If you are autistic and have ADHD, you may already know that your experience does not map neatly onto either diagnosis alone. The term AuDHD has emerged to describe this combination, and with it comes a set of tensions that are genuinely distinct: autism pulling toward routine and sameness, ADHD pulling toward novelty and stimulation. A need for certainty alongside…
Most therapists believe they work with feelings and with patterns from the past. Researchers decided to check. They listened to recordings of real therapy sessions and compared what therapists actually did. Psychodynamic therapists stood out. They did seven things more fully and more consistently than therapists trained in other approaches. Those seven things are what I do every day in…
Somewhere in the decade before retirement, a question tends to surface. It does not always arrive loudly. For many people it comes in quieter moments: driving home from a meeting that felt pointless, watching a friend navigate an illness, realising that the promotion you worked toward for years no longer feels like the thing you actually wanted. The question underneath…
Retirement, identity and the self beneath the role Retirement is supposed to feel like arrival. You have worked toward it, planned for it, perhaps counted down to it. And then it happens, and something unexpected follows. Not relief, or not only relief. A quieter, more unsettling question begins to form. If you are no longer the job, the role, perhaps…
Retirement changes your relationship with time, with identity, with purpose. What is less often talked about is how comprehensively it changes your relationships with other people. The structures that held your social world in place for decades, the rhythm of work, the colleagues you saw daily, the clarity of roles at home built around competing schedules, quietly dissolve. What remains…
Most people who seek therapy are not struggling to identify what they have done wrong. They are struggling with a more corrosive and harder to locate feeling: that they themselves are wrong. Not their actions, not a specific mistake, but something about who they are at a more fundamental level. That distinction, between what you have done and what you…
Many people are drawn to the idea of writing about difficult experiences long before they feel ready to actually do it. They sense, often correctly, that there is something in the writing that might help. That putting words to something painful could shift it, even slightly. That the act of finding language for what has felt unspeakable might make it…
Most people who have never been to therapy carry some version of the same image. You lie on a couch, or sit in a chair, and talk about your childhood while someone nods and occasionally asks how that made you feel. It is not an image that inspires confidence, and it is not an accurate one either. Understanding what actually…
There is a particular kind of disorientation that many women describe in perimenopause, and it does not always make it onto the standard list of symptoms alongside hot flashes and disrupted sleep. It is more subtle and more unsettling than that. A sense of not quite recognising yourself. Of feeling present in your life but somehow not fully in it.…
You built the career, showed up for everyone, managed the workload alongside the children, the ageing parents, the school runs and the performance reviews, and somehow made it look manageable. You were the one people called when things needed sorting, and you sorted them. That was not luck. That was decades of determination, sacrifice, and an almost ferocious commitment to…