How We Break

a key aspect of what is entailed by being different from the majority: you become accountable, you have to explain yourself.

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.

…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

…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.

As uncertainty and precarity become the new normal, so governmental regimes have shifted their focus from how to secure us to how to make us resilient. Security, and the longing for it, have become a kind of pathology. We are no longer to expect or seek certainty but rather to embrace and accept challenge and danger, a state of perpetual emergency…

We are a deeply enmeshed republic of physiological, emotional and symbolic systems whose interactions can be thrown into disorder with frightening ease. Our story about our struggles and our suffering needs to try to capture this complexity, and how it will show up differently in every case.

The work of wellbeing is not to change the play but to be the theatre… hold your self-stories lightly and be lightly held by them.

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

Anxiety and depression are not abnormal. They are not pathologies or aberrations. They are just one end of a spectrum of normal experience playing out on the same mechanisms that allow us to survive.