Author: Stephen

Stephen is a Psychotherapist, Yoga Instructor and Artist, and practices using Existential Analysis and Integrative Psychotherapy employing a variety of creative methods designed to help people overcome their internal and external obstacles towards a free-er, more fulfilling way of living. He views mental disturbance and distress, not as illness, personal defect or failing, but as features of the spectrum of human nature responding to the world's influences. He offers individual, couples, family and group therapy, face-to-face and by Skype, with supplementary Email and Telephone support. Work can incorporate yoga and meditation, art media, writing, monodrama, body awareness development as methods of exploring experiences and personal meaning in engaging and non-threatening ways that respect the patient's worldview.

Protected: Emotions Part 6: self-care

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Protected: Boundaries Part 3: practice

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Protected: Existential Affirmation Part 6: Grounding Practice

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Protected: Existential Affirmation Part 4: beings and objects

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Protected: Existential Affirmation Part 3: labels

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Existential Affirmation Part 5: Self and Other as Objects

Cameos, written in irony, illustrating how human beings routinely and habitually relate to Self and Other as objects.

Protected: Existential Affirmation Part 1: a primer for being

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Protected: Existential Affirmation Part 2: Self-Esteem

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Protected: Emotions Part 8: Aggression Work

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Protected: Emotions Part 7: Anger, Aggression and Passive-Aggression

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Protected: Emotions Part 3: suffering, craving, and aversion to feelings

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Protected: Emotions Part 5: practice

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Protected: Emotions Part 2: Splitting

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Protected: Emotions Part 4: understanding and expressing their purpose

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Protected: Emotions Part 1: they mean us no harm

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 15: our power to refuse abuse everywhere

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Protected: Mindset Part 9: Reason for Being

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Protected: Experiential Work: integrating the psyche

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 14: resolving inner conflict and toxic introjects

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 13: recovering from narcissistic exploitation

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 10: Suffer the Little Children

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 8: Shame

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 7: reactive abuse and kicking the dog

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 6: Seeking Justice

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 5: refusing the role of victim

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 4: How Darkness Travels

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 12: narcissism’s heart of darkness

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 1: oppression and the hidden origins of suffering

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 11: the trauma of betrayal

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 9: the toxic victim

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 2: facing darkness

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle Part 2: Destructive Envy and the Hungry Family

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Protected: Mindset Part 3: clarity, purpose, direction

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Protected: The Abuse Cycle in Context 1: Authority, Common Sense and Freedom

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Protected: Boundaries Part 6: Relationship Imbalances and the Co-dependency See-Saw

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Protected: Mindset Part 7: transforming insecurity, anger and vulnerability

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Protected: Mindset Part 4: from fear to courage

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Protected: Boundaries Part 7: playing nice

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Protected: Child Work Part 1: Home is Where the Heart Is

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Protected: Child Work Part 2: The Missing Piece and re-integration of the psyche

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Protected: The Outsider Part 5: ‘the Crowd Conscience’ and the Individual

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Protected: Mindset Part 5: Stability, Power, Response

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Protected: Psychotherapy Part 8: The Talking Trap

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Abuse and Crisis Helplines

Psychotherapy can be an effective means of addressing the aftermath of abuse and all forms of interpersonal mistreatment and can help us develop the life skills necessary for protecting ourselves and meeting our needs in all kinds of relationships. However, it isn’t intended to be used for crisis intervention. The following is a list of…

Protected: Personal Authenticity Part 10: faith and self-belief

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Protected: Existential Affirmation Part 8: Anxiety, Nothingness and the Existential Survival Kit

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Protected: Existential Affirmation Part 7: Anxiety, Nothingness and Surviving the First Lie

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Protected: Personal Authenticity Part 9: your fork in the road

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Protected: Being-in-the-world Part 7: psyche, body, and world

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Mindset Part 10: Self-healing and Loving Kindness

Entitlement and Lack of Generosity I looked that the entitlement mindset in an earlier article, which examined how this mindset is a symptom of unmet infantile needs that carry the expectation that other adults owe us something. Freud referred to the Anal stage of child development in his early theories whereby interruption of the stage…

This Cold Hollow: children born to parents who don’t want them

How did I know that you had left me before I knew the words for empty, lost, bereft? Before my birth scar? Before I witnessed the guillotine of your contempt? Before I could control my bowel, or tie my shoe, or awakened trembling in the night. Before you scoffed at me as I learned to…

Using The Resources Section

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” ~Aristotle This resource section contains a collection of articles designed primarily as password-protected psycho-educational material for use exclusively by my patients who currently attend sessions weekly. It also contains some open-access pages, some of which may help people who are looking into personal development or psychotherapy work…

Protected: Psychotherapy Part 9: going beneath the surface

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Protected: Boundaries Part 5: equal investment

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Psychotherapy Support During the COVID-19 ‘Lockdown’

The government response to the Corona Virus (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in severe restrictions on the citizen’s rights to freely move and travel. In the UK we have been told by government not to leave our homes unless absolutely necessary, leaving millions of people disconnected from friends, family, employment, and support services they would normally…

Protected: Mindset Part 12: Present Awareness

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Protected: Mindset Part 6: the Lighthouse Plan

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Protected: Boundaries Part 2: information sheets

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Protected: Mindset Part 2: Entitlement, Empowerment and Cooperation

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Protected: Being-in-the-world Part 3: love and loss

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Protected: Being-in-the-world Part 5: The Traumatised Psyche

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Protected: Mindset Part 11: Worry is the Beginning, Not the End

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Being-in-the-world Part 2: the world affects us

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.” ―…

Protected: Being-in-the-world Part 1: The Vulnerable Self

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Protected: Boundaries Part 4: Relationship Skills

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Protected: Personal Authenticity Part 6: Responsibility

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Protected: Being-in-the-world Part 9: the existential void

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Protected: Personal Authenticity Part 8: when no-one’s looking

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Protected: Depression Part 6: The Narrowing Way

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Mindset Part 1: Ambivalence in Psychotherapy

ambivalence 1. simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (such as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action 2. a. continual fluctuation (as between one thing and its opposite) b.uncertainty as to which approach to follow Merriam-Webster Ambivalence as an Asset Ambivalence – the urge to go in two directions at once; to…

Psychiatric Diagnosis Part 2: help or hinderance?

Some things to consider before being assessed for a psychiatric diagnosis or treatment

Protected: Boundaries Part 1: your values and rules of engagement

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Protected: Personal Authenticity Part 7: living an authentic lifestyle

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Protected: Personal Authenticity Part 5: genuine relationship

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Protected: Personal Authenticity Part 4: being and becoming

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Protected: Being-in-the-world Part 4: When Past is Present

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A Poverty of Help: inadequacies of support to vulnerable persons in the UK healthcare system

This is the start of a collection of experiences of government-funded mental health service and medical service encounters conveyed to me by patients over the years. I will add more in time. Because of their prevalence, I thought I would start putting some of them together as an illustration of some of the bad practices…

Psychiatric Diagnosis Part 1: a guide and caution for the weary

This post seeks to give an overview of how upsetting or distressing human experiences can be viewed and categorised as illness, disease, defect, disorder or dysfunction requiring the special expertise of specific treatments, therapies, interventions and pharmaceuticals for effective ‘cure’. It is not my intention to devalue the choices exercised by patients who elect this…

Protected: Being-in-the-world Part 6: Existential Crisis

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Protected: The Outsider Part 4: the scapegoat, and surviving the dysfunctional group

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Mindset Part 13: Mental Distress and Suicide

Statistically, suicide is the highest cause of death in men between age 20 and 49. The suicide statistics are shocking, with greater numbers of men taking their own lives than are killed in road accidents, or by cancer and coronary heart disease. Of the 6 233 suicides in the UK in 2013 (male and female),…

Protected: The Outsider Part 3: whistleblowers, and surviving the inauthentic culture

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Protected: Depression Part 5: Listening to Elvis

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Dissociative Identity Disorder

Still Like A House Fractured? No, curiously I feel fractured but I see myself in the mirror and I’m whole, standing still like a house. The mirror may be fractured, but my eyes still swivel like windows in this head, guided by a nose that acts as a weather vane. I open and close my…

Protected: Spirituality II: Developing an Existential Practice

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Ways of passing the time

Indifference Here I am and there you are. And there’s the clock on the wall. I pretend I don’t want anything from you. You pretend you don’t want anything from me. Our pretending binds us like a form of artificial intimacy. And keeps us hungry, a million miles apart. Conversation I pretend I’m listening to…

Recovering your self in 7 days

Hollowday There’s a hollow in me; an absence. Like a piece of furniture missing from a room I haven’t been in for years. I enter knowing something’s changed and I can’t say what. There’s just the feeling. Hollow. Dumbday I feel dirty on the inside. I scrub the outside; wet hair, towel and soap, and…

Protected: Spirituality I: An Existential Perspective

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PTSD, cPTSD, and Dissociative Experiences

I wanted to write something about the relationship some of us have to traumatic experiences from our past. It seems important that I write this from an intuitive, non-technical place. For me, this is because intution – as opposed to fear – is what we need to develop regarding our power to manage our way…

Protected: Depression Part 4: downhill or uphill?

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Protected: Depression Part 3: ‘bad’ feelings, alcohol and substance misuse

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Protected: Depression Part 2: a well-worn path

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Depression Part 1: Causes, anti-depressants, and two simple steps on your road to recovery

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one…

Protected: The Outsider Part 2: living off-label

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CBT: a low-cost ‘cure’ for psychiatric ‘Illness’?

“The fact remains that the construct of psychiatric diagnosis and the construct of a psychological model aligning itself to it are both divorced from the actual, more complex and individuated realities of the particular patient and the individual practitioner. The technocratic relationship of the first denies the non-mechanistic, much more complex organic nature of the…

Protected: Personal Authenticity Part 3: the healing power of truth

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