There are moments when our bodies speak louder than words, carrying messages that link us to our lineage, emotions, and unseen energies. Recently, something happened that reminded me of how intertwined body and psyche truly are — how even invisible critters, as Richard Schwartz calls them, can find their way into our awareness.
Continue reading “A way of working with critters”
Anxiety is often spoken about as a problem to be fixed, medicated, or mindset-hacked away. Yet in the therapy room and in my own life, anxiety has shown up as something more complex: a protective part, a messenger from deeper hurt, and sometimes a sign that something stranger is moving through the nervous system. In this article, I share my journey with gremlins, inner critics, parts-work and “critters”, and how creativity and compassion help us move from fighting ourselves to befriending what lives inside.
This is written for anyone who feels hijacked by anxiety or critical voices and is curious about a gentler, more creative way of relating to them.
Continue reading “Can we trust Gremlins, Inner Critics, Saboteurs and Critters?”Discover how self-talk acts as magic spells on your nervous system. Reframe struggles, soothe inner critics, and embrace self-compassion this Christmas.
I draw on my breath and the overflowing love that constantly pumps through my heart – healing me, loving me unconditionally, giving me energy in surprising ways.
Words are magic spells.
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.
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…
Continue reading “ADHD assessment system wasn’t built for people with ADHD”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.
Continue reading “How long should good enough coaching or therapy last?”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.
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.
Continue reading “Gratitude: what’s the point?”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.
I created this piece using wool. The wool came from a cardigan I made where I found the seams to be too irritating so I unpicked it. I am very sensitive to seams and labels in clothing. I was left with lots of small balls of wool in varying sizes and I followed an intuitive prod to finger knit each ball into a long strand. This took a few months and during this time I was working on my dissertation for my creative psychotherapy master’s, which was a heuristic inquiry into the experience of othering people different from me.
Continue reading “Othering Me, Othering You”