“The wish to be endlessly needed is one of the most exhausting forms of love.”—James Hillman We inhabit a care system that is fracturing—not merely from budget cuts or staff shortages, but under the weight of its own mythology. The National Health Service (NHS)—a vast, intricate weave of human effort, compassion, and suffering—transcends its role as a healthcare institution. It has become a psychological crucible, reflecting a deeper crisis: the fantasy of limitless caregivin

A longstanding favourite story in our house is ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’ by Judith Kerr. For many people this is a wonderful story with no hidden meaning. Certainly the author maintained it was written only as entertainment for her children. However as poet Michael Rosen noted, whether created consciously or unconsciously the story carries powerful metaphors. He noted that despite the tiger being depicted as ‘jolly’ within the images ‘it still is a tiger’. As such I thou

What do we do when there is nothing left to offer? That is the dilemma many health care professionals face when going about navigating their daily work activities. The dilemma reminds me of the nursery rhyme: There was an old woman Who lived in a shoe She had so many children, she didn't know what to do. She gave them some broth without any bread; Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed. The earliest printed version of this rhyme is in Joseph Ritson's Gammer Gurto

I have recently been engaged in several emotionally heated discussions concerning the complexities of the use of gender affirmative therapy for people who go through a gender transition and later de-transition. In reflecting on these conversations I remembered a 2019 blog post I wrote called ’The Cost of Compromising to Belong.’ I thought it might be useful to revisit the fairytale I mentioned in that particular blog - the Hans Christian Andersen story of ‘The Emperor's New

By Dr Libby Nugent, First Published Aug 12 2021 01:26PM Recently, I have been thinking a great deal about the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. It is a story I was told regularly when I was in a Jungian analysis and I return to it often. The story of Rumpelstiltskin – albeit under a different name – is thought to be about 4,000 years old and is one of the earliest known stories in Western literature. Something about this story has stuck in our collective conscious and it is not letti