One of the questions people often ask is ‘how can talking about myself make any difference?’ It is, on the face of it, a reasonable question. Someone suffering from anxiety, or depression, or repeated negative behaviour, or an inability to engage sexually, or suffering from abuse, will naturally wonder how such an ordinary human thing…
A famous Hollywood actor once said that after a life of womanizing he was now lonely and expected to end his days alone. On the face of it, it was a sad epitaph to an otherwise full and successful life. Yet the same man was often the ideal that many ordinary men I have worked…
So much of what we hear going on in the world is bad news. Wars, terrorism, random shootings, organised crime, ubiquitous violence… We tend to try and understand these happenings in different ways, depending on the type of crime or violence involved. Wars are caused by ideological or territorial disputes between nations or within nations….
The experience of sexual or physical trauma is bad enough but its aftermath has an even crueller dimension. Trauma doesn’t happen once, it repeats, it comes back. Its major psychological after-effect is that it forces us, often against our will, to remember it, to rethink it, replay it, over and over again. Sometimes it even…