Psychotherapist London
Thinking & Writing
On psychotherapy, the inner life, and the work of change.
The Hole Where the Story Should Be: Trauma, EMDR and the Gentler Door
Beneath most of what I treat, there is a trauma. I have written about the executive who drinks, the successful man who cannot stop the cocaine, the woman who …
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Cocaine and the Illusion of Power
Cocaine is, more than any other drug, the drug of the successful. It belongs to people who are already doing well and want to feel powerful, sharp, unstoppable, …
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Ozempic and Eating Disorders: Why the Weight-Loss Drugs Miss What's Really Wrong
Ozempic can make a body smaller. What it cannot do is answer the question the eating was asking. More and more of the people who contact me now mention Ozempic, …
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The Desert of Isolation and the Garden of Solitude
People ask whether high-functioning depression really exists. In my consulting room it does, but not quite in the way the phrase suggests. The people I see are …
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The Thirst for Oneness
Even people with no religion tend to place the root of the spiritual in one very ordinary scene: a baby looking up at its mother. The infant gazes at her as at …
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The Underworld and the Temenos
In every mythology there is an underworld. It is described in much the same way wherever you find it: dark, grey, cold, uncomfortable, a place of pain. I have …
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Body Number 2: What a Male Eating Disorder Really Is
Many men who develop an eating disorder were, as boys, a little heavy - a child carrying a bit too much weight. What the disorder then does, in one form or …
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Masculinity Across a Life: One Energy, from Boy to Wise Old Man
A great deal of what I see in my consulting room - the addictions, the eating disorders, the aggression, the aimlessness, the midlife unravelling - makes more …
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Rehab, Honestly: When It Helps, and How to Choose One
Rehab is an important place. For some people it is the thing that saves their life, and I want to say that plainly before I say anything else - because most of …
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