Retirement, identity and the self beneath the role Retirement is supposed to feel like arrival. You have worked toward it, planned for it, perhaps counted down to it. And then it happens, and something unexpected follows. Not relief, or not only relief. A quieter, more unsettling question begins to form. If you are no longer the job, the role, perhaps…
Retirement changes your relationship with time, with identity, with purpose. What is less often talked about is how comprehensively it changes your relationships with other people. The structures that held your social world in place for decades, the rhythm of work, the colleagues you saw daily, the clarity of roles at home built around competing schedules, quietly dissolve. What remains…
Most people who seek therapy are not struggling to identify what they have done wrong. They are struggling with a more corrosive and harder to locate feeling: that they themselves are wrong. Not their actions, not a specific mistake, but something about who they are at a more fundamental level. That distinction, between what you have done and what you…
Most people who seek therapy are not struggling to identify what they have done wrong. They are struggling with a more corrosive and harder to locate feeling: that they themselves are wrong. Not their actions, not a specific mistake, but something about who they are at a more fundamental level. That distinction, between what you have done and what you…
Most people who have never been to therapy carry some version of the same image. You lie on a couch, or sit in a chair, and talk about your childhood while someone nods and occasionally asks how that made you feel. It is not an image that inspires confidence, and it is not an accurate one either. Understanding what actually…
When people think about what makes therapy effective, they often think first about techniques. The specific tools a therapist uses, the framework they work within, the exercises or approaches they bring to a session. It is a reasonable starting point. But decades of psychotherapy research have arrived at a more nuanced and, in some ways, more interesting answer. What most…
Many people are drawn to the idea of writing about difficult experiences long before they feel ready to actually do it. They sense, often correctly, that there is something in the writing that might help. That putting words to something painful could shift it, even slightly. That the act of finding language for what has felt unspeakable might make it…
Most people who have never been to therapy carry some version of the same image. You lie on a couch, or sit in a chair, and talk about your childhood while someone nods and occasionally asks how that made you feel. It is not an image that inspires confidence, and it is not an accurate one either. Understanding what actually…
There is a particular kind of disorientation that many women describe in perimenopause, and it does not always make it onto the standard list of symptoms alongside hot flashes and disrupted sleep. It is more subtle and more unsettling than that. A sense of not quite recognising yourself. Of feeling present in your life but somehow not fully in it.…
You built the career, showed up for everyone, managed the workload alongside the children, the ageing parents, the school runs and the performance reviews, and somehow made it look manageable. You were the one people called when things needed sorting, and you sorted them. That was not luck. That was decades of determination, sacrifice, and an almost ferocious commitment to…