Month: June 2026

I don’t have children. I’ve never changed a nappy, negotiated screen time, or sat through a parents’ evening. So when I first picked up Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gabor Maté and Gordon Neufeld, I approached it with the kind of curiosity you reserve for books … Read more

I first heard about Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry approach during a particularly difficult year. A friend kept mentioning it in conversations about therapy, about why she kept repeating the same patterns, about why her therapist kept asking questions instead of giving advice. I was curious—and, if I’m honest, a little skeptical. Could a method that … Read more

I finished The Myth of Normal on a Tuesday evening, sitting on my kitchen floor with a cold cup of tea. Not because I was devastated — though parts of it were hard to read — but because I needed to sit with what Gabor Maté had just articulated so clearly: the exhaustion I’ve felt … Read more

I was sitting in a coffee shop when my sister mentioned her ex-partner’s latest stint in rehab. We’d known him for years — bright, funny, capable of real kindness. And completely consumed by alcohol. I remember feeling the familiar frustration rising: Why can’t he just stop? What’s wrong with him? My pick: Stops blaming addiction … Read more

I found Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté on a Tuesday afternoon, pulled from a library shelf by nothing more than curiosity and a vague sense of recognition. I don’t have a formal ADHD diagnosis. But as I read the first chapter, something shifted. Maté wasn’t describing a disorder or a character flaw—he was describing me. … Read more

I was thirty-two when my sister was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition that would reshape her life. She’d spent the previous decade as a nurse—working double shifts, saying yes to every request, managing everyone else’s crises while her own went unspoken. When the diagnosis came, it felt like a thunderbolt from nowhere. But when I … Read more

A few years ago, I came across Bronnie Ware’s “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” while researching anxiety for my own mental health blog. I read it in one sitting. What struck me wasn’t the regrets themselves—it was how universal they felt. These weren’t exotic philosophical musings. They were things I recognised in myself, … Read more

I was 26 when I first read Gabor Maté, and I wept. My pick: See yourself in your patterns instead of just hearing the diagnosis — The Myth of Normal on Amazon → Not because what he wrote was new—I’d lived it—but because someone had finally named it without making me feel broken for it. … Read more