an enormous apple: red, round and juicy-looking. But it’s growing too high for you to reach, even with a ladder. So, unable to eat it, you return to the orchard every day, sit underneath the tree, gaze up at the apple and think about how you’re not able to reach it.

You’re aware that around you, other people are strolling through the orchard, stopping at the other trees and emerging with arms full of ripe apples. But this just makes you feel all the more acutely the sting of not being able to reach the apple you want – and, once again, your thoughts return to the fact that you will never be able to taste that deliciously juicy apple.

This is rumination. Rumination entails thinking about your distress – and the causes and consequences of that distress – in a passive, repetitive way. It can look deceptively like problem-solving: isn’t the person staring up at the apple thinking of new ways to reach it? But, one day, a man comes into the orchard and stares at the apple with you for an hour. Then he brings out a saw and a plank of wood, and carves out a very long pole with wooden hook at one end. He uses the hook to reach up to the highest point of the tree and pull the apple off. Then he picks up the apple and walks away, crunching into it as he passes you.

That man was problem-solving. You were simply staring at an apple.

Ruminating on the problem

Rumination is a cycle of regret. People return to their perceived failures again and again: “Why did I do that?”; “I’ll never have what I want”; “I ruined my one chance.” Often, rumination circles a perceived source of social distress: “Did I offend them?”; “Why haven’t they replied to my email?”; “Do they secretly dislike me?” Or it can home in on a perceived wrong, magnifying the sense of grievance: “They treated me awfully”; “Why did this happen to me?”

But rumination is not simply replaying what happened to you; it can also involve analysing how you feel about what happened: “Why can’t I just get over it?” or “What’s wrong with me?” When rumination focuses on who you are, rather than on external events or interactions – “I’m a failure”; “Everyone else is able to achieve this, but I can’t” – it’s known as brooding. This is one of the most toxic forms of rumination.

Rumination is strongly linked to depression. People who ruminate, focusing on how they feel, why they feel that way and what it means for them, tend to remain depressed for longer than people who take action to distract themselves from their symptoms.

Swamp of regret

Put that way, the solution appears to be fairly straightforward. If people who distract themselves from rumination experience shorter-lived depression, then clearly everyone should just distract themselves from rumination. In other words: snap out of it.

This, of course, is easier said than done. Rumination is not a bad habit you can snap out of – rather, it is a cognitive pattern that can be remarkably persistent. US psychologists Leonard Martin and Abraham Tesser argue that rumination results when people fail to make progress towards an important goal. The mind treats the goal as an unsolved problem, and thus returns repeatedly to it. For example, if your goal is a long-term relationship, and your partner has just broken up with you, your mind returns again and again to that failed relationship. What could you have done differently? Could you have somehow prevented the break up? Are you doomed to a lifetime of failed relationships?

Clearly, ruminating over a failed relationship will not help you to get over the break up and meet someone new. No matter how many times you circle it, the view stays the same – and going around and around will just make you dizzy.

But from the mind’s perspective, it is solving an intractable problem. After all, in most other contexts – such as exercising or practising a musical instrument – focused, repeated activity is a route to achieving a goal. And so ruminative thought feels productive, even while it mires you in a swamp of regret and prevents you from moving on.

What happens then is that this swamp of regret becomes your mind’s safe place. Yes, it smells. Yes, there are mosquitos. And alligators. But it’s also familiar, and therefore comforting. Your mind may have initially started ruminating because it thought it was a way of solving a problem or making sense of a setback. But, eventually, rumination becomes an automatic response. Your mind goes back there because it feels safe, comfortable and necessary. Rumination becomes a learned cognitive habit – until every negative mood triggers the same ruminative response.

This is then compounded by the mind’s innate negativity bias – discussed in last week’s article. We remember our failures and the criticism we receive much more vividly than the successes and praise. So, for example, a person ruminating over a failed relationship would be able to retrieve memory after memory of times when they’d let down their partner – thus perpetuating the cycle of recrimination.

Don’t think of a white bear

The other reason that it can be so hard to snap out of a rumination cycle is that this would necessarily mean shutting down any damaging thoughts as soon as they arise. However, it is extremely hard to suppress a thought.

In a 1987 study, four US psychologists asked volunteers to try not to think of a white bear while verbalising a stream of consciousness for five minutes. If volunteers did think of a white bear, they were instructed to ring a bell.

The volunteers rang the bell repeatedly – and also mentioned a white bear during their stream-of-consciousness monologue. They were unable to suppress the thought as instructed. Next, these volunteers, alongside a new set of participants, were asked to think about a white bear for five minutes. The first set of volunteers, who had previously been asked to suppress all thoughts of white bears, subsequently thought of the bear more often during a second stream-of-consciousness period than those volunteers who had not been asked to suppress any bear-related thoughts.

When we try not to think about something, we activate a monitoring process in our mind that searches for the unwanted thought, in order to confirm that it has been suppressed. Essentially, a thought-police officer is wandering around our mind with a torch, checking under the beds and behind the cupboards and saying, “Any white bears here? No white bears in the kitchen – how about the bathroom?” The act of searching for the thought keeps it active.

This process transfers directly to rumination. If you tell yourself, “Don’t think about the fact that my boss keeps undermining me and I feel frustrated and unrecognised at work,” the thought-police officer will immediately start plastering your mind with “Wanted” posters for this thought – and then its mugshots are everywhere you look.

Constructive and unconstructive thoughts

It’s important to note that not all repetitive thoughts are equally unproductive. Some can be constructive. In the orchard example at the start of this article, for example, the second person came and sat staring at the apple, too. The difference was that his repetitive thoughts were linear, rather than cyclical: they had a beginning (thinking), a middle (deciding to carve a long hook) and an end (reaching the apple and eating it). In psychological terms, these three stages – reflection, planning and problem-solving – are elements of a constructive thought process. They are associated with recovery from upset, improved performance and better physical and mental health.

Constructive thoughts tend to take place at a concrete level: “What happened here? What do I want the outcome to be? What can I do next to achieve that outcome?” So, in the case of the unreachable apple, the second person thinks: “That apple is growing out of my reach. I want to eat that apple. What can I do to achieve that outcome?”

If the repetition helps to close the gap between you and your goal, then it is constructive. If the thought doesn’t help you to reach your goal, but instead keeps you focused endlessly on your failure to achieve it, then it is unconstructive.

Unconstructive, ruminative thoughts take place at an abstract level: they are about emotion, rather than action. So the first person in the apple orchard is not actually thinking about how to reach the apple. Instead, their thought process is: “Why am I so uniquely unlucky that the one apple I want is growing out of reach? Everyone else manages to find the apples they want – why can’t I?” This focuses on the grievance, without ever reaching – or even proposing – a solution.

Breaking the cycle

But if rumination is so powerful and persistent, and trying to think of something else only makes the problem worse, then how do we break the cycle?

One strategy that has been shown to help is scheduled worry time. Scheduled worry time is one of the evidence-based techniques that we explore in Reframe Your Mind, our CBT workshop launching in September.

The technique is straightforward. Essentially, you set aside time each day – or each week, as needed – to worry. You allocate, for example, 15 minutes a day for rumination (not just before bed). You set a timer, worry for the scheduled period – and then allow yourself to move on at the end. If it feels too soon and your mind wants to go back to the unresolved issue, you can remind yourself that you will be able to come back to the thought tomorrow, and the day after that. But for now, you’re putting the thought away and moving on with other things.

Importantly, you don’t need to challenge your worries or change the way you think about them. And you shouldn’t try to replace them with positive thoughts. Instead, simply control the time and place in which you ruminate.

Rumination, as we’ve seen, can become the mind’s comfortable place of retreat. It becomes automatic, rather than deliberate – a default response to almost any cue. Scheduling worry time, however, tracks down roaming thoughts and corrals them into one place. Then the rumination no longer controls you: you control it. It works to your schedule. Gradually, the aim is to reduce the duration and frequency of the periods of rumination, until you are able to phase them out altogether.

Struggling to control rumination is not a sign of weakness or ill-discipline – it is a sign of the intractability of the problem. As so often with mental health, it helps to draw an analogy with physical health. If you cut your arm, and that cut doesn’t heal as it should, it does not reveal anything at all about your moral character – but it may reveal that you’re not treating the wound correctly.

So, too with rumination. Breaking its cycle doesn’t require unusual willpower or moral fortitude – it just requires the right treatment.

Coming up: In September, we’ll be launching Reframe Your Mind, our evidence-based CBT workshop, designed to help you tackle negative thinking. This is where the practice begins.

Next week: Why we do things that are bad for us – even though we know we shouldn’t.

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It’s the glove that’s striking. The young woman in Edward Hopper’s 1927 painting Automat has removed only one of her gloves.

Has she noticed? Apparently not. She appears to be lost in thought, barely registering her current surroundings. Whatever is occupying her mind is occupying it entirely, to the exclusion of all else.

This article marks the beginning of a new series, Mind the Gap, which looks at how our mind works. In particular, we will examine why your mind doesn’t always work in the way you want it to – why, for example, you might find yourself in a diner late at night, barely noticing that you’ve only removed one glove, your thoughts instead endlessly replaying an incident from earlier in the day.

Negativity bias

You’re on a date, and it’s going well. But because you’re nervous – maybe because it seems to be going so well – you make one ill-judged remark: a joke that isn’t funny, or a comment that definitely isn’t intended to be insulting, but could potentially be misinterpreted that way. At home afterwards, which do you focus on: all the comments that made your date laugh? Or the one remark that made you cringe?

Or you’re at work, sending an important email to your boss. The email includes data that you’ve collected, analysed and laboured over: the fruit of months’ work. But it also includes the word “your” where you meant “you’re”. Which do you focus on: the hard work and pristine data, or the fact that your boss may now think you don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re”?

These questions are hypothetical, because we all know the answer: we focus on the negative, to the exclusion of the positive. The power of the negative is unequivocal and overwhelming.

This tendency to notice, learn from and remember negative information more readily than positive is called negativity bias. This concept is perhaps best summed up by the title of an academic paper on the subject, published in 2001: Bad is Stronger than Good. The authors of this paper found that the negative outweighs the positive in all aspects of human experience. Bad parents have a greater impact on their children than good parents; bad feedback makes a bigger impression than praise. Losing £50 feels worse than winning £50. A break-up affects our mood and sense of self-worth far more than the relationship that came before it.

We’re quicker to form bad impressions than good ones – and they’re harder to shed once formed. We’re also more motivated by bad than good: we care more about avoiding bad labels than about pursuing good ones. “She’s honest,” for example, is a welcome compliment. But “He’s dishonest” has much more power and hits much harder: not being labelled “dishonest” is a far more pressing imperative than being labelled “honest”.

Essentially, if you put a good item on one side of a scale and a bad item on the other, the scale will always tip in favour of the bad.

Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup

Negativity bias, however, sets up a false dichotomy. It suggests that circumstances are either bad or good: that you find £50 and lose £50, and that these are discrete events, even if they happen to the same person, on the same day.

In reality, positive and negative elements tend to intermingle, as part of the same experience. Imagine, for example, that you are on holiday at a five-star hotel. Lying on the bed feels like sleeping on a cloud; the shower is the size of your living room at home; the staff anticipate your every need; the meals are an explosion of taste and flavour. But also: every morning, when the breakfast waiter brings round a pot of coffee, he casually spits in it before pouring it for you.

When you return, a friend asks whether you’d recommend that hotel. What do you say?

Taken at face value, the number of positive elements here (bed; shower; staff; meals) are greater than the number of negative elements (spit). If you were describing something neutral with those proportions – for example, a house with four blue walls and one yellow roof – you’d err on the side of the numerically greater: “The blue house over there,” rather than “The yellow house”.

But it doesn’t work that way with negative experiences: you’d be very unlikely to say, “It was an excellent hotel and I’d wholeheartedly recommend it,” even though four out of the five elements were indeed excellent. Instead, you’d say, “Don’t go there – the waiters spit in your coffee.” The one negative contaminates the entire experience. Or to put it another way: if there’s a fly in your soup, it doesn’t make the soup slightly worse – it makes it inedible.

This is known as negativity dominance. Negativity dominance is the reason that a single incident of violent or sexual abuse can undo many of the benefits of an otherwise stable upbringing and happy life. By contrast, it is highly unlikely that a single positive event could cancel out the harm caused by a lifetime of violent or sexual abuse.

Similarly, negativity dominance is the reason that if a friend mentions someone who is intelligent, funny, talented, generous and a compulsive liar, your follow-up question is not “Great. What kind of talents does he have?” The one moral transgression cancels out the virtues.

Avoiding tigers

Social media is full of people – largely unqualified – proposing cures for negativity bias and negativity dominance. In 2020, while those who weren’t in hospital with Covid were locked down in their homes, the phrase “I am thankful for…” went viral on social media. More recently, in 2024, posts referencing “What a privilege” were receiving more than 200,000 likes on Instagram and TikTok. So: “What a privilege to be exhausted after a really long day at work” or “What a privilege to have a home I need to hoover.”

The implication in both instances is that negative thinking is a personal failing: a habit to be broken or a weakness to be overcome. At worst, it could be a sign that something is wrong with you – that you’re somehow lacking. If you were only more resilient and practised gratitude more often, you’d be less upset about the fact that your roof is leaking, your boss is a nightmare and your marriage is slowly imploding.

But negative thinking is not a character flaw. It’s an evolutionary imperative. Our brain has evolved, as US psychologist and author Rick Hanson put it rather pithily, to be “Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good”, because that is historically what kept us alive.

The earliest humans had very basic needs: food, water, shelter and an absence of threat. If those four needs were met, then they could survive and thrive. These needs, however, were not equal. Imagine that a band of early humans found a new cave to live, near a clear brook and a meadow full of juicy-looking deer – but that cave was already home to a sabre-tooth tiger nursing her cubs. If their response was, “Well, three out of four ain’t bad – let’s set up home in this cave, anyway,” the chances are they wouldn’t be around to enjoy the benefits of the clear water and plentiful venison.

The negatives mattered for our early ancestors, because threats were mortal. By contrast, if they ignored a positive – if they decided not to gather berries at the first blackberry bush they saw, perhaps because a wild boar had taken up residence nearby – chances were that they would come across other blackberry bushes before their hunger reached mortally dangerous proportions. When human existence is determined by the ability to survive external threats, nature will select those people who fixate disproportionately on the negative.

It’s important to note that the evolutionary benefit of negativity bias is not – for obvious reasons – a directly observable historical claim, nor can it be tested under controlled conditions. So this theory cannot be proven scientifically – but it remains a plausible explanation.

The problem for us today is that the human brain has not updated its threat-detection system to reflect our new reality. Instead, it treats every awkward social exchange or slightly negative workplace appraisal as though it were about to gouge out our flesh with its tusks.

Naming the boar

It would be handy if understanding negativity bias immediately vaporised it – if we were able to say, “There is no angry boar – only an email I accidentally cc-ed to the wrong person. It will not kill me,” and immediately go about our day with no worry whatsoever.

This will not happen. Chances are you will always fixate disproportionately on the fact that you wrote an email about whether or not Jon from accounts fancies you and then accidentally sent it to your boss. In fact, that fixation is no bad thing – it will stop you from doing the same thing again.

But being aware of what’s going on changes your relationship to it. Putting emotions – or, indeed, cognitive biases and states of mind – into words can affect the extent to which we experience them.

Understanding, therefore, is the first step towards recovering control. When you remind yourself that your mind is not betraying you – that it’s simply doing what it was trained to do, and doing it well – it’s easier to live comfortably with your own reactions. Instead of feeling trapped by your mind’s responses, you can step back and observe them: “I see what you’re doing here. And I understand why.” In other words: naming the prehistoric wild boar that’s chasing you across the millennia also defangs it.

And this is the first step towards a new – and better – relationship with your own mind.

Next week: We look at why we ruminate over negative events – and why trying to stop rumination often makes it worse.

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Dr Anindita and Zara

You do not need to know a person to see them. When Rembrandt painted this woman in 1654, he saw every detail of her: the hooded eyes, one cloudy with cataracts; the gnarled hands; the skin paper thin. The corners of her mouth downturned – though whether from grief, forbearance or simply bitchy resting face, we cannot know.

And this is the point: we don’t need to know. We just need to see, and to accept. The painting is not entitled “A portrait of grief” or “A study in patience”. It is Portrait of an Old Woman. She is a person, not an emotional metaphor.

Clinical synecdoche

We began this series, The Psychology of Psychologists, with a self-portrait by Rembrandt. A self-portrait is an act of creating an artist – just as DClinPsy training is the act of creating a clinical psychologist. But the artist is created in order to observe a subject and to paint it well. And the clinical psychologist is created in order to observe clients – to really see them – and to help them heal.

As clinical psychologists, we can forget this sometimes. We talk about “the borderline in room three” or “agoraphobia in room five”. We put the pathology before the person: “A study in OCD”, rather than “Portrait of a struggling young man”. Is it the person we are healing, or the condition they bring to us? Sometimes the two can be difficult to tell apart.

In linguistic terms, the reduction of a person or object to one of its constituent parts is known as synecdoche. We all do it: think, for example, of how we refer to businesspeople as “suits” or say “nice wheels” when talking about a car.

Is clinical synecdoche necessarily a bad thing? If you go to see the GP because you have a sore foot, you want diagnosis and treatment for your sore foot. It’s an added bonus if the GP asks how work’s going or where you’re going on holiday – but, fundamentally, you just want your foot to get better.

But then your foot continues to hurt, leading to a succession of medical appointments over several years. And what if, at every single one of these appointments, the medical professionals address their comments to your foot, rather than to you?

Open wide

In 1997, Tom Kitwood, a British psychologist and gerontologist, published Dementia Reconsidered: The Person Comes First. Here, he illustrated how dementia care can systematically strip personhood from dementia sufferers. As an illustration: an 85-year-old man in a care home leaves the vegetables on his plate at dinner, saying he doesn’t like them. His nurse says, “Vegetables are good for you. You can’t have pudding if you don’t eat your vegetables. Just one more spoonful – open wide.”

Imagine sitting at a restaurant table with a friend who says, “No dessert for you if you don’t finish your tahini-crusted braised aubergine. Open wide.” The nurse is not talking to his patient as he would another adult. Instead, he’s addressing him as a child – he’s speaking to the dementia, not the human being behind the diagnosis.

Kitwood refers to this as malignant social psychology: a set of interactions that depersonalise, infantilise and ignore the person who existed before the diagnosis. Malignant social psychology is not unique to dementia care. It is replicated in any clinical relationship where the clinician relates and responds to the pathology, rather than the person.

The language of clinical diagnosis encourages this tendency – clinicians discuss patients by diagnosable condition in order to ensure that they treat them effectively. But clinical synecdoche goes beyond what is professionally useful. The language of diagnosis encourages this trend; it doesn’t explain it.

Depersonalisation

When the NHS introduced targets across its services, the targets focused on numbers, rather than patient experience: the goal was to reduce waiting lists, rather than to make patients feel comfortable. We all have experience of seeing a GP and being examined and shunted out the door within the allotted 10-minute appointment span, questions still half-formed as the door closes behind us. Meeting targets is not conducive to pausing, chatting and relating as human beings. (One of the reasons I set up Affiniti+ was to offer clients an alternative model, where depth is prioritised over speed.)

But systemic problems don’t just affect the patient experience. Targets can leave clinicians depleted, with less capacity for engaging fully with clients. When you have 16 clients to see and 12 care plans to write, presence becomes harder to sustain. Excessive workload also leaves less time for clinical psychologists to work on countertransference: their emotional response to the client and what the client brings. When a clinical psychologist carries the emotional baggage of a previous session into the next one, they are not emotionally free to engage fully with what the client in front of them is bringing.

Similarly, when a clinician is weighted down by their own unexamined assumptions, it affects how they engage with the world. We saw previously how race, class and sex can inform how a trainee clinical psychologist relates to the rest of their cohort. But unquestioned biases can also affect how a clinician views a client. When you are already seeing a stereotype rather than a person, reducing them to a pathology is merely the next step.

But our job as clinical psychologists is to see the pathology in the context of the whole person – not to focus in on the pathology at the expense of anything else. We cannot do our job properly if we are not seeing the full person in front of us.

The conditions of personhood

In 1957, US psychologist Carl Rogers laid out the three core conditions that he believed were required in order to hold another person’s humanity in a clinical relationship. The first of these is congruence: an ability to be genuinely present as yourself, rather than hiding behind a professional persona. This creates a sense of psychological safety for the client.

The second is unconditional positive regard: the willingness to accept and value the client, whoever and however they are. This does not mean that, as clinical psychologists, we approve of everything our client does, or refuse to challenge them. Instead, it means that we will not withdraw our acceptance of the client because of something communicated in the therapy room.

The third condition is empathic understanding. The clinical psychologist should enter the client’s subjective world and see it as the client experiences it – while never losing sight of the fact that the experience belongs to the client, rather than the psychologist.

These conditions set out the ideal to which a clinical psychologist should aspire. This ideal was most likely achievable in 1957, when regulation was minimal, smoking breaks plentiful and very few psychologists typed up their own notes.

A clinical psychologist in 2026, by contrast, has considerably fewer breaks, smoking or otherwise. We see between four and six clients a day, but will also have a significant nonclinical workload: conducting psychometric assessments, writing detailed reports, planning for subsequent appointments, writing up session notes, keeping abreast of the latest research and attending multidisciplinary team meetings. We may come to a client fresh from a rigorous risk assessment, a complex – and emotionally harrowing – safeguarding case or a difficult supervision session. We have phone calls from clients to return, emails to write and referrals to source. Clients may face crises between sessions, and we need to help them manage these. Occasionally, we have time to make a cup of tea; whether we also have time to drink it is another matter entirely.

These are not conditions designed to help anyone achieve an ideal version of themselves. Being fully present and accepting of the client in front of you requires more than simply putting your phone on silent. It is exhausting work. When you are pulled in multiple different directions, the emotional capacity to be fully present becomes – like that tepid cup of tea on the counter in the staff kitchen – something you hope you’ll have time for one day. Meanwhile, the structural, institutional pressures all bearing down on clinical psychologists pull us in the same direction: away from the person and towards diagnostic categorisation.

An emotional guard rail

The clinician who loses sight of the person behind the pathology is not bad at their job. We must not lose sight of our own humanity, either: just as our clients are more than “depression” or “OCD”, so we are more than “clinical psychologist”. We are human beings, responding to structural forces that encourage abstraction rather than emotional presence.

The solution is not to try to give more: to invest more and more hours, more and more emotional effort into the job, until we burn out entirely. Self-sacrifice will not benefit our clients. There is no turning back the clock to 1957: targets need to be met, reports need to be written, smoking breaks are bad for your health and stenographers are few and far between.

The pressures are real, and they are unavoidable. So we need to develop and strengthen those qualities that act as an emotional guard rail – that keep us safe and prevent us from plummeting into depersonalisation, despite the pressures we face.

Key among them is self-awareness: the ability to understand how our own personal history shapes our reactions. As we discussed at the start of this series, self-awareness allows us to recognise our own blind spots: the prejudices and defences we all carry with us. It means reflecting on what we do and how we relate to others – and then adjusting our behaviour as necessary.

Reflection is harder alone. This is something the evil queen in Snow White instinctively understood: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, I know the truth on a bone-deep level, but I need you to reflect it back to me – to articulate it clearly, so that I can’t hide from it.” For trainee clinical psychologists, the training cohort acts as a magic mirror, allowing us to reflect on what we see in our clients and also in ourselves. Watching our fellow trainees struggle, we see our own struggles reflected back to us. We talk through our difficulties; we lean on one another until we can stand upright alone.

And when countertransference arises, we need to make sure we have the structural support necessary to recognise it and to work with it in a constructive way, reflecting on it so that it can be metabolised into personal growth. This is why clinical supervision is essential: it provides the structural support necessary to reflect fully on our own emotions and our emotional responses to our clients.

We also need to remember that we don’t have all the answers – and nor should we expect to. Each client is an individual, which means that their pathology plays out in a unique emotional ecosystem. What’s true for one is not true for all. If we approach our work from a position of safe uncertainty – understanding that we have only hypotheses, rather than answers, and that we need to test these hypotheses against what the client is telling us – then we have to see the person behind the pathology. There is no other way to work.

Through the looking glass

The name of this series – The Psychology of Psychologists – is somewhat misleading in its emphasis. It places the focus on the skills and strengths that clinical psychologists need to succeed in their chosen career: how to find your way into clinical psychology; who makes a good clinical psychologist; what conditions psychologists need to feel supported; how to cope with regular exposure to other people’s pain; and how to deal with the uncertainties and ambiguities of the profession. Ostensibly, this is about enabling a trainee clinical psychologist to enter the profession successfully and then flourish once they are there.

But in clinical psychology, success is not measured in terms of knowledge acquired or cases completed. It is not even – despite what the NHS tells us – measured in terms of targets met. It is about your ability to see your clients fully and relate to them as people.

The psychology of psychologists is not about the professional journey psychologists need to take. It is about the psychological clarity we need in order to be as present for our client as we possibly can. The professional skills are the looking glass, the spit and the polish that we need to achieve that.

And once we have those skills assembled and can see our clients with clarity – well, that’s when the work really begins.

Our So You Want To Be A Psychologist Podnotes series has now concluded – thank you to everyone who watched and listened. We hope you found it useful. All five episodes are available to watch here. We also have a resource pack linked to the series, which can be purchased for £10 here.

Next week: Our next newsletter series, Mind The Gap, will look at how your mind works – and why it doesn’t always work in the ways you want it to. This will start next week and continue through to the end of July.

A note from the community

Our free Substack community chat is open to everyone – whether you are navigating the Podnotes So You Want To Be A Psychologist series, exploring the ideas raised in An Affiniti for Psychology or simply curious about psychology and what it means to do this work well. It’s free – and we read everything and respond.

The conversation is already happening. Come and find us at: affinitiplus.substack.com

Resplendent in the evening sunlight, The Fighting Temeraire was painted by JMW Turner on her way to the breakers’ yard. The Fighting Temeraire was a celebrated warship, a hero of Trafalgar. And now she is on her way to become scrap.

In this painting, though, she is neither warship nor scrap – and she is both. Here, the ship exists in suspension between two truths – just as the setting sun marks the suspended moment between night and day, between light and dark.

In this picture, two truths exist simultaneously. And we, as the viewer, are asked to hold those truths in our mind – and just be there, in that moment when two opposing facts are true at once.

Clinical psychology asks us to sit with competing truths from the very start. We might be accepted for this assistant psychologist post or that DClinPsy course or a qualified post – but we might not. Our proposed solution might help this client – but it might not. Again and again, we are asked to inhabit a position of uncertainty. We are asked to feel the discomfort of that position – and then to stay there.

In clinical terms, this state of fluidity – of holding multiple possibilities in our mind at once – is known as safe uncertainty. The notion of safe uncertainty was first introduced by systemic psychotherapist Barry Mason in 1993. Mason was writing in the context of systemic family therapy, but the concept caught on, and is now used much more widely – including in clinical psychology training and practice.

Safe uncertainty

Anxiety craves certainty. Think about when you are at a party where you know no-one – as soon as you find a guest you vaguely know, it’s tempting to make a beeline for them and spend the rest of the evening talking only to them. That certainty of connection allows you to feel more relaxed – just as an anxious or insecure psychologist can feel more relaxed when they have an explanation to cling to.

Safe uncertainty, by contrast, is the ability to say: “I’m here at a party with lots of people I don’t know – I bet I’m going to have some interesting conversations.” Yes, you chat to the person you know, but you don’t spend all evening talking to them. Instead, you are genuinely curious about the people you don’t know, and are eager to see where that curiosity will take you.

The person who just wants to talk to someone they know immediately forecloses on other – possibly more interesting – conversations out there. Similarly, a clinical psychologist who needs to know the answer before they can sit comfortably with a client forecloses on the therapeutic relationship prematurely. Instead of relating, they simply dispense knowledge.

But a clinical psychologist who can hold a position of safe uncertainty is able to remain present and open-minded in the face of the unknown. We may have hypotheses about why a new client behaves the way they do – but we must also recognise that they are just that: hypotheses. We don’t know what is behind the client’s behaviour. We hold our hypotheses, but we allow them to be reshaped, replaced or even negated by the new explanations that emerge as the client opens up to us. We are therefore able to respond to information the client presents as it arises, rather than shutting down any avenues of exploration.

A career skill

Being able to hold on to a position of safe uncertainty is essential for clinical psychologists throughout their career. So much so, in fact, that candidates for places on DClinPsy courses are expected to demonstrate comfort with complexity and ambiguity – for example, the University of Sheffield’s DClinPsy interview process tests candidates’ “ability to think on your feet”.

DClinPsy course descriptions similarly emphasise the importance of sitting with ambiguity. For example, Lancaster University’s DClinPsy handbook lists among trainees’ metacompetancies the “ability to work effectively whilst holding in mind alternative, competing explanations”.

An ability to tolerate ambiguity is assessed for good reason: it’s a challenging skill, particularly for those new to clinical psychology. Trainees can become distressed when their intended interventions do not match the complexity of the client’s case or explain challenging behaviours. The distress in itself is not the problem: it can serve as a springboard for reflection. But, equally, it can lead trainees to retreat to the safety of non-directive counselling.

This is obviously unhelpful for the client – but inability to tolerate ambiguity can also be damaging for the psychologist. Healthcare professionals who are able to sit with uncertainty tend to have a better sense of wellbeing and are at less risk of burnout than those who cannot tolerate ambiguity.

The lessons of rejection

While DClinPsy courses select and assess for an ability to tolerate uncertainty, the true test in fact starts long before would-be trainees ever make it to interview. As we discussed in the first article in this series – and as Zara and I discuss in episode four of So You Want To Be A Psychologist – deciding to become a clinical psychologist can feel like embarking on a mountain climb with no path, no map and no sense of how close to the summit you might be.

When more than 100 people are applying for the same assistant-psychologist job, you may be a bright, enthusiastic graduate with a master’s degree and several summers’ worth of relevant work experience – and still find that you’re not even invited for interview.

When you’ve done everything you should and are still rejected without feedback, it can be easy to internalise that failure: to assume that the problem is you, and that nothing you do will make any difference. Psychologist Martin Seligman termed this process “learned helplessness”. You may start out believing that you have as good a chance at securing a post as anyone else; 15 rejections later, you’ve begun to see yourself as inherently lacking – just someone people reject. (We discuss learned helplessness in further detail in our article on rediscovering agency.)

People who believe that their fate is decided by circumstances beyond their control, and nothing they can do will change it – “The people hiring for these roles just want someone who isn’t me” – are described as having an external locus of control. By contrast, people who believe that their actions can influence outcomes – “Maybe the people hiring for these roles are looking for some skills I don’t yet have. How can I find out what these skills are and go about acquiring them?” – have an internal locus of control. (Locus of control is also discussed in more depth in our agency series.)

Locus of control, like learned helplessness, is affected by external circumstances. Those 15 rejections chip away at your faith that you can mould circumstances to your favour – and what remains in its place is an external locus of control. You no longer believe that you have any agency in this process: you’re simply buffeted by the winds of clinical-psychology fate.

Gradually, therefore, those repeated rejections shape the way you explain negative events to yourself. You start to believe that it’s your own fault – caused by something internal to you. You believe it will keep happening, no matter what you do. And you assume it will affect everything you try to do. Put together, this forms a pessimistic attributional style: you start to believe things will always turn out for the worst.

The antidote to pessimism

Safe uncertainty is the ability to keep your internal locus of control intact, when external circumstances are working against it. It means hope in the face of repeated rejection.

This is not the same thing as optimism. In psychology, having an optimistic attributional style means that when bad things happen, you attribute their cause to something external: “This happened because of this specific context.” People with an optimistic attributional style recognise that a single event is not necessarily part of a trend – and that, even if it is, that trend can be reversed. And they understand that it does not affect everything: receiving 15 rejections for an assistant-psychologist post, for example, does not mean that you’ll live in your parents’ house all your life, that you’ll never find love or that it will rain on your birthday.

If optimism assumes a good outcome (hopefully) and pessimism assumes a bad outcome (always), safe uncertainty makes no assumptions at all. It is the capacity to hold the outcome as genuinely unknown. And it is the ability to keep going despite – and also because of – the fact that the outcome is unknown.

Some people find assistant-psychology jobs on their first application. Some people find jobs after 15 rejections. Some people find different roles that work equally well as preparation for DClinPsy training. Others decide that clinical psychology isn’t for them after all, and find an alternative pathway. All outcomes are possible. Remembering that is a position of safe uncertainty.

Systemic uncertainty

Safe uncertainty is the psychological position needed to navigate your way into the profession. It is necessary – to protect your clients and yourself – when working in the profession. It is equally necessary when you become a clinical supervisor: you need to hold the uncertainty of another psychologist’s development without foreclosing on it prematurely.

But safe uncertainty functions at a macro level, too. Becoming an NHS service leader requires an ability to make decisions without fully knowing exactly what the service users want or need. It means designing a service where the outcomes cannot be fully predicted.

And safe uncertainty is what is required of the profession as a whole right now. In episode five of So You Want To Be A Psychologist, we discuss AI and what it means for the future of clinical psychology. Nobody knows what this profession will look like in 20 years’ time – but we need to hold on to that position of not knowing. Those clinicians who will navigate most smoothly through the choppy waters of change are those who understand how to live with uncertainty. Fear of uncertainty can congeal into paralysis: if you don’t know where you’re going, it’s easier to stay still. Safe uncertainty means that movement – action – doesn’t stop just because the direction of travel is still a mystery.

Safe uncertainty is therefore a clinical skill, a career skill and a skill for the profession as a whole. It is an important tool of the trade. But, like all tools, it is a means to an end – it helps us achieve a goal. The training, the support, the career all exist to serve this one goal: to be able to truly see who the client – the person – in the room with us is.

Next week, we’ll look at how to do this.

All five episodes of So You Want To Be A Psychologist are now available on YouTube, Substack, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Find them here.

A resource pack to accompany the Podnotes series is available here, for £10.

Next week: We ask the question that defines the profession: what does it take to see the person in front of you, rather than their diagnosis?

A note from the community

Our free Substack community chat is open to everyone – whether you are navigating the Podnotes So You Want To Be A Psychologist series, exploring the ideas raised in The Psychology of Psychologists series or or any of the series we have published on An Affiniti for Psychology or simply curious about psychology and what it means to do this work well. It’s free – and we read everything and respond.

The conversation is already happening. Come and find us at: affinitiplus.substack.com

Have a question about this episode? Join the conversation in our Substack community — ask Dr Anindita and Zara directly. We read everything:
https://affinitiplus.substack.com/publish/chat?utm_source=chat-checklist

We built this series for you and we want to keep improving it. Tell us what you need more of, what questions you still have, and what would make this resource more useful for aspiring psychologists:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf-FLJhzVXUGiJcpdhcpDWEIvf64TJScpypt5Y4IMTtd3HXwA/viewform

Timestamps

0:00 - 0:31 → Introduction to Episode 5

0:31 - 7:00 → Life after qualifying; what has Dr Anindita learnt in her roles post doctorate?

7:00 - 10:43 → The creation of Affiniti+

10:43 - 16:00 → Thoughts on the present and future of the field of clinical psychology

16:00 → Episode and series wrap-up

The scars are on the surface. In this painting, Egon Schiele’s Self-Portrait with Physalis, the artist is unsparing with his own image: we see every scar, every line and every imperfection.

But scars are not simply superficial marks on skin: they are residues of trauma. Schiele’s interior life is visible in his face; he is living from the inside out.

Clinical psychology, too, affects you from the inside out – it elides the boundaries between the personal and the professional. Who you are affects your ability to do the job – but your ability to do the job also affects who you are. Sitting with other people’s pain, trauma, grief and rage, week after week, receiving and absorbing it in order to help them heal, informs how you develop as a person.

In this series, we’re looking at the psychology of psychologists – what qualities psychologists bring to the role, but also how the role moulds us as people. In previous weeks, we’ve examined what it takes to pursue a career in clinical psychology, the personality traits that predispose people to the career and how, as trainees, we’re shaped by our cohort.

But we are also shaped by our clients.

Trauma can be contagious

Starting any new job is taxing. Drawing on nascent skills – in many cases, still developing – can be physically and mentally draining. And then, on top of that, as a trainee clinical psychologist, you can find yourself listening to a client’s disclosure of sexual abuse – and knowing that they have placed their emotional wellbeing in your hands.

The notion that trauma can affect people who didn’t experience it directly is widely understood. We use, for example, the term “inherited trauma” to describe how children’s emotional present can be shaped by their parents’ past. But you do not need to live with someone else’s trauma – or to be emotionally formed by it – in order to be affected by it. We’ve all seen and read, for example, news stories that have haunted us long after they’ve dropped from the news cycle.

As psychologists, we can be exposed on a regular basis to our client’s trauma. This can lead to a range of trauma responses, including secondary trauma stress, vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue.

Secondary trauma stress refers to the emotional distress suffered by people indirectly exposed to a traumatic event. It manifests in ways similar to PTSD: sufferers are in a state of heightened alertness, so that they feel tense, on edge and easily startled. Where PTSD sufferers can feel that they are reliving the trauma experience, people with secondary stress trauma relive the trauma account. And, like PTSD sufferers, people with secondary stress trauma can become isolated, as they try to avoid triggering traumatic memories.

Vicarious trauma is similar to secondary trauma stress, and the two terms are often used interchangeably. But vicarious trauma runs deeper: it is about having your belief system and worldview – such as the nature of other people or your own safety in the world – fundamentally altered as a result of exposure to someone else’s trauma. For example, listening to the account of a woman who was trafficked and raped by several men could lead you to believe that all men are incapable of seeing women as human beings – and to feel entirely justified in that belief.

Compassion fatigue, meanwhile, encompasses empathy exhaustion: an inability to engage with other people and to empathise with their pain. It is similar to burnout, in that it can also deplete professional satisfaction, so you end up going through the motions of professionalism, rather than investing fully in your work.

Professional vulnerability

The nature of clinical psychologists’ work means that we are vulnerable to all three of these conditions. A study of more than 500 trainee clinical psychologists in the UK found that most had dealt with one or two trauma cases in the previous six months, most commonly sexual abuse. This exposure to trauma significantly predicted trauma symptoms.

The authors of this study recommended that DClinPsy courses focus on providing high-quality trauma training, which has been shown to help trainees mitigate against trauma responses. They also advocated teaching coping strategies to reduce the stress of clinical work.

It is also worth noting that, while as clinical psychologists we can suffer with our clients, we can also grow with them. Witnessing a client’s healing from trauma can enable us to grow, too, personally and professionally. Our own sense of resilience is bolstered by observing how resilient survivors of trauma can be; we develop a greater sense of human strength as a result. Like vicarious trauma, vicarious post-traumatic growth can result in a fundamental shift in belief systems – but it cannot be achieved without first experiencing vicarious trauma. There can be no light at the end of the tunnel without first entering the tunnel.

The role of countertransference

The tunnel metaphor is instructive here, because the person walking into the tunnel is not a passive consumer of darkness. Walking through a dark tunnel is not an objective experience, which everyone responds to in same way. Some people will be scared of the dark; some will rather enjoy it. Others will feel neutral towards it. All of them will bring these pre-existing attitudes with them when they enter the tunnel. This will inform how they experience the tunnel itself and what their emotional state is when they exit.

A psychologist’s emotional response to the tunnel – the client and what they bring – is known as countertransference. Freud originally viewed countertransference as an obstacle to be eliminated. But in 1957, Argentinian psychoanalyst Heinrich Racker posited that countertransference was not a hindrance to therapy, but a potential source of insight into a client’s unconscious communication. If, for example, a client seeks therapy because he struggles to make friends, and the therapist experiences a strong feeling of “He rubs me up the wrong way,” then that feeling may offer insight into how other people respond to the client, too.

But countertransference also offers us insight into ourselves and our own lives. I want to refer here to our new Podnotes series, So You Want To Be A Psychologist. (We call it Podnotes because, in clinical work, notes are how you make sense of what’s being said: how you turn complexity into something you can work with. We hope Podnotes will do the same.)

In episode three of Podnotes, I talk about working with older adults as a trainee, and how it was the most emotionally challenging of my placements. The challenge was not the clinical complexity – though that was considerable. Rather, it was my own reaction: the countertransference. Sitting with patients who were coping with ageing, frailty, cognitive decline and the inevitable approach of death, I realised with some force that my own parents were not immortal. This would be their ultimate fate, too.

(What I failed to realise, of course, was that ageing would ultimately be my own fate, too. I was in my twenties at the time, and youth is characterised by a general obliviousness to its own mortality. This obliviousness is its own form of countertransference: the unexamined assumption that the frailty in the room belongs to someone else’s story.)

Despite its blind spots, my moment of realisation was not a small one. Nor was it a neutral one. This placement didn’t just test me professionally – it asked something of me as a daughter. This was the impact of countertransference – not as a failure of clinical objectivity, but as the proof that I am still a person, underneath the carapace of clinical psychologist.

Left unmanaged, however, countertransference can accumulate. Rather than being metabolised into personal growth, it builds and builds, until it becomes a risk factor for burnout. This is particularly true for certain personality traits – such as neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness – which are positively correlated with countertransference reactivity and burnout.

The question of personal therapy

To return to the tunnel metaphor: imagine that a person is scared of the dark, but has no choice but to walk through the tunnel alone. The likelihood is that they will find the experience terrifying and traumatic. Now imagine that this same person still has to walk through the tunnel alone, but they have the self-knowledge to recognise that they are scared of the dark and that this fear may make the experience more difficult. So they attend CBT sessions to help them manage their phobia. They arrange to have a friend walk with them to the entrance of the tunnel and another friend meet them at the exit. They’re still scared of the dark, but they now have the tools to manage that fear and the support needed to process that fear safely.

The question, then, is not Freud versus Racker: should countertransference arise? The more apt question is whether the clinician has the awareness and structural support necessary to recognise and work with countertransference in a constructive way.

For clinical psychologists, supervision is the primary structural support for managing countertransference. However, as we discussed in last week’s article, effective support – whether from peers or clinical supervisors – requires a baseline of psychological safety that not all trainees have equal access to.

Beyond peer support and supervision, most DClinPsy programmes will also offer trainees personal therapy. Some will mandate it – but not all. For example, University College London tells new trainees that “A variety of systems (including access to personal therapy) are offered.”

Optional therapy is not a sign of institutional indifference. Rather, it reflects the inconclusive evidence regarding the benefits of personal therapy for trainee clinical psychologists. A 1998 review of research evidence found that the majority of therapists felt they had benefited professionally from personal therapy. There was some evidence that personal therapy had enhanced qualities in a therapist, such as empathy, warmth and sincerity, often viewed as constructive to client change. However, there was very little empirical evidence to prove that therapy had a measurable effect on client outcome. The authors stated that it was therefore impossible to draw any firm conclusions about the usefulness of personal therapy to clinicians. This argument was reinforced a year later by Ann Macaskill, professor of health psychology at Sheffield Hallam University, who similarly found that there was no direct evidence to support mandating personal therapy for trainees.

This is not the same as suggesting that there is no benefit to trainees of seeking personal therapy. The UCL guidance for DClinPsy trainees makes explicit the two reasons why trainees might seek therapy: “a) Some trainees feel personal therapy would help them to understand themselves better, and hence be more effective as psychologists…

“b) Some trainees experience psychological difficulties, which interfere with their personal or professional functioning.”

But there is a difference between therapy as a training requirement and therapy as a beneficial undertaking. The first is a box-ticking exercise; the second something a clinician arrives at through honest self-examination.

In the second scenario, a trainee or clinician may recognise that countertransference is accumulating, and that they therefore need to address it in a constructive way. They come to therapy because they recognise that it will help them. This is very different from seeing a therapist weekly because it is a precondition for graduation.

A lifelong process

There is another reason to question the wisdom of therapy as a DClinPsy course requirement: it suggests that therapy is a part of your training, completed on graduation, rather than a lifelong process, to be revisited and resumed as needed.

Secondary and vicarious trauma are not diseases you can inoculate against with a single dose of therapy at the start of your career. Similarly, countertransference will change as you change and as your understanding of the world develops.

A 2003 landmark longitudinal study of 100 counsellors and therapists identified six phases of professional development: lay helper, beginning student, advanced student, novice professional, experienced professional and senior professional. Younger and less experienced practitioners reported becoming overwhelmed by the emotional demands of the work, experiencing higher levels of psychological distress than their more experienced counterparts. Experience is thus protective – but only when accompanied by reflection. Therapists commit to a lifelong process of professional and personal growth. There can be no emotional protection without emotional reflection.

Those clinicians who sustain the work well across a career are those who sustain themselves well alongside it. Just as we can help guard against ill health (to an extent) by eating well and staying fit, so too we can guard against emotional ill health by reflecting continuously and seeking support when needed. We are strongest when, rather than separating off the personal and the professional, we integrate them into one well-rounded whole.

Resilience, as we established last week, is not a solo endeavour: it’s socially produced and socially supported. So, too, emotional resilience in a clinical career is not a solo project. It requires supervision, peer support and, for many clinicians, personal therapy.

The clinicians who do this work well over their whole career are not those who are least affected by it. They are the ones who have learned to be affected by it well.

Episode 5 of Podnotes – the final episode in the So You Want To Be A Psychologist series — goes live today at 3pm. You've qualified. Now what? Career paths in the NHS and private practice, the long-term impact clinical psychologists can have, leadership, service development, AI and the future of the profession. And the question the whole series has been building toward: is this worth it?

Watch the trailer here.

Next week: Elaborating on the issues raised in the So You Want To Be A Psychologist Podnotes series, we look at safe uncertainty – the art of not knowing – and the role it plays clinically and in a psychology career. And we examine how repeated rejection affects an individual – and how to keep going regardless.

A note from the community

Our free Substack community chat is open to everyone – whether you are navigating the Podnotes So You Want To Be A Psychologist series, exploring the ideas raised in The Psychology of Psychologists series, or simply curious about psychology and what it means to do this work well. If you haven’t already subscribed, it’s free – and we read everything and respond.

The conversation is already happening. Come and find us at affinitiplus.substack.com

Resource pack and other personalised information for you available at https://www.affinitiplus.com/podnotes.

Have a question about this episode? Join the conversation in our Substack community — ask Dr Anindita and Zara directly. We read everything:
https://affinitiplus.substack.com/publish/chat?utm_source=chat-checklist

We built this series for you and we want to keep improving it. Tell us what you need more of, what questions you still have, and what would make this resource more useful for aspiring psychologists:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf-FLJhzVXUGiJcpdhcpDWEIvf64TJScpypt5Y4IMTtd3HXwA/viewform

Timestamps

0:00 - 0:35 → Introduction to Episode 4

0:35 - 3:06 → Dr Anindita’s application tips for aspiring assistant psychologists

3:06 - 6:33 → Tips for interviewing for assistant psychologist roles

6:33 - 8:33 → How to handle rejection

8:33 - 9:15 → Episode wrap-up

There are a lot of men in this painting. A lot of White men.

This is The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, painted by Rembrandt in 1632. Each of the attendees is reacting differently to the dead body in front of them. Some are gazing intently at what Dr Tulp is showing them; others are distracted by something beyond him – or perhaps they just prefer to look away. Their relationship to what is happening in front of them depends on their own background, predisposition and experiences. They are individuals, come together as a group to learn from their teacher and from each other.

In this series, we’re looking at the psychology of psychologists: what kind of person becomes a psychologist, and what it takes for someone to be successful in the role. Last week, we itemised the various personality traits that predispose someone to a career in clinical psychology and help them excel once they’re in the profession.

It would be easy to view clinical training as a personal endeavour: something you succeed or fail at on your own merits. But that’s not the full story. As a trainee clinical psychologist, your cohort – the group of individuals who learn together – plays a vital role.

And yet. There are a lot of White men in the Rembrandt painting. They all wear expensive clothes; they are all similarly bearded. They can learn from one another’s differences – but those differences are limited. This, as we will see, is also relevant for clinical psychologists.

From youngster to star

In the 1933 backstage musical 42^nd Street, the lead character – a chorus girl – is unexpectedly called upon at the last minute to take the lead role in a Broadway show. Her director says to her: “You’re going out there a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star.”

It is a metaphor of identity transformation that works, too, for clinical psychologists: they enter doctoral training as clinical youngsters and emerge three years later as fully fledged clinicians.

The lead character in 42^nd Street does not do this alone – she could not do it alone. The director, the male lead and a phalanx of other chorus girls are there to support her. So, too, the graduate’s transformation into clinical psychologist does not happen in isolation – it happens in relationship with others. For a trainee clinical psychologist, the cohort is the social container in which their professional identity forms.

These networks provide what political scientist Robert Putnam referred to as two different types of social capital: bonding capital and bridging capital – discussed at greater length in this article. Bonding capital is the relationship you have with people who think similarly to you: friends, neighbours and colleagues. Bridging capital is the connection with people who think differently from you, across social classes, races and religious or political beliefs. A strong cohort should provide both.

A community of practice

In 1991, Jean Lave, an anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, an educational theorist, put forward the idea that learning is fundamentally a social process. Learners, they said, participate in communities of practice. By engaging in the practices of the community – by joining networks and working in teams – individuals are able to build and develop their professional identities.

The idea of communities of practice took hold particularly in healthcare professions. Trainee doctors, nurses and allied health professionals share knowledge and build a sense of belonging by joining networks and working in teams.

Within this learning community, participants move together towards full absorption into a wider community of professionals, with its own identity, knowledge, practice and way of speaking about these things. The learning community is, in essence, a form of induction into the culture, practices and values of the profession itself. Becoming a healthcare professional is not just about knowledge and skills – it’s about relationships and social identity.

Reflective practice

This learning community, therefore, is not an added bonus to DClinPsy training – it is integral to it. The University of Sheffield, for example, acknowledges “the need for personal and professional development, incorporating opportunities to reflect on one’s practice, as a fundamental part of training”.

In order to facilitate this development, Sheffield offers academic and pastoral support, but also a buddy system – essentially an entry into the learning community. Other courses emphasise the importance of reflective practice, creating groups of peers who support one another through the often difficult process of reflecting on their own mistakes and missteps.

Trainees are placed together in high-stakes clinical situations, assessed constantly and exposed to emotionally demanding material. Reflective-practice groups are the place where they can confess to their own uncertainties, matching vulnerability with vulnerability. They learn to process emotional responses together, which reduces anxiety and increases a sense of belonging. When experiencing something new, there is huge value in knowing that others are going through the same difficulties.

It’s widely understood that going through a traumatic experience with another person creates a shortcut to intimacy. While it would be inaccurate (hopefully) to describe training as a clinical psychologist as a traumatic experience, it does take a physical and emotional toll, creating a bond between those who go through it – and reflect on it – together.

Reflecting as a group also habituates trainees to the requirements of clinical psychology: prioritising curiosity over certainty and working together to piece together meaning from observation. This, in turn, helps them to forge new, reflective professional identities. Together, they try on the identity of “clinical psychologist” for size, helping one another to wear it with confidence and pride.

Profound alienation

But what if it doesn’t quite work like that? What if, as a trainee, you try on the identity of clinical psychologist, all the time thinking, “I can’t wear this colour – it doesn’t suit me. Everyone else can carry it off, but I can’t”? And what if everyone else in the cohort is concerned about durability – but absolutely no-one else seems to be worried about whether or not they can wear it in the first place? They are all deriving comfort and reassurance from the discussion about durability – and, meanwhile, you feel increasingly isolated and alone.

Last week, we looked at how academic achievement is often used as a proxy measure for intelligence during the DClinPsy application process. Inevitably, this disadvantages those from less-privileged backgrounds. There are other structural barriers, too: in a competitive field, the advantage is given to those who can take a master’s degree, or who have worked in low-paid or unpaid assistant-psychologist roles. And, as always in oversubscribed fields, the system rewards those who have the knowledge and the connections to navigate it.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, working-class trainees are a minority group on DClinPsy courses. So, too, are those from non-White backgrounds: the latest Clearing House application data available, from 2024, show that almost two-thirds – 73.3 per cent – of students accepted on to DClinPsy courses were White. The vast majority are female, straight, able-bodied, single and have no dependents.

This has an inevitable impact on how those who deviate from this norm relate to the group. When people in your peer group speak differently from you, eat different foods, do different things in their spare time and have a common outlook on life that you do not share, the result can be profound alienation – from fellow trainees, but also from the profession itself.

This awareness of difference becomes particularly key during reflective-practice group sessions – ideally the cornerstone of peer support. Minority trainees can feel alienated or invisible in these sessions, or as though they are being shut down when they deviate from the majority narrative. Others talk about being hyper-conscious of their difference.

This undermines the sense of psychological safety needed to make themselves vulnerable in the group. Some Black trainees talk about being worried that any reflection they bring to the group will be immediately interpreted as general to all Black people, rather than coming from their own specific personal experiences – or, alternatively, seen as a veiled attack on White people. Some therefore end up seeking alternative support spaces – taking them further away from any sense of their cohort as a container for professional transformation.

Working-class trainees, meanwhile, talk about trying to mask their identity in group sessions: they speak less, and can appear aloof and distant. Masking also creates a dissonance between their internal and external selves – which inhibits their ability to fully assume their new professional identity.

As a result, the reflective-practice group, which is supposed to contain trainees as they explore their new professional identity, becomes actively distressing. Rather than integrating into their professional community, marginalised trainees withdraw from it. “I went to eat my lunch with the nurses instead,” said one working-class trainee.

A solo burden

To return to 42^nd Street, what happens to the ingenue thrust into the limelight if the assembled company is not behind her – if the orchestra plays a different tune and the chorusline doesn’t dance to her song? She certainly doesn’t feel like a star; instead, her career is over before it’s begun.

Burnout – essentially, the collapse of a career – is an individual response to organisational or systemic failure. People burn out because they are not being supported organisationally and end up bearing a burden that should be shared by others. The risk of burnout is high among clinical-psychology trainees, who carry the simultaneous burden of being mental-health professionals and students. And it is particularly likely at times of transition – such as completing professional training and moving into a first post.

Social support, however, has been consistently shown to mitigate against burnout. A burden shared is a burden diminished. Peer connection reduces emotional exhaustion; a sense of “It’s not just me” helps you to cope.

We discussed last week the role that resilience plays in getting would-be trainees through the clinical-psychology door and enabling them to keep going once they were across the threshold. But resilience is not a solo project: it is socially produced. Your cohort helps you to assume the identity of clinical psychologist – and it enables you to maintain it.

When a trainee or newly qualified clinical psychologist struggles to cope without cohort support, it may feel like a personal failure, but it is not. Peer support is an integral part of the DClinPsy programme. A trainee who lacks that support has not had access to the full clinical training – as much as if their university had simply failed to deliver one of their modules. And, just as no-one would blame a clinical psychologist for struggling without full academic knowledge of their subject, neither should anyone blame them for struggling when peer support is absent.

Redressing the balance

The British Psychological Society acknowledges the detrimental role that marginalisation can play in determining a person’s life chances and opportunities for success. Recognising that DClinPsy courses needed to become more diverse, it launched a number of schemes aimed at widening access to psychology degrees and psychology as a profession.

Their Student Committee Bursary Scheme offers students from underrepresented backgrounds up to £150 towards the cost of attending a BPS conference. The Undergraduate Research Assistantship Scheme provides funding to enable academics to offer a summer research post to one of their undergraduates. The aim is to help identify potential PhD students, and to encourage them to consider an academic career. The BPS also offers one year’s free membership to students. And a scheme aimed at widening access to undergraduate psychology degrees. This has had a trickledown effect, and the increase in undergraduate diversity has begun to be reflected at doctoral level.

The NHS Aspiring Clinical Psychologists Access Scheme, meanwhile, offers paid assistant psychologist roles to recent psychology graduates who can’t afford to take on unpaid internships or voluntary roles. It also benefits those who are unable to relocate, who need flexible-working arrangements or have caring responsibilities – which similarly opens up the field to a broader range of applicants.

The aim of these schemes is that, ultimately, DClinPsy cohorts will become less homogenous. Which, in turn, means that trainees who do not fit the White middle-class single female norm will no longer be quite so isolated. Ideally, this would then create a cohort that is capable of sustaining and holding a much wider group of people.

This benefits those who would otherwise be marginalised, obviously. But it also benefits those in the majority. Bridging capital requires us to meet and connect with those outside our immediate networks: people from different backgrounds, with different lived experiences. Without that bridging capital, the entire cohort is weaker. With it, the group itself – and all the individuals in it – are stronger.

Next week: We look at how clinical work changes a psychologist’s relationship to their own emotional life.

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Episode 4 of So You Want To Be A Psychologist – Standing Out in a Brutal Market – will go live at 3pm today on all our platforms. Watch the trailer below.

Over 100 applicants for one assistant psychologist post. That is not exceptional. That is normal. This episode is about what you do about it. We cover how to structure a CV and cover letter that gets read, how to prepare for interviews when everyone in the room is equally qualified on paper, and the most common mistakes candidates make and don’t realise they’re making. We also talk honestly about rejection: how to handle it, how to keep going, and what it does to your sense of agency when the system is designed to filter you out.

A note from the community

In our Substack community chat last week, a reader raised something that deserves more than a passing answer.

They described watching highly competent assistant psychologists — people who had done everything right, prepared thoroughly, demonstrated real clinical ability — crumble in DClinPsy interview rooms because the pressure felt so great. Zara, who is navigating this process herself, responded with characteristic honesty: she feels it too.

What they are describing has a name. When the stakes feel existential — when a single performance will determine whether years of preparation amount to anything — the nervous system responds accordingly. Cognitive resources narrow. The very competence that got you to the room becomes harder to access in the room. This is not a failure of preparation or of character. It is a predictable response to evaluative threat, and it happens to capable people precisely because they care.

It is also, as we will explore in next’s week’s article, directly connected to the capacity for safe uncertainty — the ability to remain present and functional when the outcome is unknown and the pressure is high. That is not only an interview skill. It is one of the most important clinical skills a psychologist can develop. The interview, in that sense, is not only a selection process. It is the first test of a quality the work will ask of you throughout your career.

If this resonates, come and join the conversation at affinitiplus.substack.com — the chat is free, open for subscribers and we read everything.

Want personalised guidance on your own pathway and timeline? Our career strategy session (£120) offers one-to-one advice on exactly this. Book at https://www.affinitiplus.com/podnotes.

Have a question about this episode? Join the conversation in our Substack community — ask Dr Anindita and Zara directly. We read everything:
https://affinitiplus.substack.com/publish/chat?utm_source=chat-checklist

We built this series for you and we want to keep improving it. Tell us what you need more of, what questions you still have, and what would make this resource more useful for aspiring psychologists:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf-FLJhzVXUGiJcpdhcpDWEIvf64TJScpypt5Y4IMTtd3HXwA/viewform

If you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, leaving a review takes 30 seconds and makes a real difference to who finds this series next.

Timestamps

0:00 - 0:33 → Introduction to Episode 3

0:33 - 1:40 → Life as a DClinPsy student

1:40 - 5:30 → Dr Anindita’s experience of teaching and placements on the DClinPsy course at Salomon’s

5:30 - 7:33 → Mapping out a career: is Psychology A level important?

7:33 - 8:11 → Mapping out a career: is an undergraduate degree in psychology essential?

8:11 - 9:05 → Mapping out a career: are Master’s degrees in psychology useful?

9:05 - 11:33 → Mapping out a career: how to gain clinical experience?

11:33 - 12:17 → Episode wrap-up

The person depicted in this charcoal drawing is its artist, Käthe Kollwitz. In this 1910 self-portrait, she appears lost in thought, turning her focus inwards.

Drawing a self-portrait is an act of deep contemplation: of the self, but also of the external gaze that will look upon this version of you. The artist is seeing herself from within, but she’s also considering the world from the perspective of the other.

That act of contemplation – of inhabiting the inner and outer views simultaneously – is also the work of a clinical psychologist.

This month, to tie in with the launch of our podcast series, So You Want To Be A Psychologist, we’re examining the psychology of psychologists: what it means to take on that inside-outside role, and to do it well.

Becoming a psychologist

It’s exceedingly rare for anyone to say to a small child, “You’d make a great clinical psychologist,” in the way that they might identify an incipient lawyer on the school debating team, or suggest that a particularly good babysitter consider becoming a teacher.

But if there are personality traits that predispose a person to a career as a lawyer or teacher – if some people are more suited to those careers than others – then surely there must also be similar traits that lend themselves to a career in clinical psychology, too.

Knowing this matters. It matters for those who are considering a career in clinical psychology, obviously. But it also matters for those who work with clinical psychologists, as clients, colleagues or simply as interested passersby. Understanding what qualities make a good clinical psychologist helps us to understand – whether from the inside or the outside – the work that clinical psychologists do.

Four dispositions

There are four personality traits that are necessary for a successful career in clinical psychology. These are: intelligence, curiosity, a sense of adventure and self-awareness.

None of these four dispositions is individually sufficient: the best clinical psychologists have all four. Working in combination, these dispositions give an individual the qualities needed to function as an empathetic scientist-practitioner: the intelligence to hold complexity and synthesise evidence; the curiosity to keep questioning the formulation; the adventurousness to work across the full breadth of the role; and the self-awareness to know when your own history is entering the room.

These are not the qualities of anyone who chooses to work in a therapeutic role – they are specific to clinical psychologists. A therapist is trained to deliver therapeutic interventions; a clinical psychologist is trained to understand, assess, research and redesign the systems that deliver these interventions – as well as to deliver them. It is a different form of training from therapists’, and produces a different type of practitioner.

These four dispositions draw a person to clinical psychology work, and they are assessed explicitly in the doctoral selection process. They are the qualities that experienced supervisors consistently recognise in outstanding trainees. Training identifies and stress-tests these qualities over three years. And these are the areas where the work will similarly test clinical psychologists and make demands of them, throughout their career.

Disposition 1: Intelligence

A career in clinical psychology requires a range of different intelligences: academic intelligence, emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, capacity for self-reflection and a questioning mind.

As clinical psychologists, we need to be able to hold multiple perspectives – and multiple truths – in our mind at the same time. We need to be able to see the big picture and the small detail: we develop the strategic vision, but we also need to be able to put ourselves in the position of those implementing the strategy, so that we can see how it would play out on a day-to-day basis.

But complex forms of intelligence can be hard to measure empirically. So university selection committees for doctoral courses tend to fall back on what they can measure: academic success. A University of Birmingham study of more than 1,500 applicants to a clinical psychology training course in the UK found that proxies for academic ability – such as post-16 education at school, degree class, postgraduate study and authorship of publications – were among the best predictors of shortlisting and selection, alongside vocational experience and ratings from referees.

In particular, DClinPsy programmes tend to focus on undergraduate degree class: most specify that applicants should have achieved a high 2:1 in their first degree. Justifying this, the University of Sheffield’s Clinical and Applied Psychology Unit states: “The rationale for this is that a good undergraduate degree reflects a robust performance across a broad range of modules and examination processes.” In practice, many DClinPsy applicants already have a master’s degree – which reflects the competitive reality of the programme, rather than a formal requirement.

Of course, good results are easier – not easy, but easier – to achieve when you come from a privileged background. The authors of the Birmingham study acknowledge this. But the current system does appear to work: a 2014 study of seven consecutive intakes of students at University College London – the UK’s largest clinical psychology training course – found that a higher class of undergraduate degree was the strongest predictor of performance on the doctoral course, ahead of both interview scores and referee ratings. Strong A-level results were also a positive indicator, though the undergraduate degree remained the more consistent measure.

Disposition 2: Curiosity

Being a scientist is about being open to possibility. It’s about sitting with uncertainty – and investigating what might create certainty in its place.

Working with other human beings is also about being open to possibility. It’s about accepting that what another person tells you may surprise or wrongfoot you – that you cannot ever know someone else’s story until they have told it to you.

Clinical psychologists are scientists who work with other human beings. We use exploratory questioning and reflection to remain open to new ideas and new solutions. We form hypotheses about what may help other people, and then test those hypotheses through our work.

In clinical psychology, the term “curiosity” is generally used to refer to this kind of openness: a resistance to premature certainty, and a willingness to question one’s own assumptions and explore the client’s reality instead. It is about being interested and engaged in the world – rather than defensive in the face of it.

Often, DClinPsy courses will refer to this quality as “intellectual curiosity”. It appeals to clinical psychology departments because it suggests a predisposition towards lifelong learning. It also reflects a scientific mindset – and thus a desire to contribute to the scientific foundations of the field.

Disposition 3: A sense of adventure

Clinical psychologists are, by our nature, adventurous. This is not to say that we are all thrill-seeking adrenaline junkies: no DClinPsy courses has yet included bungee jumping in its selection process.

Instead, “a sense of adventure” refers to the variety of the role – clinical psychology is unusual among healthcare professions in its breadth. Clinical psychologists work with children, young people, adults and older people. We work with individuals, with couples and with groups. We encounter people experiencing mental-health difficulties and physical-health difficulties, as well as people who are neurodiverse or have learning disabilities. We work with people with short-lived problems and those with lifelong issues. We provide therapy, supervise staff, advise organisations and examine systems. We teach, research and write reports. We lead teams and design services. We explore uncharted, emotionally difficult terrain – for our clients and for ourselves.

If you are looking for a job that is predictable and familiar, clinical psychology is not for you. It is a profession that requires openness to new ideas and constant adaptation to new situations. The Salomons Institute, at Canterbury Christ Church University – one of the oldest DClinPsy programmes in the country – explicitly states that it wants to produce clinical psychologists who can adapt their skills and use them effectively in unique and complex situations.

People who choose to become clinical psychologists tend to exhibit scientific drive: a predisposition towards exploratory thinking and scientific research. They opt for the career precisely because they know it will be varied and wide-ranging, and that it will provide challenge and intellectual stimulation. This scientific drive often correlates with extroversion and openness to new ideas – which, in turn, are linked to novelty-seeking and divergent thinking. Novelty is anathema to the unadventurous; challenging the status quo in the pursuit of knowledge is an adventurous act.

Disposition 4: Self-awareness

As psychologists, we put ourselves in our own toolkit. Psychologists bring parts of ourselves to a therapy session to help our clients feel understood, accepted and supported. This can be done through judicious self-disclosure, management of countertransference and therapeutic presence – all of which require self-awareness.

Self-awareness is the ability to understand how our own personal history shapes our reactions. It means recognising our blind spots and noticing the impact we have on others – and then adjusting our behaviour accordingly. It also refers to an ability to reflect on and critically evaluate our influence on services and practice – as an individual, as a profession and as a service.

For this reason, DClinPsy courses view self-awareness as one of the cornerstones of training. Most place an emphasis on reflective writing, as well as the ability to learn from mistakes and through experience. The Salomons Institute focuses part of its training on the reflective-practitioner model, developing awareness of the influence of self and others on practice. And, in supervision sessions – which are mandatory for trainee clinical psychologists – trainees are encouraged to acknowledge their imperfections and mistakes, and to learn from them.

Supervisors also model their own reflective practice for trainees: “It’s partly showing to the trainee that you’re not the one with all the answers, that you need to reflect on what you’re doing,” one clinical supervisor said. “And they watch you freeze or struggle with something or get something wrong, and then you can reflect on it afterwards.”

Bonus disposition: Resilience

The four dispositions discussed above are the traits that lead a person to consider a career in clinical psychology: they take us to the threshold of the profession. But in order to cross that threshold – and then keep going once we’ve crossed it – we need an additional quality: resilience.

As we discussed last week, finding an assistant psychologist role and going on to secure a place on a doctoral course require an ability to tolerate setback, rejection and failure – and to pick yourself up and start all over again afterwards. This ability is resilience – and it is vital for all stages of a career in clinical psychology.

Resilience gives us the wherewithal to tolerate emotional strain and keep going under pressure – while continuing to reflect and learn. High levels of resilience also help insulate us from burnout in a demanding profession.

The need for resilience begins early. DClinPsy training is academically intense and emotionally demanding. DClinPsy trainees have high workloads and are evaluated constantly; imposter syndrome is common. Those trainees who are resilient – who view these demands as manageable and have access to appropriate support – have the fewest problems adapting to the course, are able to learn and work effectively and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Clinical supervision plays a key role here, too. Supervision helps trainees to build resilience, by placing appropriate demands on them, while providing professional support. Peer support is similarly important – which is something we will examine in more detail next week.

A psychological journey

Becoming a clinical psychologist is a professional journey – but it is also a psychological one. Like all innate skills and talents, these dispositions flourish with attention. Intelligence can be nourished; curiosity can be fed; a sense of adventure can be cultivated; and self-awareness and resilience develop best with support and encouragement.

The journey of becoming a clinical psychologist is therefore one of personal, professional and psychological growth. But it is also one of honing skills to the highest level possible – because the work we do matters, and it matters that we do it well.

Next week: We look at why the people you train alongside matter as much as the academic staff who teach you.

___________

Episode 3 of So You Want To Be A Psychologist – The Doctorate Reality – will go live at 3pm today on all our platforms. Watch the trailer below.

If you are navigating this process and have a question you have never found a clear answer to, come and ask us. We read everything and we respond. The free subscriber chat is open

affinitiplus.substack.com/publish/chat

So You Want To Be A Psychologist is aimed at anyone in that in-between space, whether you’re applying for doctorates or at the early stages of finding out what a career in psychology involves. The series covers key parts of the journey, including early decisions, CV building, interviews, rejection and what the process actually feels like from the inside.

But we know that sometimes information is just the beginning: it’s helpful to have someone explain how that information can translate into practice. We’ve therefore published a £10 resource pack to accompany the series. This brings together key points from the episodes in a more structured format. There is also optional 1:1 support available through Affiniti+, which can include a career strategy session, CV review or mock interview, depending on what stage you’re at in the process.

If any of this resonates, you can find out more here:

https://www.affinitiplus.com/podnotes

Want to get started right away? Our Resource Pack (£10) includes: a checklist for assistant psychologist applications, a CV template, a UK DClinPsy application timeline, and additional reading; a perfect first step in your journey. Available now at https://www.affinitiplus.com/podnotes.

Have a question about this episode? Join the conversation in our Substack community — ask Dr Anindita and Zara directly. We read everything: https://affinitiplus.substack.com/publish/chat?utm_source=chat-checklist

We built this series for you and we want to keep improving it. Tell us what you need more of, what questions you still have, and what would make this resource more useful for aspiring psychologists:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf-FLJhzVXUGiJcpdhcpDWEIvf64TJScpypt5Y4IMTtd3HXwA/viewform

If you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, leaving a review takes 30 seconds and makes a real difference to who finds this series next.

Timestamps

0:00 - 0:32 → Introduction to Episode 2

0:32 - 3:18 → What actually is a clinical psychologist?

3:18 - 3:59 → How does a clinical psychologist differ from a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist?

3:59 - 8:04 → Dr Anindita Sarkar’s route to the doctorate in clinical psychology

8:04 - 9:22 → The experience of applying to a doctorate in clinical psychology

9:22 - 10:23 → Advice for those at the beginning of the journey to the doctorate

10:23 - 11:04 → Episode wrap-up

Rembrandt painted this self-portrait mid-process. Most portraits show the finished person. This one shows someone still becoming. Indeed, there’s a particular kind of uncertainty that comes with trying to become a clinical psychologist. It’s not just the competitiveness of the pathway, but how unclear the early stages can feel when you’re trying to figure out what actually matters.

This article isn’t only for people navigating that process. If you’ve ever sat in a therapy room and wondered what brought your psychologist to this work, what it cost them to get there, what the training asked of them and what they carried into the room before you arrived, this is where that conversation begins.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be exploring the psychology of psychologists: what draws people to clinical psychology, what the journey involves, and how to ensure you have the support and emotional strength you need for it. That exploration begins here.

We’re Zara and Ellie. We both graduated with master’s degrees in psychology last year, and we’re currently navigating the early stages of postgraduate life and the clinical psychology pathway. We’re writing from inside the process, not from the other end of it.

A lot of our early experiences have involved trying to make sense of vague advice, such as “Get more experience” or “Build your CV”, without ever really understanding what that meant in practice, or whether we were actually moving in the right direction. At times, it can feel like there’s an unspoken rulebook everyone else has access to, while you’re left trying to piece things together as you go.

It’s a process that can strip you of any sense of control over your own life. As we’ve discussed in our recent series on agency, even when events feel out of your control, there’s always a way to forge your own path.

Lack of control

For us, it wasn’t just that the process felt difficult – it was that it felt disorientating. We had a loose understanding that a doctorate was the goal, but very little sense of what sat between here and there.

When everything feels important, it’s hard to know where to focus. You can end up trying to do everything at once – gain more experience, write stronger applications, constantly refine your CV – without a clear sense of what’s actually making a difference.

Over time, it becomes clear that rejection is a constant part of the process, not an exception to it, but that doesn’t make it easier to interpret in the moment. And when there isn’t much feedback to work with, it can become very easy to fill in the gaps yourself – and usually not in a helpful way.

There were points when we didn’t feel particularly motivated to continue, especially when effort didn’t seem to translate into visible progress. No matter how much you try to adjust, it can still feel like things are happening beyond your control.

Finding clarity in the chaos

At some point, we realised that this sense of things happening beyond our control was part of what was keeping us feeling stuck. The focus had become external: trying to work out the “right” sequence of steps, rather than understanding what we could realistically control at any given stage. We had lost any sense of our own agency within the process.

Shifting that question slightly – from “What am I missing?” to “What can I actually do with what I know right now?” –changed things.

It didn’t suddenly make the process easier or less competitive, but it did make decisions feel more grounded. Instead of reacting to uncertainty, we could take small, intentional steps forwards. Developing even a partial understanding of the system makes the process feel less overwhelming. In an environment where feedback can be limited, this gives us a sense of direction and puts the control back in our hands.

Moving away from black-and-white outcomes and towards what we could learn, we found a greater sense of hope and confidence. Even without immediate success, there was more value in noticing what was being built along the way: skills, reflections, familiarity with the process itself. Staying engaged then became less about optimism and more about continuity. You don’t need to feel confident about everything in order to keep going.

The value of resources and support

One of the hardest parts of this journey isn’t just how competitive it is, but how unclear it can feel at the start. As we’ve mentioned, you’re often told to “Get experience” or “Strengthen your CV” – but what that actually looks like in practice isn’t always explained in a way that feels usable.

That gap between effort and understanding is what led us to make the So You Want To Be A Psychologist podcast.

Informally, we refer to our free podcast as “Podnotes”. In clinical work, notes are how you make sense of what’s been said – how you turn complexity into something you can actually work with. We wanted Podnotes to do something similar: to take conversations and turn them into something more practical, especially for people trying to figure things out as they go along.

So You Want To Be A Psychologist is aimed at anyone in that in-between space, whether you’re applying for doctorates or at the early stages of finding out what a career in psychology involves. The series covers key parts of the journey, including early decisions, CV building, interviews, rejection and what the process actually feels like from the inside.

But we know that sometimes information is just the beginning: it’s helpful to have someone explain how that information can translate into practice. We’ve therefore published a £10 resource pack to accompany the series. This brings together key points from the episodes in a more structured format. There is also optional 1:1 support available through Affiniti+, which can include a career strategy session, CV review or mock interview, depending on what stage you’re at in the process.

Sitting with uncertainty

If you’re feeling stuck, uncertain or unsure whether you’re doing the “right” things, you’re not alone. We’re both still on the pathway, still figuring things out and still learning as we go. Our podcast isn’t a reflection from the end of the process, but from within it.

Uncertainty is part of the process. As uncomfortable as it feels, to sit with uncertainty and understand it is the best way to navigate it.

It’s okay to feel unsure at points along the way – no one has it fully figured out. Be kind with yourself, and give yourself permission to learn and to make mistakes. And remember: taking the long way round isn’t a sign of failure. It just means you have extra experience to draw on by the time you arrive.

If any of this resonates, you can find out more here:
https://www.affinitiplus.com/podnotes

Episode 2 of So You Want To Be A Psychologist – about the role itself and the path to qualification – will go live at 3pm today. Watch the trailer below.

One more thing. Amelia asked us last week in the subscribers Substack community chat where to start with relevant experience when you are early in the process. It is exactly the kind of question this space exists for and we answered it there in full. Zara and Ellie will also be opening their own chat threads in the coming weeks and there will be plenty of opportunity to ask them directly about their experience of the pathway too. If you are navigating this process and have a question you have never found a clear answer to, come and ask us. We read everything and we respond. The chat is open.

affinitiplus.substack.com/publish/chat

Next week in The Psychology of Psychologists series: what kind of person makes a good psychologist? Not the official answer. The honest one.

Want to get started right away? Our Resource Pack (£10) includes: a checklist for assistant psychologist applications, a CV template, a UK DClinPsy application timeline, and additional reading; a perfect first step in your journey. Available now at https://www.affinitiplus.com/podnotes.

Have a question about this episode? Join the conversation in our Substack community — ask Dr Anindita and Zara directly. We read everything: https://affinitiplus.substack.com/publish/chat?utm_source=chat-checklist

We built this series for you and we want to keep improving it. Tell us what you need more of, what questions you still have, and what would make this resource more useful for aspiring psychologists:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf-FLJhzVXUGiJcpdhcpDWEIvf64TJScpypt5Y4IMTtd3HXwA/viewform

If you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, leaving a review takes 30 seconds and makes a real difference to who finds this series next.

Timestamps

0:00 - 2:29 → Introduction to So You Want To Be A Psychologist

2:29 - 6:01 → Introducing Dr Anindita Sarkar and her reasons for pursuing clinical psychology

6:01 - 7:30 → Tips for facing the level of competition in the field

7:30 - 8:16 → Episode wrap-up

Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People in 1830, after the July Revolution in France. It shows people moving together, over barricades, into the line of fire.

This collective action would not have been possible without active decisions taken by every single one of the people pictured. As individuals, they chose to pick up their swords, their rifles, their pistols and their flags and take to the streets. Without those individual decisions, there would have been no revolution.

Individual agency is vital if we are going to fight for the betterment of society. But we need it in order to make our own lives better, too.

Facing the sunrise

Agency is a sense of control over our own lives – and, for many today, it remains soul-destroyingly elusive. Where is your individual agency when you’re competing against hundreds of others for a job you’re overqualified for – and not even being shortlisted for interview? How can you feel in control of your life when your landlord keeps raising your rent and you doubt you’ll ever be able to save enough to buy your own flat?

The answer, unexpectedly, comes in defeat. In March, the Wales football team lost 4-2 to Bosnia-Herzegovina on penalties, crashing out of the competition. His country’s disappointment lay heavily on the shoulders of Craig Bellamy, the team’s manager. When he spoke after the match, it was with visible emotion: “I hurt tonight, and I’m accepting to let that hurt – it’s sinking in now as I’m talking. It’ll be a sleepless night.”

But then, noticeably, his tone shifted: “But it makes me even more determined. Tomorrow the sun will rise. And I’m going to watch that sunrise tomorrow. Then straight away: how do I go again?”

Firstly, what’s important here is that Bellamy did not perform composure. He acknowledged his pain, fully and publicly. But then – and this is equally important – he turned away from the pain, towards what comes next.

This decision to look to the future, rather than dwelling on past failures, is exactly that: a decision. Of course, Bellamy can’t control what happens next: his team may lose 5-2 on penalties. But he can control his own response. He can ask: where do I go from here?

This ability to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again is known as resilience. US psychologist Angela Duckworth extended the notion of resilience to something she called grit: a blend of passion and perseverance that allows you to keep trying over and over again, even in the face of repeated failure. Duckworth argues that it’s what goes through your head when you fail, rather than talent or luck, that is the key to success. Grit is about asking the question that restores agency: how should I try again?

Write a better book

Our grittiness can be helped – or hindered – by those around us.

Another example, this time from the world of literary fiction: when author Sarah Perry learnt that her critically acclaimed 2016 novel The Essex Serpent had not been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, she went on Twitter (as it was known then) to express her disappointment. But, she added, her husband had said to her: “You just need to write a better book next time.” Yes, she tweeted, he was right: she would write a better book next time.

When a loved one receives bad news – for example, when they are not offered a job, or when a relationship fails – our natural tendency is to want to make them feel better. And, often, the easiest way to do this is to locate the source of pain externally: “They probably already had someone else in mind for the role” or “He’s just emotionally immature.”

This is known as decommitment, and it undermines agency. It says, effectively, “The source of your failure is outside yourself, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” As we discussed in the second article of this series, this is called an external locus of control: you believe that life is determined by forces beyond your control, and you are helpless in the face of those forces.

A study published this year shows that a decommitment response makes little difference to the recipient’s wellbeing – and sometimes makes things worse. If someone’s sense of agency has already been depleted by structural conditions, then blaming others merely confirms the sense of helplessness they’ve already internalised.

But there is another way to support a loved one receiving bad news – and it is the way that Sarah Perry’s husband chose. This alternative approach is known as commitment, and involves finding benefits (“This will help you grow”) or reinforcing agency (“You can handle this”). So: “I’m sorry you didn’t get this job. Have you asked the company for feedback, so you can look at where you need to improve?” Or: “I’m sorry your relationship failed. Were there any warning signs of emotional immaturity that will help you to identify it earlier on next time?”

The 2026 study showed that a commitment response can make a positive difference to the recipient’s wellbeing. It can also enrich their relationship with the person providing the support.

And, importantly, a commitment response can also lead to greater agency. Having a strong internal locus of control – a belief that you can shape your own destiny – is shaped significantly by birth and circumstance. If you grow up in an environment where your choices produce results, you internalise agency.

But locus of control can also shift with experience. Imagine, for example, that the unsuccessful job interviewee asks for feedback from the interview. The company tells her that she did not provide enough examples to illustrate her experience, so they concluded that she was underqualified for the job. In her next interview, she therefore gives plenty of examples of relevant situations she has dealt with. She doesn’t get this job, either, but she is invited for a second interview. After each successful application, she requests feedback and hones her technique, until eventually she is offered a job. By the end of the process, her internal locus of control is much stronger than it was at the start – she has started to believe that she has control over her own destiny.

Balancing reason with emotion

What’s important to note in both the Craig Bellamy and Sarah Perry anecdotes is the presence of emotion. What we are not saying here is: ruthlessly suppress emotion so that you can focus on the path ahead. Bellamy allowed space to feel his disappointment and frustration before turning towards the sunrise; Perry acknowledged the disappointment and frustration of not being longlisted for the Booker prize before resolving to write a better book. The rational response does not replace the emotional – instead, they coexist.

This is the premise behind the Wise Mind concept, developed by psychologist Marsha Linehan. Linehan proposed that we have a reasonable mind, functioning from a purely rational, analytical perspective, and an emotional mind, which is feelings-driven and reactive. We shouldn’t be suppressing emotion in favour of logic – but nor should we allow ourselves to be hijacked by emotion at the expense of reason.

The wise mind, therefore, is the integration of the reasonable and emotional minds. Wise mind is a state that allows us to act with clarity and emotion.

When we learn to believe that our actions have no impact on the world, we are allowing our emotional mind to take over: the rational assessment that your actions haven’t produced results in one specific situation becomes an emotion-driven belief that your actions will never produce the results you want, in any circumstance or situation. It is, in effect, the leap from “My friend’s new dog bit me” to “Dogs don’t like me and want to bite me.”

Agency involves holding both dimensions simultaneously. It means not bypassing the pain and letting the rational mind take over – but also not being wholly consumed by it, succumbing to the emotional mind. Agency lies at the meeting point of reason and emotion.

Hope is a discipline

There is another element that is vital to individual agency: hope. Mariame Kaba, a US activist, grassroots organiser and educator, describes hope as a belief in the potential for transformation and change.

A 2024 study reported that lack of hope is a key factor in the rising numbers of deaths in the US of despair – a term that encompasses suicide, overdoses and alcohol-related deaths. By contrast, surveys of teenagers in low-income households in Lima, Peru and St Louis, in the US state of Missouri, found that those who have hope for the future are more likely to avoid risky behaviours and put effort into their education.

As with an internal locus of control, the existence of hope can be determined by birth and circumstance – if hope is rewarded, it is easier to maintain. But, equally, hope can be built and strengthened, like a muscle. It is notable that many of those hopeful teenagers in Lima and St Louis were working with a mentor.

Mariame Kaba describes hope as a discipline: something you practise every day, reinforcing it over time. “In the world we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that nothing is going to change ever, that people are evil,” she said in a 2018 interview. “I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. I choose to think a different way, and I choose to act in a different way. I choose to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy.”

Hope is a discipline, but it is also a choice – and choosing to be hopeful is itself an act of agency.

Staying hopeful: a new resource

Finding hope takes discipline – but hanging on to it can also require gargantuan effort. It’s all very well asking for feedback from a job interview, but what if the feedback amounts to: “Your answers weren’t quite good enough”? How do you turn that into something positive?

This was what our assistant psychologist, Zara Tandy, and Ellie Webb, our psychology intern, found when applying for psychology jobs after completing their master’s degrees. “You’re often told to ‘get experience’ or ‘strengthen your CV,’ but what that actually looks like in practice isn’t always explained in a way that feels usable,” they write in an article about their journey to employment, to be published next week.

“It can start to feel like things are happening outside of your control, no matter how much you try to adjust.”

This desire to maintain control – to keep agency alive throughout the psychology job-hunting process – was what inspired us to create our new podcast, So You Want to be a Psychologist.

So You Want To Be A Psychologist is intended for anyone with an interest in psychology – from those applying for doctorates to school students exploring an early interest in the field. Across five episodes, we provide an overview of a career in clinical psychology, and then focus in on the practical steps needed to make it happen: CV building, interview preparation and dealing with rejection.

We offer an insider’s perspective: less “We’ve been there and we’ve done that” and more “We’re still there and still doing that.” Zara and Ellie are navigating a brutal system, and they’ve chosen to create this podcast in the hope that it will make the system a little less brutal for those coming up just behind them.

This is hope as discipline in action. This is agency.

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Episode 1 of So You Want To Be A Psychologist goes live today at 3pm – the trailer is below. You can watch the full episode on Substack or YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music.

Next week, Zara and Ellie will share the rationale behind the podcast series. In the weeks that follow, we will explore in depth specific themes from each episode. The Substack community chat is open, and we read everything – so please ask us any questions you want.