Subscribe to our newsletter

Working in private practice, office parties are mostly a non-event. Yet they still wander into my consulting room: in reflective practice, in supervision, in the stories colleagues tell with both fondness and dread. During my years in the NHS and social care, I always felt conflicted about them. I rarely looked forward to going, but usually ended up having a good time once there. It is a familiar paradox, loving groups and fearing them, drawn to belonging and wary of it at th

Professional loneliness has become one of the quiet epidemics of our time. It shows sometimes through dramatic burnout, but more often, you find it in the small, private moments when practitioners realise they are holding far more than their frames were built to contain. It is the loneliness of shouldering clinical risk in overstretched services, of making decisions without adequate consultation, of offering containment that one is not receiving in return. It is subtle and cu

Recently, I have found myself, like so many others, drawn to two stories. The first is The Traitors , where celebrities are siloed in a castle, accuse, betray, and splinter into Faithfuls and Traitors. The second is the fate of Ophelia. More specifically, Taylor Swift’s retelling, which transforms Hamlet’s collapsing lover into a survivor. In Hamlet , Ophelia becomes a vessel for the anxieties, desires, and conflicts of those around her, denied her own stable subjectivity. In

“Lies, my boy, are known in a moment. There are two kinds of lies, lies with short legs, and lies with long noses.”— Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio  (1883) A discussion has been circulating online recently about what counts as “honest” when describing one’s NHS experience. The question seemed simple: is it misleading for a clinical psychologist to write, for example, “ten years’ NHS experience” on a professional profile if only one or two of those years were post-

A reflection on Antigone, the NHS, and the moral task of mourning in group life. Much attention in psychoanalysis (and by extension, group analysis) has been given to the Greek myth of Oedipus.  We are fluent in the language of the Oedipal triangle: the child caught between love and law, desire and prohibition, longing for union and fear of punishment.  The myth has become almost synonymous with psychic development, shaping how we think about authority, rivalry, and individu

Halloween approaches, and with it the invitation to sit with what lingers. In psychotherapy, we are asked to host the unburied: losses that have no grave, traumas that speak in symptoms, ancestral echoes that arrive unannounced. Samuel Kimbles (2021) calls these “suffering ghosts”, unacknowledged cultural and familial histories that demand psychic reckoning. The task is not to banish them but to transform suffering into kinship. This requires a mind that is both porous and bo

I recently came across a comment by Rupert Lowe, a figure often associated with right-wing conservative politics in the United Kingdom. Unexpectedly, I found myself agreeing with much of what he said. His remarks were not about immigration or the usual theatre of culture wars, but about work – the relentless, anxious, and precarious life of the small business owner. He spoke of a Parliament full of people who “don’t get it”, who have never run a business, never lived the 24-h

We live in a time of strong opinions and urgent calls to action. The pace is fast. The stakes feel high. And the invitation to respond publicly, quickly, and with certainty is relentless. But in this climate, where does our relationship with not knowing go? In a culture that prizes certainty, our professional and group lives are shaped by the same pressures: the pull to know, to define, to align. These forces can eclipse our capacity for genuine dialogue. In group life, espec

In the old versions of Cinderella, before the glass slipper and the pumpkin coach were polished into Disney sheen, there is grief. The...

It has long been debated in clinical literature that children suffer not from hostility but from neglect . Winnicott suggested that the...

In Indian folklore,   vetalas   are spirits that dwell in cremation grounds and are said to animate the dead. Although unsettling, they...

Over the past eight years, I have increasingly relied on online spaces for community, communication, and care in my professional world....

I am on the ferry to the Isles of Scilly again, heading for the annual family camping trip. The crossing, the salt wind, and the gradual...

When I was pregnant with my first child, I imagined I could shape the birth I would have and the mother I would become. Like many choices...

“Freedom… is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of...

Everything Can Be a Defence One thing you learn quickly in analytic work is that anything and everything can be a defence. The healthy...

The story of Rapunzel has been passed down for centuries. From Persian epics to Italian folktales to the Grimm Brothers’ more familiar...

When the Body Won’t Stay Quiet Fairy tales say things our theories often cannot. They bypass the defended mind and speak in symbols,...

“The dwarf carried in the ravens’ dinner on seven little plates, and in seven little cups.” Illustration by Albert Weisgerber, published...

"Without the hands—without the ability to act, work, create, and touch—we are not whole. Yet in the ordeal of their loss, a woman comes...