Writing on Relationships, Attachment & Growth
Reflections on relationships, growth, and the courage to know yourself — written for anyone who takes their inner life seriously.
New reflections published regularly
The man who kept going
He has been good at this for a long time. At school, effort was noticed and rewarded. At university, the rewards grew. Somewhere along the way, achieving stopped being something he did and became how he knew he was all right. Academia suits this pattern almost perfectly. It is one of the few places where…
Healing Attachment Wounds: Why Do I Have to Go Through All This Suffering?
Why do I have to go through all this suffering? And perhaps an even harder question follows it: if the crisis is over, why am I still not okay? In an earlier blog, When Crises Initiate, I wrote about crisis as the point at which the ways we have understood ourselves and navigated our lives…
When the Plan That Worked Stops Working
Many of the people who come to me have spent decades doing exactly what was asked of them. They studied hard, chose a field with good prospects, and worked well. For a long time the arrangement held. There was a path, it looked secure, and there was little reason to ask how it felt to…
When the World Begins with a Question We Can't Answer
There is a kind of not-knowing that children live inside more easily than adults do. Where does the world come from? What happens after we die? Why does the old have to end before something new can begin? These are not questions we ever fully answer — not as scientists, not as philosophers, not as…
Teaching Children to Connect with Their Animal Guides
I would approach animal guides quite differently with a child than I would with an adult. And perhaps this difference is actually the most interesting part. When we introduce children to the idea of animal guides, it can be tempting to explain what the different animals represent, how to find them, or what their particular…
When Crises Initiate
I don't know exactly when it happened. The part that surprises people most when I talk about it is the fact that I can't point to a single moment and say: there. That's when something changed. We're trained to expect transformation to arrive like a scene in a film: a diagnosis, a collapse, a turning…