This week, some dear friends faced unimaginable news. Their 16-year-old goddaughter, who was living in their care, suffered a sudden and unpredictable brain bleed, quickly losing consciousness, and then slowly fading away over many days in intensive care. Their life turned upside down, as life can, in an instant.

It was a week of witnessing trauma up close, and facing into the helplessness, horror, and lack of control that are an unavoidable part of our human experience.

Crisis brings us face to face with the hardest parts of being human, but in amongst the anguish and unreality, it can also show us the best of humanity.

As an immigrant, living far from roots and family, I often wonder about who shows up in these critical moments. This week I got to see up close.

Our friend put out a call to his immediate circle, and within hours, people rallied, showing up, gathering, and helping in whatever way they could. Over days I watched the same group of friends turn up again and again, bringing food, sharing hugs, quietly taking care of tasks, and sitting for hours in muted companionship.

Somehow a network of care wove itself together and wrapped itself around the family, as they in turn wrapped themselves around the young girl and family at the centre of the evolving crisis. Different friend groups who had only known each other casually over the years, became more intimately acquainted, exchanging contact details, and coordinating care.

I watched support ripple outwards in concentric circles, with the young woman’s family at the epicentre. As my husband and I stepped in to offer care to them, other friends, further removed, checked in and offered support to us.

Of course, it’s not only support that ripples outwards, trauma does too, and I felt the aftershocks rippling through my nervous system throughout the week. The phenomenon of vicarious trauma is well-documented in the clinical literature. Our nervous systems are wired to fall into sync with each other, and it’s hard to be in the presence of trauma without also experiencing some of the activation, intensity, and hyper alertness through our own system. This is the basis of empathy. We not only see with our eyes but feel through our physiology the distress of another.

People often ask me how therapists hold so much of other people’s distress on a day-to-day basis. Personally, I have a few responses to this. I’ve found it’s important to keep the body open, and the energy moving. To allow myself to fully feel the impact of what is unfolding and moving through the field. To allow it to land in my body, be felt and acknowledged, but also to flow through, and to leave again. Movement helps with this, as does breathing, vocalising, singing, crying. As soon as we begin to suspend the breath, brace, resist, or lock down the body, energy becomes stuck, unable to flow, and lodged in our tissue as constriction and tension.

The other key piece is being part of a network. The supporter needs support.

At the centre of the therapeutic process sits the person or people in distress. They are held by a therapist who shows up with capacity to meet what’s arising, bear witness to their pain, and hold a wider-angle lens on the situation, enabling insights and fresh perspectives to emerge. But this never happens in a vacuum.

The therapist in turn is met and held by their own network—a clinical supervisor, peers and colleagues, and perhaps their own therapist too. The supervisor is also held by a supervisor, and so on, as the holding ripples outwards, with no end point.

There’s a circularity to the flow of support. One day you are receiving supervision for your own work, the next day you might be offering it to colleagues with theirs. We move between roles, between moments of capacity and moments of need. Whenever you can’t see the wood for the trees, there is someone else who can.

I’ve grown to deeply appreciate the networks of peers and colleagues who hold me in my work. And I recognised how that was replicated in my friendship groups this week.

Of course, different types of trauma and loss have different levels of visibility, and attract different levels of care and support, but I’m learning to trust that in moments of need, it usually appears.

I’m reminded of a time when another friend experienced a stroke, while travelling alone in India. She later told me how many people showed up for her, including the kindness and generosity she received from complete strangers. Somehow, people appeared out of the woodwork, and her needs were taken care of. A net formed, as if from nowhere, to catch her as she fell.

I can often feel untethered in my life—as an immigrant without family close by, as a solo practitioner in self-employment, and as someone without kids, who is not plugged into the network of mums, coffee-dates, and school communities. But this week the web of connections that exist around me were illuminated. When the proverbial sh*t hits the fan, we truly are interconnected beings.

In amongst the hopelessness and horror of the week, something beautiful took place.

A village formed itself.

And it reminded me: We were never meant to do this all alone.

Thank you for being here. As always, I’d love to hear any thoughts and reflections that arise from this piece. Do stop by in the comments and say hello.

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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

I was talking with a friend recently about our respective experiences with infertility. Both of us had extensive journeys that did not result in the family we longed for.

My friend confided that this had broken her trust in life. I instantly understood where she was coming from. It was not the deal we were promised as young girls with plastic baby dolls thrust into our arms. It was not the vision of womanhood or a fulfilled life we are sold from every direction in the world around us.

But I was surprised to find that I had a different response.

I found myself telling her that this profoundly life-altering experience had ultimately increased my trust in life.

Before I tell you why, I want to be clear that this is not a Pollyanna piece. Unexplained infertility was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. I barely made it through certain years, when the grief, shame, rage, and devastation threatened to overwhelm me. It was also one of the loneliest periods of my life as I watched friends and peers, one by one, peel off down the more conventional life path.

But out of the depths of crisis can come post-traumatic growth. We emerge altered, and our perspective on life is forever changed.

One of the ways this period of life changed me was truly coming face to face with how little we actually control in our lives. I was raised in a culture that tells us we get to plan, choose and curate the life we want. That we get to tick off items as if on a shopping list—career, partner, house, kids, grandkids and so on. That if we work hard enough, anything is possible. My journey with infertility shattered this illusion. But in destroying the illusion, it showed me something else.

This chapter showed me that there is a life path awaiting us that has little to do with the plan and the map inside our head. It showed me that we do not need to know the details of what is going to happen, we do not need to be able to see the destination. It showed me the value of continuing to put one foot in front of the other, showing up, and letting go of the attachment to certainty and predictability. Of allowing life to unfold and to reveal to us what it has in store.

Previously, the idea of radical acceptance only lived in my mind as an abstract concept. It took life pulling the rug out from under me in a spectacular way for this intellectual idea to begin to land as an embodied understanding: we really are not in charge.

We often find ourselves stuck railing and fighting at the injustice of life, and I certainly landed there for a period of time. But the narrative of injustice is ultimately a limiting one. It keeps us confined to a cage, pounding on the bars, all the while failing to notice that the door is not, in fact, locked. Yes, there can be valid rage that needs to be expressed and moved through. But staying stuck in this place perpetuates our suffering. Beneath the rage are quieter and softer emotions that have a lot to teach us.

Grieving this loss over a period of many years softened me and humbled me. It left me with a deeper compassion for myself and my fellow humans. It helped me to release the vice-like grip I had once tried to hold over what my life should look like. It showed me that there can be beauty hiding inside periods of darkness, and that there can be growth and forward movement happening, even inside what appears to be a dead end.

It’s wonderful (momentarily) when life gives us what we want. But I don’t believe humans incarnated into these complex lives only to get what we want. I’m continually reminded that the deepest growth and learning happen elsewhere.

What I know for sure is that every life contains suffering, loss, and disappointment, albeit to varying degrees of intensity. The work of being human is to navigate this and figure out what we do with it. How we meet it, grow through it, the values we live by, and the meaning we create. This is so much more important than how life looks from the outside.

A decade ago, letting go of the path of motherhood, in the traditional sense, was a terrifying prospect. It was the only picture that lived in my head, and I had no idea what an alternative future would look like. If you ask me today, I’ll tell you I believe I am exactly where I need to be, doing exactly what I need to be doing.

That’s not to say that it was easy to get here, or that there aren’t still days when grief shows up. But the strange and unexpected learning has been that the map that lives inside our head can actually get in the way of being present for, and appreciating, the life happening in the here and now.

Whilst I may always wonder about that alternate path I never got to take, I’ve learned to recognise that the one I am on is the one marked for me. My life was never a Plan B or a consolation prize.

Today, as I sit on my deck, watching the sunlight glistening on the water, as the high tide rolls in from the Waitematā harbour, I feel a deep gratitude for the life I have. I have hopes and dreams for my future, but I hold them a little more lightly these days and am more ready to give them up if needed, to be surprised by life.

Infertility stripped me of the illusion of control. What I’ve discovered in its place is greater trust.

Trust in the future to unfurl moment by moment, as it will.

Trust in life to show me the path that is mine.

And trust in myself to meet whatever that path throws at my feet.

Life does not look the way my younger self expected it to, but I’ve stopped arguing with reality.

There’s a relief in letting go of the reins and knowing I am not in charge of it all.

And there are some learnings that only truly land when life doesn’t go the way we planned.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts and responses to this piece. What have you learned from the hardest periods of your life that you couldn’t have learned any other way? I always value the comments and connections here.

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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

I was a painfully shy child, easily silenced in a group or social situation, but once I found a place of safety and a willing ear, you could not shut me up. It was as if all the words and phrases that had been caged inside were finally breaking loose. I could chatter quite excitedly, so enamoured with my own thoughts that I could lose sight of the listener. This is not a great quality for a budding therapist.

Early in my career as a psychologist, I tended to have a preference for more active styles of therapy, eschewing the blank screen stance of the first therapist I saw in my mid-20s, where I would lie on her couch in a darkened room, and she would lurk out of sight behind me, leaving long silences for me to fill with my own thoughts and projections. I wanted more active engagement. I wanted guidance. I was young and needing direction, and I couldn’t feel enough of her presence in the room.

The therapies I practiced early on tended to be very skills-based and active. For a long time, I felt the need to be useful, and even now, in my therapy practice, I can sometimes fall into the trap of fearing that I’m not offering value if I’m not sprinkling wise insights and learned perspectives throughout the hour.

But I’m reminded time and time again that this is not where the magic happens in the therapy room.

There’s a deeper way of working that happens when we start to slow down and become quiet within ourselves. When we drop underneath the chatter of the thinking mind, into the felt sense of the body here in the room, and begin to notice what it has been holding, what it has been trying to whisper to us.

This is where we begin to notice the heaviness we may have been holding, the grief we have been running from, the subtle undercurrent of emotion that has been patiently waiting for us to turn towards it and listen.

There’s a reason why we find it so hard to become quiet in our lives, and it’s not just about the frenetic pace of modern living. It’s a form of dissociation. If we keep busy, keep moving, keep talking, and keep filling every quiet moment in our day with tasks and screens and noise, we can try to stay on the run from ourselves. We can try to outpace the emotions that are asking to be felt and acknowledged.

This form of avoidance can keep us buoyant for a while, but it’s time-limited. Sooner or later, what is asking for our awareness will force us to listen. Emotion will erupt through the surface, in a way that feels out of proportion to the moment. Anxiety will start gnawing at our insides. Irritability, tiredness, or lethargy will become the currency of our day-to-day lives. We may find ourselves unable to sleep, because nighttime becomes the quiet time when the voice of our emotional world can finally make itself heard.

All of these patterns are calling our attention to something. All of them are an invitation to meet ourselves on a deeper level.

Many of us find ourselves trying to drown out these messengers by dialling up the noise even further, medicating them away, or reaching for a range of comforting distractions—food, alcohol, shopping, scrolling. But these short-term fixes only push us further away from ourselves and deeper into avoidance.

Getting quiet is not an easy task. Ask anyone who has tried to begin a meditation practice, and they will tell you the myriad ways the mind tries to take us away from ourselves. But it’s a muscle that can be built with repeated, consistent practice.

It is also one of the reasons people come to therapy. We arrive into the room and are received by someone with a settled nervous system, who can slow us down, meet us with compassionate curiosity, and invite us to join them in a place of presence, a place of noticing. Sometimes we need the container of a witness to be able to find this.

Whilst therapy can also be active and cognitively driven at times, I find the deepest work happens when we can arrive in this shared relational field.

In the quiet of this kind of work, I find space to notice nuances in myself and the other. The crimson flush of someone’s cheeks as emotion rises, the flicker or flinch of a grimace as an old wound or memory passes through, the heaviness in my body as someone taps into grief, the resonance of their nervous system echoing in mine. It can be moving and powerful work. There’s a shared bond of connection woven through presence and deep listening that goes beyond talking. The containment that comes from an attuned witness creates a transformational space.

This way of relating does not only belong in the therapy room. All of our relationships can benefit from these deeper encounters. These are rare moments where we feel truly seen and met, and this is the vital ingredient of the deeper intimacy many of us long for and find ourselves missing in our lives.

When your partner or friend offloads about their day, and instead of jumping in with the details of yours, offering advice, or moving the conversation to the practicalities of plans and tasks, you meet them with genuine curiosity and attentive listening—you say less instead of more—there’s a moment of connection available that can otherwise be missed. We can live in such close proximity to each other without actually meeting in this way for days, months, years, decades.

There’s a settling that happens deep in the nervous system when we’re offered the space to speak, and we feel truly heard and witnessed. There’s a sense that we’re being trusted to find our own way, an opportunity to tune into our inner wisdom and intuition. And within this space, it’s beautiful and sometimes magical to witness what spontaneously arises. As if we have finally become quiet enough to hear our own inner voice. Insights arise and sometimes land with an unshakable sense of truth that only comes from the inside.

These are subtle shifts that can change the entire trajectory of relationships. They can deepen intimacy, build trust, and create lasting bonds. They can allow us to shift from tired narratives towards knowing ourselves and each other more intimately.

I’ll confess that sometimes I’m better at doing this in the therapy room than I am in other places in my life. At home, there are triggers, there are hooks that pull me into old patterns of relating. But when I experience this type of connection, I’m reminded of what we are most longing for as humans.

It’s a practice I have to revisit time and time again, but therapy, life, and relationships all become more rewarding when I do. I’m reminded that my clients have their own well of wisdom to tap into. My friends and partner too. There is no need to fix or rescue another. Holding space in this way feels less effortful, and expands my capacity to be with people without burning myself out.

As a person who loves words, it continues to be both confronting and life-changing. I recommend trying it as a practice. What would it be like to move through your day with less talking, more listening; less knowing, more witnessing; less striving, more being; less noise, more space? You may just be surprised by what you discover in the gaps that open up.

Thank you for being here. I’d love to hear how this landed for you, and what helps you to connect more deeply to the people around you? Whether you value quiet, or find it challenging, I’d love to hear your experiences.

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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

I bumped into one of my phobias this week.

Yes, therapists have phobias too, even after many years of personal work.

I’m someone who identifies more at the introvert end of the spectrum, and I’ve had a long-held fear of public speaking. Writing is my happy place, where I can thoughtfully curate my words and send them out into the world from the comfort of my hermit cave, where I can edit and review what I want to say, before I dare to share it with others. But lately, I’ve begun to receive invites to take part in the scary world of Substack Lives.

I’ve wrestled with this for a while. My initial response tends to be a resounding No. There are many things in life I have avoided out of fear, knowing that as an adult I really don’t have to do things I hate. Sport is one of them. Teaching and presenting have often been another.

But I keep coming back to a question posed to me recently by one of my meditation teachers. We talked about how to discern the Nos that deserve to be respected and honoured, versus the Nos that may be reflexive and holding us back, and she asked me a simple question:

In saying no to this, are you limiting yourself and what you have to offer in this life?

That question spoke straight to the heart of the dilemma. The answer was clear to me, and it was enough to tilt me towards a tentative yes.

Cut to this week, and I found myself having accepted an invite from my Substack friend , and facing directly into one of my fears.

Over my years as a therapist, I’ve come to understand anxiety, not as an enemy that seeks to sabotage our life, but rather as an overzealous and overprotective friend who tries to foresee every possible catastrophe and avert disaster.

I’ve learned to smile as it manufactures everything that could possibly go wrong and all the myriad ways I could humiliate myself, fail, be judged, or rejected. The voice of anxiety can be very creative.

In EMDR therapy, we often use a practice known as an affective bridge or ‘floatback’ that helps to trace an emotional experience back to its origins. I played with that this week, tuning into the felt sense of anxiety in my body and the fear of humiliating myself, and letting my mind drift back through time to where this felt familiar from. Two memories quickly surfaced, both from my school days. One was the time our music teacher had us each stand and sing solo in front of the entire class without accompaniment, so that she could assess who was good enough for the choir. I could hardly breathe, let alone sing, and the voice that came out was awkward and strangled (needless to say, I did not make the choir). The other memory was from a much younger age, around six, from a time when I peed my pants in front of my peers and teacher.

It sometimes helps to recognise that the parts that hold those seemingly irrational fears are often very young and vulnerable. Making those associations conscious helps us to know what territory we are in, and helps us to respond appropriately, taking care of the young, tender parts. Making these connections offered enough distance to be able to recognise—that was then, this is now, and I am much more resourced today.

So, I showed up for the live chat and decided to be open about the fear. The pressure to appear confident when I’m not is far more challenging than simply being authentic.

It reminds me of something a supervisor said to me, at the beginning of my very first placement as a trainee clinical psychologist. I’d been handed a referral for a woman with a debilitating mouse phobia, and I confessed that didn’t know if I could help her because I wasn’t very good with mice myself. My supervisor’s response surprised me:

You’re perfect for it. Your clients don’t need someone who has never experienced what they’ve experienced. They need a coping model. Someone who knows some of what they’re going through, and is managing it.

Those words have stayed with me all these years later, and they’re often what I lean into in moments of self-doubt. It can be easy to imagine that as therapists we need to have it all figured out, but the reality is we are swimming in the soup of human struggle, alongside our clients, though we may be one or two steps further along in certain places, shining a light for those following in our wake.

That simple conversation about mice changed how I show up as a therapist and paved the way for how I show up as a writer too. Whilst I don’t always share my backstory in the room with clients, because it can cloud the focus and shift the spotlight away from them, I also don’t present myself as someone who has it all together or has all the answers. I show up as someone who has struggled, and continues to struggle, and who is happy to share what I’ve learned along the way, from many years of study and personal work.

This week, that struggle was speaking in public.

I faced that fear, and I think it went OK. Now, please leave me alone in a dark room for a few days so my nervous system can unwind.

Thank you for reading.

If you’re curious to hear two off-duty therapists chatting about writing, life, and vulnerability, you can catch the replay of our conversation here.

And I’d love to hear—what fears and phobias are you navigating? And how are you discerning your yeses from your nos? I always appreciate the connections that happen here.

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If you value what you read here, you can support my work by liking and sharing this post, and by becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Therapy Room.

Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

Recently I was asked, by someone here on Substack, how the therapeutic relationship can be healing when ‘it’s not a real relationship because you have to pay for it’?

This person likened it to sex work, which is an analogy I’ve heard before.

It’s a great question.

It prompted me to think about some of the myths and misconceptions about therapy.

It’s a common assumption that, because it’s a service you pay for, the care is formulaic, and the therapist is just doing their job.

My first response to that is if you don’t love this work, there are far simpler ways to make a living, that don’t involve six-plus years of study and an unusual amount of self-examination. It’s a peculiar profession that you don’t fall into by accident.

I’d venture so far as to guess that most of us arrived at this career choice out of a deep curiosity about people and a desire to make sense out of life, often as a result of painful journeys of our own, and the struggles we’ve witnessed in those around us. There’s a desire to understand and disentangle the complexity of our human pain. And yes, as cliché as it sounds, a desire to help.

Research has repeatedly shown that, beyond the model or technique, it’s the quality of the therapeutic relationship that determines the client’s outcome.

This is something that truly can’t be faked, and cannot even really be fully taught.

Of course, there is a professional front we wear in the therapy chair that may conceal some parts of our personal life, but the work requires us to show up with our full humanity and presence in the room. In fact, the professional boundaries are part of what allows us to do this, by making sure the focus remains on the client’s story. I don’t believe we can do this job well if we don’t also care deeply about the well-being of the people sitting in front of us and bring our full selves to the encounter.

Another question I sometimes hear is: But how do you care about everyone? Don’t you sometimes just dislike some of the people you work with, or find them irritating?

And yes, it’s true, there can be moments when judgement or irritation arises in the therapy room, but these moments are part of the process.

In psychotherapy-speak, these are moments of countertransference, where the client evokes an emotional response in the therapist that offers us valuable information about how that person may be operating in the world. The patterns and struggles that may show up elsewhere in their relationships.

These are valuable moments.

The therapy room is a microcosm of life. The patterns that show up offer us important insight into where someone may be experiencing difficulty, repeating a familiar pattern, or responding to an old wound. The beauty is, in the therapy room, we get to look at that. Instead of simply reacting and replaying old scripts, we get to slow the exchange down, shine a light on what just happened, and get curious about the layers of attachment wounds and hurts that may be sitting underneath it. Our client gets to be met with compassion, understand themselves more deeply, and try out something different, within a relatively safe container.

The therapist’s genuine human response becomes useful clinical information that can be reflected back to the client, gently and carefully, in a way they can digest, assimilate, and learn from.

Where other people in our client’s life might respond with rejection, judgement, or abandonment, the therapist stays the course.

Of course, therapists don’t always show up perfectly. We’re human too. It’s a human-to-human exchange. This is also part of what makes it real. But hopefully we’ve done enough of our own work that we can respond without being reactive; we can get curious instead of taking something personally, and we can hold a wider-angle lens on the whole interaction. The fact that our clients are not woven into our personal lives, are not our friends, family, co-workers, or neighbours, means that we have a spaciousness and a distance that allows more clarity. Most of us would struggle to do this in the same way at home.

The therapy room is one of the very rare spaces in life where someone is willing to hold this kind of space for us to empty out our messy parts and continue to feel accepted and seen, while offering space to try out new possibilities and not be confined to old roles.

Some days, I feel like the most real, raw and tender exchanges in my day happen within the four walls of the therapy room.

The work pays my bills, but I do it first and foremost because I love it. Because it is an immense privilege to accompany people on these intimate journeys. If I were simply ticking a box and going through the motions, I would burn out very quickly, the work would not be enlivening, and I suspect my clients would not stay. The reality is, people come back (as I have with my own therapists) because they feel seen, met, heard and understood in ways that are exceedingly rare in day-to-day life.

The places we visit are deep, raw, vulnerable, and sometimes transformational. The care that is offered is genuine and heartfelt, as we see people confront themselves and grapple with what’s hardest in their lives. Once you’ve witnessed someone share their vulnerabilities, confront their rough edges, and commit to their own growth, it is very hard not to find something likeable about them. As therapists, we often find ourselves caring deeply and rooting for our clients’ successes. Even sometimes wondering how people are doing years after the work has ended.

And this flows in both directions. I recently heard that one of my former therapists was going through cancer, and I was genuinely moved by that news. I think of her often, even though our work ended some fifteen years ago.

It is a weirdly one-sided interaction, but that is part of the beauty. If you’ve ever poured your heart out to a friend, only for them to jump in and start talking about themselves, or offer unsolicited advice, you’ll appreciate how precious it is when someone holds space just for you, for really deep listening. It’s a chance to be heard and received in the way we have often longed to be.

And if all of that is not a real relationship, I don’t know what is.

Thanks for reading. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this piece, and what your own experiences have been on either side of the therapy relationship. The thoughtful conversations that happen here are part of the joy of writing this newsletter.

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If you value what you read here, you can support my work by liking and sharing this post, and by becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Therapy Room.

Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

Over the last few years, nervous system regulation has been having its moment, with a cascade of online advice offering the tantalising hope that if we learn the right breathing techniques, somatic hacks, and self-talk, we can unlock the key to settling anxiety, soothing our emotions, managing our stressful lives, eliminating burnout, and expediting healing.

A regulated nervous system has become something of a holy grail.

Many of us, myself included, have spent years learning all the skills and tools to regulate our own system, from complex pranayama, to icepacks and cold plunges, bilateral stimulation to mindfulness.

Believe me when I say I have tried it all.

Much of it has been very helpful, but despite all the knowledge, for a long time I struggled to figure out why my anxiety still spiked so high at times, and why some days none of the tools seemed to ‘work’.

There are a lot of incredibly valuable resources out there. But the skills and tools are only one part of the picture.

The word regulation is problematic in itself. It implies that the aim is to have control over our nervous system, which is an appealing idea in theory, but was never part of our biological design. Our nervous system is wired to operate a little below the level of conscious awareness. It’s built to respond quickly, instinctively, and reflexively, enabling our system to mobilise faster than our thinking mind can weigh up the evidence in a situation. It’s designed so that, if a predator comes out of the bushes, we can harness energy for fight, flight, or freeze before the thinking mind can work through a course of action.

It straddles both conscious and unconscious processes. Which means we can have influence over the system, but not control.

This is one of the reasons that regulating our nervous system is harder than we expect. And it’s why I’ve come to prefer words like settling, nudging, or influencing, over the word regulation.

And there’s another piece we are often missing.

This came into sharp focus for me when I began a much more relational form of psychotherapy. A therapy where the work focused on what was happening between two people in the room.

We come into the world as babies without the ability to settle or soothe ourselves, and our nervous systems are built to co-regulate before we can self-regulate.

We first borrow the nervous system of a settled, safe other, and, with repeated experience over time, we eventually internalise this as a capacity to soothe ourselves.

Many of us did not have this need sufficiently met in childhood. Not necessarily because of abusive or traumatic environments (though sometimes this is the case), but often because the carers who met us when we were distressed did not have that internal calm themselves. They may have been exhausted, stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed. They may simply have never internalised the capacity to soothe and settle from their own childhoods. Nervous systems are intergenerational, both through our genetic inheritance, and through the modelling and mirroring that happens between carer and child.

Our nervous systems are contextual and relational. They are responding to internal and external environments, and they are in continual conversation with the nervous systems around us. We are influenced by the people we are in proximity to, and this shapes our nervous system range and capacity.

If you have been reading, absorbing, and practicing all the fabulous nervous system tools out there, and wondering why some days none of them seem to work, it may be this:

We were never meant to do this all alone.

Some years ago, I was lucky enough to attend a week-long meditation retreat with senior teachers at Spirit Rock in San Francisco. I arrived on the back of a few weeks of travel, navigating Google maps, and driving on the opposite side of the road in an unfamiliar country. I arrived into a very large group of restless, chattering, nervous strangers. I had no idea what was in store. As I took my seat in the meditation hall on the first evening, my heart was racing, palms were sweating, and anxiety was spiking high. The teaching staff arrived, took their seats on the front podium and gazed silently around the room, taking in the sea of faces before them. Within moments, I felt my entire being become quiet and steady. And I felt this energy move like a wave through the room. This is the power of being in the presence of a very anchored nervous system. We hadn’t even begun the formal teachings or practice, yet an entire hall full of people had dropped into silence and steadiness.

This is co-regulation. When you feel it, you know it. And it is the precursor to self-regulation that many of us have missed.

The container of co-regulation acts as a bridge that prepares our nervous system to function independently. It can happen with any settled and safe person, but it’s not something that’s always available. Steady nervous systems are something of a rarity in our world, which is why we sometimes need to source this co-regulation with a skilled therapist or mentor.

In relationally focused therapy, we get to slow down an interaction, tune in and notice the dance that happens between two (or more) nervous systems. We can notice the places where we are pulled off centre, where we lose ourselves, where we begin to subtly scan the other and the environment for cues of danger.

When we can inhabit this place in the presence of other people, and slow down enough to observe the ebb and flow of safety and threat, this can gradually begin to generalise to other relational situations. Then all of those skills and tools we’ve learned have a place to land. We get to experience ourselves more anchored and grounded in the world of relationships, not just in a solitary practice at home. We get to carry our practices off the meditation cushion and into the world of work, life, and connection. This is when the real shifts can begin to happen.

In our quest for self-regulation, and in the booming industry of self-help, the relationship piece is often missed, but I believe it’s crucial if we want to integrate an ability to find safety and calm into our daily lives. It’s the foundation upon which our capacity to self-soothe can be built, and when it’s missing, no amount of breathwork or ice baths can fill that hole.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What are your experiences with self-regulation and co-regulation? How have you found doing this work by yourself versus within the container of a relationship? I always love to hear your experiences and perspectives.

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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

I feel her dying—my younger self.

As I navigate this gnarly juncture of midlife, I feel myself shedding layer upon layer of who I used to be.

The most obvious, perhaps, is the physical—forty years spent riding the waves of a monthly cycle that’s winding down to completion. Youthful, dewy skin and chestnut hair being replaced by deep lines and shades of silver. The forgiving, flexible body that could hold yoga shapes with ease, now aching and creaking as the practice that used to fit like a glove begins to feel alien and awkward.

And there are the deeper layers of shedding. The layers of societal expectations I have taken on and subsumed as part of my identity. Expectations of who I am and how I show up in the world. The striving to be ‘cool’, the performing, the efforts to be likeable and accepted. To be feminine, pretty, desirable, nice. Successful, but not too successful, in case anyone feels threatened.

The version of me who’s dying is worn out. She’s exhausted. She has lived her life with so much fear. Fear of getting things wrong, being rejected, failing, making mistakes. But the engine that drove all that hypervigilance is running out of fuel. It’s in its death throes.

Death is liberating, and death is painful. The body aches and complains. The tiredness is bone deep. Some days, the brain cells don’t fire.

Midlife feels like a deep cocoon. Like the caterpillar turning into goo before emerging into the next phase. Everything breaking down and being reconstructed. My brain has certainly felt like goo in moments. Like when I reach for a thought, and it’s no longer there, or when I crashed my car because my mind was absent. The emotional world has been turbulent too. So many tears, so much grief, spiked with moments of sharpness, anger and irritation that have more jagged edges than before. Energy that tumbles out before I can censor it. Before I can paste on my appeasing face.

There’s no funeral for my younger self. No friends gathering to share memories of youthful misadventure—hearts broken, mistakes made, lessons learned the hard way. Perhaps there should be. Perhaps we should gather and sing and watch a photo reel—the highlights of youth. Perhaps we should light a funeral pyre and burn the trappings of the past—the clothing that was never comfortable, the alcohol that propped up low self-confidence, the cigarettes inhaled because everyone else was trying them. I’d throw in high heels and push-up bras. Late nights and seedy clubs. The letters from ex-lovers who didn’t deserve their place in my bed. I’d burn everything that never truly fit. The years spent trying to squeeze my introvert self into an extrovert mould.

With loss and letting go comes grief, and grief demands a healthy respect. Demands a period of quiet mourning and turning inwards before a new chapter can emerge. There’s a strong need to observe life from the sidelines, to step back from view for a time, to allow the deep work to take place.

But life doesn’t fully support this. At least the way we have structured our Western lives. Mortgages and bills must be paid. Responsibilities to others must be upheld. I don’t think our physiology was ever designed for working through this life stage. Biology and intuition are demanding something quite different.

This life stage asks for surrender to the unknown, descent into the underworld, and trust that something useful will re-emerge.

How to resolve this conflict? Do we patch ourselves up with HRT and carry on? Or do we respect the deep alchemy and transformation that is taking place?

This is a life stage when everything unresolved in our psyche comes to the surface. Where the tension of trying to hold it all together will break apart and reveal to us in stark relief all that is not working in our lives. We fight this, we resist it. Change is confronting, and it comes with loss built in. But sometimes things need to fall apart in order to come back together in a new configuration. There is power in facing into what needs to be addressed. It’s a potent time for healing work.

Beneath the layers of loss, something deeper is stirring. There’s a rebirth wanting to take place.

Some days, I feel glimmers of her. A wiser, steadier version of myself beginning to emerge. She has a broader lens on some of the struggles I used to become so tangled with. She’s been through the fire. She’s seen enough pain to recognise the arc, the learning, the impermanence. She’s softer and stronger, humbler, and more outspoken. She’s less afraid. She’s learning, she’s growing. Watching and waiting. Finding her ground. On a quiet day, I can hear her whispering to me from the foothills of elderhood. I want to lean into her open arms, her quiet wisdom, her gentle care.

She demands a simplification. Not as loss but as gain. In the sloughing off of things that no longer serve me, I get clearer about where I want to expend my precious energy, my limited time.

Mortality comes into sharper focus. Suddenly, death is everywhere, and it’s visiting my peers. Whilst I continue to fear it, I am also deeply curious, drawn towards the mystery of our fate, trusting there is more than a decaying corpse to show for the work we do in this lifetime.

Transition is murky territory. We humans like to hold on to clarity, certainty, stability. This is anything but. On a good day, it feels like transformation, on a bad day, it feels like the end.

I know there is no going back. I know I will not emerge from this transition the same person who entered. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thank you for reading. Tell me, how are you navigating intense periods of transition, whether at midlife or elsewhere on life’s journey? I always love to hear from you. Your comments and responses are my favourite part of writing this newsletter.

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My therapist is perceptive. She challenges me. She keeps wanting to talk about what’s happening in the room between us. In the here and now. The moments I go quiet, the moments I withdraw, the moments when she feels an emotion arising in the field, or senses it in her own body. The moments I am lost in my story and a million miles away from her.

She attends to the minutiae of the interaction, she tracks what’s happening in the field, and she doesn’t let me hide.

She sees the patterns of how I relate, and she calls me out on them. Gently. Kindly. But still.

I’ll be honest, I sometimes find it excruciating.

I find myself thinking:

Do we have to do that?

Can’t I just tell you what’s hard in my life?

Can’t I just come here and share what’s challenging in my other relationships—my friendships, my marriage, my family, my work? And you nod empathically and tell me how to handle them better?

My resistance to looking at the here and now speaks volumes. My resistance is exactly how I know I need to go there.

These are the conversations I often struggle to have in my friendships, my marriage, my family.

These are the conversations we struggle to have as a collective.

It doesn’t help that I had a British upbringing. We signed up to the unwritten rule that we do not talk about the elephant in the room. We can talk about all kinds of hard topics, but we resolutely do not talk about what’s happening between us in the here and now. We smile politely, pretend all is OK, then go and offload to someone else about what just happened.

But I recognise that this way of relating is limited. That this way of relating keeps me at a distance from some of the people in my life. It keeps my real self concealed behind a mask of acceptability. It’s a form of fawning and people-pleasing. It keeps my healthy anger and hurt locked away inside a straitjacket. Ultimately, it can be a lonely and disconnected way to relate to the world. And yet, by and large, it’s our cultural norm. At least, where I grew up in England, and where I live now in New Zealand. I can’t speak for all cultures.

I recognise that the path my therapist is trying to lead me down is where the deeper layer of healing lies. The true healing is not in her giving me a strategy that I go out and apply in my day-to-day life. There is a role for this in therapy, of course, but at this stage, I have enough strategies to sink the Titanic. Another strategy is not going to transform my life. Learning how to show up with more honesty and authenticity in my relationships just might.

In a recent session, she invited me to voice the hidden judgements and criticisms of her I harbour in my mind. I froze like a deer in the headlights. She was not wrong that I’ve had them, but the idea of saying them out loud felt sacrilegious. That’s just not what good girls do. It felt like dangerous territory, where I risked judgement, rejection, or worse, an angry and hostile response. My rational mind knew that wouldn’t be the case. She’s a professional, and she can handle it. She has her own supports in place. But still, it felt risky.

It took me another week to be able to respond to her question. To voice some of the moments that had not quite landed well, where I had not quite felt met. But when I voiced this, something transformed. I realised I could express these things with care, and that they could be received with thoughtfulness. When the sky didn’t fall in, and the ground didn’t open up and swallow me, and she simply nodded and took the feedback on board, the level of connection in the room expanded. I felt seen, I felt heard, I felt met, I felt trusted. I felt more energy in the room.

The therapy room is a microcosm of life. What shows up there is what we grapple with in our daily interactions. What’s different is that it’s a place where we can slow things right down. Where we can shine a light on what happens moment by moment in our interactions. Where we can recognise our patterns and our moments of reactivity and understand them more clearly. There is nowhere else quite like it.

Sometimes it makes me squirm, sometimes it makes me sweat, sometimes it makes me freeze, but as I work my way through these moments and come to understand more closely the triggers that show up for me in the interpersonal space, I come to know myself more deeply and to understand the places where I get stuck in daily life and relationships. The relationship feels more real, more alive, more intimate, and I recognise that this kind of relating is what makes for a richer and fuller experience of life.

So, I’m taking some risks in my therapy. I’m taking risks that I need to bring into my other relationships. Slowly, incrementally, that’s beginning to happen, and the practice ground of the therapy room serves as a bridge. It’s gentle, it’s encouraging, and it’s daring me to go places I haven’t been before. And that is a gift worth showing up for.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear whether this resonates with you. How do you navigate talking about what’s happening in your relationships? And what have been the most impactful moments in your own therapy, if you’ve done some? I always appreciate the comments and conversation that happen here.

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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

This week, I was fortunate to receive an early copy of ’s new book ‘When the Ache Remains: Lessons on tending to the unfixable and finding beauty anyway’. Lisa is a writer and therapist I have followed and admired since my first days on Substack. Her words speak directly to my heart and soul, with a clarity and wisdom that emerges from having walked her talk and tended to her own healing work.

Lisa’s book addresses a theme very close to my heart—how we can come into relationship with the long-standing hurts, wounds, and aches that accompany us on our journey.

The longer I’ve worked in the field of psychology, and the longer I’ve navigated the minefield of being human, the more I’ve moved away from the idea that we need to ‘fix’ our hurt parts, and the more I’ve moved towards the idea of learning how to relate to those struggles as companions on the road. Meeting ourselves with gentleness, care, curiosity, exploration, and acceptance feels much more possible and fruitful than trying to eradicate the painful parts of life.

Life has taught me that we will continue to circle back to issues and struggles we thought we had dealt with, we will continue to grieve losses that we believed we had let go of, and we will continue to meet ourselves in our full humanity at all the different junctures and developmental stages of our lives.

This is what Lisa speaks of so beautifully in her book, with her signature thoughtful, poetic, and insightful style, and she generously agreed to respond to some questions about it.

Lisa, can you tell us who you wrote this book for, and what you hope they will take from it?

I initially wrote this book for myself, feeling connected to a familiar sensation of needing to pour out what I had been holding inside. Through the writing process, I slowly knew it was meant to reach more than just me—that it felt like this tether to the aches in others, to the pain I know I’m not alone in tending to, to the human experience of multitudes and duality we are each living through in our own ways. I hope readers feel seen and met in the places they often hide from people. I hope they recognize themselves in some of my words, creating a sense of unaloneness. I hope they cultivate more curiosity and love toward the achiest parts of themselves. I hope it encourages readers to continue making room for beauty, pleasure, joy, and deep care alongside all else. I hope they allow their full humanity to be welcomed, nurtured, and companioned. And I hope the book offers an outreached hand, a reminder that we are never the only ones, and a map back toward the wholeness each of us inherently contains, even alongside all that still hurts.

In your book, you share the raw and moving story of being abandoned in a field as a newborn baby, and how you have carried a deep, unresolvable grief from this time. I’m curious how it feels for you to share this tender story publicly?

I’ve shared small bits of this story publicly over the course of my life, so it doesn’t quite feel like a secret or a grand reveal… but sharing more intimate details, as well as being more open about the impact it has had on my sense of self, has been quite tender. I’ve noticed a deepening of courage activated within me as I’ve chosen to write honestly about some of my experiences, and I also feel my infant self being held and nourished as she gets to be seen and known in new ways, too. I’ve done so much inner work around these pieces and layers of me, so sharing them comes from a place of wanting to be of service and offer a mirror to anyone who holds similar grief, whether closely related to my own or entirely unique to them. It feels like a gift to get to offer my heart in this way, and with the gift comes a continued turning inward and exploring how I might stay bolstered and connected to my center as I keep sharing and offering parts of myself in this book. There are so many parts of myself and my life I keep private, but this particular thread of my story and experience has felt healing to share, not only for others who struggle with the depth of lifelong, often misunderstood grief, but also for the versions of me who felt they weren’t allowed to be honest about it all. There’s a real sense of pride in being able to name it all out loud now.

For someone who is reading this and carrying a heavy burden of grief and pain, and who feels like turning towards their pain is an enormous ask, where would you suggest for them to begin?

I write often in the book about smallness being everything at times. We often think we must figure it all out or get to the bottom of things right away, but meeting our pain and our tender places can be exquisitely subtle and quiet. It can be as simple as noticing sensations and feeling what it’s like to be in the practice of noticing them. It can be offering gentle touch to the face, shoulders, or jaw when sadness arises. It can be not doing it alone, which has been integral in my own path—seeking out support and connection as I face parts of myself more fully. It can be moving between the pain and something pleasurable or beautiful, moving toward the grief, noticing when it feels like too much, and moving back out toward a tree, or a beloved poem, or a soft blanket to curl up with. It can be staying with one sensation, one feeling, and one piece at a time, trusting there will be plenty of time for all that has yet been tended to. And holding this as a lifelong practice, one you can stray from and return to again, rather than something to complete or finish in one fell swoop, can bring relief and a pace that is supportive, rather than overwhelming. Honoring the choice to be in this practice at all feels like a profound gift to oneself.

You have also shared a very painful crisis point, at age 14, when you wanted to end your life. If you could go back in time and speak to that 14-year-old you, what would you want to say to her?

Goodness, I find myself thinking of her often. Especially lately. She’d be so thrilled, so very proud to know she made it through the parts she wasn’t sure she could survive. If I could go back and speak to her, I’d tell her she has an untouchable source of wholeness within her that I promise she’ll discover and feel again. I’d remind her how okay it is to be in pain, how understandable her hurt is, how deeply I see and witness her grief. I’d hold her and let her know she wasn’t alone, that she wasn’t a burden, that she had so much love to give, that her very life was a gift, without needing to prove or earn it. And I’d tell her she can move through her pain as slowly as she needs, at her own pace. That it’s okay to let goodness and beauty in, even though so much still aches. That there is room for all of it. That I promise so much light is on its way, not the kind that will completely remove the dark but the kind that will widen her aliveness within all of it, which is all she ever wanted, I think.

I love how you describe not ever being truly alone, because we are held by nature. As humans, we often seem to forget this. Do you have any thoughts on how to move this from an intellectual idea to an embodied knowing?

I find this to be so simple, often in ways my mind wants to complicate. It can be as simple as noticing the way our bodies interact with nature, because we are nature: noticing the sensation of wind dancing on our face. Noticing the texture of earth below our feet, how it is quite literally holding us up along with our own bones. Noticing what the natural world around us might be noticing about us—how that connection can go both ways. And being willing to slow down enough to let this intimacy in, which can be quite tender for some. I find it so comforting to remember we inherently have an embodied knowing of our connection to nature, because it is one of the most natural parts of being alive—and yet our culture and society often pulls us away from that embodied knowing. So the process isn’t about learning or figuring it out, but is instead a practice of remembrance, of returning, and of allowing. And it needn’t be anything we get perfect or “right”, but simply something we are willing to stay tethered to.

In your book, you describe psychedelic-assisted therapy as part of your healing journey. I’m curious what you feel the plant medicine adds to more traditional therapy approaches, and what it has shown you?

Psychedelic-assisted therapy, which in my case really means doing psychedelic journeywork with a therapist as a guide, can be incredibly profound in supporting clients in accessing themselves beyond the places of fear and protection, reaching layers underneath that can be deeply challenging to access. I’ve found in my own experiences that because my learned modes of protection, defense, and fear have been so deepened since I was in the womb, accessing certain parts of me without the support of either a psychedelic experience or deep somatic work has been hard. Moving through psychedelic-assisted therapy work with my ongoing therapist over the last few years has been truly life-altering for me, and has shown me the true essence of myself I couldn’t ever quite reach before. It has widened my lens of who I am and what it means to be in this world, while also tethering me so much more deeply to reality and to staying with What Is. I could speak about this forever, but I’m so grateful for my experiences and also note that psychedelics are not a panacea and aren’t for everyone! For the right fit, though, they can be profoundly meaningful and support healing in new, more embodied ways.

Lisa, thank you so much for your time and thoughtfulness. In a world full of quick fixes and 10-point plans, I believe your book is so deeply needed. It’s a book that deserves to be savoured and revisited many times, as a gentle companion in moments of need.

‘When the Ache Remains’ is available now for order.

And you can follow Lisa’s writing at her Substack newsletter, Human Stuff.

Thank you so much for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts and responses to Lisa’s words. What is your relationship to the deep wounds that continue to circle back in life? And how do you support yourself through the inevitable grief and pain of being human?

Leave a comment

If you value what you read here, you can support my writing by liking and sharing this post, and by becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Therapy Room.

Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

Twenty years ago this month, I upended my life—though I didn’t fully appreciate the extent of what I was doing at the time.

I quit the job I loved in an Adolescent Outreach Team, packed up my one-bedroom flat in East London, deposited my worldly belongings into a cavernous storage warehouse, and handed over the keys of my beloved home to a lettings agent. After a tearful farewell with my parents and brother at Heathrow, I stepped onto a plane, as a solo traveller, to the furthest corner of the globe. To a place I’d never been, where I didn’t know a single person—Auckland, New Zealand.

My 32-year-old self was craving a travel adventure, before ‘being responsible’ and ‘settling down’. I was escaping a recently broken heart, looking for a fix in the external world that would take me away from my internal pain. I was also following the pull of intuition, curiosity, and beauty. I wanted to explore new landscapes, cultures, experiences, before returning to what I believed was my forever-home in London. I chose New Zealand because it looked stunning and because I could find work as a psychologist here to fund my big ‘year out’.

It was 2006. The same year that Elizabeth Gilbert published the iconic Eat, Pray, Love. I was having my own Eat, Pray, Love adventure, before reading the book, except mine didn’t have an ending. Somehow, twenty years later, I still haven’t found my way back.

As I reflect on the twenty-year anniversary of this hastily made, life-altering decision, here are a few of the things it has taught me:

Different contexts open up different parts of us.

There’s an expansiveness that comes with travel. When I landed on these shores, I began to meet new parts of myself. My former city-girl self began to discover a love of nature, a curiosity about spirituality, yoga, and holistic models of healing. I began to meet some creative parts, some intuitive parts. Parts that were always there in some capacity, but that came to the foreground in this new context.

We are shaped by the land.

Somehow, the rawness of the land, the spaciousness of a relatively undeveloped place with a tiny human population, the vastness of the ocean, mountains, rainforests, and volcanic craters, connected me to an aliveness within myself that I struggled to access while living amongst a concrete jungle. When you take away some of the noise of human (over)development, there’s a hotline to self and spirit that becomes easier to sense and hear. Within weeks of arriving here, I started to have intuitive dreams and psychic connections I had never experienced before. I was opened to wairua (spirit) in new ways by these lands and their traditions.

Belonging is complicated.

Since I became an immigrant and truly fell in love with another land, there has always been a question mark about belonging, and along with that, layers of grief and loss, wherever I end up basing myself. It’s a little like having two lovers and feeling forever torn between your loyalties to each. Life becomes complicated, your heart fractured into multiple pieces that are scattered across the globe. There is no way to resolve this. The grief needs to be felt and integrated as a part of life, alongside all the beautiful gifts those two parallel lives offer.

You get to see your own culture from a different vantage point.

Distance gives us a fresh lens on what we have always considered ‘normal’. We get to appreciate its quirks and eccentricities. When you ask Brits how they are, they will often lead with something that’s hard. This can sometimes be seen as whingeing or complaining by those from elsewhere, but for us Brits, it’s a way of connecting, sharing vulnerability, and remaining humble—Heaven forbid we make you uncomfortable by appearing to brag about our lives. Many Kiwis do not get this, and will respond by telling you how to fix it, or that you need to harden up.

Home can be everywhere and nowhere.

On a good day, immigrant life feels expansive and rich. I’m a citizen of the world, and home is a place I can source within my own being, my close relationships, and my connection to the universe. On a difficult day, immigrant life feels lonely and disconnected. Like missing an anchor, being untethered and free-floating through space.

You take yourself with you.

Eventually, after a couple of years of distraction, I had to face into the pain I had been trying to outrun when I left on my big adventure—the heartbreaks, the hurts, and the losses that my twenty-something self had tried so hard not to feel. As the initial excitement and adventure settled towards normality, I discovered myself again, and found that whatever I was trying to escape had come along for the ride. Wherever we go, we find ourselves, and eventually life asks us to turn around and meet ourselves, know ourselves, understand and accept ourselves. This work is needed, no matter where we are. We can distract ourselves temporarily, but life will always bring us back to the work that needs to be done, the healing that is calling to be tended to.

Roots run deep.

Even though I now have a New Zealand passport and a hybrid New Zealand accent, for better or worse, my roots remain British. There’s a Britishness that runs through my core, and an invisible umbilical cord that keeps me tethered to the place of my birth, my ancestry, my DNA. At the same time, I’m not the same me who stepped on that plane twenty years ago this week. The land of the long white cloud1 has woven its way into the fabric of my being, and perhaps some new roots have begun to take shape here now, too.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts. What are your own experiences of belonging and connection? Especially if you no longer live where you were born and raised. Have you ever upended your life? What were you running towards? What were you running away from? What did you discover about yourself? I always enjoy the comments and connections here.

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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

It creeps up in unexpected moments—perhaps a team meeting with colleagues, a social event with friends—a growing hollowness in the chest, a draining of energy, a deep desire to hide, withdraw, and not be visible. A stark, cold feeling of exposure, accompanied by a story of unbelonging and inadequacy. An old familiar pattern, that no amount of self-compassion affirmations has managed to shift.

In the therapy room, we visit many vulnerable and tender places, but one of the deepest and darkest of these is our shame.

It’s an emotion we don’t always immediately recognise—more subtle than anger, quieter than anxiety, and with a different quality to sadness. It’s a place where many of us get stuck, withdrawn, shut down, and frozen. A state that isolates us and leaves us questioning our fundamental worth and place in the world.

Shame often shows up in the body as collapsed posture, sinking in the chest, an averting of eye contact—a survival response that attempts to make us smaller, less visible.

It can show up in our energy as fatigue, lethargy, sluggishness.

It shows up in our thoughts as a litany of reasons why we are not enough, not worthy, not loved, and not belonging.

And sometimes it hides behind the mask of other emotions.

When we react to criticism—real or imagined—with anger and defensiveness, we are probably in the realm of shame. When we are unable to apologise and get stuck in a story of blaming another, we are often in the realm of shame. When we take life’s failures and disappointments to heart, sinking into a story of quiet defeat, we are usually in the realm of shame. When we believe our inadequacy is to blame for the challenges in our lives, we are speaking through the lens of shame.

It can be subtle and insidious, but it can have a profound effect on our lives. Shame often sits at the heart of depression, and at the heart of anxiety. It can be the fuel behind suicidal impulses, and behind the desperate longing to escape through a range of substances that offer to momentarily lift us out of the pit. When we trace our pain to its roots, we find shame at the core of many of our emotional struggles.

At times, shame is a transient passing emotion—the healthy version of it alerts us to moments of potential disconnection and prompts us to repair and make amends in relationships. But it becomes more toxic when it is persistent and pervasive. The pervasive kind often has its roots in early developmental trauma. When we looked into the eyes of one who was supposed to love and protect us, and instead found real or perceived rejection, or an absence of our needs being met.

Or when events occurred that overwhelmed our capacity to understand and integrate what was happening. In the aftermath of trauma, one way we make sense of the world and create an illusion of control and predictability over life is by directing blame towards ourselves. It offers a false sense of security—if I’d done better, made different choices, I could have altered the outcome.

This is particularly true for young children, who have not yet reached the developmental milestone where they recognise they are not the centre of the world. When disaster strikes young, we tend to believe it is about us. We may unconsciously feel responsible for death, divorce, illness, absence, other people’s anger or dysregulation, and conclude that in some fundamental way we are lacking.

Working therapeutically with shame often means shining a light into those dark corners of the psyche. Listening for the subtle subtext beneath the surface turbulence. Attuning to the moments of withdrawal and disconnection in the room, the moments where something is hidden, or something internally seems to collapse. Moments where someone checks out or shuts down, reacts or withdraws.

Somatic work can be helpful. We can tune into the shapes and postures of shame. The changes in voice tone and body shape. We can play with shapes, sensing into postures of worthiness and unworthiness, moving between, and noticing what changes as we grow taller, show up more fully, allow ourselves to become visible in the room.

We can normalise internally held experiences, bringing them out of the shadows and contextualising them. Nothing dissolves shame faster than the words ‘me too’, and this is where recognising that we belong to a community of people who have shared similar experiences to our own can be powerful. We see ourselves reflected in the story of the other and can access the compassionate lens that has previously eluded us.

I’ve found parts work, like IFS (Internal Family Systems), highly valuable too. There is usually both an internalised shamed part, as well as an internalised shaming part—a critical voice that continues to remind us of our unworthiness, perhaps carrying on the narrative of someone we encountered earlier in life. The shaming part often imagines it is motivating us to be better versions of ourselves and keeping us safe, but careful dialoguing can uncover and highlight the costs of that pattern. The shamed part often feels very young, and needs warmth, care, compassion, parenting. It may need to hear words that were absent when we were young—you’re doing great, you’re enough, it’s OK to make mistakes, you’re human, you’re lovable.

I’ve found that shame heals slowly, and it heals in connection. The wounds at the heart of shame usually took place in relationship, and we need the loving, caring gaze of another to melt the places where those experiences became frozen. We need to see ourselves through the eyes of someone who can hold us in our full complexity and continue to accept us. This can be one of the most valuable parts of the therapy process, as well as deep friendships and partnerships. We learn to see ourselves through the eyes of another, and this becomes the bridge that helps us to internalise that compassionate gaze and direct it towards ourselves.

Shame will only begin to crawl out of the shadows within an environment of relative trust and safety. We need to feel secure enough to begin to reveal the most vulnerable parts of our story, the dark corners we guarded, believing that they would lead to our rejection and abandonment. Only then can we discover that someone can meet these parts and stay with us. That someone can see us in our full 360-degree humanity and still find us worthy. Only then do we truly begin to heal, rather than mask, those darkest places.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on this, though I recognise that shame can be a hard and heavy subject to talk about. But I believe that sharing these experiences can be one of the most powerful antidotes to getting stuck there. I always appreciate your thoughtful comments and take time to respond to them all.

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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

I’ve had my fair share of personal therapy over the years, from the more traditional psychodynamic kind, where the focus is on the therapeutic relationship and attachment patterns, to the more modern somatic kind, where the focus is on nervous system regulation and how emotion expresses through the body. All of it has been rich, growthful, and extremely useful on the path to finding greater ease in my life.

But there is one kind of therapy that stands apart from the rest—and that is couples’ work.

One-on-one therapy allows you to form a deep alliance with the therapist, who is unquestionably on your side, seeing the world through your eyes, and rooting for you to be the best version of yourself.

Couples therapy is different.

Couples’ therapists hold two people’s realities, and while they also strive to form a trusting bond with both people, there are inevitably times when it feels like they are not on your side, as they take up your partner’s position momentarily and hold you to account.

In couples’ work, there is really nowhere to hide from all your rough edges and dysfunctional patterns. You can try your hardest to present your most together and functional self in the room, but there is someone right there who knows you intimately, has seen you at your worst, and will lay it all on the table. There is no running away from yourself.

Our deepest attachment wounds tend to surface in our closest and most intimate relationships. This means that the parts of ourselves that we may successfully try to conceal in other areas of our life—the young parts, the wounded parts, the dysregulated parts, the needy parts, the frightened parts—will usually find their way to the surface within our partnerships. This is what makes romantic relationships so challenging. And it is also what makes them so rewarding. If we find someone who can see all our wounded parts and still find us lovable, we have hit the relationship jackpot.

But it’s not simple. Healthy, robust relationships require ongoing work. They require two people who are committed to growing themselves, owning and taking responsibility for their flaws, and holding each other to account. They also require two people who can see each other with compassion, recognise that the journey of being human is not easy, and extend some generosity towards each other.

In couples therapy, when you are held to account over patterns of behaviour, you cannot simply deflect or defend or turn the tables with but what about what you did? The therapist will slow you down, allow the feedback to land, and insist you hear the complaints being laid against you, receive them thoughtfully, and respond and repair appropriately.

It requires a certain amount of self-worth to face into it and not collapse into complete shame and unworthiness. We need to be willing to acknowledge that we are imperfect and that we make mistakes. We need to be willing to hear difficult feedback about ourselves. We need to be willing to learn and grow, to try things, change things, get things wrong, and try again. We need to be willing to apologise and admit when we mess up. But the mirror that’s held up is powerful. Nowhere will we see ourselves so powerfully reflected back to us. Nowhere will we be called to step up and take responsibility so fully. Nowhere will the stakes be so high, and the gains so potent.

I’ve found myself sweating through many a couple’s session with my partner. You know how your sweat can smell different when you’re fearful or under the pump? My husband and I have a standing joke that this is how we come out of a couple’s session. Sometimes it’s him, sometimes it’s me. The spotlight is equally shared around. But just like a good gym session, we know we have done some serious work.

But it’s not all painful. The pay-off of facing yourself in this way is huge. We come out feeling more alive in ourselves, softened around our hard edges, more deeply and intimately connected to each other. When you see your partner really showing up, really doing the work, really confronting themselves and grappling with their patterns, your respect towards them expands exponentially. There’s nothing more attractive to me than a man who is emotionally honest and doing his work. And when my husband sees me doing the same, his heart opens, resentments dissolve, and closeness is amplified.

Not all sessions are hard. Some are tender and gentle, as we bear witness to each other’s past hurts, early wounds, and unmet needs. As we connect to the childhood versions of ourselves that shaped the particular patterns and coping styles that show up today. Many times, we leave the session feeling closer, seeing each other more clearly, and with deep compassion for the respective journeys we have been through in our lives.

I’ve found couples therapy, in many ways, the most growthful therapy of all because there really is nowhere to hide. Your partner is your teammate, your mirror, your challenger, your accountability buddy, and your witness. They come to know you in a way few people do. To me, this is what’s precious about a committed partnership. This person is not just your playmate for dates and companion for holidays, your carer when you’re sick, witness to your life journey, and supporter of your projects and dreams. They are also the training ground through which you grow and learn and heal and become the best version of who you can be. And if we use that gift well, and commit to doing the work together, the journey of coupledom can grow us like nothing else. And that is pure gold.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your experiences of doing this kind of work, and how you navigate those stuck places in relationships. Do stop by to share your thoughts, experiences, questions, and comments. I always take time to read and respond.

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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

I’m hearing from so many people how the events of the outside world feel overwhelming at the moment. Perhaps they always have been, but right now it feels like a lot. I’m not going to try to capture everything that’s happening here. I know you know.

But a question I keep returning to is, how do we show up in relation to everything that’s unfolding? How do we stay grounded and well in the face of challenge and uncertainty? How do we walk the tightrope between staying informed, active, caring, and compassionate, while not becoming overwhelmed, bitter, fearful, or numb?

As a psychologist, I have some thoughts on this.

Whether it’s personal pain in our own lives, or we’re watching suffering play out in our communities and on the global stage, finding a way to navigate through it without collapsing, numbing or locking down is essential to our wellbeing.

We have a range of ways of responding in the face of pain. Our coping styles can fall on a spectrum from overwhelm at one end, to shutdown at the other.

Both ends of the spectrum come with a cost attached.

At the overwhelmed end, we allow in too much, too quickly. We get lost in online rabbit holes. We might become flooded, distressed, exhausted, and stuck in repeating fears, frustrations, and thought loops. Our nervous systems get locked into activation. We might find ourselves frozen in states of anxiety, rage, or hopelessness.

At the shutdown end of the spectrum, we look away, distract, get busy in our own backyards, making money, spending money, watching screens, filling our time. We might take the edge off with a range of substances, becoming numb and disconnected, living at a distance from our own feelings. This seems protective in the short term, but as we close down and resist the world, we can become stagnant, brittle, and defended. It can be an exhausting way to move through the world. The body tense and contracted, the mind a mirror of this.

Sometimes we yo-yo between the two.

Each of these responses makes sense on some level, but each can be costly to our wellbeing, our relationships, and our health if we get stuck there.

We cannot engage with the world when we’re shut down, we’re blocking everything out. We cannot engage with the world when we’re overwhelmed, we’re letting too much in. Between these states is a middle ground.

Finding the middle ground is not always easy, but I believe it’s essential for our wellbeing. It’s a place where we can feel more grounded, present, able to move and act, able to yield and adapt.

The middle ground requires having boundaries clearly in place, while also being porous. We are not immune to what is happening around us, we allow ourselves to be affected, but crucially, we try not to let it get lodged in our systems.

We need our healthy anger, grief, and fear, but we need to not get stuck there. We need to return to our hearts and our humanity as often as we can.

This means, when we hear something horrific, taking a pause, taking a breath, letting it land, letting it be felt. Noticing where we sense it in our body, where we tighten or contract. Feelings need airspace. We don’t get stuck in the thought loops for too long, but we allow emotions to travel through us freely, without resisting, and without clinging on.

Sometimes this means we will feel our hearts break as the sadness of the world seeps in and touches us deeply. Let it happen. Heartbreak will not break us apart but break us open. It leaves us more humane, more compassionate, more considered, more awake. The alternative of bracing, defending and closing down creates tightness and brittleness, and that might actually break us, or at the very least, become held in our posture and bodily tension, impacting our health and vitality.

That said, we also need to notice if the feeling is too big, too overwhelming for our system right now. We can be kind to ourselves. Step away, take a pause, move the body, connect with nature or something that represents relative safety in our present surroundings. We can moderate our contact with distressing material, keep an eye on our limits, our triggers, and our needs in any given moment.

We can move in and out of what’s hard. We can borrow from trauma therapy the concepts of titration (microdosing our exposure to intensity) and pendulation (dipping into something painful and then back towards something settling). It doesn’t need to be all-or-nothing.

We can learn to experience our feelings fluidly, without locking down, without collapsing.

To maintain our humanity, we need to let the painful parts of life in, let them through, let them move, and let them release again. We need to let the world affect us, to know that we are not separate from the suffering of other humans, non-humans, and the planet.

Some places to begin:

Let yourself cry liberally and often when needed.

Let the non-human world mean as much as people. Let your heart break for an animal. Let yourself care for plants and trees and birds and bugs.

Use your voice. Speak, sing, chant, express your anger in healthy, respectful ways.

Quiet yourself enough to feel and hear the people or beings you are alongside.

Move your body regularly, don’t let the energy sit and stagnate.

Breathe fully and deeply, letting the world in, and letting it out again.

Don’t refuse any emotion. Let yourself feel everything you need to feel.

Notice when you’re stuck in a story, triggering an emotion on repeat. Step away.

Connect with the natural world as often as you can, whether that’s hiking a mountain or tending a plant on your windowsill.

Hold a boundary, but allow it be fluid, flexible, semi-permeable, instead of rigid, armoured, tense.

Choose when to engage and when to step away. Move in, move out.

Talk, write, process, express what affects you.

Rest often. Take time out.

Find the beauty in life, as well as the pain.

Let yourself feel the world deeply and vividly in its full technicolour, but don’t hold onto it.

Maintaining some softness in a hard world is not weakness, it’s strength. We can be both soft and strong, both vulnerable and powerful, porous yet boundaried. Angry yet loving.

If you’re not feeling some moments of grief and heartbreak at some point in your daily life, you’re probably not awake to all of the pain unfolding around us.

If you’re not feeling joy and gratitude at some point in your daily life, you are probably not awake to the beauty and abundance that surrounds us.

Let it all come, let it all go.

Let the world break your heart sometimes, because the only alternative is to turn away, to numb, to disconnect – from the world, from other people, and ultimately from yourself. Disconnection may bring short-term relief. But it also brings a form of emotional death. Do not die while you are still alive. Be alive to the world until your last breath. The pain. The beauty. And everything in between. To feel is to live.

Thank you for being here. I’m curious - how are you doing at the moment, with everything that’s unfolding around us? How do you find a balance between opening your heart and protecting your heart? I’d love to hear your thoughts and responses to this piece. Reading and responding to your comments is one of my favourite parts of creating this newsletter.

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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

If you’ve been following my writing for a while, you’ll know that I’ve grappled with a few chronic health issues. The latest iteration of this seems to be a frozen shoulder. A common midlife complaint, it seems, as almost everyone I speak to in this age-bracket has either had one, or knows someone who has. As I externally rotate my arm, extend it overhead, or try to reach behind me for something in the back seat of the car, a nauseating pain shoots down through my upper arm, taking my breath away for a few seconds as I urgently rub to try to soothe the intensity.

I don’t rush to the GP, as I sense that it’s going to be one of those poorly understood conditions that tend to be labelled as ‘psychosomatic’ or ‘stress-related’. Two overly simplistic and reductive terms, in my view, that gloss over the complexity of mind-body interactions and fail to acknowledge the body’s communications as inherently meaningful.

I’m a firm believer in a both/and approach to Western medicine and alternative healing modalities. Sometimes, though, we are so quick to want to rid ourselves of discomfort that we seek a fix before we have even pondered what the meaning of a symptom may be, when or why it may have shown up, and what it might have to tell us about how we are living.

For now, at least, I opt to try a listening approach.

Which begs the question - how exactly does one listen to the body?

Clearly, this is not an exact science.

As a somatically oriented psychologist, I frequently explore this territory with clients. I like to think of it as a form of meditation, where the task is to become quiet and receptive, and begin to listen and explore with an open mind.

After taking time to settle, we start to tune into sensation. We may begin with the more obvious exterior feelings, such as contact with the chair or floor, before moving into the subtle interior realm. The great thing about body symptoms, though, is that they are often not subtle, so even the more disembodied among us can orient towards these sensations. Pain is hard to screen out, it demands our attention. The body is clever that way.

We sit with an awareness of sensations, breathing with the affected part of the body, and visualising the breath creating space. Sometimes this in itself is enough. A word, image, feeling or memory may arise. We simply notice what comes.

Other times, we might ask a question, such as ‘what does my body want me to know?’

These are not questions for the intellect. We don’t try to rationalise our way to an answer, search our cognitive knowledge banks, or look it up on Google (though that can be useful too, in other moments). Instead, I prefer the image of dropping the question into your awareness as though you were dropping a pebble into a pond,1 and then simply pausing and waiting to see if anything bubbles up to the surface into consciousness. It doesn’t matter what shape it comes in, our job is to simply receive it, sit with the fragment, and consider what it may be communicating.

Just like when we work with the dreamworld, sometimes the messages seem clear, other times ambiguous. We don’t over-analyse or interrogate it but simply allow it to sit and percolate. Sometimes nothing at all comes, and that’s absolutely fine too. Or we struggle to know whether the thought came from intellect or intuition. I take the view that it doesn’t matter too much. If it arrived, perhaps it’s useful.

When I explore this practice with clients, holding space for them to get quiet and drop into connection with their body, I’m surprised by how often something does come, even for the sceptics.

Sometimes people visualise their pain as a colour, or an image, and from there, curiosity can arise about what that image may be asking for – perhaps there’s a fire that needs cooling, or a sharp edge that needs smoothing. Our imagination is limitless, and we can explore possibilities.

We might pay attention to stories, beliefs, and emotions that are connected to the symptom, and sometimes we add bilateral stimulation, a technique from EMDR therapy,2 to bring our less linear, more imaginative right brain into play.

We can follow any interesting lines of enquiry, and ask further questions of the body part, such as ‘what do you need?’, or ‘what are you trying to protect?’

It’s a playful practice that can lead in many directions.

I sit and tune into my shoulder pain for several days in a row.

The first day, a somatic memory pops up of how much tension those shoulders have carried over the years, each time I’ve held my breath, striving for approval, anticipating judgement, or stuck in the clouds of my thinking mind. I wonder if my shoulders are simply exhausted from bearing the weight of it all?

The second time I sit with it, some words pop into my mind - ‘you don’t have to do this the hard way‘. I sit with this and take note. It could refer to many things in my life, and I carry the words around with me for a while, trying them on at different times.

Day three, the message is similar – that perhaps I can take my foot off the gas in life a little more. This time, it seems to refer to my working life.

I carry my curiosity onto my yoga mat, too, exploring the tiniest movements, listening closely for where there is space to move into, where there is resistance—all the time responding and recalibrating according to my body’s feedback. As I do this with gentleness and care, without forcing any movement or pushing past any limits, something starts to ease. Over days of practice, I find some more freedom in my left shoulder again.

No big downloads arise, just simple fragments of body-mind wisdom. Getting quiet and intentional connects me to a deeper sense of my intuition, a deeper trust in my body’s knowing. The symptoms continue, but I’m less a passive victim, and more an engaged companion.

How we listen to our body is how, in an ideal world, we listen to another person. By quieting our thinking mind, dropping into our body, and stepping into observing and receiving mode. Tuning into our sensory and interoceptive awareness. It’s a meditative way of relating to the world that we can bring to just about anything.

Through this way of relating, we can begin to treat symptoms with reverence, as a meaningful communication from our intelligent, complex body system, rather than simply an annoying inconvenience to be drowned out, pushed through, fixed, or ignored.

It’s a gentler and kinder way of living in a collaborative relationship with the body. I’m not suggesting that we don’t also draw on outside experts and medical treatments; there is a time and a place for this, but sometimes we may also find that the answers are living inside us all along.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your responses to this piece. Do you consider your body’s communications as meaningful? And how do you engage with them? Have your symptoms ever carried messages or wisdom you needed to hear? I always love reading your thoughts and comments, and take the time to respond to them all.

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My partner and I both err on the side of conflict avoidance. We’re generally good at being generous, accommodating, and relatively ‘easy’ to be around.

You might think this would be great for a relationship, and on the surface, it can be. We don’t have many big fights in our household. But it comes with hidden costs attached.

For one thing, it can be exhausting when you show up in all of your relationships like that. You find yourself pouring a lot of energy into tracking and monitoring other people. A pattern that’s often a carryover from early attachment experiences. A form of hypervigilance where you are continually aware of the other people in your space and unconsciously find yourself monitoring mood, tone, body language, and facial expression to read the hidden communications. It can make you highly perceptive about other people, exceptionally good at reading a room, and quick to anticipate needs before they are spoken. It makes you a very attentive (if somewhat exhausted) host when guests come to stay. And it can be very hard to turn off.

Many people with this pattern learned that their safety and belonging depended on navigating someone else’s mood, not rocking the boat, keeping things light. This can be particularly true if you grew up around anger, volatility, or unpredictability. It’s also often true for children who grew up around addiction or intergenerational trauma.

It’s one of the many ways we can subtly burn ourselves out. This form of quiet hypervigilance toward others keeps us in a mild state of alert. Our nervous system continually running a background level of activation that drains our battery.

And there are other costs to this way of relating that are sometimes less obvious – it costs us true intimacy. It costs us the gift of being deeply seen and known. People end up interacting with our social mask – a friendly, appeasing avatar that conceals our real thoughts and feelings behind a mask of social acceptability and niceness. People don’t get to meet our authentic self.

We think we’re doing a favour to our relationships by being nice and easy-going, but over time, it can lead to simmering resentments that ultimately eat away at a relationship and leak out sideways. These are the types of relationships where one day someone leaves, seemingly ‘out of the blue’, and the other person is blindsided. They simply didn’t see it coming because the issues had not been aired.

When my husband and I first went to couples therapy, it wasn’t because we were fighting and in conflict with one another. It was because we had grown distant, disconnected, and lonely in our partnership. Our therapist was quick to name our pattern of conflict avoidance, and her work with us was to turn up the heat on the points of difference and disagreement we had not been voicing – yes, she actually wanted to dial up the conflict in our relationship.

‘Clean’ conflict that is engaged with directly and honestly, with respect, sensitivity, and reciprocity, turned out to be a path to greater closeness and intimacy.

This differs from ‘dirty’ conflict, where people attack, blame, name-call, or make global character assassinations. And I hope that it goes without saying that it does not include any form of verbal or physical abuse, which is always destructive to a relationship and should not be tolerated.

But skilful conflict, when we voice directly, ‘I was angry/hurt when you did/said X’, has the power to bring us into closer connection. Especially when it’s matched with a willingness to listen, accept fault, repair, and apologise – to let your partner (or friend, or family member) know that it matters to you that they were upset.

This kind of honest communication is the foundation for deeper intimacy.

It requires being able to hear difficult feedback about yourself without collapsing into shame. It requires a willingness to reckon with yourself, to know you are not perfect and that you don’t need to be. To understand that this is what it is to be a messy, complicated human, growing and learning on the job.

As we slowly learned to voice differences, and recognise points of tension, simmering resentments, and unspoken needs, my husband and I found our way back towards more aliveness and vitality in our day-to-day interactions.

Of course, this is not the case for all couples, and there are many who need to learn to dial down the heat and air their grievances in more gentle, thoughtful, respectful ways.

But as we learn more about our partners’ frustrations and grievances, we get to know them more fully, to see a more 360-degree view. We deepen intimacy, and we ourselves get to feel more known.

There’s a different kind of love and commitment that comes from knowing your person, warts and all, and respecting them for who they are. Allowing them space to be who they need to be in the world.

I’ve learned a lot about how I can tie myself in knots trying to be what I believe others want me to be and suppressing healthy anger. I’ve learned a lot about how this left me feeling unseen in many of my relationships. How I’ve ended up resentful, and sometimes drifted away from friendships or internally shut down, rather than voicing my legitimate needs and frustrations. And I’ve learned how lonely this can leave me at times.

My current challenge is how to take healthy conflict into other relationships, which can sometimes feel even more precarious. How to bring more of myself to the table in many different situations and dynamics. How to drop anchor and steady myself through a storm, find my voice, and speak needs and boundaries instead of shutting down. How releasing suppressed anger and hurt can reconnect me to my life-force energy.

These days, I like to think of myself as a people-pleaser in recovery. It’s an ongoing work in progress, even after many years in the therapy field. We never stop growing ourselves if we are up for doing the work. I’m a psychologist, married to a psychotherapist, and we’re still learning as we go.

I’m curious to hear, do you recognise yourself in any of this? And which end of the conflict scale do you find yourself falling? Do you need to dial it up, or dial it down in your own relationships? And if you identify as conflict-avoidant, what have been the costs to you?

I always love hearing from you, and I’m very grateful you’re here reading.

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Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

For better or worse, I’ve always been curiously drawn towards the darker sides of life. I seek out stories, memoirs, and movies that take me into the depths of human pain. The ones that break my heart wide open. My work in the therapy room takes me to those places, too. These are the conversations that feel the most real, the most honest, the most human, the most connecting.

If you ask me how I am in casual conversation, I tend to resist a superficial response. I’ll likely tell you something about what’s hard in my life right now. Not because I’m not interested in the positive, but because sharing what’s hard creates an intimacy, born of vulnerability. There’s a rawness and honesty, that offers an invitation for you to share deeply with me in return.

Not everyone understands this. Some see it as complaining. Others feel burdened, as though they need to ‘fix’ whatever I am sharing, or make me feel better. These are not my people. My people are the ones who can simply sit and hold space and can share deeply and honestly in return. Those who don’t rush to sugar-coat life, who aren’t interested in the Instagram-edited version. Those who are willing to touch the void inside their own existence, and acknowledge what is painful and hard.

Don’t invite me to your party if you want me to simply recount funny anecdotes and lighten the mood. I’m the one you’ll find sitting in the corner in a deep one-on-one about grief, fear, disappointment and shared vulnerability.

Call me strange, if you like, but this is where I come most alive.

Humans, on the whole, seem so afraid of the darker sides of life. We consider a rainy day ‘bad’ weather, rather than celebrating the replenishment of life-sustaining water supplies. We have a collective aversion towards winter, darkness, and the yin sides of life, instead of celebrating them as a vital and beautiful part of the whole - periods of rest, replenishment and deep essential internal work. Our Westernised culture wants to live solely in light and never in darkness, perpetual summer, without the rebalancing of winter, perpetual joy instead of the full spectrum of human emotion.

In the darkness of winter, in the deep pause around the shortest daylight hours, our Northern Hemisphere-centric world has created the biggest, brightest, most lavish, and manic of festivals. An invitation to outrun our darkness, if ever I saw one.

We invest vast amounts of energy running away from our internal shadows. Our grief, anger, shame, disappointment. Labelling the low periods as problems that need fixing and medicating, rather than periods of deep humanity, necessary to our survival and growth. Sacred periods that need handling with tenderness and care. That can offer opportunities for deep healing, wisdom, and repair.

Our shadow parts are often the parts of ourselves that we learned, as children, were not acceptable to others. Perhaps we received early messaging that our rage or our tears were not OK and threatened the security of our attachment to our caregivers, so we learned to split off those parts of ourselves and bury them out of sight. We learned to build a socially acceptable mask that would earn us the love and approval we needed for survival. We learned to be less than whole.

If I had one wish for humanity, it would be to embrace our darkness more fully.

I’m not talking about getting stuck in negative news cycles and doomscrolling, or trading judgement, blame, or gossip. I’m talking about connecting honestly to the complexity of our internal world, allowing all of our emotions to have space to breathe, allowing the world to break our hearts a little (or a lot), acknowledging what is real and painful. I’m talking about a willingness to meet this place in ourselves and in others. To hold space for what is hard.

When our shadow is not faced directly, not met, not felt, not witnessed, and not integrated, it tends to leak out in unhelpful ways, that can be downright destructive at times. Our unprocessed grief turns into anger, judgment, and hostility. It can turn into numbness, disconnection, and depression. Sometimes an anxious, manic energy builds, as we rush around, disembodied and disconnected from ourselves, trying to outrun our own pain and distract from inconvenient emotions. This is at the heart of so much suffering and conflict in our world.

The paradox is that as we face our shadow fully and deeply, as we find space to integrate what’s hard, to be witnessed and met in that place, our hurts begin to heal. And as we heal around our hurt places, we discover we are so much more than that. We find access to deep and profound joy, connection, and purpose.

We don’t visit the shadow in order to become stuck there, to revel in negativity, and find ourselves frozen in misery. We visit it to move through it, understand it, integrate it, and release it. We visit it to know ourselves more fully, inside and out. We visit it so that there is no longer anything to fear, anything to avoid, to numb or escape from. So that we can step more fully into our aliveness and humanity. So that we can live full three-dimensional lives.

There are gifts contained within the shadow. It’s often where wisdom is sourced. It’s where compassion is seeded.

It is through exploring the darkness that we regain access to our light. When we disconnect from one, we disconnect from both. We disconnect from ourselves and each other, and from the pain of the planet.

It takes enormous amounts of psychic energy to suppress and avoid our pain. When we finally turn and face it, we get to reclaim that energy and direct it elsewhere.

This is what it is to be connected, embodied, alive.

This is the work of therapy, of growth, of healing.

This is the work that can save us.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear - what is your relationship to your shadow? And have you experienced the energy that can arise from facing into it? I always value your comments and feedback, and I take the time to respond to everyone.

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If you value what you read here, you can support my work by liking and sharing this post, and by becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Therapy Room. All content is currently available free, but the generous souls who have taken out paid subscriptions help to make this possible and sustainable.

Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

One of the most consistent themes I witness throughout the year in the therapy room is exhaustion.

There’s the type of exhaustion that announces itself loudly with heavy limbs, foggy minds, and a leaden body dragging itself from under a duvet through essential tasks of the day.

And there’s the other type, which can look more like restlessness and agitation. A mind that will not slow down, a schedule packed to the hilt, every spare moment filled with noise, scrolling, activity, stimulation.

Both seem to me to be expressing the same longing, the same desire. A need to pause, to drop deeply inside yourself, to come home to the ground of your being, to replenish the well at a fundamental level.

This was the place I found myself as 2025 drew towards a close. A struggle through fog to respond to the morning alarm, a lack of space inside myself for any additional challenges or unexpected tasks, an absent, distracted mind, sore body, weary limbs. A strong sense that the short break I had planned was not going to be enough to ready me for a fresh new year.

I made a last-minute call to extend my holiday. This goes against the grain for a therapist who aims to offer clients consistency and predictability. But there are moments where there is little choice. Moments when we have to put on our own oxygen mask first, before we can show up with the space to be present for others.

But more radical than extending my holiday dates, I did something that runs against our cultural grain – I made no plans for my time off.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – we do not know how to rest in the Westernised world. What I see around me are people tending to their exhaustion by making more plans – travelling, socialising, scheduling. Bombarding their brains with sensory input from screens. As if empty space is the enemy, perhaps the sign of a failed life, and to be avoided at all costs.

With some trepidation and self-doubt (will I fall into a hole of self-pity and lethargy?) I gently declined social invitations, avoided making plans, and emptied my schedule for the best part of three weeks. Assisted by the fact that my husband would be away for two of those three weeks, I stepped into solitude and treated the window between the end of one year and the beginning of the next as a retreat from life, a sacred pause. I stopped short of turning off my phone, but I radically reduced my contact with the outside world. I let go of all activities that felt ‘purposeful’ and made space for those that felt dreamy, playful and meandering – reading, walking, painting, collaging, pottering in my garden. Sleeping. I barely used the car at first, aside from necessities like buying food.

What I find, almost as soon as I do this, is a profound sigh of relief in my body. The tiredness persists for a while, but the brain fog, the weariness and achiness shift. I feel like I am finally living at the speed of my body’s rhythms. Eating when I’m hungry, falling asleep when I’m tired, waking without an alarm (unless you count a kitty licking my nose because he has waited too long for breakfast).

For the first week or so, I move very slowly. Then, after about a week, the first glimmers of boredom show up. This is when my curiosity starts to lead me beyond the bounds of home. There’s an emerging desire to do things that comes not from pushing to achieve my mind’s plans and goals, but from following the quiet pull of where my body leads me – walking a clifftop trail, Vietnamese food, a massage, a movie. I’m reminded of Julia Cameron’s idea of artist’s dates – I start to date myself, to explore anything that feels like fun.

But it remains slow. I’ve learned from past experience not to take that glimmer of energy and instantly burn through it. I’ve learned to kindle it, gently and slowly, to savour and revel in the feeling of a little energy arriving in my tank and no demands.

I realise that this amount of downtime is not accessible to everyone. But I also believe it’s more available than we think. I see humans cramming their lives to the hilt, filling all of the spaces where silence could reside with TV, social media, gaming, shopping. I think largely we’re on the run from ourselves – afraid of what we may find if we pause long enough to truly meet ourselves.

And there’s reason for this. When we pause, when we slow down, when we drop the distraction and sink into silence, we tend to meet what is unresolved in ourselves. We meet not only our physical exhaustion, but also our pain, our grief, our fears, our doubts, disappointments and frustrations. We’ve been socialised to avoid this like the plague. We’ve been socialised to stay busy, on the run, and stay one step ahead of our shadow. But in doing so, we miss something vital. Meeting our shadow is not something to fear. When we meet what’s there, give it time and space and awareness, an alchemy begins to happen. This is the beginning of a deeper healing and integration that means we eventually don’t need to run away from ourselves anymore. And when we stop being on the run, being rested becomes not just a state we can aspire to on an occasional break from normal life, but a way of life in and of itself.

This is radical rest.

Radical rest does not necessarily mean stepping outside daily life. There are periods that call for this, but radical rest works best when it’s woven right into the fabric of our lives. Radical rest means introducing a sacred pause – between tasks, between words, between breaths. Radical rest is allowing our bodies to breathe in and breathe out, our nervous systems to steady, our minds to quieten. Radical rest is stepping away from sensory overload and simplifying our day. Even on the busiest days. Especially on the busiest days. Radical rest is stepping away from screens into nature. Resisting the urge to fill a 10-minute pause with scrolling. Looking at the night sky instead of the TV. Reading a book instead of online shopping.

If we imagine rest happens somewhere other than in our daily lives, we have an inherent problem. Rest needs to become as important as eating, sleeping, and other essential tasks - because it is. Because it is the bedrock of good physical and mental health. And because our world is so depleted of it.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear, where do you source rest in your daily life? And are you starting the new year feeling rested or depleted? It’s a constant practice for me to come back to what fills my tank. I would love to hear what fills yours?

Leave a comment

If you value what you read here, you can support my work by liking and sharing this post, and by becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Therapy Room. All content is currently available free, but the generous souls who have taken out paid subscriptions help to make this possible and sustainable.

Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

In the world of farming, a fallow year is one where the land is left unplanted, allowing the soil to regenerate and repair, disease cycles to be interrupted, and nature to rest from endless growth and depletion. I’ve been contemplating this notion lately. It seems like something our world could embrace more as an antidote to the endless-growth mentality that is draining us and our planet’s resources.

As I look back on 2025, I realise that, without fully intending to, I created my own fallow year.

After two years filled with travel and big life events (turning 50, getting married, two trips to Europe and one to Australia), I began this year with the intention of keeping my feet on the ground and staying close to home. As much as I love the energy and adventure of travel, my midlife body does not appreciate the toll taken by bad sleep, jet lag, and the level of activation required when I’m on the move in unfamiliar places.

This year, I haven’t set foot on an aeroplane. With the exception of a couple of ferry rides across the Waitematā harbour, and a vicarious journey through Samantha Harvey’s wonderful novel, Orbital, I have kept both feet firmly planted on planet earth, and I haven’t ventured more than a couple of hours’ drive from my home in Auckland.

The journeying has been largely of the internal kind – every bit as much of an adventure, but with far fewer Instagramable images to share.

The pause has invited a drawing deep into myself, a stripping back of layers, a softening and a humbling.

It has been a quietly turbulent year. I companioned a dear friend through the loss of her partner. I lost another very dear friend – not to death, but to the mutual triggering of old attachment wounds and hurts. I buried my delightful, mischievous grown-up kitten, Tigerlily, and I’m watching my older cat begin to fade before my eyes as his world becomes smaller. Meanwhile, another dear friend has suffered a brain bleed and is awaiting brain surgery. The confronting losses keep coming.

I’m noticing a difference between 50-something me and 40-something me, though. In my 40s, I was still resisting and arguing and railing against reality. 50-something me is quieter, softer, and much more willing to roll with it all, to say yes to the life that is in front of me, rather than insisting on the version that was living in my head. To find the aliveness and vitality that lives within grief, and to allow it all to wash through me. To let myself engage fully and be transformed by these events. To see them as an integral part of life’s journey, rather than an interruption from it.

I’ve emptied out a lot of tears this year, but it’s left me feeling spacious, quiet, and calm. On the surface, there seems to be nothing much to report. Yet quietly, beneath the surface, I feel a great deal moving, changing, shedding, and releasing. I’m curious to see what will germinate from the compost of my fallow year, and I’m curious about inviting an intentional fallow period every few years or so.

Writing has been a refuge throughout the year, and I’m deeply grateful to each of you who has taken the time to show up here and follow along. Your support, sharing, commenting, and encouragement have meant a lot. An especially big thank you to the generous souls who have taken out paid subscriptions, supporting me to carve out time for writing and creativity in amongst my self-employed life. It feels like the biggest vote of confidence.

The seeds of new projects for 2026 are currently being sown. I have plans, dreams, and hopes emerging, but I intend to hold them lightly. The words I would like to carry with me into 2026 are softness and surrender.

In the meantime, in case you missed them, here are my three most popular pieces from the past 12 months.

See you in 2026.

With much gratitude,

Vicki

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear – how has your year been? And what words or intentions are you carrying with you into 2026? I always love to hear who is reading, and I take the time to read and respond to all of your comments.

Leave a comment

If you value what you read here, you can support my work by liking and sharing this post, and by becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Therapy Room.

Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.

It began with spiking anxiety in my system. A sudden heightened sensitivity to the sensory overload of the external world, sending me retreating into solitude. An old, familiar friend that I thought I’d laid to rest many times, had cycled back for another visit.

It’s hormonal, I told myself, reinforced by my GP who assured me progesterone is nature’s Valium. And there’s truth in this - heightened anxiety is often one of the earlier symptoms of perimenopause. But I think if we’re too quick to dismiss it as just hormonal, we often miss another layer. So I decided to do a deeper investigation with a therapist.

I’m reminded of something I see over and over again in the therapy room – when we drop into what’s underneath the surface emotion, the feeling that’s been stuck shifts, dissolves, transmutes into something else.

The perimenopausal anxiety was a thin veneer, it turned out, masking layers of grief, sadness, aloneness, and deep existential questioning. What I actually needed to grapple with was loss. The loss of youth, the loss of my body as I’ve known it. The imminent loss of parents, friends, partners, pets. The loss of my youthful idealism and sense of infinite possibility. The loss of abundant young energy. The loss of friendships that come and go and fall by the wayside of life. The loss of time. The finiteness of life. Suddenly, at midlife, mortality stares you in the face like never before.

In my mind, I still picture myself looking the same way I did at 33. Young for my age, I think. Until the day I wander into the bathroom with new reading glasses on and catch sight of the deep lines of my face up close. Catch sight of a woman looking a little tired, a little lived in, a little middle-aged, and quite a bit like my mother.

And just when I thought I’d reached the bottom of the well of loss, the floor fell out and revealed another layer – anger. The hurts absorbed, boundaries unspoken, the striving, trying, efforting. The patterns of stuckness and self-judgement that I’m well and truly done with.

It’s a bittersweet time. As I sit with clients in their 20s and 30s, I feel a spacious perspective on what they are living through. I witness my younger self, fused with the struggles that felt like the sky falling in, and I recognise, from my vantage point further along the decades, how all things come and go, how everything that doesn’t feel acceptable somehow becomes integrated, over time, into the fabric of your being, until one day you look back and cannot imagine it being any other way. One day, perhaps you even feel a faint glimmer of gratitude that the catastrophic event led you to exactly this point on the map of your life journey. Recognising that perhaps it was a necessary part of your growth and learning.

I want to share all of this with the younger ones, but I also know that I can’t. That we have to live our way into these realisations as a rite of passage. There is no shortcut.

It’s tempting to buy into the narrative of ageing as decline. There’s a slowing down and turning inwards. But it’s not so much a loss of vitality, as a simplification and stripping away of what no longer serves me. A valuing of spaciousness, solitude, and silence. I wouldn’t trade it for the late nights, loud music, and exciting adventures of youth. You could not pay me enough to return to those insecurity-ridden lands.

I only know I’m glad I have been able to drop a layer deeper, beneath the anxiety spikes, the night sweats, and the palpitations, to find the stillness and quiet that allows a closer reckoning with the challenges and insights of this life stage. To do this, I’ve needed to step away from much of the busyness and noise of daily life. I’ve needed to socialise less, watch TV less, travel less, spend less time in the city. I’ve needed to connect with nature more, read more, and find the precious few souls I can have deeper one-on-ones with. The people who don’t give advice or try to fix me. The people who are willing to confront their own shadow, stand alongside me, and let me know I’m not alone in the forest. The people who can bear the painful parts of life without moving to distract, avoid, or run away.

As we journey through this unfamiliar territory of midlife, there are some steady companions on the roadside. We travel with death and loss to one side, perspective and experience to the other.

We await biopsy results, bury friends and pets, discuss wills, and exchange ailments. I wonder who will have the job of emptying out all the material goods I’ve accumulated along the way. We try to distil the years of learning and living into the gifts we can offer back to the world. The fruits of all these years of struggle and growth.

I sense a deep alchemical process at work beneath the surface of daily routines. I’m here for it, and despite the moments of existential dread, I’m also kind of excited to see where it is leading me next.

I notice that older women are often characterised as cantankerous, and I realise it’s because many have dropped their smiling, appeasing demeanour, found their voice, and claimed their anger in ways that the world would prefer women not to do. Women are still socialised to be pretty and accommodating. The most inspiring older women I meet are no longer wasting their energy on these concerns. They are standing in their power, using their voice, and telling the world what they think. I’m excited to become a part of this tribe of elders. I’m hungry for role models who have defied the patriarchal norms that tell us we should dye our hair and inject our face with Botox, stay youthful, and attractive to the male gaze. Or remain quiet and non-threatening, gently fading from view. I’m looking for the rebels, the warriors, the crones, and the hags. I’m ready to lay down the burdens of youth and patriarchal straitjackets. I’m ready to burn away what’s no longer serving me on the funeral pyre of menopause, and step into the soul work of this next life stage.

I’ve no idea what’s in store, but I hope you’ll continue to join me for the journey.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear if any of this resonates, wherever you happen to be on life’s journey. I always deeply appreciate your comments and the experiences you share here.

Leave a comment

If you value what you read here, you can support my work by liking and sharing this post, and by becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Therapy Room. All content is currently available free, but the generous souls who have taken out paid subscriptions help to make this possible and sustainable.

Disclaimer - Content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for individualised mental health treatment or advice.