Again and Again and Again You said the anger would come back just as the love did. I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates. It is old. It is also a pauper. I… Read more

Watching the baby in the still face experiment, it is evident how a sense of shame can become so embedded in a person’s experience. The way the baby falls apart, not through overt humiliation or obvious shaming by the other, but through not being responded to. This feeling of distress, expressed so clearly by the… Read more

Phil Mollon’s new book “The Disintegrating Self: Psychotherapy of Adult ADHD, Autistic Spectrum, and Somato-psychic Disorders” has some interesting things to say about ADHD and autism and the role therapy has in helping deal with these states caused by neurobiological factors.Traditionally psychotherapy has dealt with these conditions poorly through a lack of understanding of their… Read more

MP Liam Byrne bravely highlighted this week the experience of children of alcoholics in his article, My dad spent 18 years trying to drink himself to death. Interestingly he remembered the periods when his father was sober as worse than when he was drunk because of the fear.  He couldn’t relax wondering when his father would change.… Read more

Listening to David Bowie this week, it struck me how much anxiety has the power to disable thought. So much so that we’re tempted to want to get rid of it altogether. We self medicate it in many ways which can provide a temporary fix but it can seem powerfully debilitating. Although, there is no permanent escape from the… Read more