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Tag: relational therapy

  • The Garbled Handbook

    What boys are actually given, and what men are left holding

    A watercolour cartoon of a young red-haired boy sitting on the floor with building blocks, asking 'Who should I be, what should I do?' while a group of bewildered adult men look on unable to answer.

    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.

  • Are You Stuck in a Pattern of Your Own Making?

    The Locked Brain and the Surfboard

    A brain locked in a pattern of its own making, A free surfing brain.

    Look at the image at the top of this post. Have you ever felt stuck in a pattern, just like this image suggests?

    On the left, a skull, chained and padlocked, sealed inside a glass case. On the right, a living brain, richly coloured, roots trailing like a nervous system still reaching, perched on a surfboard.

    I’ve been sitting with that image all week. It does something that a thousand words of neuroscience struggle to do. It says it in one frame.

    What neuroscience is telling us about trauma and the brain

    Recent advances in our understanding of the brain have given us a useful idea. In a healthy mind, neural networks move fluidly between states, integrating, separating, reconfiguring in response to what’s happening. The system is flexible. It can be surprised, moved, changed by experience, and return to itself afterwards.

    Neuroscientists call that metastability.

    Trauma destroys it. The brain locks into a narrow loop, stuck on one channel, unable to shift. Not because something is stored in the tissue, but because the system has learned that movement itself is dangerous. Stay still. Stay defended. Stay right.

    That’s the skull in the glass case. And the padlock, if you look carefully, is on the inside.

    The ocean, the board, and what I learned before I had words for it

    I grew up in Bude. The sound of the ocean was a constant companion; I could just peek it from my attic window. I learned to read weather in it before I knew what I was doing: the ebb and flow, the change in rhythm before a storm. There was information in that sound, and something settling in it too. I didn’t have the word for it then, but I was learning something about what it means to move with what’s coming rather than brace against it.

    Many of my clients surf. It would surprise me if they didn’t. We live on the North Cornwall coast, and the sea is always there. I understand the flow state they’re describing, that quality of complete absorption where thinking stops and something else takes over. For me, it’s jazz piano. Facing the technical demands of the music, at a certain point, I’m no longer planning or deciding. I’m simply in it, and whatever wants to come out comes out. The board and the keys are different instruments for the same thing: the brain finding its way back to the freedom of childhood imagination.

    When guilt becomes the padlock

    Can you imagine a client whose flow state is surfing, and yet he can barely get to the beach? Not because of injury or illness. Because the responsibilities of work and family have slowly closed around him, and somewhere in that closing, pleasure started to feel like selfishness. The paddle out, the hour in the water, the thing that restores him most reliably, now arrives wrapped in guilt. So he doesn’t go. The padlock goes back on, this time not from trauma in any clinical sense, but from the accumulated weight of obligation and the gradual withdrawal of giving himself permission to be fully alive.

    That’s metastability collapsing in ordinary life. The system can’t move toward what would restore it because moving has come to feel dangerous, self-indulgent, and wrong.

    When being right becomes a matter of survival

    And then there’s a different kind of locked brain. Can you imagine a client who must never lose an argument? Not because they’re arrogant, but because somewhere along the way, losing ground came to feel like losing themselves entirely. The self is too fragile to risk contact without armour. So arguments get created where none exist. Positions get defended past the point of reason. And the people around them, partners, friends, colleagues, gradually stop trying to reach them. The very rigidity designed to protect the self ends up isolating it.

    That’s the glass case with the padlock on the inside. The system can’t be moved, can’t be influenced without feeling annihilated, and can’t lose an argument and still find itself intact on the other side.

    Two very different people. The same image.

    What the therapy room actually offers

    What the therapy room offers, when it’s working, is a place where movement becomes possible again. Where the client who’s locked out his own pleasure can sit with someone who takes his aliveness seriously. Where the client who can’t lose an argument can be genuinely met without being beaten, and discover that the ground doesn’t disappear when they yield a little.

    That’s not technique. It’s not cognitive retraining or processing stored content. It’s the therapist being present enough, free enough in themselves, to model what metastability actually feels like in a human body, in a room, in a relationship. The surfer who knows how to ride uncertainty rather than lock it away.

    Healing isn’t excavation. It’s the return of movement.

    Neuroscience is catching up with what relational practitioners have always known. Flexibility, genuine contact, the productive uncertainty of real relationship: these aren’t nice extras. They’re the thing itself.

    The brain on the surfboard isn’t free because nothing bad ever happened to it. It’s free because it has learned to move again.

  • Not Fixing, Not Fitting In: A Different Kind of Support for Neurodiverse Children

    A messy moment in history

    We’re living through a genuinely messy time for neurodiverse children and their families. Messy, because for decades, autism was understood as an illness, something broken, something to be managed. All the systems and institutions built around that understanding share the same basic premise: diagnose, then train the child to be acceptable in society. Train them to mask. Make allowances. Fit them in.

    Then, over the last twenty years, the concept of neurodivergence arrived. Autism, ADHD, OCD, PDA and plenty of other presentations began to be understood not as illnesses, not as problems to fix, but as different ways the brain can function. Different ways of thinking, different ways of experiencing the world. The argument shifted: we should accommodate these children, not make them feel like outsiders.

    The messiness comes from the fact that the people and institutions working with neurodiverse children are often still soaked through with the older medical model. A child might attend a school, trying hard to secure accommodations, only to step into a CAMHS assessment still rooted in diagnosis and compliance. Individual teachers, psychologists, and psychiatrists: some work from a neurodivergent framework; others still work from a medical one. The child and the parent are left trying to work out which lifeline to grab.

    The medical model focuses on behaviour and fitting in. The neurodivergent model focuses on identity, authenticity, and accommodation. These are not minor differences in approach. They lead somewhere quite different.

    What masking actually costs a child

    The practical outcome of the medical model, for a neurodiverse child at school, is that they spend the day masking. They walk into a noisy form room where the social dynamics are chaotic and unpredictable. They’re overwhelmed within minutes. They don’t understand the social banter, the shifting roles, the unspoken rules that neurotypical children navigate without thinking. They’re looking for clarity and predictability, and all they get is noise.

    But they’ve learned to hold it together. To sit there. To get through. And then they come home.

    At home, they can’t mask anymore. The exhaustion tips over. Something as simple as sitting at the table for a meal is too much. The meltdown happens here, with the people who love them most. And parents are understandably confused: how can this be the same child who held it together all day at school?

    Over time, the costs run deeper. A child who has to perform constantly, who is never simply allowed to be, begins to internalise the message that something is wrong with them. That they are the problem. They may start to withdraw, to isolate, to disengage from the world. And who could blame them?

    Something I know from the inside

    I understand something of this from my own experience. At ten, I was the annoying child who was top of the class but couldn’t sit still. In the earlier years of primary school, there had been art, movement, creative work, and I’d been fine. But by the final year, it was pencils and desks all day. I still carry a small mark on the palm of my hand from where I stabbed myself with a pencil out of sheer restlessness. I can see it as I write this.

    The teachers didn’t know what to do with me. I was put on a very strong sedative as I moved into grammar school. This was the mid-sixties; ADHD wasn’t yet a concept. But the diagnosis of anxiety led to heavy medication, and the medication suited the school rather better than it suited me. I went from a restless, engaged, bright spark to a daydreamer staring out of the window. Compliant. Invisible. Easy to manage.

    When I came off the medication, I’d already learned the lesson. On the few occasions I allowed my real self into the classroom, it didn’t go well: too loud, too much, too cocky. So I daydreamed my way through secondary school. That was masking. And it cost me my education, more or less. I wasn’t interested in what they were putting in front of me; I was interested in music, drama, art, and poetry. My mother understood this, and I’m grateful to her for protecting those interests and allowing me to follow them. They became my life.

    I’m not claiming a diagnosis. I’m saying it feels familiar. And that familiarity matters to how I work now.

    Forty years of watching the same mistake

    Forty years ago, I worked in an extraordinary therapeutic educational environment where the curriculum followed each child’s special interests and emotional needs. That approach was gradually lost to UK education for children we’d now describe as neurodiverse, squeezed out by behavioural frameworks driven by cost and accountability. I struggled to work in mainstream education, where compliance was consistently held above the individual needs of the child.

    For the last eight years, I’ve been in private practice as a psychotherapist. It’s a genuine relief to work again in a way that puts the child’s needs first.

    What a relational space actually offers

    What I offer is not strategies. It’s not tools for managing behaviour, techniques for fitting in, or new ways of masking what’s going on. It’s a relational space. A space where a child doesn’t have to conform to any particular way of being.

    There’s no diagnosis required, and no diagnostic category changes how I meet a child in the room. I meet the person, not the label.

    What it looks like in the room

    One child spends most of the session blowing bubbles while we talk. Another’s eyes light up the moment they spot the spinny office chair: they can have it, and they know it. Children bring their favourite soft toy, or a precious object from home. One liked to stand on their head in the corner before settling. Another bounced a ball around the room throughout every session.

    In the therapy room, a child learns that they have agency. They can affect the space they’re in. They can decide whether the light is on or off. They can get up and walk about whenever they want. They can make noise, hide under the table, lie stretched out across all the cushions. And whatever they do, I’m still there, listening, giving them space in the way they want to use it.

    For some children, it takes time to get used to that. Some never quite manage it; they’re so conditioned to compliance and controlled spaces that the freedom itself is overwhelming. But when a child really is being themselves in the room, it’s a remarkable place to be. I’m seeing a side of them that many other people don’t. And just by allowing them to be fully themselves in that space, something changes. I don’t know what that is, and they don’t know what that is. But we both know that it’s giving them something.

    Children who arrive in crisis, who’ve been suspended, excluded, and had the riot act read to them, often end up in a completely different place after a sustained period of this kind of work. I haven’t taught them any skills. I’ve just allowed them to work out for themselves what overwhelms them, what helps them feel connected, and what safety actually feels like.

    Why parents are part of the work

    The room alone doesn’t do it. What happens in the therapy space needs to connect with what happens at home. At a minimum, parents need to understand that I’m not working towards compliance. I’m not reinforcing the institutional approach. I’m working in a different direction entirely, and home needs to be on board with that.

    The main thing I work on with parents is regulation and co-regulation. A child comes home from school having masked for most of the day. They’re exhausted. They need demand reduction. They need to be allowed to be messy, noisy, and a bit uncontrolled, within boundaries. If you can give them that, and you can stay calm while you do it, you’re giving them what they need. They need you to be calm so they can be calm. They need you to be warm so they can feel safe. That’s co-regulation, and it’s one of the most powerful things a parent can offer.

    If you’re reading this as a parent

    Whatever stage you’re at, whether you’re trying to keep your child in school, trying to get them back into school, or simply exhausted from the sheer energy of keeping going with something that doesn’t seem to be working, this kind of relational support exists.

    I work with a small handful of children in person in Bude, North Cornwall. If that’s within reach, I’d be glad to talk. If it isn’t, the thing to look for is a therapist who is neurodivergence-aware and comfortable with unmasking: someone who isn’t going to teach your child to perform differently, but is willing to sit with them as they are, and trust that to be enough.

    That kind of space is rare. But it exists, and it’s worth finding.

  • I’m a therapist: Why I Still Go to Therapy

    Personal Therapy for therapists. A man seated and composed , a double exposure with stormy seas.

    A personal account of what personal therapy makes possible in the consulting room

    Eight years ago, my daughter died by suicide. That fact sits in the room with me every time I work with a client. Most of my long-term clients know it. It’s not something I hide, and it’s not something I’ve resolved. It’s something I carry, and part of my job is to know, at any given moment, how I’m carrying it.

    This article is about one session where that carrying became difficult, what happened next, and why I believe the answer to the question “Do I really need personal therapy?” is, for most therapists, yes.

    Something in the room

    A client I have worked with for some time was talking about the circumstances around her partner’s suicide. She knows about my daughter. That’s part of how we work; I use disclosure as a relational tool, and she had found it useful to know that I had some personal proximity to the kind of loss she was carrying.

    As the session progressed, I became aware of growing anxiety in my body. Not thought-level anxiety, the kind you can reason with, but something lower and more physical. I realised she was building towards telling me the specific details of how her partner was found.

    I asked her to stop, just for a moment. I needed to regulate. I sat with what was happening in my nervous system, and then I was honest with her: I asked whether we could skirt around those particular details, at least for now. She understood immediately. She was not distressed by the request. Because we had a relational contract, because she knew something of my history, and because I had named what was happening rather than trying to manage it covertly, we could make a joint decision about how to proceed. That’s how I work.

    But the session left something unfinished in me.

    The next morning

    I had a fortnightly appointment with my personal therapist the following morning. I’ve been seeing her for five years. I didn’t know what I was going to bring; I rarely do. What was most alive when I woke was a dream.

    In the dream I was in a war zone. There was chaos around me. I was carrying a large assault rifle and being pursued. I took shelter in a cafe. A few minutes later one of my pursuers came in and sat down, ordered coffee, appeared to settle. I was standing in the corner, my rifle propped beside me, and I had to remain still and upright in order to keep it concealed.

    My therapist asked me how I had felt on waking from the dream. I told her: calm. Not relieved, not shaken, calm. In the dream I had known what I needed to do and I had been doing it. She asked whether there was any present-day connection. I went straight back to the session the day before.

    What the body was holding

    We began to look at my nervous system response in that session: the anxiety, the physical signal, the decision to stop. The obvious thread led to my daughter’s death. And as we followed it, I realised something I had not consciously registered before: I had never told anyone the specific details of how she was found. Not my own therapist, not my supervisor, not anyone.

    I’m not going to tell you those details here. But I want to tell you what happened when I told her.

    I asked my therapist if it was all right to go through it. She held the space. With a great deal of shaking and trembling, I told her everything. As the account came out of me, something began to shift in my body. By the time I had finished, it was as though something in my nervous system had dissolved, or at least loosened its grip. The weight of those specific images, held silently for eight years, had been witnessed.

    My supervisor cannot do that work with me. Supervision holds the work; it is where I bring clinical material, ethical questions, and relational dynamics I cannot see clearly. But when something is lodged not in my thinking but in my body, supervision is not the right container. My supervisor has said to me on more than one occasion: “You should take that to personal therapy.” She is right to say it.

    What this makes possible

    After that session with my therapist, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to offer my client the quality of listening I had withheld. Not because I had been wrong to stop, I had been right to stop, but because I now had more capacity than I had before. Something had been processed that had been blocking me. Next time we meet, I’ll share something of that process with her. We will decide together, as we always do, how to proceed.

    This is what personal therapy makes possible. Not the absence of response, therapists are human beings, and we respond, but the ability to stay present with what is difficult rather than being pulled under by it. The difference between a nervous system that can be with a client’s account and one that cannot is not intelligence or training. It is the degree to which our own unprocessed material has been worked with.

    If you’re carrying something and you haven’t given it a proper place to land, it will find one in the room. It will show up in what you cannot hear, what you deflect, what you subtly redirect. Your clients will feel it even when they cannot name it.

    A professional necessity, not a personal indulgence

    There are therapists who treat personal therapy as a requirement to be fulfilled during training and then quietly set aside. I understand the logic: time is limited, fees accumulate, and once you’re qualified the external pressure disappears. But the argument for continuing is not about compliance. It’s about what you’re actually offering in the room.

    I have been in practice for a number of years. I still carry material that surfaces unexpectedly. I still dream things that turn out to be directly connected to my clinical work. I still need a space where I’m the client and someone else is holding the frame. That’s not a sign of inadequacy; it’s a sign of ongoing engagement with the work.

    I don’t go to therapy purely for my own benefit. I go to be in a position to serve my clients better.

    If this article has brought up difficult feelings

    This article discusses suicide and suicide bereavement. If you’re struggling, please reach out.

    Samaritans

    Free, confidential support available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

    Call 116 123 · jo@samaritans.org

    SOBS — Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide

    Peer support from people who have been bereaved by suicide.

    Call 0300 111 5065 · Monday to Friday, 9am–9pm

    More crisis support resources on my Help and Support page →

    https://johnwaltercounsellor.com/dream-exploration/
    If Therapy Didn’t Work Before, This Might Be Why

  • If Therapy Didn’t Work Before, This Might Be Why

    person choosing a therapist, looking out a window pensively

    You’ve been here before. You tried therapy, it didn’t quite feel right, and now you’re left wondering what that means. Was it your fault? Are you too complicated, too resistant, too broken for it to work? Did you do it wrong somehow, or is therapy simply not for you? Finding the right therapist is harder than anyone tells you, and when it doesn’t work out, the easiest person to blame is yourself.

    It probably isn’t any of those things. The fit was wrong, or the approach was wrong, or the level of work was wrong for where you were at the time. That matters more than most people realise, and nobody tells you this when you’re starting out.

    I’ve had several different therapists over forty years, for many different reasons. Some felt right. Some were limited in their helpfulness. And some have been an absolute haven. The difference was rarely about their qualifications or experience.

    The right therapy for the right season

    At a very raw time, a bereavement counsellor handed me a paper assessment form. I started ticking boxes, felt something in me resist, screwed it up and threw it in the bin. She didn’t seem to mind. I carried on seeing her for a few weeks because I desperately needed some support, and she provided it.

    But that was containment, not the deeper work. She was right for that occasion. What I needed then was someone steady to sit with me while things were very raw. Most people aren’t told there’s a difference between that kind of support and longer-term relational work. If therapy felt surface-level or the changes didn’t stick, it may simply be that you were offered crisis support when what you needed was something slower and more relational, or the other way around. That’s not failure, it’s simply a mismatch.

    When the approach gets in the way

    On a couple of occasions, my partner and I saw a sex therapist together. In each case it wasn’t particularly helpful. It felt more like being in a remedial class at school, being handed homework to get us back up to scratch. The therapist wasn’t really relating to us as a couple; we were being put through a process rather than being understood for who we were and what the issues actually meant on a deeper level.

    We later found tantra groups where we were encouraged to explore massage, mindfulness and breathing. We were getting to know our own bodies and what we needed, rather than following someone else’s protocol. The difference was simple: in one setting we were a presenting problem to be corrected; in the other, we were two people trying to understand ourselves.

    That distinction seems important. A therapist who is more interested in applying their model than in understanding you will leave you feeling processed. You might not be able to name it at the time, but you’ll feel it.

    What a good fit actually feels like

    I’ve been seeing my current therapist for over three years. I cycle to her each fortnight with a few thoughts going through my head, but I never arrive with an agenda. Stuff just spills out. She knows my background, elements of my childhood, my relationships, the highs and lows of life past and present. She knows about the imagery of my inner child and parts of my experience where feelings are more vivid than factual detail. Each session takes us on a journey inwards.

    As we come to a close, she asks what I’m doing afterwards. It started as a way of reminding me to ground myself before getting back into ordinary life. Now she knows the answer: I will find a café, order a hot coffee and something comforting to eat, and spend at least an hour alone. No social contact, no talking, no scrolling. Just sitting with whatever happened in the room, letting it settle.

    That question, “What are you doing after this?”, is a small thing. But it tells me everything about how she sees me. She is thinking about me as a whole person, not just the fifty minutes. She wants to know I’ll be alright when I walk out the door.

    That is what a good fit feels like from the inside. You arrive without a plan, something moves anyway, and afterwards you need to be alone because you’re full.

    So what are you actually looking for?

    Not credentials. Not a long list of models and modalities. Those things matter less than you’ve been led to believe.

    Start with the profile. Does something in it connect with you? Does this person seem interested in people, or in problems? If nothing lands, move on.

    If something does, there’s often a phone call. Notice how you feel during it. Do you feel heard, right there in those ten minutes? That’s information.

    If you get to a first session, notice what happens in the room. Do you feel like a person or a case? Are they following you, or leading you through their process?

    And pay attention to the hour after. Do you need to sit quietly and let things settle, or are you left with a vague sense of discomfort and unfinished business? Both can be useful information, but they’re different kinds.

    The felt sense of a session is data. Your body is registering something your mind hasn’t caught up with yet.

    If therapy didn’t work before, you probably knew something was off. You just didn’t know you were allowed to trust that feeling. You are.