If you’re a parent trying to reach a struggling teenager, that blank stare is probably familiar. Have you ever wondered about the meaning of it, that look you get when you ask, over spaghetti bolognese on a Tuesday evening, what they did at school today? You’re hoping to hear about an inspiring lesson, a breakthrough moment, something that tells you they’re okay. But what comes back is nothing. Just the stare.
Here’s what’s behind it.
Their day has been consumed not by physics or history but by the social minefield of being young. Who said what to whom. What that message actually meant. Whether that look was hostile or just distracted. Whether they fit in or didn’t, and what to do about it either way. By the time they walk through your door, they’re not withholding from you. They’re exhausted. And now you’re asking them to explain something they don’t have words for, to someone they suspect might try to fix it, or panic, or both.
That’s not a criticism. It comes from love. But it lands as pressure.
The world a young person navigates is genuinely relentless. They’re trying to work out who to be with this friend and who to be with that teacher and who to be at home, and none of those versions quite match. The image that opens this article carries a phrase that I hear underneath a lot of what young people bring into a room with me:
I don’t know who to be or what to do.
That’s just what it feels like to be young and trying to make sense of a complicated world without quite enough self to do it yet.
When helping makes it worse
When we see a young person struggling, the instinct is to do something. Sort it out. Speak to the school. Have a word with the other parent. Make it stop.
I worked with a boy who was being bullied because other kids had decided he was gay. He hadn’t told his parents. When I asked him why, he said he knew what would happen: his mum would go into school, and then everyone would know, and it would be worse. He was right to be cautious. His mum did find out, and she did go in, and within days there had been a school assembly on homophobia. She’d acted from love and genuine concern. But what she’d inadvertently done was force her son to come out, publicly, before he was ready.
That’s not a story about bad parenting. It’s a story about what happens when the urge to fix overtakes the capacity to stay. The boy didn’t need the problem solved. He needed someone to sit with him in it first.
Connection happens in the body, not just the mind
We tend to think of connection as something that happens between minds. Words exchanged. Thoughts understood. But that’s only part of it, and probably not the most important part.
When two people are genuinely present with each other, something happens at a physical level. Breathing. Heart rate. The whole nervous system begins to settle, or doesn’t, depending on the quality of the contact. A young person who is flooded with stress or shut down with exhaustion can’t think clearly, can’t find words, can’t make sense of their own experience. What they need first isn’t a conversation. It’s a body to be near that isn’t also alarmed.
Think of a parent and child doing something together without any agenda. Building something. Kicking a ball about. Cooking. Fishing. Not talking much, just doing. That shared activity does something that conversation often can’t: it creates a kind of contact that doesn’t require explanation or performance. The young person doesn’t have to produce anything. They just have to be there. And in being there, something settles.
The parent has provided a connection without strings, without pressure.
What you can offer that no strategy can
Connection needs the right conditions. It can’t be rushed, demanded, or scheduled into a twenty-minute slot between homework and bedtime.
If mealtimes are where you want to reach your child, the quality of that time matters more than what’s said in it. No phones, not because it’s a rule, but because anything that breaks the contact breaks the possibility of connection. A slowed-down, unhurried atmosphere. Taking it seriously without making it serious. You’re not trying to extract information. You’re just being together.
And here’s what the research on this suggests: a young person who experiences that kind of safe, unpressured presence with a parent carries it with them. It becomes part of how they understand what relationships can feel like. It gives them something to return to.
If they mention something they saw on the way home, or something a friend said that confused them, let that be enough. You don’t need to solve it. You just need to receive it.
There is no getting it right
If you’re reading this and thinking you’ve been getting it wrong, I want to say something directly: there is no right or wrong in parenting. There’s only the question of whether you can be present with your child.
As they get older, that becomes harder. They’ll push you away. Your presence will irritate them. They’ll seem to want nothing to do with you. But the truth is that knowing you’re there, without pressure, without control, without judgement, gives them something they can’t get anywhere else. It gives them somewhere to come back to.
What young people are doing, all through adolescence, is moving back and forth between you and the world. They step away, make mistakes, figure things out, and step back. What makes that possible is knowing that you as the fallback exists. That you’re still there when they return.
You don’t need to put them on the right path. You don’t need to fix what’s going wrong. You just need to be there, steadily, as they work out who they are.
That image of the boy, not knowing who to be or what to do, isn’t a permanent state. It’s a question the young person is living. Your steady presence is part of how they find the answer.
What boys are actually given, and what men are left holding
After several sessions with a man I’ve been working with, I found myself thinking it’s like talking with a seven-year-old boy who just wants to do his best but doesn’t know how he’s supposed to be or what he’s supposed to do. He didn’t fail. He was never taught.
That thought has stayed with me. Because it’s not just him. I see that boy in almost every man I work with.
They come in presenting as failures. Failing in their relationships, with their children, in their work. And what I actually see is something quite different. I see men who are trying their best with the equipment they were given. Men who are lost not because they’re broken, but because the map they were handed was unreadable.
The handbook no one mentions
Every boy receives a handbook on how to be a man. Nobody passes it over formally. It arrives through a thousand small moments, in what gets praised and what gets shamed, in who cries and who doesn’t, what fathers do with their anger, what they do with their tenderness.
The trouble is that the handbook is garbled. Pages are missing. Others are coffee-stained and half-legible. Some are in the wrong order entirely.
I once heard a man in a group describe his father with genuine love. The fishing trips. The football matches. The sense of being chosen, being included, being seen. And then, in the same breath, the unpredictable rage. The physical violence that arrived without warning.
He couldn’t reject that father. There was too much love in him for that. But he couldn’t follow him either, because the model didn’t hold together. So, he was left, as so many men are left, holding a document that couldn’t be read straight through, trying to assemble something coherent from contradictory instructions.
That’s not absence of love. It’s the presence of love alongside something that makes the love impossible to build on.
What the handbook actually says
The pages that are legible tend to say the same things. Don’t show weakness. Produce. Perform. Be useful. There’s a consistency to that message across most of the male role models boys encounter, whatever else might vary.
The cruel twist is that most of the role models boys actually witness are men failing to meet that standard. Because the standard is unachievable. So what boys learn, in practice, is not how to be the thing the handbook describes. They learn what it looks like when men fall short of it. They learn the shame that follows.
The missing pages, or those obscured by coffee stains, are the ones about vulnerability, emotional expression and tenderness. The instructions on how to be warm without it being reframed as weakness or something worse. They’re difficult to find, written in the margins.
When the instinct itself gets pathologised
It isn’t only that boys aren’t taught how to handle warmth and closeness. It’s that the instinct itself gets taught out of them.
I remember being a boy, perhaps seven or eight, with female cousins I adored, a decade or so older than me, who lived next door. I loved being around them. I was physically affectionate, naturally so, because that’s how I was with people I felt close to.
One day I overheard a conversation between one of my cousins and my mother. The way I was with my hands was being discussed. Not with cruelty, exactly, but with a kind of discomfort, a suggestion that it was too much, that it crossed a line into something that needed reining in. The implication was faintly sexual, though I had no framework for that at the time. I just felt the shame of it.
What I’d lost wasn’t knowledge I’d never had. It was trust in something I’d already known how to do. That feeling, of not knowing how to be around women whose company I enjoyed, of second-guessing warmth, of keeping my hands to myself in ways that felt like self-betrayal, followed me for years. It took a long time in therapy to find my way back to it.
That’s what the garbling does. It doesn’t just leave gaps. It plants doubt in the places where you were most naturally yourself.
The boy is still in the room
The men I work with are carrying that boy with them. The one who wanted to do his best and couldn’t work out how. The one who felt the love and couldn’t make sense of it alongside everything else. The one whose natural expressiveness got redirected or shamed before he had the language to defend it.
By the time they reach a therapy room, these men often experience themselves as failures. In their relationships, with their children, at work. What I see instead is someone still trying to follow instructions that were never coherent to begin with, still measuring themselves against a standard that was always going to be out of reach.
The shame sits right at the centre of it. Not the shame of having done something specific, but the ambient shame of not knowing how to be. Of sensing, somewhere deep down, that everyone else received a readable copy and yours was the damaged one.
On crisis lines and culture change
There’s a lot of conversation at the moment about men’s mental health, about male suicide rates, about what the NHS should be doing. The funding question is real. But even fully funded crisis intervention addresses the problem at the wrong end.
What produces a man in crisis at forty is usually something that began at seven. An education system that pointed boys towards compliance, performance, and emotional suppression rather than curiosity, creativity, and genuine self-expression didn’t help. A culture that handed boys an unachievable model of manhood and then expressed disappointment when they couldn’t meet it did real damage.
What might actually help is something much slower and less measurable: men who’ve done their own work being honest about it, in front of boys. Not performing vulnerability as a technique, but actually modelling what it looks like when a man doesn’t know something and says so. When he gets it wrong and acknowledges it. When he’s moved by something and doesn’t cover it over.
What the work actually is
When I’m working with a man who’s carrying that seven-year-old, I’m not trying to teach him what the handbook should have said. I’m trying to help him locate what he already knew before the handbook arrived and started doing its damage.
That’s usually still in there. The warmth. The expressiveness. The instinct towards closeness. It got covered over or redirected, but it didn’t disappear.
If you recognise the boy in yourself or the garbled handbook you’ve been trying to follow, that recognition is usually the beginning of something. Not a fix. Not a solution. Just the start of being able to read what’s actually there, rather than what you were told should be.
I read Iron John when it came out in 1990. I was 36, working as a performing storyteller, and it made immediate sense. Robert Bly’s book sold millions and launched what became known as the mythopoetic men’s movement: a widespread cultural moment in which men gathered in groups, retreated into nature, beat drums, and tried to reclaim what modern industrial life had supposedly stripped from them.
Bly reached into Norse and European mythology and said: something has been lost, and it matters. Around the same time, I was going to men’s groups, sitting in sweat lodges borrowed from Native American tradition, doing vision quests, exploring tantric sex. As a young man who had recently become a father, making compromises and sacrifices I hadn’t anticipated, I found something genuinely useful in all of it.
But something was missing, and it took me a while to name it.
Those groups weren’t only men. Women were there too, and we were all seeking the same thing: the inner warrior, the deep fierce purposeful self. At the time that felt inclusive. Looking back, what I notice is that a particular version of masculinity, Western, traditional, warrior-shaped, was being held up as the template for human wholeness. Not just for men. For everyone. And nobody was questioning the template itself.
A Body That Didn’t Fit
I grew up with five brothers, most of them emphatically on the masculine side of things physically. One was covered in hair at sixteen. I was in my thirties when I grew my first chest hair. It took real effort to grow a moustache. Even in my sixties, the beard comes in patchy. So doing those masculine things in my thirties was genuinely affirmative. I’m not dismissing that. But what I was actually doing, though I couldn’t have said it then, was finding a version of masculinity that could include me, not becoming the template.
Because the template never quite fits. And I don’t think it fits most people, if we’re honest.
Recently I watched a woman describe her experience of being intersex. Her body developed testes but couldn’t assimilate testosterone, and so developed externally as female. A coherent biological variation, one of many that occur naturally across the human population. The medical profession, confronted with something that didn’t fit the category, removed the testes without her consent when she was a teenager. The anomaly had to go. The category had to be preserved.
That’s not medicine responding to a problem. That’s a template being enforced on a body that didn’t conform to it.
What’s Already There
I’m a psychotherapist now, working relationally, in what is an almost entirely female profession. I’m not uncomfortable with that. My feminine qualities sit alongside my masculine ones, and always have. I think that’s true for most people. Western culture has pushed those qualities apart, named them opposites, and planted people at one end of the spectrum yearning for what’s at the other end, without recognising that what they’re looking for is already in them. It’s somewhere between the two. It doesn’t need to be created. It needs to be uncovered.
The Handbooks Arrive
Which brings me to a pattern I’ve been noticing on social media: a steady stream of book promotions, one after another, all circling the same territory. The books have titles like Ideal Man: Reviving Masculinity and The Palgrave Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health. They are promoted as landmark, ground-breaking, comprehensive. Some of them do important work: male suicide rates are real, help-seeking barriers are real, the way Western psychotherapy has historically ignored or pathologised male distress is real. These are legitimate concerns and they deserve serious attention.
But the subject of these books, the man whose psychology is being mapped and whose masculinity is being revived, is quietly assumed rather than examined. He is straight, cisgender, and Western.
Gay men, bisexual men, trans men, and men from cultures that have always held gender more fluidly appear occasionally in a subordinate clause about intersectionality, then disappear. The template is back. Just wearing a research methodology.
The WEIRD Problem
This isn’t new. It’s the same move that Western psychology has always made, constructing a baseline from a narrow demographic slice and then universalising it. Researchers have a name for it: the WEIRD problem, shorthand for the tendency to build psychological models almost entirely on Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic populations, and then treat the results as universal human truths.
The male psychology movement hasn’t escaped this. In some ways, it has doubled down on it because its political energy depends on “men” being a coherent, legible category with shared interests and a recoverable identity.
The Binary Was Imposed
The colonial parallel is worth exploring. Many indigenous cultures around the world recognised more than two genders long before European contact. Two-Spirit identities in numerous Native American traditions, Hijra in South Asia, Fa’afafine in Samoa: these are not modern inventions or Western imports. They are ways of holding human variation that existed for centuries.
Colonisation actively suppressed them, through missionary activity, through legal systems that criminalised gender nonconformity, through the imposition of European binary categories onto bodies and communities that had never organised themselves that way. The binary wasn’t discovered. It was enforced.
And now, apparently, it is being revived and sold as a return to health.
It Isn’t Consensus
I’m not trying to make an argument. I’m just noticing the volume of noise, and noticing that it doesn’t match my experience of being human, or the experience of most people I sit with in the therapy room. It’s a loud, well-resourced, self-referential ecosystem that has learned to sound like consensus.
How do you make decisions? Do you make them quickly, just choosing instinctively, without much fuss? Or do you take ages, weighing every option, asking everyone you know, going round and round until the moment has passed? Maybe you avoid decisions altogether and find ways to hand the responsibility to someone else.
There’s a story by Terry Jones, yes, the Monty Python one, in his book of Fairy Tales, called “Katie Make Sure.” Katie is offered the chance to visit Goblin City. She can take the short way, which is quick, or the long way, which is pretty. She can’t make up her mind. She goes back and forth, weighing the options, considering the merits of each. And while she’s standing there deliberating, she loses her chance. Goblin City closes. She doesn’t go at all.
The cost of not deciding, it turns out, isn’t the wrong choice. It’s missing the thing altogether. Katie didn’t choose the short way or the long way. But she did make a choice, by default. If you can’t choose between strawberry and vanilla, you end up choosing no ice cream.
On writer’s block
I’ve been thinking about this because of something that happened to me recently with my own writing. I write articles, usually about therapy and the things I notice in my work. For a while, I was writing one a week, and I enjoyed it. The articles were personal, sometimes messy, but they felt like mine. Then AI came along, and I started using it to help. At first, it was useful, generating headline options, suggesting structures, speeding things up without changing the voice much. But gradually it started to get out of hand.
The problem wasn’t that AI was writing badly. The problem was that it kept offering me choices. I’d get to the closing paragraph of an article and ask for some help, and it would give me seven or eight different approaches. Which one did I choose? I didn’t know. So I’d leave it and come back to it. And then I’d ask again, and get more options. Eventually, I realised I hadn’t finished an article in two months. I had three or four sitting there, almost done, waiting for the final flourish. I had given my power away, not to a person but to a process, and the process had no interest in helping me land anywhere. It just kept generating possibilities.
If you search online for help with decision-making, you’ll find plenty of advice, most of it perfectly sensible: determine the stakes, know your objective, minimise your emotions. It’s the kind of guidance that works well enough for business decisions with clear criteria and measurable outcomes. It doesn’t do much for the person sitting by the signpost, paralysed, wondering which path is quickest, which is prettiest, which is most likely to lead somewhere good.
Unsticking the stuckness
In therapy, I sometimes work with people who are genuinely stuck in this way. For some of them, the roots go deep, into childhood, into families where decisions were made for them, where their developing sense of agency was never encouraged or trusted. They arrive hoping for tips, a system, something they can apply. And I understand the impulse. But a six-step framework rarely touches the thing that’s actually in the way.
What I find more useful, and what seems to help, is a distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding implies a process: reasons, justifications, criteria, a case to be made. When you decide, you owe yourself and others an explanation. Choosing is different. You simply choose. You don’t need a reason. You don’t need to defend it or explain it. Vanilla or strawberry, it doesn’t really matter, just choose. Red pill or blue pill, you can’t know what lies ahead, but you still have to pick one and step forward.
It sounds simple, and it is, but it’s also surprisingly hard. The time and energy that can go into the most straightforward choices are extraordinary, and for some people, genuinely debilitating. The shift from “I need to make the right decision” to “I’m just going to choose” can feel almost too small to matter. But sometimes it’s like taking the red pill: the earth moves, and you find yourself standing in a different dimension of space and time, wondering why you waited so long.
Space and freedom
The point isn’t to arrive at the perfect destination by the optimal route. The point is to keep walking. You can adjust as you go, make another choice, find your way back to the path. What you can’t do, if you want to get anywhere, is stay sitting by the signpost, reading it over and over, hoping it will eventually tell you something it hasn’t already said.
Katie never got to Goblin City. She never went anywhere at all. Maybe that felt safer. But is that the option you choose for your life?
When nothing can be fixed, something may still be held.
Relationships are a shared journey. They often begin with excitement, closeness, and hope, but over time, they also meet moments of struggle and uncertainty. There may come a point when that early sense of promise is questioned, when things feel stuck, or energy begins to fade.
Cracks may appear, and external pressures such as loss, stress, or change may start to strain the relationship. Children may join you, bringing new emotional demands. You may find yourself navigating a terrain you never anticipated or desired.
As intensity builds, difficult questions often arise. Should I try harder? Should I pull away?
Is it possible for all of these tensions to be held within the relationship?
When a couple make the often difficult decision to come to relationship therapy, they may arrive looking for answers. They may hope that the therapist can fix things, that the other person will change, or that they themselves will need to change, even though they have little sense of how that might look.
Often, there is also a feeling of crisis. A sense that something has to shift quickly, that one of them may have to leave, or that something dramatic needs to happen for the relationship to survive.
What I tend to see as the first stage of relationship counselling is something quiet and containing. It is about me getting to know the couple as they are right now, and helping them to hold their relationship safely.
This means slowing things down, not making rash decisions, not jumping too quickly into action, and not remaining trapped in cycles of blame or shame. Instead, it is about holding the relationship steady and taking the time it may need to find some stability, and with that, the possibility of a renewed sense of hope.
We live in a world where many societies and cultures tend to see things in binary terms. Black or white. Male or female. Ill or well. Whole or broken.
Relationships are often understood in the same way. They are either fine or they are broken. If something feels wrong, then the assumption is that it must be fixed, or that the relationship itself must end.
It is worth remembering that not every culture in the world understands human experience in these terms. There are far more fluid, layered, and nuanced ways of thinking about mental health, physical health, and relationship health. Ways that allow for difficulty, contradiction, and change over time, without immediately deciding that something is wrong.
From this perspective, one of the first steps in coming to couples counselling may be to question the idea that the relationship is broken at all. With time, care, and attention, it may be possible to allow things to settle, to be held, and to move towards a different kind of balance, rather than rushing to fix or decide.
Can a relationship become dysregulated?
When my nervous system becomes dysregulated, I tend to go into fix-it mode. I organise things, I problem solve, I look after others and try to protect them from harm. None of these are bad things, but they can move me away from connection.
It may look like connection, but it feels like I am one step away.
When my partner’s nervous system is dysregulated, she tends to withdraw. She seeks ways of regulating herself that give her space and room to breathe. It can feel as if stepping back creates the conditions she needs to settle herself.
With both of these survival patterns in place, can it be that the relationship itself becomes dysregulated, and that we arrive at a point where regulating ourselves begins to threaten the relationship?
Are we incompatible? Are we tearing each other apart? What is the point of staying together?
These questions arise in a state of urgency. I am feeling pain. I am feeling it now, and I want it to stop. These are nervous system responses. They need regulating, not fixing.
How do you regulate a relationship? Can you find a way to stay connected to the relationship and to create some safety? Can you find a way to hold differences and disconnections without trying to resolve them? Can you, together, find a way for the relationship to survive?
I can recognise a state of holding in my own relationship. When we lost our daughter several years ago, we both moved into dysregulated states, yet found a way to hold the relationship safely. What I am recognising now is how much we protect each other. The relationship is in survival mode.
It is a strength that we have been able to hold the relationship in this way. It has kept us safe. And yet I am starting to notice how much of our energy has gone into protection. The relationship feels steady, but muted. I find myself longing for more vitality, more spark, more aliveness between us.
Can a relationship be held too tightly?
A relationship can move into a state of holding, which I would describe as survival or protection holding. This often happens in response to loss, trauma, betrayal, or rupture. In these moments, holding becomes necessary. It is oriented towards safety, steadiness, and not making things worse.
This kind of holding can look like care. It can feel very comfortable. It can involve patience, thoughtfulness, and a mutual effort to protect what remains. And in many ways, it is care.
But survival holding can also feel as though the relationship is being held too tightly. As if something is being braced or contained. What can quietly go missing is a sense of risk, a sense of desire, and a sense of movement. The relationship survives, but it stops inviting either person to step forward.
This is where I find myself wondering what holding space can make possible.
A different kind of holding might be described as holding space for each other, or for the relationship itself. This form of holding is less focused on protection, and more on staying in contact.
In this kind of holding, safety may come not from containing things tightly, but from a growing sense that the relationship can tolerate difference, uncertainty, and movement. There can be room for each partner to step closer or further away, without the relationship immediately feeling at risk.
This does not remove difficulty, and it does not guarantee ease. But for some couples, it can begin to feel as though the relationship has a little more space to breathe. Safety may be experienced less as bracing against loss, and more as a quiet confidence that tension, misattunement, and repair can be survived.
In my own relationship, I really value the time we have spent holding things gently and safely. That period of holding has mattered. It has given us somewhere steady to stand, and something to rest into.
I am also aware that we are beginning to move, almost quietly, into a more differentiated place. Not in a dramatic or decisive way, but through a growing acceptance that we may have different directions we need to explore.
What feels new is not the difference itself, but a sense of being able to allow it, and to be comfortable enough to stay connected while we do.
Understanding feelings beyond Western psychological models
When I first met my in-laws, I encountered what looked like a real-life example of familiar gender stereotypes around emotional expression. My wife had prepared me to meet her mum, a Relate counsellor, and her dad, a retired farmer. She told me she spoke easily with her mum about emotional matters and had very little conversation with her dad. The picture was clear: Mum was emotionally expressive, Dad was quiet and did not show his feelings.
When I actually met them, my experience was different. I felt an immediate connection with my father-in-law. He was practical and economical with words, yet clearly emotionally alive, closely connected to his grandchildren, and engaged in making sculptures and artwork. He did not talk much, but his emotional presence was unmistakable. With my mother-in-law, conversation flowed more readily, but it took me longer to feel the same sense of connection.
In my psychotherapy work, I often find myself returning to this early encounter. When I hear the familiar description of men as emotionally repressed and women as emotionally expressive, it does not sit easily with my clinical experience. I am left wondering whether this is simply an individual bias that therapists sometimes hold, or whether it reflects something more deeply embedded in the foundations of psychotherapy itself.
How psychology emerged
Western psychology developed within nineteenth-century European society, where gendered assumptions about emotional life were already well established. Men were culturally associated with rationality, restraint, and stoicism, while women were linked with emotional expressiveness, vulnerability, and relational sensitivity.
Early psychological theory did not invent these distinctions, but it did formalise them, translating prevailing social understandings into explanatory models of the mind. In doing so, particular ways of organising and expressing emotion became woven into the foundations of psychological thinking. Although social conditions have changed significantly since then, elements of those original assumptions continue to shape how emotional health and maturity are implicitly defined within psychotherapy.
More recently, while attending a psychotherapy training focused on relationships, I was struck by how readily gendered assumptions about emotional expression surfaced in discussion. Several participants spoke of emotionally expressive women and emotionally restricted men as if these were near-universal clinical truths. When I questioned this, some colleagues explained that they were simply describing what they observed in their therapy rooms.
What stayed with me was the contrast between that confidence and my own experience. This is not a pattern I consistently recognise in my practice. That difference left me wondering whether we are sometimes seeing through the lens we have been trained to use.
If particular ideas about emotional expression are repeated within training, supervision, and theory, they can begin to feel self-evident. Over time, what may have started as a cultural assumption risks becoming a clinical expectation, shaping not only how we interpret clients but what we notice in the first place.
Why This Model No Longer Holds
When the early architects of psychological theory were developing their models, they were working within a society organised around very rigid gender roles. Economic and relational dependency structures were tightly defined. Norms around sexuality and identity were restrictive, and expectations about how emotion should be expressed were narrow and highly regulated.
Contemporary Western society looks very different. Women’s roles have expanded far beyond domestic and emotional labour. Many men now participate more actively in family life and express masculinity in a wider range of ways. Emotional expression among men is more visible than in previous generations. Greater recognition of gender diversity and non-binary identities reflects a broader questioning of earlier binary frameworks that did not capture the full range of human experience.
At the same time, public conversation around mental health, vulnerability, and sexuality has opened considerably. These developments signal a shift in how emotional life is lived and understood. The social scaffolding that once supported earlier assumptions about gendered emotional roles is no longer stable.
Culture has changed, and emotional life has shifted with it. The question for psychotherapy is whether its underlying models have evolved at the same pace, or whether aspects of the field still carry assumptions shaped within a very different social landscape.
The global perspective
Victorian European emotional norms were never universal to begin with. From a global perspective, they represented one cultural pattern among many, shaped by particular social, economic, and moral structures. Yet during periods of colonial expansion, European relational and emotional frameworks were carried across the world, where they often came to be treated as standards rather than as culturally specific ways of organising human life.
Many societies organised family and community life differently. Identity was often located more collectively than individually. Emotional regulation could be embedded in roles, rituals, and communal practices rather than centred on verbal self-disclosure. Ways of understanding and expressing emotional life did not always follow the same gender divisions assumed within European models.
Psychotherapy emerged from within this historically and culturally specific context. Over time, elements of that emotional template travelled widely and, in some settings, came to be regarded as psychologically universal rather than culturally situated. Recognising this history does not invalidate Western psychology, but it does remind us that it represents one model among many.
For practitioners today, this invites a broader stance: openness to multiple forms of emotional organisation and expression across cultures, genders, and generations, and a willingness to question whether inherited frameworks fully capture the diversity of human emotional life.
When Therapy Recognises Only One Emotional Language
These questions are not abstract for me. They have been pressed into my work by the clients who come into my room.
I think of an autistic young person I have worked with who finds verbal emotional expression extremely difficult. In ordinary conversation, he appears silent, withdrawn, or unresponsive. In school, this silence is often interpreted as refusal, resistance, or poor behaviour. When he becomes overwhelmed, his distress can look like destructiveness, when in fact it is an attempt to regulate an internal state that has become unmanageable.
Yet when we work with images, picture cards, or stories, his emotional world becomes unmistakably clear. Through metaphor, visual language, and narrative, he communicates fear, attachment, frustration, and longing with precision. His difficulty is not an absence of feeling but a mismatch between his way of organising emotional life and the narrow channels through which emotion is often expected to be expressed.
Work with autistic children and adults has repeatedly required me to widen my understanding of what emotional communication can look like. The same has been true in my work with gender-diverse and queer clients. Here too, inherited models of identity, relationship, and emotional expression often fail to capture lived experience. Assumptions about how men, women, or partners “should” feel or relate do not always fit. Therapy then becomes less about applying a template and more about learning the particular emotional language of the person in front of me.
These encounters have made it increasingly difficult for me to hold onto a single, standardised picture of how emotion ought to appear in therapy. They have pushed me towards a more individualised and culturally aware stance, where the task is not to measure clients against a fixed model of emotional maturity, but to recognise how emotional life is organised for this person, in this body, in this social and cultural context.
Can Psychotherapy allow itself to evolve?
Psychotherapy does not exist in isolation. It is embedded within large professional bodies, training institutions, regulatory frameworks, and healthcare systems. It intersects with medicine and mental health services, each with their own established practices, languages, and expectations. These structures bring important strengths: accountability, ethical guidance, and shared standards. At the same time, they can make theoretical and cultural evolution slow.
This raises a genuine question. As our understanding of identity, culture, neurodiversity, and emotional life expands, can psychotherapy adapt from within these systems, or does meaningful change require movement at their edges? How flexible are the conceptual frameworks we have inherited, and how easily can they make space for forms of emotional organisation that do not fit older models?
In many ways, change is already underway. A number of contemporary approaches place greater emphasis on embodiment, relational experience, and individual patterns of regulation and meaning-making. Perspectives such as Polyvagal Theory and Internal Family Systems, among others, foreground lived experience, internal diversity, and context rather than a single template of emotional development. These approaches are not abandoning earlier insights, but they do signal a shift towards recognising that emotional life is organised in multiple ways.
Perhaps the question is not whether psychotherapy should step outside its institutional structures, but whether those structures can remain porous enough to allow new understandings to reshape practice. If psychotherapy is to remain responsive to the people it serves, it may need to hold its models more lightly, recognising them as evolving maps rather than fixed descriptions of human emotional truth.
How Theories Reflect Their Time
The scientific impulse to observe, categorise, and name patterns in human behaviour has brought enormous value to psychotherapy. It has helped the field develop shared language, structure, and rigour. Yet scientific understanding does not arise outside of history. What is studied, how it is measured, and how findings are interpreted are all shaped by historical context.
A psychology examining emotional life in the early twentieth century was observing people living within very different relational structures, gender expectations, economic arrangements, and moral norms than those that shape contemporary life. When those observations became models, and those models became theory, they carried with them the imprint of their era.
This does not make earlier psychological frameworks invalid, but it does mean they are historically situated. The emotional life of people living in today’s plural, interconnected, and rapidly changing societies cannot be assumed to organise itself in the same ways as those living in more rigidly structured social worlds a century ago. If the conditions of life change, the patterns of emotional expression and regulation change with them.
For psychotherapy, this suggests that our theories function less like timeless laws and more like evolving maps. They are useful, but always drawn from a particular vantage point. As the terrain shifts, the map may need to be revised.
Psychotherapy is not a fixed territory but an evolving field shaped by ongoing dialogue, experience, and social change. Within it, there are always different tendencies: some practitioners drawn towards established frameworks and shared standards, others more inclined to explore emerging understandings and to listen closely for forms of emotional expression that fall outside familiar models. Both movements play a part in the life of the profession.
For my own part, my work has increasingly drawn me towards a stance of listening across difference, by attending to the particular ways emotional life is organised for each person, rather than assuming it will fit a pre-existing template. This is less a rejection of established models than an effort to hold them lightly, as guides rather than prescriptions.
The language of emotion is as diverse as human language itself.
Five Everyday Essentials That Support Change in Therapy
When people think about therapy, they often imagine big breakthroughs or sudden moments of clarity. In my experience, the real change is quieter. It grows through small shifts that slowly reshape how you feel, how you relate, and how you understand yourself.
Over time I have noticed five everyday movements that help people move toward steadier, more grounded living. They are not rules or techniques. They are simply the patterns that tend to emerge when therapy feels safe and supportive.
If you would like the full article, you can download it here:
Many people arrive in therapy thinking they only feel things when they are overwhelmed. But there are often earlier signs. A breath that tightens. A flutter in the stomach. A sense of heat rising. Therapy helps you notice these small cues without judging them. When you can recognise what your body is telling you, you gain more choice and more space to respond.
2. Exploring relationship patterns
We all learn how to relate to others in childhood. Those early patterns often follow us into adult life, even when the original situations have changed. You might find yourself walking on eggshells around a partner or boss in the same way you once did as a child. Therapy offers a safe place to look at these patterns with curiosity and compassion. When you understand where they came from, you have more freedom to relate in new ways.
3. Sitting with discomfort
Difficult emotions do not always need to be fixed or pushed away. Sometimes the most healing thing is to stay with a feeling for a moment, connected to yourself and your breath. This is not the same as tolerating pain. It is about noticing what comes up without running from it or turning against yourself. Many people find that this simple practice becomes a turning point in therapy.
4. Understanding protective parts
When you start to notice your reactions more clearly, you may see that the parts of you that panic, shut down or flare up are not flaws. They are protective responses that made sense at another time in your life. Therapy helps these parts feel safer so they can soften and update. The aim is not to remove them but to understand them, so they no longer have to work so hard.
5. Valuing small changes
Change rarely arrives in one big moment. More often it comes from small, steady shifts that build over time. A breath before reacting. A clearer boundary. A kinder inner voice. A new understanding of what you need. Therapy supports these micro-movements because they are the ones that last.
For a deeper exploration of these themes, you can read the full article here:
Many influences have shaped my way of working. Writers, researchers and therapists across the field have shaped how I think about change. I draw on relational, psychodynamic, and body-based ideas, but I do not follow a rigid method. Instead, I weave together the threads that support each person in front of me.
Just as clients gently unfurl, I do as well. My work continues to evolve as I learn, reflect and meet each person as who they are. Therapy is not a fixed process. It is a relationship. It is two people unfolding at their own pace, finding steadier ways forward together.
This is a screenshot of the app. Click on it to access.
Exploring Feelings – A Self-Reflection Tool
This interactive tool is designed to help you explore emotions in a creative, open-ended way. Choose an image that catches your attention, then follow the prompts to reflect on how it connects with your feelings. You can respond through free drawing, colouring, or marking sensations on a body outline. Nothing you create is saved or recorded. It’s purely for your own self-reflection.
You can use it on your own, or with a partner, friend, or family member. If you explore it together, agree to listen without criticism, judgement, or the need to “fix” anything. This is about noticing, expressing, and being curious, not about getting the “right” answer.
Sometimes it’s hard to know what we’re feeling, or even to find words for it. Emotions don’t always arrive as clear, named experiences. They can show up as a tightness in the chest, a vague unease, a sense of flatness, or a restless energy we can’t quite explain. Images can sometimes reach those places more easily than words, offering a way in that feels less exposing and more exploratory.
This tool reflects the way I often work in counselling, using images, creativity and metaphor to explore feelings in a safe, non-verbal way. With children, creative methods such as drawing or mapping sensations on a body outline can make it easier to express experiences that are hard to put into words. Adults sometimes find that creativity opens up new perspectives and helps bypass the inner critic. Whether it’s through art, stories or shared reflection, these approaches can make emotional exploration feel lighter, more accessible and less pressured.
The tool draws on a simple but powerful idea: that paying attention to what attracts or repels us in an image, and sitting with that response rather than rushing to interpret it, can tell us something useful about our inner world. There’s no analysis, no scoring, no right way to use it. Just a prompt to pause and notice.
If you feel this way of working might help you, you’re welcome to get in touch.
Compassion goes beyond simply feeling for others. It’s about understanding, acting, and fostering connection. Here are some key aspects of this transformative force:
Empathy: Compassion starts with understanding someone else’s pain, walking in their shoes, and not just feeling sorry for them.
Desire to Help: It’s the drive to alleviate suffering. Whether through offering support, a listening ear or simply being there for someone.
Self-Compassion: Compassion isn’t just for others. It’s about treating yourself with kindness and acceptance, especially in times of struggle.
Emotional Resilience: Compassion helps us stay grounded in tough situations, enabling us to be there for others without becoming overwhelmed.
Connection: Compassion builds stronger bonds and a sense of belonging, helping us feel more connected to others and ourselves.
Compassion is a force for personal and collective healing, bringing us closer together and helping us grow.
