I found myself doing something I rarely do this morning. Arguing with strangers on the internet. Strangers who were other therapists. The topic was whether therapy should be “politicised”. And what struck me wasn’t just the disagreement, but how often this comes up. I’ve heard it in training, in professional spaces, and now again online. It tends to split into two camps. On one side, therapists who believe therapy should be a politics-free space. A meeting between two people,

During my counselling training, one of my tutors shared an analogy that has stayed with me ever since. She compared therapy to a snow globe. She said that in a session it can feel like the globe is being shaken. We might revisit experiences from the past to understand how they continue to affect things now. When those experiences have been sitting quietly in the background for years, bringing them into focus can stir things up. But the important part of the analogy wasn’t the

Anxiety is one of the most common reasons people come to therapy, and it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on, both in my work as a therapist and in my own life. People often talk about anxiety as something to fix, manage, or get rid of, but my experience has taught me it’s usually more complicated than that. Over time, I’ve learned a few things about anxiety that have shaped how I understand it, and how I work with it in therapy. 1. Anxiety exists for a reason