Some people choose their therapist on instinct, but others want to know a lot of information about what they’re signing up for. For the latter, I’ve shared here my particular understanding of the important aspects of therapy, and what I hope to offer each patient who comes to see me. I hope this will provide you with what you need to make the right decision about whether this kind of support might be a good fit for you.
Read MoreThe intricacies of human attachment have become a source of fascination not only for psychologists and researchers, but more recently, everyone. Resources like Amir Levine’s Attached and public figures like Esther Perel, snowballed a prolific-Tik-Tok-fuelled discussion in which vast sections of the population categorised themselves and everyone around them by their attachment style. Disorganised attachment, often deemed more ominous and pathological, remains the least discussed and least understood.
Read MoreThe proliferation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM), now in its fifth iteration, normalised thinking about psychological, emotional and existential problems in terms of diagnostic categories. Borrowing the DSM from their colleagues in the medical community, psychological training institutions have focussed on teaching their trainees to think categorically about psychopathology…
Read More“How little we still commit ourselves to living. We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life. We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that way aim past the light. How can we presume to want to know in advance, from where the light will come to us?”
Read MoreThe notion that the appropriate response to experiencing “symptoms” is to seek their immediate removal is a bizarre product of our time which has become dangerously ordinary. It positions us immediately against our bodies, hearts, and souls, and frames them as systems that are prone to meaningless malfunction, like an iPhone engineered to break after a certain time for no apparent reason. People with lots of symptoms, or more severe symptoms, are deemed very unwell, and by virtue, less powerful, less important and less good than those who are not symptomatic. In our capitalist economic structures, they may also be less productive and therefore less valued or successful.
Read MoreI have never found anything that summarises my experience of therapy (as both therapist and patient) quite like Garrick Duckler’s short film, On Being A Patient. His words provide two gifts: they touch the intricacies of the kinds of problems that people bring to therapy, as separate from diagnostic categories or symptoms, and they articulate the nuances of what can be frightening about the intimacy and vulnerability of a therapeutic relationship. It is nine minutes unequivocally well spent for any patient, therapist, or curious other.
Read MoreBeing a therapy patient, especially in a longer-term, more exploratory treatment like psychoanalysis, requires a certain kind of courage. Those who choose this mode of healing (arguably the most expensive, open-ended and uncertain option, in many respects, of those ‘on the market’) submit themselves to a path towards the perimeter of themselves as they have come to be known, by others and by themselves. Eventually, they must heave open the rusty gate at the edge of their familiar, conscious self, step into the overgrown grass and begin their navigation of the unmapped, incoherent, shadowy outskirts of who they are.
Read MoreI don’t know a person who has not, at one time or another, felt a longing for greater love in their life. The absence of enough like-minded friends around, less support and success in a particular endeavour than one would wish, a sense of rarely being understood, or the absence of sincere, satisfying romantic or sexual connection, can leave us in great pain and suffering, even if it might seem we are surrounded by many people who care about us. We are all, always longing to be loved, in a world where there is so much confusion about what love even is, and what it might mean to love each other well.
Read MoreI recently bought and have been renovating a little office all of my own. It’s in the only building in the city I could ever imagine working in: heritage-listed, high ceilings, definitely filled with all manner of ghosts. Almost five years ago I walked in there for the first time to meet with a supervisor and fell immediately in love. I remember thinking “Maybe one day, in like 20 years, I could work here too.” Two and a half years later I signed a rental agreement for a room down the hall, and as of a couple of weeks ago, I now have my own name above my own door. I’m ahead of schedule.
Read MoreThe training that qualified me as a psychologist treated the mastery of the practice of psychotherapy as a science. I was instructed that I should feel pride in striving to become a “scientist-practitioner”: someone who could encounter a patient, decided what is wrong with them, then carefully plan and deliver an intervention based on "evidence-based models" that follow a linear course, in a particular time frame, and could be tracked and monitored along the way using a variety of measures and questionnaires.
Read More
