We have an inbuilt cognitive and behavioural resistance to the new; we work to try to make our ‘now’ just another version of our ‘then,’ so that nothing new needs to be decided, no extra effort needs to be made, no discomfort felt. But a tendency to get stuck in old ways, even in the face of new demands, can become a source of our trembling and bre

The ability, or lack of it, to live with uncertainty shows up in psychology as the individual characteristic intolerance of uncertainty (IU). The person with more IU responds to situations of uncertainty with more negative emotions and rumination. It is a trans-diagnostic trait, i.e., it seems to be an important factor across various emotional diso

There are some worlds where it is really hard to feel good about yourself, or to think well of yourself. There are some where it's hard to think at all. Our worlds are full of impediments. It is not just that our desires are thwarted by circumstance, although that's part of it, but equally our desires are by circumstance, our wants are shaped by wh

There are three basic systems at work, two enabling us to be ON, one enabling us to switch OFF. Both of the ON systems manage and direct our energies and attention towards or away from things in our world in anxiety, fear, reward or pleasure.

Our best defence against the turbulence of life is not self-transformation but self-knowledge and self-acceptance.

…what the sociologist Michael Bury calls ‘biographical disruption.’ His work highlights how the experience of illness or breakdown ruptures the fabric of normal life and forces us to rethink our relationships to our bodies, our lifeworld, our mortality, our values and our identity.

The unsafe person is in a state of situationally induced paranoia; they are put in a position of terrible alertness', as Sedgwick observes in her essay on paranoia. … The threatened individual can only ensure their safety by feeling unsafe, by maintaining a constant state of anticipatory vigilance. This is the emotional logic of the threatened self

…we are composed from what is not us. We are a bricolage of what is to hand in the place and time of our formation. Psychological origin stories tend to focus on the influence of one or two main characters, usually the parents, often ignoring other players and the setting entirely, but these are key variables that need to be accounted for in the st

The more we identify with a limited and fixed version of our self, the more vulnerable this self is to hurt and harm, to the effects of change, accident and turbulence. If it has no flexibility, it is fragile.