My daughter, returning to university in a few weeks, is trying to choose a new duvet and makes the mistake of asking for my advice. Our neurodivergence makes decisions more difficult and creates anxiety around change, so deciding on new bedding might appear straightforward but instead, we tie one another up in knots of perpetual […]
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Someone said to me recently, “I think I’m suffering from some sort of weird depression.” I was intrigued by the use of the word “weird” because, when they described how they were feeling it just sounded like depression, nothing weird about it. When you look up the definition of depression in a dictionary, you find […]
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One day, my therapist asked, “Where does your self-esteem come from?” I looked out through the window into his lush green garden and at the woodlands beyond, wishing myself in amongst the trees. I didn’t know where my self-esteem came from, I just knew that I wasn’t generating much of it from anywhere. There were […]
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Some years ago, in the midst of an argument, my wife said to me, “There’s more to running a house than making dinner.” She was right, there’s no denying it. I felt shame being perceived as such a domestic “one-trick pony”, but it also resonated in a different way, as something I rely on to […]
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I’m playing “Bananagrams” with my daughter and, in what now feels like a rash move fuelled by early game bravado I have “dumped” too many of my opening letters and find myself with a swathe of tiles in front of me and unable to make anything of them. Serenely fashioning “Paradoxical” on the table, my […]
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I had a question from a client this week variations of which I receive regularly. “I feel I’ve hit burnout and I don’t know what to do about it.” I opened with something like, “I spent a while wondering how to answer you and thought about it while I walked my dogs and looked at […]
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One morning last weekend, we couldn’t find the dog’s collar which made me irrationally angry. The two things I really can’t deal with, apart from goat’s cheese, are being late, according to my exacting routine, and losing things. So not being able to locate the collar made me late for walking the dogs which, if […]
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My therapist reaches into an old A4 envelope for my notes down at the side of his chair wedged between whichever book he’s reading and a travel mug I have never seen him sip from. These beginnings always take an age, a ritual of sorts. While he shuffles pages into order I look out of […]
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In the mid-eighties, I went on holiday to Corfu with my friend Adam. It was the first time I had flown and the first time I felt consciously out of control. Late one Friday the 13th as the plane sped down the runway towards take-off I thought to myself, “My body has never travelled at […]
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When I did the Belbin psychometric test to find out which team role I play most effectively, I remember less about my results and more of a jealous feeling related to people who were “Completer Finishers”. Everything tidy and settled is beyond me and consequently annoying. I think I was a “Plant” or a “Resource […]
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