In recent months I have been delving into Brown and Elliott’s comprehensive book about Attachment Disturbances in Adults. It’s a detailed exploration of the way adults relate, looking at how therapy can assist clients who find themselves anxious or avoidant in their attachments to others, and to help clients who experience a disorganisation of the way they attach that combines both anxiety and avoidance behaviours. One of the ways of working that Brown and Elliott advocate p

“Healing does not mean wallowing in or identifying with injury. Nor does it mean defensive inaction. It means having the courage to see, acknowledge, grieve, and repair the holes within ourselves (with, if we are fortunate, loving help from others). It means moving on, patches and all”. Jill Mellick This quote for me is packed with important messages. I am so lucky to be in the position of being ‘loving help’ to my clients as they heal themselves, it is a role that conti

I recently came across a cracking set of questions about letting go. If you’ve a sense of it being time to reflect on what energises you and what does not, why not grab a pen and notepad, and find a quiet spot where you feel safe and relaxed, and have a muse? What's heavy, what’s weighing me down? What am I tolerating, putting up with or settling for? What am I fantasising about leaving or radically changing? What would I love never to do again? What am I tired of feeling?

My weekend poem this week is called The Abyss. I wrote it in 2011. It speaks of trauma, of the fragmentation inside that happens when we have unresolved horrors that we have locked away, yet to be explored. For me it expresses the pain I sit with all too frequently with my brave and inspiring clients. If it resonates with you, it comes with my love. The Abyss Beneath the veneer The appearance of normality Lies the abyss In that place of innumerable unscreamed screams A mi

Congruence matters. That sense of rightness that you feel in your body that lets you know that what you are doing is aligned with what is good to do. You might think that we should act congruently all the time, yet you only need look at the daily damage to our planet home or to wars and conflicts to know we don’t collectively act with congruence. Closer to home, how many times a day to you find yourself over-riding your sense of things and doing what you think you should, o

It seems natural to be distressed when something awful has happened. A death. A traffic accident. Abuse. Faced with situations like these, people generally find they can make sense of their upset and as a result can find ways to work through it. What can sometimes be more challenging is embracing our emotions when they are evoked not by what happened, but by what did not happen. For example, there may have been times when people who ought to have been have not been there for

One of the most useful metaphors I have for the brain is to consider it as a road network. There are some thinking patterns that are like well-used motorways, wide, fast and without interruption to slow you down. You zoom along them often. There are other ways of thinking that are like hilly, muddy tracks that twist and turn through foliage, great for a walking adventure, but difficult to navigate, and hard work to win through. In between there are A roads, B roads, and c

It is a common wish, isn’t it, the desire to go back. ‘I wish things were the way they used to be’ or ‘I wish we got on like we did before’ are laments that are so commonly heard, and they are natural. Most of us can recall sunnier days in our lives and relationships, the wish to return is heart-felt and sincere. However, what went before is what led here. Were there any way to go back, which there currently isn’t, it’s important to recognise that if you did, in time, you

“In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few” Shunryu Suzuki I was reminded of this familiar quote while reading the lovely book Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home by Toko-pa Turner. In the book she remarks “To be in a constant state of learning is to be receptive to life itself.” These two quotes really spoke to me about the wonder and awe experienced when we look at anything with fresh, inquiring eyes. To know that we really

Feeling insignificant and invisible while in relationships is sadly not an uncommon experience. Therapeutically and in life more generally, I meet many people who have experienced not having their psychological needs fully met by their care-givers as children. When this is unresolved it carries on into adulthood, with the person looking to others to meet their needs, and finding it very hard when they do not. This issue comes about sometimes through neglect and abuse, but of

“When I am at home with myself, everything I do ends as a love poem” Yeats What we experience depends on our state, on our way of being, in any particular moment. I loved this quote from Yeats which so eloquently expresses how life can be when lived from a place of comfort and contentment inside. It reminds me that when there is a depth of connection between our own being and our surroundings and the people we are present with, then love is the natural expression that flows

As a psychotherapist and trauma therapist, a big theme in my work is somatic wisdom. The body remembers, we are all mammals, and to quote Stephen Gilligan “there is a whole pattern of intelligence and wisdom within the body to which you may or may not be attuned.” My role involves helping people to align and centre within their bodies, so that their way of being physically can become expansive, and generate new possibilities and patterns. As Robert Dilts says, when we lose

I’ve recently been reading Daniel Brown and David Elliott’s work about attachment difficulties, which focuses on how to help adults who are having difficulties relating to repair the wounds they carry as a result of their early experiences. It’s important to know this is not about blaming others, or passing on responsibility, it’s about proactive work in the here and now that can repair and improve our inner experience of ourselves and of relationships. I really like their d

It's more years since I care to remember since I first came across the idea of Character Strengths, back then I was working in the corporate world as an Employee Engagement specialist. The concept of character strengths is that we have enduring characteristics that energise us when we express them and act congruently with them. These strengths are virtues, they are what makes us us, and when we live a life that maximises our opportunities for them, we flourish psychological

A colleague described beautifully to me the other day the power of unspoken communication in families. You know…the looks. The sighs. The eye rolls. The silences. The walking away. Or crowding in. The body postures. The facial expressions. Many of us grow up in one family of origin, others move through several families in the course of their childhhod. Either way, in each family with time we learn the unconscious rules by which we are expected to live, and the consequ

Anger is an unpopular emotion, and frankly it gets quite a bad press. The caricature of an angry person is red faced, steam coming out of the ears, an unattractive figure that people feel comfortable judging and looking down on. Anger is actually a very normal and important emotion. Anger is what we feel when we are wronged and when our boundaries are ignored or trampled over. It's the natural emotion we feel when we see injustice. Anger energises. It mobilises us to defe

We’re not always in touch with all of the capability, wisdom and resourcefulness we have inside. While we are all multi-faceted, it's easy to get disconnected from our own sense of perspective, humour and groundedness. When this happens, you might not feel at your best, you might get stuck in repeating patterns that you know don’t do you any good, you might even feel like you go round and round in circles. When simple grounding isn’t quite doing it, another way of getting ba

Discovering unconscious patterns I was teaching at Bishop Auckland College last week, introducing some concepts from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (#NLP) to their Counselling Degree students. I wanted to share one of the unusual techniques we talked about, it can be fun to do, and also be illuminating. Judith DeLozier, an early NLP exponent, articulated many techniques designed to access unconscious wisdom, going beyond what we know and think to what is held intuitively in ou

“Trauma represents a profound compression of “survival” energy, energy that has not been able to complete its meaningful course of action.” Peter Levine We think of trauma responses as a problem, a dysfunction, an indication that something has gone wrong. I love this quote from Peter Levine, which so effectively captures the truth that the trauma response was an attempt at defence, a way to survive and to maintain our integrity as a living being. Getting rid of or pushing a

“Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates” from the Hermetic Kybalion, quoted by Peter Levine in In An Unspoken Voice. I find this quotation profoundly helpful. Health is a state of flow, a natural rhythm. Healing calls for flow, for rhythm, for movement and grace. When we are flowing we are