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
Learning disabilities don’t disappear when you leave school. For many adults, they were never diagnosed at all — the word “stupid” or “lazy” filled the gap instead. If you have always found reading, writing, spelling, or maths inexplicably harder than it seems to be for others, this learning disability quiz for adults is a starting … Read more
Most of us come to therapy carrying the past. We want to explain how we got here — the childhood, the relationships, the things that went wrong. Person-centred therapy, at its heart, doesn’t dismiss any of that. But it does something unusual: it asks us to feel our experience now, in the room, in the … Read more
You’ve read the articles. You know what anxious attachment is. You know what avoidant attachment is. You’ve nodded along to descriptions of the “anxious-avoidant trap”—how one partner pursues while the other withdraws, how this triggers more pursuing and more withdrawing, how it’s all very understandable from both sides. And then you’ve looked up from your … Read more
Nobody prepares you for what happens to your relationship when a parent gets sick. The logistics alone — hospital visits, medication schedules, emergency calls at dinner — are crushing. But the harder part is the emotional asymmetry: one partner is drowning in grief and duty, and the other feels shut out, resentful, and guilty about … Read more
When I searched for advice on dating after being widowed young, everything I found was aimed at people in their 50s and 60s. The guidance assumed you’d been married for decades, that your friends understood loss, that you’d already done the work of being partnered as an adult. But dating after being widowed young — … Read more
When I was going through my own relationship struggles a few years ago, a therapist told me to “fight fair.” I nodded like I understood, left the session, had another argument with my partner, and afterwards thought: well, that was useless. Because here’s what she didn’t give me — the actual words. The specific opening … Read more
When I was working through my own anxiety a few years ago, I noticed something interesting in my relationships: every argument seemed to follow the same pattern. My partner would bring up something bothering them, I’d go quiet and withdrawn, and they’d get more frustrated. Round and round we’d go. It wasn’t until I learned … Read more