First of all thank you for your support. Even though I have been quite scattered this year in sending out pieces for you to read, I am very pleasantly surprised to find that the number of people who open my articles has not changed from when I was regular in my writing. I am honoured to have your interest and I take your attention very seriously.

This year I have told myself that I have not been writing regularly because I am going through significant professional and personal changes in my life. While this is true, another part of me says “well what better time is there to write than when you are going through significant changes, you idiot”. So this excuse for being lazy has been evaluated, confronted and in the final analysis, discarded.

My next reason for not writing is far more legitimate, it is that I have been writing. Let me explain, I have been spending scattered time writing fictional work that I would like to put out into the world in the near future. However, in the process of building my fictional world, I’ve found that I am quite isolated. My favourite part of writing for you, is that I am able to interact with you the reader as soon as I post. the work put into these articles takes a few hours per article at most, and the time required between finishing a piece and publishing it is entirely up to me. However, when I write fiction, I can only share my work with you when the story is complete.

Or perhaps I can share it? I am quite tempted to ask a few of you if you would review chapter 1, I have been playing with the idea recently. So given the isolation of my fictional work, I return to the pleasure of writing for you, my readers on this wonderful platform.

A trap I tend to fall into, that many advanced writers warn us of, is that I feel I must write the perfect article. It must be profound, well researched, quotable, moving and entertaining. Ideally all at the same time. Otherwise what is the point of sharing it with you? But that ends up putting me in a position where I share nothing at all. So this piece, that is nothing but a conversation with you, my reader, is an attempt to break free from the tower of perfection I have locked myself into. It’s very cold in here and I’m throwing a rope to climb down and get back to earth, please hold it steady as I do.

This piece has no purpose, I have nothing to teach you and I have no profound psychological principle that I would like to communicate. I tell you this because that is a direction I will sometimes take with this project of mine, we are textured. I had to remind myself why I kept the name we are textured, it was to remind us all that we human beings can never be smooth, we will always have bumps and unexplored crevices hidden by our texture. I am at war with perfection and falsifying the self. It’s just that I had forgotten that lesson in my writing, so this is me reminding myself.

I plan to start writing to you again. But I would like you to understand something about the one who writes. I do not write this newsletter as a clinical psychologist, I write this newsletter as a writer who happens to also be a clinical psychologist. So, while I may write on psychology, I may write unrelated reflections at time, stories at other times and who knows what else.

One thing I can tell you is, I will never disrespect your time. To me, the greatest way to respect your time is by making sure that I write with honesty and clarity while laying my humanity bare. I love the written word, if you are here and you are still reading then perhaps you too love the written word. For some reason beyond your better judgement, you have decided to give me your attention. Where we decide to give our attention, is where we are living in that moment, your life is what you give attention to. So as you offer me the little slice of your life when you read my work, I will honour it.

I have noticed that the pieces you interact with most are the ones I have enjoyed writing the most. So I must return to sharing just that with you.

So, welcome back to we are textured, I aim to be regular again. I intend to write to the best of my ability and I always welcome your thoughtfulness and criticism. Out of respect for the name of my own newsletter, I will not be editing this piece, I will only reread it once to ensure that there are no grammatical errors or spelling mistakes. In doing so, I maintain the integrity of my newsletter, I ensure that his piece is as textured as we all are.

Speak to you soon dear reader, you may not have known this but I have missed writing to you.

With great attention,

Ali.

She said “I recently came across this post that said if you still think about past relationships, it’s probably because you haven’t forgiven that version of yourself. I was curious, what do you think about that?”

Over the past few years I have built the habit of digging deeper into patients’ online history, what sort of content they consume, how they relate to it, how that impacts their inner world and their relationships (with self and others). As a result there are sessions where I end up discussing something or the other that a patient may have seen on social media from a mental health professional.

A lot of these conversations revolve around unlearning something that they may have heard online, that they may have considered to be true because it came from a professional.

It’s completely understandable that a layperson may look at a professional and assume that what they are saying is true. I do not have the background information to listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson and critique his take on astrophysics because I am a layperson on the subject of astrophysics. So to some degree, we must be able to trust what professionals tell us simply because we do not have the expertise, time and energy to critically engage with everything we hear.

But that is why it is so important to be able to take certain information online with a pinch of salt. Here are two things to keep in mind when consuming mental health content online:

First, it is important to remember that most professionals in every field are by definition, average. That means that a lot of the therapists/psychologists you encounter when you look for treatment, or most people that you see online, are most likely average. But you might immediately think that if someone is average how could they have such a large following where so many people listen to and trust their opinion. That takes me to my second point.

The second point is one that Jonathan Shedler makes on his substack (a therapist I actually recommend you follow). That the ability to create a presence online is a completely different skill set as compared to the skillset needed to be a competent therapist. Consider for a moment that creating a solid online presence requires an understanding of editing, hooks, creating engaging material, marketing and a public persona. None of these are metrics we would use to measure if someone is a good therapist, that requires us to see their hold over their area of expertise, attunement, ability to sit with others’ discomfort, the ability to create comfortable spaces and so much more. None of these metrics are visible when we see someone making mental health content.

I must confess, I am a strong case study for Shedler’s point. In my first two years as a therapist I accidentally built a following online which led to me having a full case load and a waiting list. I was asked to be on podcasts, give talks and provide my opinion on very important subject matter.

It was a privilege but looking back I wonder, should I have had that sort of recognition? I was just starting out, I barely had any experience. You wouldn’t ask someone with a year of HR experience to come and speak to multiple HR organisations about HR. My success online was a reflection of my ability to engage an audience, not my therapeutic skillset. There was much I had to develop and I still do. Of course, 7 years into my practice, I now feel a lot more comfortable being asked to engage with such tasks. My general discomfort around my own recognition came from the growing feeling that I am not as professionally developed as people are assuming I am. This was part of the reason I decided to reduce my presence on social media, that and what was at the time a growing disdain for the intrusiveness of social media and the idealisation of those who are winning the social media game.

This was a humbling experience and I look back with mixed feelings, gratitude and concern. I now have a better understanding of an online mental health culture that I believe hurts more than it helps today.

Let me return to the question my patient asked. I will tell you what I told her. We must be wary of any message someone is trying to give us where they offer a single idea as a cause of disturbance of your textured and complicated inner life. You as a human being are incredibly complex, you are influenced by your genetic make up, you are influenced by the history of your immediate family, you are impacted by new experiences that continue to shape you, you have parts of yourself that conflict with each other, the food you eat, your sleep hygiene and so much more.

You might think of a past relationship because you are still grieving it, you may think of it because you are experiencing shame, you may think of it because you were traumatised or you may think of it because you’re human and you miss someone you used to love. The answer for you will vary, answers we explore in therapy, not answers that we have declared before we even get to know you.

All that these reductionist ideas offer us, is a comfortable story that keeps us trapped in the castle we are trying to escape. A castle where we stay locked in a loop of entering the same room again and again wondering how we got there.

You are complex, far too complex for a simple 90 second explanation online to capture even a modicum of your being.

Mental health Instagram and TikTok are generally spaces full of as much misinformation and disinformation or, sometimes worse, oversimplification. The misinformation and disinformation can be a bit easier to dismiss; we can simply say “well, that’s not true”. But oversimplification is a much more nuanced enemy. It is the enemy that wears your team’s uniform as it approaches you, because oversimplifications always have a nugget of truth. So correcting an oversimplification is more like saying “okay, that’s true but... {long speech}”.

One oversimplification that I struggle with a lot online is something many therapists, coaches, and mental health advocates talk about and rarely talk about with nuance or depth. That is nervous system regulation. Let us start there.

Now, you may be forgiven for thinking that we psychologists are experts of the nervous system considering how often we go on about it, but you would be mistaken. I can guarantee you that most psychologists, the vast majority, if you were to give them a pop quiz on what the components of the nervous system are, would fail to name all of them. This is because psychotherapists and psychologists (except for very biologically oriented or trained psychologists) are not nervous system experts. We have a rudimentary understanding of how the nervous system is implicated in its interaction with the mind and the environment. Yet the issue is it is rarely spoken about with the humility that is in order, especially considering that one of the most popular biologically oriented models of psychotherapy, polyvagal theory, has come under severe scientific scrutiny.

I do not at all mean to say that nervous system regulation is not real. It is very real and I use it as a part of my practice. I have also received specialised training in it so I can include it in my practice to the best of my ability. So, to be clear, nervous system regulation is a very necessary and useful tool for understanding ourselves and regaining a sense of control over our bodies.

Now that my position on it is clear, let me tell you what the issue is and where the oversimplification comes in. I recently gave a talk at a multi-national organisation on stress management and, as they usually do, they had asked me to talk about regulation. Towards the end of this talk, one of the participants asked me a very important question. She said to me “you know, I practice a lot of self-regulation, I do the meditation, the somatic activities etc., but nothing is changing”. She was right to be confused. She, along with millions of people around the world, has had the idea of nervous system regulation crammed into them so much that they cannot be blamed if they start to believe that nervous system regulation IS mental health. Though this couldn’t be further from the truth.

So let’s get clear on what nervous system regulation is and what it is not. Regulating the nervous system is a very important skill that therapists learn either as part of their training or in their continuing education. It is something that they also do their best to practice while they teach others to do the same. To put it simply, it is the skill of learning to shift from a stressed physical state, sympathetic nervous system activation, to a relaxed physical state, parasympathetic nervous system. Why is this important?

Because we often do not even realise that we are in a stressed state, and when we are, we cannot live out from our preferred values. We are a lot more difficult to be around, we may be more irritable, and we may have a sense of constantly being on the go, among other things. So unless we learn to regulate ourselves we might spend chunks of our life in this state and damage or neglect our relationships with ourselves and others. This is why regulation is important, and a big part of learning regulation is learning interoception, not to be confused with introspection. Interoception is the sense that allows you to feel your body’s internal physical and emotional state. This is also something that we get better at over time. All of us have interoception but not all of us are skilled at using it to calm the body. Here is a quick way to experience interoception. As you read this, bring your attention to your forehead, now your fingers, now your shoulders, now your feet, now your forehead again. Did you see how your attention shifted between those areas as you read the sentence? Did you notice how, if you held tension in any of those muscles, as soon as you became aware of the muscle tension you unclenched your muscles? Congratulations, you just practised interoception. Now you know what it is as a concept and in your body.

So once we learn interoception, we start learning if our body is in a stressed or a relaxed state and we empower ourselves to intervene. This is tremendously beneficial for two reasons. One reason is what you often hear: that we are regulating and we have learned how to shift the state of our body to become relaxed. The other reason is a lot more subtle and one I believe we don’t think about enough, or maybe at all. That is that learning self-regulation skills helps us regain a sense of autonomy over the body when we may have lost hope for any control over our state. This is the realm of psychotherapy. This is the autonomy we can return to the human. That is the true psychological empowerment that is taking place in parallel to the physiological process.

Now back to the woman’s question. Why did she do regulation so well but still felt nothing was changing? The woman’s confusion is completely justified and she is not the only one who falls victim to the desire for a simple answer that can help us regain full autonomy of ourselves. We are all likely to look for simple answers that may bring us comfort, especially when we are in a state of despair.

The woman, like countless others, had made the mistake of thinking that self-regulation IS mental health. It was not clear to her, as it is not clear to many, why we self-regulate. The reason we self-regulate is not just so we can live in a more relaxed state, though that is of course a big pay-off of regulation. In therapy, it is important that we the therapist teach the patient how to regulate so that we can go to deeper realms with them, so that we can have more difficult conversations, so that we can go to the areas of their lives that cause distress and take the journey that they may have entered therapy to take. Regulation is not the end-goal of therapy. It is the prerequisite to more profound work.

The problem I am highlighting is not strictly limited to the conversation around regulation. There is a historic pattern that mental health professionals, researchers, and the public fall into. Before we saw the term regulation everywhere, you may remember that mindfulness also had its 15 minutes of fame.

There were a good six to eight years that I recall everyone in the field and outside the field talking about mindfulness. This was during the time I was getting my clinical training and the pattern was similar. We would hear people describe how they are attempting to be more mindful, we had people on social media describe themselves as mindfulness coaches, all the alternative healing practices had started incorporating mindfulness in their approaches. Does that sound familiar? I remember a moment during my master’s where we were given a lecture on noticing, a form of mindfulness, and we were asked to practise it in class. After the practice, one of the attendees pushed back against the trainer and said that she didn’t believe this was enough for her to see change in her life or in someone else’s. At the time I felt she was being contrarian and I missed what she was trying to say. Looking back I can see that she was looking for complexity, which she believed the practice of noticing didn’t contain. The field and the public have done this with attachment styles, self-esteem, psychoanalysis, conditioning, and more.

The problem is as old as the field. We even have a word for this phenomenon: we call it reductionism. A complicated mental health condition that may involve genetics, family mental health history, social learning, past difficult experiences, and socioeconomic factors may be reduced to simply that a person is not self-regulated, or whatever other explanation you might want to pick. This is an attractive idea because it gives us a very simple answer that we feel we may be able to work towards. Let me also say that I recognise there are forces beyond reductionism that pull us to simple answers. So as not to sound reductionist in my argument against reductionism, I am, however, for the sake of this article, choosing to zoom in on reductionism.

One of the reasons that a simple explanation is so satisfying is because it takes the pressure off of us. To take the example of regulation again: instead of noticing how we show up in our life and in our relationships, noticing how our past behaviour impacts our present, if we can simply say to ourselves “ah, all I need to do is learn self-regulation”, there is an ease, because we no longer have to take responsibility to change the many other factors in our lives that lead to us engaging in ways that harm us. It frees us of the burden of too much freedom. If we are free agents of our lives and we have the power to change drastically tomorrow and we do not have to follow any external authority to tell us how to live, we run into the burden of that responsibility, which can be very anxiety inducing. Sartre referred to this feeling of realising that we have more freedom than we admit as groundlessness. This simple story, this reductionism, offers us a relief from that existential dizziness of groundlessness.

None of this is to say that self-regulation, mindfulness, or attachment styles are not important factors to consider as part of our mental health; they absolutely are. They are not, however, the final answers that may free us of our suffering as human beings. There is plenty of evidence that all these concepts and the practices built on them are very useful and I include them in my practice too. But if we were to take a critical look at what is happening, we might find that there are trends in mental health just as there are trends in any other field of study. The evidence for somatic practices in psychotherapy has been around for many decades but it is only having its moment in the sun now. What we must attempt to do is look beyond the trend. To study the trend, seeing what we can take from it and what we would like to leave aside. This helps us strengthen our clinical identity as clinicians and it helps anyone who is not a clinician to see themselves with more nuance.

There is no final simple answer and perhaps that is the answer. The messiness of our humanity does not allow us to have a final answer to our suffering. Parts of the answers are held by the clinicians in my field, parts are held in the arts, by the poets, the filmmakers, the novelists. No field is capable, at present, of providing the final answer for humankind’s suffering. But we can help. My field has many great things to offer and I am proud to work in it. But we lose all the beauty and complexity of psychology when we offer simple tips and tricks style interventions rather than deeply engaging with the messy insides that we all have, which are far more complex than a single label can explain.

The truth of the matter is there will probably never be a final answer and we will always feel a deep pull towards the simplicity of the reduced explanation. The dance we, clinicians included, will probably always struggle with is the move between simplicity and complexity. There will be new frameworks, they will rotate in popularity, there will be old answers and new ones. This is not a failure of the field. It is how fields grow and it is a reflection of our own complexity.

This dance, I believe, is what being human is all about. It is between finding complexity where there is complexity and finding simplicity where there is simplicity.

There is no better way for me to make this argument than to share my own experience with you. I am in my early 30s so I belong to perhaps the last generation that played outside and slowly transitioned more towards the digital world. I remember what the transition was like. It felt pretty cool to be able to see your friends online and what they were doing, there was a sense of community and you mainly just had your friends on your profiles. I remember exactly what it felt like to log out, “well that’s it for today.”

There is no modern equivalent to logging off because that would hurt advertisers and the world that benefits from you spending hours and hours a day scrolling on whichever social media app you’re addicted to. It was Instagram for me. Living alone and spending days at a time just by myself outside of work, I started scrolling Instagram far more than ever before.

I was seeing higher screen time than I had in my whole life towards the end of 2025. I could actually feel the fuzzy and foggy feeling of my brain being completely overloaded with scrolling. I felt I couldn’t do a productive thing beyond what I had to. I felt a paralysis of decision, I wasn’t really doing anything but felt tired most of the day. I felt like a zombie.

I know I’m not alone, I know many of you reading this have felt that same way. I had dedicated such a large part of 2025 to writing and had made a lot of progress, but I could see that this was really impeding me, so I decided to do something about it. I started small. I got rid of the app on my phone and instead shifted to only scrolling on my laptop like I used to. I made the switch in November, hoping that this would be the change I needed. It didn’t take long for me to realise that this helped, but just a little. My screen time fell by no more than 10 to 20%. The algorithm and the habit were drilled deeply enough in me that I would continue to return to the laptop to scroll.

I bounced back and forth, downloading the application, removing it, downloading it, removing it, logging on, logging off. In December, I decided I needed to go completely off of it. I was supposed to be visiting home in a week and I thought, let this be the reset that I need. So I deactivated my account.

Initially I was anxious about what to do with my free time, of which I now had many more hours. I always felt I could be reading so much more if I wasn’t so distracted, so I started taking a book with me everywhere. If I felt the urge to scroll (which I still did for weeks), I would just read instead. Slowly and slowly I observed my habits and much did improve. From the start of this year till now, I have finished 6 books, currently on my 7th, all during a stretch that included Ramadan, a gout flare up, and war across the region.

Much has changed since I made the switch, and what has changed is far more than just retrieving my attention and reading more. First of all, that feeling of fuzziness and fog that used to occupy the front of my cranium is gone. I feel a lot more present. I feel that I actually get to control what I want to pay attention to. Before, wanting to do anything, I felt I was constantly fighting the urge to pick up my phone. It was like trying to fight gravity.

Now, I feel that I am able to direct my attention and it is no longer being controlled by an app that has me looking at people I mostly don’t care about, doing things that portray a lifestyle they probably don’t live. I feel liberated.

I started enjoying waking up to no notifications outside of work, other than from people I am actually in contact with, people who actually care and vice versa. Since Instagram was the only social media platform I struggled with and used regularly, I didn’t have to worry about other platforms. I had good friends who I barely talked to, we only used to send each other reels. Once I went off Instagram, I started getting on more calls with those friends. I realised that the false connection we feel we have with people far away on these platforms is actually the laziest way to maintain a relationship. And on the other side of that, you also learn that some people you only have a very superficial relationship with, and you are not too bothered when you stop sending each other memes.

So I got my attention back, I started feeling less anxious, and my relationships felt like they got deeper. But that wasn’t it. I had to figure out how to supplement where I got my news from. I started looking into different platforms, diversified my news diet, and realised that what I thought of as news on Instagram was short form content that was not built to teach me anything in any greater depth. I started reading more about history, reading different op-ed pieces, watching documentaries, and attempting to get to deeper ground through longer form analysis. I realised short form content wasn’t keeping me informed. It simply gave me the illusion that I was informed, which is dangerous because it made me feel like I didn’t need to look deeper at what was happening.

Now here is what I’m excited about. It’s only been 3 months since I did this (with the exception of a week in the middle when the war started). I look forward to no longer being in an echo chamber and being bombarded with opinions mostly similar to mine. I often wonder what I would think of an issue if I wasn’t constantly being told what the “right” thing to think or feel is. I also look forward to slowly falling out of touch with meme culture and being slightly out of touch with what’s happening online.

Now where does reading come into this? If you’re no longer consuming the way you once were, you can be more deliberate about what you consume. Perhaps you are like me. I love non-fiction, it is essential to me, but I consider fiction just as essential. As Paul Kalanithi wrote, your relationship to statistics changes when you become one. What narrative does is get you into the shoes of the subject. It is the closest we can come to experiencing a thing without experiencing it. It can make you happy, give you sorrow, make you cry, help you feel hopeful. Some lessons find their place in our beings only through story, and we can know something we already know more intimately if we read it in story. Reading also helps us build our attention muscle. You will find yourself being able to sustain your attention on something you may not find very interesting in the moment while it builds up to something far more interesting, without the cheap little hits. This is a great skill to have, one that can genuinely change your life.

Let us no longer let strangers on the internet tell us what to think, most of it is designed so that corporate overlords can continue being in charge of their digital kingdoms, where everything is curated for you while you are allowed to believe you choose your own subjects of interest and your own opinions.

If you would like to get started, I recommend beginning with something accessible. Don’t jump into Dostoevsky because you think you should, read what you want. Some of the most incredible books I have read over the last few months have been “The Art of Loving” by Erich Fromm, “The Razor’s Edge” by Somerset Maugham and “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro. If you would like something more accessible and fast paced, I would highly recommend “And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie and “Billy Summers” by Stephen King, my favourite work by King.

For a seeing eye is dangerous to those who rule the blind.

Happy reading.

If you were to ask a novelist what their book is really about, their answer would almost always sound less profound than the story itself. The insight lives in the experience of reading, not in the summary. This is also why I hate apps/services that offer summaries of a book as though the only value in it is what you will learn and not the actual experience of reading it.

I digress, novelists are not the only ones living inside stories. All of us are.

Each of us is inside a narrative about who we are, what the world is like, who we are, what love means and what kind of future is possible. And often there are multiple stories running in parallel.

Sometimes when we try too hard to articulate a story, we step outside of it and stop living it. Life becomes something to analyse rather than something to inhabit. As Kierkegaard wrote, life is a reality to be experienced, not a problem to be solved.

What fascinates me about therapy is that, at its core, we are working with stories. Different models may use different language, but much of what we do involves helping someone revise the narrative they are trapped in. We help them loosen a rigid story about worth, guilt, failure, or identity. We help them experiment with alternative meanings. In many ways, we are teaching people how to tell a more coherent, compassionate, and flexible story about their lives.

In some ways, I would like to think a good therapist does what a good novelist does, they give the reader the power to interpret the story as they please.

Yet we do not often speak about our work this way. Narrative therapists perhaps do, and there may be something the rest of us can learn from that tradition.

On a related note, the story I am reading is To Kill a Mockingbird. It is a reminder that moral development, prejudice, courage, and innocence are not arguments to be won. They are experiences to be lived through characters. That may be why stories stay with us long after theories fade.

It was not immediately clear to me why this quote struck me as it did. I sat with it for weeks before I was fully able to appreciate what it might mean. What better time to share it than the last day of the year.

You see, today we live in an abundance of technology, but not necessarily an abundance of thought. We live in an abundance of confidence, but not an abundance of depth.

When a beautiful dish arrives at our table, surrounded by friends at our favourite restaurant, we do not pause to appreciate how it smells, how it is presented, or who we are sharing it with. We immediately take a picture for social media to show how beautiful it is, without experiencing how beautiful it actually is. As soon as the picture is taken, without pause, we dig in. The moment we hoped to capture is gone.

Recorded but not experienced is how many of us now move through the world. The social animal has become the social media animal. Not concerned with feeling well, but with appearing well. Not concerned with being good, but with appearing good. Not concerned with experiencing our senses, but with curating a sight to be seen.

You cannot take a picture of a moment in the hope of freezing it in time or sharing it with someone who is not there. It is already gone. But you can experience it. That picture of the sky can be a moment you sit with before the urge to capture it takes over. In a world where recording a moment is more important than experiencing it, those of us who choose experience can feel like outcasts. But this is your place. I welcome you.

I have noticed that over the last few months my writing has increasingly returned to the present moment. That is because the more I reflect on the problems of living, the more I realise that I am only ever living in the present. When I am in the future, I will experience it as the present. When I was in the past, it was my present. My experience of the world is limited to this moment, and always will be.

The only way to engage more deeply with life is to keep returning to it.

Today, if you celebrate New Year’s, I ask you to shift your focus away from recording the experience and towards actually experiencing what the day is. You will never experience the last day of 2025 again, no matter how many pictures you take.

We are constantly trying to record moments. Perhaps that is also what I do when I write, and that is perfectly fine. Recording moments matters, but never at the expense of experiencing them.

So on the last day of this year, I ask you this. How can you enter 2026 with presence?

For me, it looks like reflecting on this year of writing and feeling deeply thankful for the nearly 300 people who have chosen to read my work. You have helped me feel like a writer this year, and that makes me brave enough to keep writing. Thank you for your support, your comments, your criticism, and your presence.

All of it brings me back to myself.

I wish you all a happy new year.

Often, when we think of purpose, this is the sentiment that lurks beneath: that what keeps us going must be grand, ambitious, something worth striving for over years. But we rarely think of meaning as it is found in relationships. And when we do, we tend to think of romance, not friendship,though perhaps friendships deserve far more recognition than we give them.

Close relationships shape us profoundly. The 80 year Harvard study showed that embracing community leads to happier, healthier, longer lives. But today, I don’t want to communicate science. I want to communicate the significance of this point in the form of a story,one that blends fact and fiction.

Let me tell you about a little boy.

Adam is 12 years old. He lost his father three years ago. After the loss, he had to switch schools to a more affordable one. He went from being one of six kids in a class to being one of forty, where it took weeks for the teachers to even learn his name.

In his old school he excelled in academics, in sports, and in the eyes of teachers and classmates alike. Every Friday he participated in any sport he wanted. He was active, confident, and involved.

Now, everything has shifted. The kids in his new school are tougher; he is too polite for their liking. He uses the formal آپ instead of the casual تم,a small detail that irritates them. He’s not a cool kid.

He tries joining them in sports, but they’re more aggressive than he is. He raises his hand in class, but when he gets an answer wrong, they mock him. During lunch they take his food. They intimidate him. And when he witnesses one boy threaten another saying “you have no idea what my dad will do to you” something inside him twists.

Ah, there it is. The realization of his own defenselessness. He has no father who can protect him.

At home, his mother has withdrawn into her pain and grief. He has been told that his little sister is now his responsibility. He is alone. That feeling etches itself into his bones.

This is 5th grade. He quickly accepts that there is no running from this fate. He submits to it. Within months, everything is different. He doesn’t try anymore. He too withdraws into his grief, though he doesn’t yet possess the words for it.

He stops trying to play sports. He puts on weight. The weight leads to more bullying; the bullying leads to further withdrawal. He eats lunch alone in the playground, watching other kids laugh and chase each other.

He is sad, and he is angry. Sometimes he tries to act out,staying in the classroom during lunch and eating the bullies’ food. But the act only makes him feel weaker, more pathetic. Eventually he stops.

He is depressed. He has no one to talk to. No one to look out for him. He begins thinking about his own death. Would it truly be such a terrible thing? Maybe his suffering could finally end. Maybe he would see his father again. He daydreams about how he could die. The fantasy comforts him, not because it ends his pain, but because he imagines that in death people might finally care about him.

How do we expect this child to have hope? Is it reasonable to ask him to be resilient?

He flunks 5th grade. Of course he does. Shame drowns him, he has never done poorly in academics. His mother is angry and frightened, but she lacks the resources to help him.

He repeats the year, promising to do better, though he does not know how. He begins the year with renewed shame,most of these kids are a year younger, and at that age a year feels like a gulf. He starts no differently than before. How could he? Nothing has changed.

One day, a boy approaches him. Adam is scared and he’s no longer used to children initiating conversation. He wonders if this is a trap, a setup for humiliation.

The boy asks, “Want to play kings with us?”

Play? With me?

Fear rises, but so does something else, pressure. If he says no, maybe this boy will turn on him. So he says yes, hating himself, calling himself a coward.

“My name is Noman,” the boy says, offering a handshake.

Adam plays with Noman and a few others. He waits for the other shoe to drop, but it never does. He hasn’t played with anyone in nearly a year. Kindness feels alien.

Fifteen minutes into their 40 minute games period on a hot Friday afternoon, he realizes: So this is what it feels like to have friends. He doesn’t expect it to happen again. He isn’t used to kindness,from strangers or familiar faces.

But he savours it: the dust dirtying the standard school shoes, creeping into charcoal grey trousers; the marks from the other kids’ shoes as they tag him and he tries to tag them.

When the moment ends, sadness settles in. Surely this will be taken from him. Surely he is meant to be alone.

Yet Noman walks with him back to class. Bittersweet. Hope is a dangerous thing.

The school day ends. Kids flood toward the gate to be picked up. That gate, where it felt like all the kids had only one parent, the one that was picking them up. Here, he didn’t feel so alone.

Noman walks with him again. Adam dares to hope for friendship.

Outside the gates, Noman spots his mother. Adam follows politely. He notices that the resemblance between Noman and his mother is uncanny, not in appearance but in warmth. She greets him with genuine compassion. Who knew a simple hello could bring such comfort?

She asks the question all adults ask: “What does your father do, baita (son)?”

“He passed away.”

He cannot recall her face at that moment,not because he’s forgotten, but because back then he couldn’t say those words without looking away. He wasn’t far enough along in grief to speak them without feeling that hollow isolation rise in his chest.

She makes a gentle prayer for his father and asks how long it has been since he passed away. Adam tells her and she looks at him deciding not to burden him with any more of these questions so she asks if they had a nice day. They say they did. Little does she know this is the best day he has had all year.

She invites him to come with his mother on the weekend. Noman gives him his landline number.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Over the next few years, Adam found a confidence far greater than he once had and it all started because of a kind child. Thanks to Noman, Adam was able to recover the will to live.

We adults get so much wrong.

People often ask me, “What do I do when someone I love is sad or weeping?”

The question comes from a good place, but perhaps Noman teaches us something simpler: sometimes all a lonely ship needs is a light shone upon it, acknowledgment that allows it to endure a little longer in the dark sea.

May we all be lucky enough to have someone with a light like Noman’s. And if you already do, may you cherish that friendship.

For we are all here only a little while, on our small ships, on a rough sea. And perhaps Camus was right: the meaning of life is whatever keeps you from killing yourself. Sometimes, that meaning is nothing more, and nothing less, than the presence of a kind friend.

We look for answers but rarely pause to ask if we’re asking the right questions. I’ve found that asking better questions gets us further than searching for answers to impossible ones.

Luckily, my job, and my passion, allows me to ask these questions of others each week. In doing so, I’m forced to reflect on them myself.

Here are some of the questions I return to most often. They are existential in their very nature, questions all of us must eventually face.

What parts of myself do I avoid by staying busy?
Movement can disguise fear of uncertainty. Stillness reveals much more.

Which of my values am I living up to, and which have I neglected?
Meaning shifts over time; paying attention to those shifts can be profoundly grounding.

When I say “I can’t,” do I actually mean “I choose not to”?
Sometimes we refuse our own agency and turn unwillingness into helplessness.

What do I need to grieve so I can move forward freely?
What pain am I refusing to acknowledge? Letting it breathe may be the first step toward release.

Do I allow myself to be in the present, or am I always rushing toward the future?
We are distracted not only by screens but also by our own ambitions. Sometimes, our vision of the future distracts us from the only experience we ever truly have: the present.

The beauty of these questions is that they can meet us anywhere in life. We don’t need the answers right away, we just need the courage to ask them with curiosity rather than judgment.

As a wise man once said, you can’t walk ten miles into a forest and walk out in one.

Of course when I ask that question, I don’t actually mean death but I do mean an ending. Seen as such the title is actually optimistic because just as change leads to something new, I choose to have faith that death will too.

But that loss that comes with change is a quiet one, isn’t it? Even positive change can carry a kind of loss as our inner world shifts and we lose a sense of stability.

You wish you could get into that program, and you do, but now you have to study, and sometimes it feels like you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. You pray that you and your partner can get married, and you do, but marriage is not a bed of roses, and you realise it takes more work than you thought. You move abroad, hoping the change will bring wonderful things, and while it may, it also brings the stress of building a life alone and the ache of isolation.

More than anything, when we find ourselves at the early stages of these transitions and we find our inner world, relationships, routines changing we experience a quiet loss. A loss that we may not even allow ourselves to acknowledge. “This is what you wanted, what are you crying about?”

Ah, there it is, the shame seeping in. That voice we picked up somewhere along the way that keeps telling us to keep it together. But if that voice were honest, it may say something more to the effect of “shit, let’s not open that box, I’m scared”.

Allowing ourselves to experience the grief of change, even when they are changes we wished for, is necessary in easing the pain of this adjustment. Sometimes, if the struggle becomes too intense, we might even be given a diagnosis of adjustment disorder. A reversible one, of course, painful but treatable.

The one thing that may come up if you’re going through a big change in your life is nostalgia. Now nostalgia, as we know, can be an existential resource (Routledge. 2011). It gives us a sense of meaning in our musings of the past when we may struggle to find it in the present. This is helpful but we must be careful. Just because the nostalgia makes us feel like the past was perfectly beautiful, does that mean it truly was?

Here’s a time I’m nostalgic for, it’s 2011 and I play basketball almost every day with some of my closest friends. When I look back at this time, I remember my friends and I remember how much I loved having a sense of community and meaning in this game I loved. I reminisce about a time when technology didn’t feel like it was so invasive and Zuckerberg and co were not busy trying to sell me basketball shoes on Meta after I just had a conversation about that with my friends. I miss the walks I used to take every night in the winters in the quiet isolation of my mind as my wired earphones used to blast music that dug into my soul and made me feel like I would be the king of the world one day.

I miss that time, but nostalgia conveniently left out the part where I was struggling academically in pre-engineering which significantly contributed to me developing a panic disorder and having 4-5 panic attacks a week. Nostalgia dresses up the past and makes it look beautiful. Nostalgia is motivated recollection.

I did love playing basketball with my friends but If I could ask my teenage self what he thinks of where I am now, he’d be surprised, maybe even proud. My past was just like my present: some parts I loved, some I struggled through.

That thought brings me back to the present. I look around my room, the soft hum of the AC, the faint scent of chai still in the air. This, too, will become a memory. I ask myself: what parts of my life now will I one day miss? All of a sudden, I can see them, the small joys, the slow progress, the quiet pride of building a life from scratch in a new land.

One day, I may look back at this exact moment with fondness. That realisation fills me with warmth and comfort.

So, fellow travellers, I ask you: what might you be doing today that you’ll look back on nostalgically ten years from now?

It looks like finding beauty and awe in the only thing you will ever truly have: this moment.
Put down your phone. Ask yourself what you love about right now. What can you do today that you’ll one day remember with tenderness?

As the saying goes, these are the good old days.

The debate I joined was on diagnosis in trauma: should we diagnose, or should we not? If I had been asked this question at any point before 2025, I would have stood firmly on the “do not diagnose” side. But my position has shifted over the last year.

This time, I volunteered to be on the diagnosis team. Preparing for the debate, I did a deep dive into the issues surrounding diagnosis and trauma. In the process, I gained deeper clarity and nuance. One argument I made was what I considered our strongest point and it’s the one I’ll focus on here.

First, a clarification. Trauma itself is not a diagnosis. There is no “trauma disorder”. Trauma is a factor that can contribute to many difficulties: PTSD, depression, anxiety, psychosis, and so on. Sometimes trauma leads to PTSD, but just as often it does not.

It’s also true that diagnostic manuals are flawed and always evolving. The DSM has a dark history, and diagnosis has been used to oppress marginalized groups. The early editions of the DSM look quite different the DSM-5, but that doesn’t erase the harm done along the way. Criticism, whether from skeptical psychiatrists, critical psychologists, or the anti-psychiatry movement, has forced the field to grow. I have my own criticisms of diagnosis too, and I take them seriously.

So what is the utility of diagnosis, given this complicated history?

Here’s my case: differential diagnosis saves lives and prevents harm.

Consider a 22-year-old man who is assaulted outside a theatre by someone much larger and intoxicated. Afterwards, he develops flashbacks, fear, difficulty sleeping, appetite loss, distrust of others. One thing stands out: hyper-vigilance.

Now, if you are trauma-informed (a term I will be dissecting soon), you can see how the assault shaped his difficulties. But you would still need to assess: is his hyper-vigilance part of PTSD, or is it the beginning of an emerging psychosis?

That distinction matters. If it is the sign of a psychotic disorder, he may need early anti-psychotic intervention. If it is PTSD, the priority would be safety, stabilisation, and trauma-focused work. The interventions are not the same. If you dismiss diagnosis altogether and refuse to assess, you risk treating psychosis as trauma. In doing so, you delay life-saving treatment.

This is the danger of throwing out the diagnostic baby with the bathwater.

Now, critics of psychiatry often respond: “But you don’t need diagnosis. You can reach all this through a good formulation.”

I think this is where the conversation often falls short. Yes, formulation is essential. Yes, diagnosis should never replace a careful, individualised formulation. But the minute your formulation includes the possibility of differentiating psychosis and trauma, you have already used a diagnostic framework, implicitly or explicitly. You cannot separate the two. Formulation can explain context and meaning, but it cannot tell you whether the right course is anti-psychotic medication, trauma therapy, or both. For that, differential diagnosis is indispensable.

This is why I believe skepticism about diagnosis is healthy, but an outright denial of its utility is not. Formulation and diagnosis are not enemies. They are complementary. Diagnosis brings clarity about risk and safety. Formulation brings depth, context, and humanity. Without diagnosis, we may miss urgent needs. Without formulation, we reduce patients to categories.

This balance is too often overlooked in anti-psychiatry critiques, and I have yet to hear a convincing response to this specific point.

I’m transported back to when I am 15 and I start getting hair on my jaw for the first time. I am so excited.

I am becoming a man, I am becoming an adult. I notice the two strands on the right side of my jaw and I go and I show my mother, then I show my sister, then I show Aunty in the neighbourhood that we’re close to.

I remember how excited I felt, now I have a full beard but I sense no excitement when I look in the mirror, luckily I don’t go around saying “look I have a full beard”.

Perhaps the excitement is in the wait, the excitement of what might be comes from our imagination. At 15, I was aging. At 31, I am aging.

I sit across Mr. Taimoor, he’s 71. He sits across me and tells me that he was a bad son, he carries great regret and tells me not to be the kind of son he was. I can see the sadness on the terrain of his face, the marionette lines of his face look deeper than the rest of his wrinkles, communicating the regret and sadness that he has experienced for decades. He fondly tells me about his days when he was younger, when he is done telling me his stories, there is a sadness in the air. He feels like his best days are behind him, he is ageing or perhaps he would say he is aged. He has been depressed for many years. He doesn’t talk to anyone, I am honoured that he has shared a regret with me, a man much younger than him.

We are all ageing, all the time and we take it for granted. We look forward to the future so often, that we miss out what is in the present. Alan Watts was right; there is no such thing as the future or the past, we can never experience anything but the present.

I have been looking into the mirror in the gym for 30 seconds or so now, I am immediately brought back to the present by that last thought. I return to the whites in my hair.

Yes, I say to my vanity, I hope I do look good when the white overpowers the black. But for now, let me enjoy where I am. I will only be here once and I like a little bit of the white slowly peaking through the black.

Everyday, I attempt to appreciate mind, body, and soul where it is in the present. If I always rush to who I could be in the future that I am working for, I may never meet the resilient and persistent version of me that is trying to make it all happen. I turn my attention inwards, “thank you for what you are doing right now, from all of me to all of me”.

May we all be present, may we all learn to appreciate the ageing process, in work, in body, in friendship and in struggle.

And may the strangers at the gym forgive the man who stared at himself in the mirror for a full minute, weights in hand.

“I am a failure.”
“I am noticing that I feel like a failure.”

The difference is not purely semantic. In the first statement, you are expressing something as a fact. In the second, you observe a thought or feeling you are having and create a distance between yourself and that experience. Suddenly, you are not the failure, you are the person experiencing the thought of being a failure.

Whenever we have such an intense experience inside ourselves, we can ask: Am I the experience, or am I the one who observes the experience?

This is a concept many therapy frameworks talk about. I will simply call it noticing.

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, it is called cognitive defusion. In Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and others, mindfulness. In psychoanalysis, the observing ego. In Internal Family Systems, the self. All of these models point to something we attempt to do with our minds to create a sense of distance that reduces overwhelm and helps us see ourselves more clearly.

But what is this and how does it help?

Think of it this way, you’re in the middle of an argument, and you feel your chest tighten and your voice getting louder. In that moment, instead of simply being angry, you might notice, “I am experiencing anger right now.” That pause creates just enough space to choose whether to speak, to breathe, or to step away, rather than letting the emotion drive the entire exchange.

Today, I don’t just want to tell you what noticing is, I want to help you experience it and how can you use it day to day.

This practice can be done at any time: eyes open or closed, busy or free, for a few seconds or a few minutes.

When we engage in the art of noticing, we simply try to observe what we are experiencing rather than immediately engaging with it. What might usually become a spiral of difficult thoughts such as anxiety, judgment, and shame can instead become a moment of clarity, holding our experience warmly in awareness.

This requires practice. The more often you do it, the more natural it becomes. I first started using it three years ago, and for months it helped me fall asleep faster. When I stopped and later returned to it, I needed time to settle back in. But when I resumed regular practice, it again helped reduce the intensity of difficult experiences, moments that might otherwise have led me to acute stress.

May you meet your “self” with more warmth and awareness. For once, let us not rush to see where we are. Let us simply observe that we are.

I wanted to sit down and reflect on what these six years have been like, and how much I’ve changed as a person and as a therapist.

There have been many hurdles and hoops to cross over these last few years. I feel deep gratitude for the people who helped me establish a strong practice early in my career in Pakistan, even when I was just a fresh graduate. Somehow, the things I was saying were getting through to people. Looking back, I remember how awkward and out of place I felt when asked to give talks or appear on podcasts. I was scared of saying the wrong thing. I was scared of making a mistake.

And I did make a lot of mistakes, as every new therapist does. But something changed in the third year. That’s when I first encountered the existential perspectives of psychotherapy through Yalom. I began to see the therapist's role differently. Six years in, my understanding of therapy has grown beyond Yalom, but I will remain grateful to him throughout my career. That paradigm shift opened a new way of thinking for me.

Over the years, I moved countries and saw how I handled myself in an international market, and that gave me greater confidence in my skills. Seeing the difference between my first year and now, entering my seventh, makes me excited to imagine how I might grow in the next ten years.

The most beautiful part of these last six years has been the long-standing relationships I built with people I’ve worked with on and off for many years. Many of them will likely continue to come to me whenever they seek support. What a unique job this is. I get to walk with people through major life changes. It makes me deeply happy to know I play a positive role in that process.

Of course, there have also been people I was not a good fit for, or those I could not provide support to. Those were difficult experiences, both for them and for me in different ways. But those moments taught me what I needed to do differently. Learning from them helped me make important changes so I wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes.

As a person, being a therapist has been beautiful but also difficult. I am no longer just a person in day to day life to the people that I meet. When someone finds out what I do, most of the time, they cannot see me beyond my profession. It’s funny, as an eighteen year old struggling with a severe panic disorder, all I wanted was to be a psychologist. It was the existential escape that would support me through difficult times in a life that felt too difficult to live most of the time. Now, in my early thirties, all I want is to be seen as more than that by new people I meet. I love what I do, but I love other things too.

One of the most meaningful ways my work has impacted me is by showing me how important it is to expand all the different domains of myself. I’ve learned to access both external and internal resources. Most of all, I’ve come to see the importance of therapy in my own life, and I found a great therapist whom I’ve been seeing for a couple of years now.

I’ve learned that the person feeds into the therapist, and the therapist bleeds into the person. There is no on and off button, but there are boundaries, and I am glad to say I have learned what they are. It is an evolving process that I continue to keep my eye on.

In the coming years, I look forward to where my curiosity will take me, which theoretical orientations I will explore, what ideas I will change my mind about, what positions I will hold more firmly, what kinds of people I will work with, and what I will write.

It has been a beautiful journey, and if life is not interrupted, then I’m just getting started.

You’re still trying to process this when Dr. Ape gently asks, “What brings you in today?”

Would you want to receive therapy from this intelligent, kind, experienced Bonobo?

Many of us would say no, and not because he lacks credentials. Dr. Ape may be brilliant. But he is not human. He may be highly trained and deeply informed, but he hasn’t lived the human experience. He doesn’t know what it’s like to grow up in a family, fall in love, grieve a parent, or question his purpose. He sleeps in a nest, eats seeds and leaves, and lives around 40 years just like other Bonobos do.

It’s a strange image, I know, but it reveals something serious: intelligence, even deep intelligence, is not the same thing as shared experience.

This brings us to a fundamental question: What role does experience play in knowledge? A famous thought experiment by philosopher Frank Jackson, known as Mary’s Room, captures this beautifully.

Mary is a brilliant scientist who has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room. She has never seen colour but has learned everything there is to know about it, how it works, how the brain processes it, what light frequencies correspond to which colours.

Now imagine she’s shown colour for the first time. Does she learn something new? Can she really know colour before seeing it?

That’s the dilemma: there’s a kind of knowing we can’t get from study alone. Some things must be lived.

Now, back to Dr. Ape.

He might understand grief from an academic perspective. He might know the neurology of heartbreak or the psychology of attachment. But he can’t know your experience or mine. And because of that, he cannot meet us there. His sympathy may be technical. But empathy, as we know it, is born of likeness.

That’s the difference between knowing about something and truly understanding it.

A good human therapist brings many skills to the room that go far beyond technique. One example is strategic self-disclosure. A therapist may share their own loss. Say, losing a father at a young age, if it helps a client feel less alone. While the therapist doesn’t claim to know exactly what the client feels, he does know something about the pain of loss. Dr. Ape may have also lost a parent, but his mourning might last only a few weeks. Bonobos, of course, grieve differently.

Another essential skill is attention to relational dynamics. A therapist may notice how a client shuts down when emotions get too close. For example, a client might make a joke every time they approach their vulnerability. A good therapist might say,

“I’ve noticed that whenever I get close to your pain, you shut me down with humour. It’s happened often enough that I feel dismissed by you, and it’s frustrating. I wonder if others have ever given you that feedback?”

The client may be surprised and respond, “Yes, actually… people have pointed that out.”

From there, the therapist can reflect:

“If we can shift how you relate to me here, maybe we can shift how you relate to others out there.”

Dr. Ape can’t do that. He might understand the theory, but he doesn’t feel it. He’s not a member of the human fraternity, no matter how much he knows or how high his IQ is.

At this point, it’s clear Dr. Ape can help us with symptoms. He can give sleep tips, suggest behavioural routines, and even psychoeducate us. But he can’t help us with our grief, our intimacy issues, or the emotional terrain that leads humans to write poetry, make music, or direct films.

Strangely, we seem to understand this when it comes to Dr. Ape. But we lose that clarity when it comes to Artificial Intelligence.

We talk seriously about whether AI will replace therapists. We forget that therapy requires a relationship at its centre. We reduce therapy to advice giving, feedback loops, and “emotional support”. We forget what therapy really is.

Even if AI becomes sentient, it will still have the sentient AI experience, not the human one.

We’re already seeing stories emerge of AI fuelled narcissism, delusional thinking, and in some tragic cases, encouragement toward self-harm and suicide. AI is imperfect. Perhaps that is the most human thing about it. It will surely be useful for assessment, for psychoeducation, for accessibility. At best, it will be a supportive assistant. And that’s important.

But it will never replace what we often forget is central to psychotherapy: the human relationship.

Let us be careful with the technologies we use to access the deepest corners of our inner world. Let us draw thick lines in the sand between what helps and what harms. And let us please stop calling it AI therapy and start calling it something that is more descriptively accurate for what it does.

As for therapy, I know an AI will never sit across from someone and feel what I feel when I see a client who has survived something unimaginable and is now relating to the world differently.

When a client tells me I’ve helped change their life for the better, I must compose myself so they don’t see me holding back tears of joy.

Because I’m not driven by code.
I’m driven by that very human stuff that allows me to feel the shared thread between us.

I’m driven by the stuff that transforms pain into art, and art into connection.

I sit with my patients, not as a technician, but as a human being acknowledging our shared struggle, our shared uncertainty, and our shared search for meaning.

Without that, I could never help anyone on the journey to healing.

So, we must ask ourselves as AI becomes a part of our daily life, where do we still need to be held, heard and seen by a human being?

After months of consistent writing, I’ve decided to shift the pace of this newsletter to a biweekly schedule.

The purpose of this change is simple. I want to give each piece more breathing room, for research, reflection, and refinement. My hope is to offer you fewer, but richer, articles. Pieces that continue to respect your time and attention.

To stay connected to the spirit of what we explore here, I’d like to give you some book recommendations today.

1. Staring at the Sun by Irvin Yalom: This is a wonderful book that goes over our understanding of death anxiety historically, philosophically and psychologically. The author writes about clinical instances of death anxiety with great accessibility. This book is written by one of my favourite authors and a towering intellectual figure in the field of psychotherapy.

2. The Undiscovered Self by Carl G Jung: This collection of essays by Carl Jung explore his understanding of the unconscious and its impact and influence on the individual and society. It’s always hard to figure out where to start reading Jung but I believe this is a great entry point.

3. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb: A funny, poetic and deeply humanising book about therapy. If you are interested in therapy at all, you will enjoy reading this book. It is part auto-biographical, part clinical vignette and fully reflective. She writes about herself, her therapy patients and her relationship with her own therapist. There is something for everyone in this book. This one is a fun read.

4. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes: This is the only novel on the list. This is a story written as a journal entry by the central character. He undergoes a surgery to go from having an intellectual disability to becoming super intelligent. This book will pull on your heart strings and it will inspire you to have more compassion towards those who are not born with the privilege of being in the “normal” range of IQ.

Thank you for being here, for reading, for thinking alongside me. I’ll be back in your inbox in another two weeks with something that, hopefully, leaves a mark.

It felt like I was starting all over again. The doubt crept in:
“What will I write about?”
“I’m not inspired.”
“That idea is too long.”
“That idea is too short.”

Every day for the last two weeks, I wanted to write. And every day, the resistance felt heavier, including today.

Today, I realised the struggle to write was exactly what I needed to write about. Or more broadly: the struggle to return to something. But even with that realisation, the resistance remained.

So what changed?

Nothing, really. This day is no different from any other, except that I’m consciously choosing to return. You could say the day didn’t change anything. I changed the day.

But how?

The experience I just described is something we all go through, isn’t it?

There are things we know we need to do, and yet we don’t do them. We say, “I just can’t.”

Can’t? Is that true?

Pause for a second. Think about one thing you said that about in the last week. One task, one habit, one decision you avoided, saying to yourself: “I can’t do it.”

Let’s look closer.

When we say we can’t do something, we imply a lack of ability. I can’t fly, no matter how hard I flap my arms (trust me, I’ve tried). But is it really true that I can’t write today?

No.

Now go back to the thing you thought of. Would it be more accurate to say you can’t do it, or that you won’t do it?

The distinction might seem small. But it’s powerful. It touches something essential about our agency and our freedom.

Often, we disguise our unwillingness as helplessness.

Back to my example: when I told myself “I can’t write,” the more accurate truth was “I won’t write.” As soon as I named it that way, something else kicked in. A voice inside me responded:

It was uncomfortable to admit I was unwilling. But in that discomfort, I found a sense of choice and with that, the first real movement back to the page.

That’s how we reclaim agency:
Not by shaming ourselves.
Not by performing positivity.
But by recognising where we’ve handed away our own power.

Here’s the trajectory:

Now, an important note, especially for those of us who tend toward shame or self-blame:

Just as we shouldn’t call ourselves helpless when we’re actually unwilling, we also shouldn’t call ourselves unwilling when we’re truly helpless. That’s where self-help culture often gets it wrong. That’s how we end up trying to shame ourselves into change and we already know that doesn’t work.

If I told myself I just “won’t fly,” I’d end up shaming myself for not flapping my arms hard enough to start levitating. That’s absurd. And it’s damaging.

We’re not here to slip into magical thinking or toxic positivity. We’re here to become more honest about where we do have choice, so we can begin to act on it.

If you remember this small shift in language, can’t vs. won’t, you might begin to locate more of your life inside your own hands. The words we use to talk to ourselves reveal how we view the world. But the good news is: changing those words can also change the way we engage with that world.

Thank you for reading. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled posts next week because today, I found my way back to willingness.

I hope you do too.

You’ve likely heard something like this. You’ve probably said something like this. And I get it. It can be comforting to name things that make us feel better as therapy. But in this piece, I want to invite you, gently and maybe a bit stubbornly, to stop saying it.

And yes, I’ll admit: part of my motivation is personal. Every time someone calls their post-gym/pilates high “therapy,” I feel a speech rising up in me. Writing this article might just save a few people from having to sit through that speech.

Therapy vs. Therapeutic

Let’s start here: Why do we call these activities therapy instead of therapeutic?

Saying “X is my therapy” turns an entire profession into a mood. It reduces a complex, relational, and often rigorous process into a feel-good moment.

The general public didn’t distort the meaning of therapy on purpose. It’s a word that’s been diluted in the marketplace of wellness trends and pop-culture lingo. The internet turned it into shorthand for anything that feels good or grounding. Somewhere along the way, we forgot there’s a difference between what soothes us and what actually helps us change.

Still, language matters.

Because when we reduce words like therapy, we start reducing experiences too.

Why It Matters

Let’s look at what happens when we conflate therapeutic activities with therapy itself.

We begin to assume that the goal of therapy is simply to feel better. So anything that makes us feel good becomes “my therapy.” The logic goes like this:

therapy = feeling good

this makes me feel good → this = therapy.

It reduces the therapist to the category of a professional friend.

But therapy is not about momentary relief. In fact, good therapy often doesn’t feel good in the moment. It may feel heavy. It may stir discomfort. It may require you to say things you’ve never said out loud. To face parts of yourself you’ve avoided. And to leave the session feeling tired, raw, or exposed.

That doesn’t mean it’s not working. That means it is.

When we expect therapy to feel like a gym high or a comforting meal, we set ourselves and others up for disappointment. And worse, we reinforce the belief that if something is hard, it must not be helping.

“My Friend Is My Therapist”

Here’s where it gets even trickier.

If we start calling feel-good activities “therapy,” we naturally start calling good listeners “therapists.”

“She’s basically the therapist of our friend group.”
“My partner’s like my therapist.”

On the surface, these are compliments. But they also carry a quieter assumption: that a good conversation = therapy, and a good listener = therapist.

It doesn’t.

Let me offer a simple analogy. Imagine you’re at the gym, and your friend who’s been lifting for a few years pulls up a calorie calculator and gives you some pointers on your macros. Would you say, “She’s basically my doctor”?

Probably not. Because you understand that while she may know more than you do, that doesn’t make her a trained professional. There’s a level of humility we bring to conversations about physical health that doesn’t exist when we talk about mental health.

The Stigma Beneath the Language

This isn’t just semantics. It reveals something deeper. Calling everything “therapy” gives us an easy out from seeking actual support and it is an easy way to dismiss those who want to seek out actual support.

It allows people to say:

“You don’t need therapy. Just go for a run. Lift something heavy. Talk to a friend.”

It reinforces the idea that turning inward, asking for help, or sitting with a trained professional is excessive or unnecessary.

It ensures that we learn how to make ourselves feel better and manage symptoms without ever addressing the cause.

So What Is Therapy?

Psychotherapy is not just about talking. It’s not just about listening. It’s not just about feeling heard.

It’s about:

• Assessment

• Theoretical orientation

• Trauma-informed practice

• Risk evaluation

• Containment without absorption

• Compassion without codependence

• Regulation of emotion, memory, and the nervous system

• Helping people unlearn the past without disowning it

• Knowing when to speak, how to intervene, and why it matters

The list goes on but more than anything, therapy is a relationship that is built over time, with intention, skill, and safety at its core.

So yes, a workout, a walk, a good conversation, a hug can be therapeutic. But those things don’t make you, or anyone else, a therapist. And they don’t replace therapy.

A Small Change That Matters

I say all this because language shapes culture, and culture shapes how we treat ourselves and each other.

If we want a world that takes mental health seriously, then we need to stop dismissing therapy by comparing it to feel-good moments. That doesn’t uplift therapy. It gives people permission to avoid the discomfort that real growth often requires.

So the next time you find yourself saying, “X is my therapy,” try this instead:

“It’s really therapeutic for me.”

It’s a small change. But like so many small changes, it matters.

And as for me.
Writing this article was a deeply therapeutic endeavour.

But sometimes, certain topics grab your attention in a way that pulls you down a rabbit hole, making you need to understand what’s going on. These are the areas that leave you both bewildered and deeply curious, pushing you to keep exploring. They remind us how little we know while fueling us with the energy to learn more. They inspire the perfect blend of humility and curiosity, priming us for true learning.

So, without further ado, here are four psychology rabbit holes I’ve found that may change the way you see human behavior. Each of these has a link attached to a video or article to get you started on your exploration.

Creating False Memories
False memories are far more than simple errors in recall, they are vivid reconstructions that feel just as real as true memories. Under the right conditions, people can recall entire events that never happened, especially when suggestions or reinforcement from others come into play. This is particularly chilling in areas like legal testimony, therapy, and even everyday interactions. The Mandela Effect, where large groups of people misremember the same detail, shows how false memories can take on a collective quality, challenging our sense of reality. It raises important questions about how malleable our identities are, as they are shaped by memories that might not even be real.

Split Brain Studies
When the corpus callosum, the bridge between the brain's two hemispheres, is severed, the two sides stop communicating. This leads to bizarre behaviors, like one hand buttoning a shirt while the other unbuttons it, or participants being shown images to each eye and only being able to report seeing the image from the right eye. These studies force us to rethink how we construct our identity and how much control we actually have over our perception of the world.

Mass Psychological Illness and Social Contagion
Social contagion refers to the unconscious spread of emotional or mental states from one person to another. It explains why anxiety can sweep through a group without a word being spoken or why laughter becomes contagious in a crowd. Our brains are wired to mirror the emotions of others, making us vulnerable to collective moods. A striking example is the dancing illness of 1518, where hundreds of people couldn’t stop dancing, many reportedly dying as a result. It shows how our inner states are never truly our own, they are shaped by those around us.

The Proteus Effect
The Proteus Effect describes how the avatars we adopt in virtual spaces, whether in video games, social media, or VR can influence our behavior in the real world. When people use more attractive or confident avatars, they tend to act more assertive and self-assured, even in offline situations. One fascinating study found that participants, using a robotic arm in virtual reality, reported actually embodying the experience of the robotic arm in the physical world. This phenomenon demonstrates how our digital selves don’t just reflect who we are, they actively shape how we act and interact, blurring the lines between our physical and virtual identities.

These rabbit holes remind us that there’s so much we don’t know about ourselves and the way we experience the world. Psychology has an uncanny way of pulling back the curtain of the mind, revealing layers of complexity that we often take for granted. It’s a journey of constant discovery, and with each new insight, we’re reminded of how much more there is to learn.

Stranger: Do you think you’re self-aware?
Me: Aware of what?
S: Aware of yourself?
M: Am I aware of what I’m unaware of about myself?
S: What do you mean?
M: Well, the question’s a tricky one. We can never be fully aware of ourselves. So, if I were to answer “no,” that would be true, and paradoxically, that very answer would be an act of self-awareness. But if I were to say “yes,” that might actually reflect a lack of self-awareness because in saying that, I’d be ignoring all the parts of myself I don’t yet know. So without realising it, you just asked me a trick question.

This response is usually followed by some mix of surprise, irritation, or engagement, depending on who I’m talking to. Really, I’m just walking them through an intellectual exercise about what awareness even means.

No, I’m not fun at parties.

But the question I’m posing is an important one. I find people talk about self-awareness the way they talk about being an adult. At some point, we realise that whether we feel like it or not, we’re adults; socially, legally, and existentially. In other words, adulthood is a destination we arrive at and cannot return from.

Similarly, many people talk about awareness like it’s a destination. I see it on social media. I see it in some of the people I work with. I see it in some of my friends. There’s this quiet assumption that you either are self-aware or you aren’t. So let me offer a few questions:

• Do you believe awareness is a destination or a skill?

• Is your awareness helping you to change?

In the first question, I offer you an alternative way of thinking: not as “Am I self-aware?” but as “Do I practice self-awareness?” One treats awareness like a personality trait; the other treats it like a discipline. And that’s a crucial difference.

Now to the second question, because I think it’s even more important than the first. If I had a dollar for every time someone said to me, “Oh, I know what my problem is. I’m very self-aware…”

My next question to them is always, “Has that awareness helped you change?”

With close friends, I’ll go a little deeper. I might point out how painful it must be to feel aware of a problem but unable to change it. That’s often a heavier burden than ignorance itself. This is where shame creeps in. Guilt. Low mood. Anxiety. This is when awareness starts to feel like a trap, when it convinces us we’re bad actors in the play of our own lives.

So we have to ask:

Is there any benefit to self-awareness if it doesn’t lead to change?

In scientific terms, we often talk about things being necessary vs. sufficient. If I want to write, having a pen is necessary. But if I have no paper, the pen alone won’t do the job, it’s necessary, but not sufficient.

Awareness may be necessary for change. But it is not sufficient.

We must also act.

Take a common example: poor sleep. If I’m aware that my sleep routine is harming me, what then? I have to actually do something. Maybe I spend too long on my phone at night. Maybe I go to bed too late. Maybe I’m drinking caffeine at the wrong times. Whatever the specifics, awareness is just the first step. Change begins when I start altering my behavior, however gradually.

Of course, when the issues are more complex, change is more complicated. But even then, it’s often the smallest things that slip first: our sleep, our appetite, our sense of rhythm. And those are the very things that, when cared for, help us slowly regulate and stabilize again.

Even in the face of deeper struggles, everyone benefits from better sleep, better nutrition, and better self-regulation.

So I’ll leave you with a few reflective questions:

• What problem in my life am I aware I participate in?

• What’s keeping me from making the change I need to make?

Her mother becomes immediately enraged and shouts, “Why are you making such a mess? Didn’t I tell you not to drop anything from the table?”

The child is scared. She imagines two mothers: one who is kind and loving, the mother she likes to think of as the real one. And the other, who shows up out of nowhere and scares her, the fake mother. She doesn’t want to go near the fake mother and wonders why this one hides in her real mother’s body.

She wishes she could banish the imitator from her mother’s body, but she can’t.

All the child can do is make sure she never gives this mother a chance or a reason to come out. So, she starts to think of all the things that summon the fake mother. She makes a list in her mind:

• Don’t make noise in bed after 10.

• Don’t play around her when she’s eating.

• Don’t touch the remote when she’s watching TV.

• Don’t go near the table with all her things on it.

The list goes on. Every time she’s tempted to do something, she reminds herself of the fake mother’s angry screaming, telling her, “Why are you such a disappointing child?”

She cries in bed, holding her pillow, muffling her sobs after each time the fake mother appears. She has plenty of incentive to never let that woman come out.

For a year, she keeps to the list. With some failures along the way, she believes she’s succeeded in learning how to avoid the wrath she fears. Behold, she has learned the gentle art of walking on eggshells.

The child has domesticated herself.

Years pass. She goes to school, makes friends, attends university, starts a job. She lives her life without any “real” mental health issues. She thinks of herself as pretty stable. She describes herself as a perfectionist, and others see her as a skilled and intelligent colleague and a reliable friend among the many roles she juggles.

She doesn’t remember thinking of her mother as two anymore. Now, there is only mother. An imperfect woman, sometimes gentle, sometimes angry.

But something else changed too. The sentence that used to echo in her head, “Why are YOU such a disappointing child?”, shifted. It became: “Why am I such a disappointing child?”

And when that sentence changed, so did the voice.

It used to come in the voice of the fake mother. But the new version has been repeated for over a decade in her own voice.

At first, the list and the sentences were repeated to protect herself from the mother she feared. But now, because the sentence sounds like her, and the voice delivering it is hers, she mistakenly believes it is her.

How tragic that the very thing she used to save herself has become the same voice that now attacks her in the dark, when she tries to sleep.

In her heart, no matter how many people tell her she’s a good friend, a trusted colleague, someone with great potential, or even a good daughter, she can’t believe it.

She can’t take in the compliments.

She keeps asking herself:
“Why am I such a bad child?”
“Why am I such a disappointing friend?”
“Why am I such a disappointment?”

Her self-esteem is deeply damaged. And all those years ago, mastering the art of walking on eggshells damaged her in ways she never could have imagined.

She wore a mask to survive but she’s worn it for so long, she doesn’t know what she looks like underneath it anymore.

She yearns for the freedom of authenticity.
She longs to tell a few people to go screw themselves.
But she feels stuck.

After trying everything she can, she finally reaches out to a clinical psychologist. She walks in convinced that there’s something deeply wrong with her, something the therapist will be able to spot.

“Maybe he can fix me,” she thinks.

So here she sits, in front of me, sharing the history of her childhood as she weeps for the parts of herself that never got to see the light of day because they had to be shunned. If they weren’t, she would have had to endure the wrath of the fake mother.

When she’s done sharing what she believes are the important parts of her story, she looks at me, eyes full of tears, and says:

“I don’t know why I am such a disappointment.”

My heart fills with warmth as I get a glimpse of the child within her, the one who tried so hard to survive. And after hearing her pain, I feel compelled to begin my inquire with a question. A simple question, but an important one: