ooliatr – Julia Fry – Psychotherapist, Neurodivergence Coach, Writer, Poet, Artist.

The Inner Critic Hides a Wounded Child

I am so very grateful to Julia Cameron, writer of The Artist’s Way. In that book she taught me to give space to the inner critic by writing down what it says and then turn each phrase around.

My Heart Sings (2020)
Collage, colour pencils
20 x 14 cm
Julia Fry

I have many inner critics and I’m grateful to all of them for protecting me in the ways they knew how, even though those ways are no longer useful. It’s amazing to me when I become aware of one of them. Their patterns are so automatic and it’s easy to believe the bullshit they spout.

Their job is to protect hurt parts of me and I see these parts as wounded inner children. They bubble up to the surface when they’re ready to be seen and loved, and to finally process what had to be frozen way back when. When this happens, they bring feelings that feel really fucking hard to hold. Then the critic piles on with shame and all the usual crap it heaps on top.

I had this happen for me recently. It can feel like losing grasp on reality – all the feelings of panic and ‘badness’ coming in waves, not related to any event in the current moment.

The next day, I gave space to the feelings in my journal. A torrent of beliefs I’d made up about myself as a child poured out. Thanks to the many times I’ve gone through The Artist’s Way process, I turned them around.

Here are some of them:

No one actually likes or loves us because that’s impossible

A lot of people love us very much.

We’re too ugly and big and noisy and imperfect

We’re beautiful and just the right size, always. It’s okay that sometimes we’re noisy, we’re also quiet too. We’re perfect just as we are. We’re not like your sister, thank goodness; she’s her wonderful self. We’re us. And that is perfect.

I’m not important any more

I’m as important as anyone is.

I’m under the radar

I’m seen with love by people who see me.

I’m excess baggage

I have the right amount of baggage and I am beautiful baggage. If I am excess then the plane isn’t right for me.

I’m ugly

I’m beautiful.

I’m unwanted

I’m so wanted by by so many people and Gaia and guides. So many reasons for wanting me, not least because of the unique expression of love that I am. You’d want me because of my flavour of loving and shining my light. All of us together make a beautiful sight.

I’m useless

I’m useful, without trying to be, through the ways of being that flow through me.

Obviously, there are reasons why this kicked off now: I’ve just started rebirthing breathwork with an incredibly loving practitioner, my partner is deeply loving, I hold my clients with loving, exquisite attention, which also affects my nervous system, I’m putting myself out there in the socials, writing and sharing my offerings. Then there’s the recent traumatic brush with the medical model with the advent of my ADHD assessment. Also, Christmas – but that’s for another post, perhaps.

For me, turning those inner‑critic phrases around feels like creative alchemy — and you might find your own version of that magic.

If you’d like somewhere to explore your inner landscape in your own way, I’d love to hold a space for that. What we do together unfolds from what you bring. I offer a free 20–30 minute initial chat if you’d like to see how it feels.

You’re welcome to book one here:

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ADHD assessment system wasn’t built for people with ADHD

After waiting over five years for my ADHD assessment, I finally began the process — only to discover how deeply unfriendly, bureaucratic, and depersonalising the system can be for people like me. This wasn’t news to me intellectually, but now I have a felt sense of it in my body…

How long should good enough coaching or therapy last?

The therapy that I practice is not designed to try to fix you (I don’t see you as broken). I believe that you are doing the best you can with what you have and my job is to be with you with empathy, genuineness and unconditional positive regard. These attitudes form the basis of our therapy and I can add in coaching, mentoring, astrology, or creative methods, if you require them. In this way, I attune to you and your needs, and you receive genuine care that helps you to let go of what no longer serves you and move towards understanding what kinds of environment help you grow as a neurodivergent person.

The Little Boy Who Wanted to Jump a Gap and Was Scared of Falling

Listen to Julia Fry reading this article

I watched a video on Instagram of a little boy who wanted to jump a gap and was scared of falling. His dad was cheerily pressuring him into it, telling him he could do it. The child kept trying but kept stopping at the edge, and the dad egged him on, a note of exasperation creeping into his tone. As the child grew more agitated, his self-talk became more erratic with words and phrases being repeated excitedly, like “one step, one step, one step.” The dad said at one point that he had to stop himself laughing at the child’s self-talk. Finally, the child did the leap with a reassuring hand hold from the dad. Then he did it without the hand hold and was rewarded with cheers and high fives, and loads of praise. This is how conditions of worth are created.

Moon (2025)

Your glow bathes me in

Cold, beautiful love

And I stand beneath you

Yet with you

Hearing your musical chatter

Making requests

That I have long ignored.

I feel the grief of this disavowal

Of our true nature,

Our ability to hear one another

In ways science can’t fathom

In its fearsome grip on rationality.

I feel you, your beauty

Brings tears to my eyes

As I long for our connection

To last forever

While knowing it cannot

And the exquisite pain of

Bittersweet loving reigns

My human heart.

For this vast, weightless

Heavy feeling I am

Utterly grateful.

Your silver beauty

Moves me like no other,

And yet, as the wave flows

I am left with this sense of

My earthiness and your sorrow

Of the unknown of this.

Together we are other and

This bliss of appreciation

Sustains our relationship.

No longer will awe

Disconnect us

My silver friend.

I Saw the Crescent Moon

La Luna (2011), paper, white emulsion, tippex, acrylic, plastic stars and wool

Last week I saw the crescent moon and it looked like art made by human hand, which made me recall my attempt at making a crescent moon many moons ago. On finding the blog post from 2011, I felt glee to see it! It was a playful experience and I want to share it with you!

I’m developing a special relationship with the moon and I really enjoy connecting with her. I say ‘her’ because I feel the presence to be feminine. Maybe that’s because I project my femininity onto her. Who knows? Who cares?

I’m looking forward to celebrating the next full moon, maybe with a fire ceremony, or maybe quietly, writing a piece of poetry. As we wax towards that, I hope you enjoy my crescent moon. Here’s the original text I wrote to accompany it in 2011:

The Three Muses set their weekly artistic challenge: “the moon”. It ties in with one of my current projects: telling the story of the different identities my imagination created during my childhood to protect me.

One is a she-wolf; she lives inside me on a beautiful snow covered mountainside. I discovered her existence during my first counselling session with Emma Welsh.

The moon has an important role in helping the wolf to release the pain she has held for me and the other identities; when the moon is full it stirs something in her to howl out. It’s not full yet…

I made the light side of the moon using a page from a magazine and several coats of white natural emulsion paint.

The dark side of the moon is black card flicked with tippex and painted over with black acrylic paint.

The fabric of the universe, or dark matter, is a large knitted square over which I sprinkled stars that were given to me by a wise woman at Survivors Network.

If there is a god or creator, I wonder if it created the universe as an art project?

What do you think?

Adaptations (2013)

Adapations (2013)

In the middle of the night I woke with the memory of a module about home in my moving image degree (2013). I couldn’t remember what I had produced for the module. I felt an urge to look at the external hard drive that contained all my work from that time. It was the middle of the night! However compelling the urge was, it could wait. I went back to sleep. That was Thursday night.

On Friday evening I plugged my hard drive into the laptop and in the directory was a file called journal-FINAL. The file contained my process notes for a short film I made called ‘Adaptations’ that was very much influenced by the home module. I was exploring ideas about what makes a home (things we use everyday?), how we identify with home, being exiled from home, and the relationship dynamics within home.

My partner and I were about to go on a trip to Tyneham in Dorset, which is a village taken by the British Army in 1944 so they could use the land for war practice. They promised the inhabitants that they could return to their homes after the war but the Ministry of Defence kept the land. They still use it for tanks and shooting practice.

My father was in the army and he killed himself when I was 9. My mum, sister and I had to leave our house, and community, because we were no longer valuable (if we ever were) to the army. We were stationed in Bovington, the nearest army base to Tyneham. There were beautiful woods behind our house and I used to spend a lot of time with the trees. I knew the feeling of being pushed out from a place I loved, like the villagers of Tyneham.

My partner and I watched Adaptations 3 times, at his request. It has no words, just sounds I’d found on a free sounds website to use as foley, and a beautiful, haunting flute composed by a friend at the beginning and end. You can portray a lot without words. The film was a way for me to work through a relationship breakup at the time.

I don’t know why I didn’t share it on my website earlier. I kind of forgot about the film until the intuitive prod to look at the home module occurred. Reading the accompanying journal was interesting. Here’s an excerpt that relates to the film:

A few weeks before he died, my mother and father had an argument in which it seemed he wanted to leave the relationship. They reconciled and he made a big show of making an effort with her, whilst she seemed resigned and closed down. Their communication always seemed to be broken but they managed to keep the relationship going until he died. I wonder how much of their ability to keep going related to how we lived and the objects that we saw everyday that helped us to retain our identities: the kitchen objects, the lounge objects, the bedroom objects. The mundane things that we touched and used or played with daily were real; they had tangible substance, whereas the arguments and the acts of undermining and violence could be ‘forgotten’ with enough distraction.

Gratitude: what’s the point?

In a dark place once, I felt utterly depressed; could not think of one thing I was grateful for. Not one. I hated where I was living in my sixth floor council flat, where I’d taken up the tiles leaving a bare, concrete floor in the lounge. It felt cold, looked freezing, like the night sky. I had no spiritual practice. I had isolated myself. I wasn’t working. I was on government ‘benefits’. I felt unable to work and bad for not working. Wretched is the word for it.

Moving with infinity – an intuitive walk in Venice

As I practised my shamanic drumming before going on an intuitive walk today, I found myself pacing in a figure of 8 around the bedroom. The movement came from my body – a natural urge – rather than my mind leading the way. The intention I set for the intuitive walk is: to find ‘dead’ space to sing to (I am doing art research in Venice for the British Council – see bottom of this post for more information on my project).

Image shows an art exhibit with sculpted landscape with a sheep with elongated legs laying down with legs folded up, a tiny deer (in relation to the sheep's - a tenth of the size) and a spherical light hanging above.

Is it safer to fit in or stand out?

Listen to this article:

Do you want to be different or do you want to fit in?

When I was a teenager, with undiagnosed AuDHD and cPTSD, I desperately wanted to fit in, be accepted, be loved for who I was. I also wanted to express myself through what I wore and I had all kinds of ideas of the outfits I would put together to give space to this self-expression, but I didn’t let myself. I couldn’t. The need to fit in, not be ridiculed, and the desire to feel safe were stronger than the courage needed to stand out and be different.