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If everything is declared uncertain, then uncertainty itself becomes dogma; and dogmatic uncertainty is simply certainty wearing different clothes. In therapeutic practice and in the wider social field, moments arise that unsettle what once felt like morally settled ground. Court cases, public reckonings, emerging evidence. They carry practical consequences, but they also create a deeper disturbance. They shake collective confidence. They disturb the belief that good intentio

You only took a small bite. You did not mean to fall asleep. The apple was not obviously poisoned. It was polished. Persuasive. Glossed with the language everyone else seemed to be using. Half red: urgency, justice, belonging. Half green: freshness, safety, growth. It did not feel like deceit. It felt like fluency. You told yourself it was only language. You are a leader. You understand that leadership involves translation. You cannot afford to ignite unnecessary fracture. Th

I have been revisiting the fairy tale Bearskin in preparation for an upcoming workshop. It is a story that helps me think about what it means to arrive depleted, and about the ethics of waiting when people, and systems, are under strain. In the tale, a soldier returns from war with nothing. He has lost his home, his place, and his usefulness to the world he once served. Offered an impossible bargain, he agrees to live for seven years wearing a bearskin, unable to wash, groom

Sometimes in clinical work a particular myth starts to preoccupy me. For a while it was Rumpelstiltskin. Lately it has been the Greek myth of Icarus. One familiar psychoanalytic reading comes from Stephen Mitchell’s 1986 paper The Wings of Icarus, which uses the myth to explore narcissistic illusion. I have been reworking it through a more contemporary group-analytic and institutional lens. For those who do not know the story, the myth of Icarus is really a story about his fa

I keep returning to the old tale of the fisherman and the flounder. It turns up in supervision and in my own thinking at moments when effort feels endless and strangely unquestioned. In the story, a poor fisherman casts his net into grey, restless water and pulls up not an ordinary fish but a talking flounder. Flounders are creatures of the seabed, almost invisible against the sand until they are disturbed. This one is enchanted and pleads to be set free. The fisherman lets i

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

Over the past eight years, I have increasingly relied on online spaces for community, communication, and care in my professional world. In these spaces, particularly on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, the usual scaffolding of tone, ritual, and embodied presence often falls away. What remains is a volatile mix of projection, preference, and performance. Clinicians, academics, and facilitators often find themselves caught in reactive loops, where the desire for "just righ

“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 Atuan I am currently on holiday reading the Books of Earthsea, recently recommended to me. I have been reflecting on the symbol of the labyrinth as part of a series of workshops I am running, exploring myths and fairytales I consider vital for navigating depth psychology theory. The Minotaur and the labyrinth are central among them, revealing

The story of Rapunzel has been passed down for centuries. From Persian epics to Italian folktales to the Grimm Brothers’ more familiar telling. But this isn’t just a bedtime story of damsels in distress and princes. It’s a symbolic tale of entrapment and longing, of psychic inheritance and separation. It’s about the architecture of captivity, and the complicated relief of release. In today’s context, particularly for newly qualified clinical psychologists navigating the NHS,

mem When the Body Won’t Stay Quiet Fairy tales say things our theories often cannot. They bypass the defended mind and speak in symbols, archetypes, and the secret language of the body. Lately I have been thinking about a lesser known fairy tale: The Singing Bone. Collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, it is not a story of heroism or redemption. But of betrayal, lies, and what happens when a group mistakes performance for truth. To me, the singing bone is not merely a met

“The dwarf carried in the ravens’ dinner on seven little plates, and in seven little cups.” Illustration by Albert Weisgerber, published in Kinder-und, publication date unknown. Originally published in German. The Seven Ravens is a lesser known Grimm tale that begins with a father who has seven sons and longs for a daughter. When she is finally born, frail and sickly, the father sends the sons to fetch water for her baptism. In their haste, they drop the jug into the well and

Little Red Riding Hood is a tale of innocence betrayed, its roots tangled in centuries-old folklore. A young girl, basket full of gifts, steps into a forest to visit her sick grandmother, only to meet a wolf whose charm hides fangs. Charles Perrault’s 1697 version is the most popular version that most are familiar with. A curious feature in older tellings, is that the wolf poses a pivotal question: “Which path will you take—the path of needles or the path of pins?” This choic

The Vow and the Cradle: A Nation That Made a Promise In the Brothers Grimm's tale of Little Briar Rose, a long-awaited child is born to a rejoicing court. In celebration, twelve fairies are invited to bestow gifts—wisdom, beauty, grace. Yet a thirteenth fairy, uninvited and excluded, interrupts the blessing with a curse: the child will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall into a sleep lasting one hundred years. Despite every attempt to destroy all spinning wheels and

Jack running from the giant in the Red Fairy Book (1890) by Andrew Lang Jack and the Beanstalk to many in the UK is a familiar fairytale: it tells of a young man of modest means, a handful of magic beans, a towering giant, and a triumphant return with treasures. On its surface, it appears a straightforward story of grit and reward. Yet, viewed through the lens of group analysis, it reveals other insights into the nature of human relationships and collective processes. In thi

Hans My Hedgehog, a German fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm in 1815’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), traces roots far older, echoing ancient struggles with transformation and otherness seen in tales like Theseus and the Minotaur or Oedipus. These stories, like Hans’, probe how the monstrous and the human collide, challenging notions of belonging. The tale follows Hans, born half-human, half-hedgehog, rejected by his parents and society for

Odlot żurawi" ("Departure of Cranes") by Józef Chełmoński, 1870. In the Japanese folktale ‘The Crane Wife’, a poor man rescues an injured crane, and soon a mysterious woman appears at his door. She becomes his wife, weaving exquisite cloth to lift them from poverty—but only if he promises not to watch her work. Driven by curiosity or greed, he breaks that promise, discovering she’s the crane, plucking her own feathers to create the fabric. Exposed, she transforms back into a

Lately I have been having a rather strange split experience. I move in some groups and there is a feeling of angst and fear - conversations are consumed with how we are about to face something terrifying: Leaders of the world have gone mad and we are in imminent danger. In other spaces people are exhaling: Finally someone is doing something about the insanity we have been living in the past few years. Yes we are moving in to a period of noisy instability for the purpose of

Christmas is around the corner and I am again returning to some of my favourite Winter stories. My most beloved winter stories are C.S. Lewis's 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' and Hans Christian Andersen’s timeless fairy tale the 'Snow Queen'. Both stories terrified and disturbed me as a child but I felt compelled to read them over and over. At some point fear transformed into fascination, and finally into delight. In the book 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe'

Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable. ~David W. Augsburger “And you, and you You're gonna love me” ~ Jennifer Holliday, Dream Girls. The recent riots in the UK, triggered by the knife attack and murder of a group of children in the coastal town of Southport, is adding to the evidence that there is something that feels very powerful and dangerous bubbling just below the surface of English society. Parts of our s

Dream I am in the basement of a make-shift house on the seafront. The room is full of windows that have a huge compelling vista over a beach and the ocean. There is also a small concrete defence. I can see on the horizon a tsunami moving at speed towards the coast line. A clock ticks and I worry about a crocodile. I see a group of young boys lost in the room with me. It is a kitchen. We have to leave quickly, to get to higher ground. The boys move swiftly out and up