📚 All articles
Currently training for a BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) in Tooting. A simple collection of pieces, each offering a brief glimpse
A trainee therapist reflects on a supervision conversation about what truly counts as therapeutic success, exploring the difference between ideological victory and genuine psychological development, and arguing that humanistic values remain central to any…
Part 2 explores how unfinished inner relationships enter the therapy room through transference and countertransference, why boundaries matter, and how the frame and containment support working-through so repetition can loosen into choice and integration.
Part IV explores what happens when insight is followed by backlash: the moment a pattern is named and then seems to tighten, test the relationship, or reassert itself with new force. As a trainee, I’m learning to treat this flare-up not as failure but as…
This article explores how hidden psychological processes shape thought, emotion, and behaviour. Drawing on Freudian and Jungian perspectives, this section looks at symbols, dreams, archetypes, and unconscious patterns as they appear in lived experience and…
This article is a reflective exploration of why certain people continue to occupy our inner world long after a relationship has ended. Drawing on psychodynamic and attachment-based thinking, it looks at how relationships are internalised, how unfinished…
A third reflection from a trainee psychotherapist on working with the collective unconscious in real time. This piece explores what happens when archetypal patterns are finally recognised in the room, how they “push back” through resistance and repetition,…
A reflective review of Carl Rogers’ On Becoming a Person from a trainee psychotherapist, with practice-based vignettes and a grounded comparison of Freud and Jung on change, repetition, and the unconscious.
One of the strangest discoveries in my training so far has been this: sometimes it feels less like people “have” patterns, and more like patterns have people. Clients sit down and tell me stories that are utterly their own particular families, specific jobs,…
New Year always feels a bit like standing in a forest clearing at dawn. The old year is still clinging to the trees, the new one hasn’t quite arrived, and you’re somewhere in the middle holding a takeaway coffee and wondering how you’ve survived another…
A reflective piece from a trainee psychotherapist on how archetypes and the collective unconscious quietly shape clinical work. Moving between theory and practice, it explores repetition, transference and countertransference, and the role of supervision in…
This page gathers some reflections from my final supervision session of the year as a trainee psychotherapist. It traces a year of learning with clients, the steady presence of a ninety-four-year-old Jungian supervisor, and the realities of holding a busy…
When I began psychotherapy training, I thought I’d mostly be learning technique: how to reflect, how to pace, how to hold silence, how to work with anxiety without rushing in to rescue it. I did learn all of that. But something else happened over time. I…
“I walked into an already-sinking ship with a torch. They didn’t like the light, but the leaks were there long before me.” There are workplaces you join, and there are workplaces you are thrown into places where the story was already in motion long before you…
As a trainee therapist, you’re often told to “be a mirror.” What that really means is that, wherever you can, you allow yourself to become the surface onto which people project their unmet emotional. One of the most demanding aspects of this is transference,…
In Jungian psychology, archetypes can quietly imprison the soul by scripting the same roles and endings across generations, so that what one ancestor could not resolve becomes the unconscious task of the next. The Hero, the Martyr, the Abandoned Child, the…
Self-actualisation is the process of becoming the fullest, most authentic version of yourself. It’s about realising your potential not just in terms of career or achievements, but in how deeply and honestly you live your life. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,…
Archetypes, romance & the roles we don’t know we’re playingThere are times in life when we feel less like authors of our story and more like actors dropped into a script that was written long before we were born. A forbidden attraction, a love triangle at…