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

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

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.

Neuroticism is a personality trait, a particular way of approaching and responding to the world. Those of us who are more neurotic approach the world with caution; we look for and expect danger and difficulty. We are always on guard. When we do meet danger and difficulty, we tend to react more strongly to it; we experience more distress, more

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.

Jacques Derrida once observed that some of the major events in his life were meetings with books.

…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

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