Since the time of Sigmund Freud, psychologists have been interested in how much of our mental life takes place outside conscious awareness. Freud developed his own theory of the unconscious, while modern psychology tends to use different ideas around automatic processing, implicit learning and habit. They’re not all describing exactly the same thing, but they […]
This year’s World Mental Health Day theme is Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change. It asks us to think about whose voices we listen to when we talk about mental health, and how much influence those voices actually have. When we think about mental health services, research or workplace policies, how often are people […]
When someone is distressed, our instinct might be to help by offering advice, solutions or a different perspective. Yet sometimes what a person needs first is to feel heard. As we mark World Suicide Prevention Day, Ronald Lee, who has served as Head of Counselling for two private universities in Malaysia, reflects on the role […]
Across the course of any close relationship, whether with a partner, friend, parent, or child, there will be moments when people misunderstand each other, get defensive, feel hurt, or say something clumsy. One common misconception is that a healthy relationship is one where there’s little to no conflict, as though love should somehow remove irritation, […]
Most of us would prefer life to offer more certainty than it does. We want to know whether we’re making the right decision, whether our plans will work out, and whether the future we imagine will be the one we end up living. The difficulty is that life rarely gives us answers to those questions […]
Many people come to therapy with the worry that they’re too sensitive, perhaps after years of feeling affected by things that other people seem to move past more easily. It might be something small on the surface, such as a friend replying with a shorter message than usual, a colleague using a sharper tone in […]
In a lecture titled Against Self-Criticism, the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips suggests that, if our self-critical voice were a person who followed us around, we’d find them boring and wouldn’t want them around for long. We’d soon find out that our self-critic was “impoverished and cliché”. In other words, it says the same things over […]
Have you ever found yourself in a spiral of silence? You might not recognise the term, and yet there’s a strong chance you’ve experienced it a few times. In many ways, silence is golden. When we’re sitting by the sea, quietly driving alongside someone we know well, or spending a few minutes in reflective stillness […]
When you hear the words “self-harm”, what comes to mind? For many, there’s a feeling of discomfort and a preference not to think about it. There might also be some misunderstanding about why some people choose to physically harm themselves. March is Self-harm Awarness month, and like any awareness month, it invites us to learn […]
Many of us reach a point in adulthood where time starts to feel like it’s moving faster than it once did. Weeks seem to disappear into months, months into years, and before we know it, we’re left with the sense that it all happened very quickly, even though plenty changed along the way. Psychologists often […]
At this time of year, many of us are in mindset of thinking about our plans, our hopes, and the kind of direction we want the next twelve months to take. January arrives with a sense of renewal, alongside the usual resolutions and how to be “better versions” of ourselves. It also marks Mental Wellness […]
When we think about therapy, we often focus on the client’s experience: how we can help them, how to support them effectively, and which evidence-based methods might work best. But it’s worth giving thought to our own experience of therapy, too. If we’ve been in therapy ourselves, we’ll know something of what it’s like to […]
