Lack of Motivation: What It’s Really Telling You (Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t)
Is your motivation measuring your worth? A therapist on why lacking motivation feels like failing, and what the research says it really means. In my consulting room, I keep meeting the same knot, tied by different hands. A person wants to change something that matters to them. The career move, the fitness habit, the degree, […]
I Wish Grief Only Took What We Had: Grieving a Future That Never Happened
Listen carefully at a funeral. The official business of mourning is the life that was lived, the stories, the photographs, the character. But underneath the eulogies runs a second current of loss, and it speaks in a different grammar. She never got to see her grandchildren grow up. He was two years from retiring; they had the maps out already. She’d just been accepted onto the course. The sharpest pain in the room is so often not for what happened, but for what now never will. We are mourning a person, yes, and we are also mourning their unlived life, the version of them that was still arriving.
…The funeral buries the life that happened. Nothing buries the one that didn’t.
The boy who wanted tea with his father
A dying boy in The Long Walk reveals his wish: tea at his father’s house. A therapist explains why she turned the film off at that scene and what it says about the futures we invest everything in.
“Therapy Is for Crazy People”, And Other Things That Keep Us from Getting Better
My mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder 40 years ago. For many years, she took her medication, saw her psychiatrist, and managed in the ways that medication allows a person to manage. But she would point blank refuse to see a therapist.
Her reason, stated plainly and without apology, was this: “Therapy is for crazy people.”
She did not consider herself crazy. And we, her family, the people who loved her, lived inside the consequences of that refusal for a very long time.
If You’re in Therapy, It Says More About You Than You Think
There’s a quiet assumption that people in therapy are somehow not holding it together. When you look at what therapy actually requires of a person, the picture it paints is almost the exact opposite.
Therapy Isn’t Just for When Things Go Wrong
Most people come to therapy because something hurts. But the work you do once the crisis has passed, or before one ever arrives, is often where the deepest growth happens.
You Already Know You’re Overthinking. So Why Can’t You Stop?
A reel told me to stop overthinking because ‘the problem isn’t the problem,
it’s the 400 versions of it you create.’ Helpful! Groundbreaking! Also, completely useless. If you could just stop it, you would have stopped it by now. Here’s what’s actually going on.
When Feedback Feels Like a Personal Attack
There is something strangely humbling about spending years studying psychology only to find yourself sitting on the kitchen floor thinking: “Well. Apparently I am an intellectual fraud after all.” Not metaphorically.Not academically.Emotionally. And unfortunately, emotions are not particularly interested in qualifications. Recently, I received an academic outcome that, objectively speaking, was absolutely fine. I passed […]
Coming Home, Where Love and Limits Meet
Coming home does not always restore what we imagined.
Sometimes it reveals the space between love and availability, and asks us to learn how to belong without erasing ourselves.
Living Between Worlds: On Belonging and the Soft Struggles of Life Abroad
Living abroad comes with a quiet complexity that most people don’t see. From the outside, it looks bold. Exciting. Courageous. The kind of life people admire from a distance and occasionally romanticise on Instagram. But underneath the adventure, expats and nomads are constantly navigating subtle emotional negotiations: identity shifts, identity and belonging abroad, cultural translation, […]