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Tag: self expression

Feeling Safe in Therapy: What the Body Knows Before the Mind Does

John Walter | NCPS Accredited Counsellor & Psychotherapist | johnwaltercounsellor.com

Feeling safe in therapy is the cornerstone of successful practice. I knew that long before I could explain it, from fifteen years working with drums, rhythm, voice and connection. Now the neuroscience is catching up.

There’s a moment I’ve never quite been able to explain away.

I’m leading a singing workshop with a group of ten-year-olds. An Ofsted inspector walks in, clipboard ready, pen moving. Standard inspection posture: detached, evaluative, looking for the evidence. At some point I glance across and she’s put the clipboard down. By the end of the session she’s close to tears. She catches my eye on the way out and offers me a single word.

“Wonderful.”

She wasn’t watching a performance. Something in the room had got to her.

For fifteen years I ran facilitated drum circles and rhythm-based group work, trained by Arthur Hull in Hawaii, whose influence runs through schools, hospitals, and organisations worldwide. I’ve seen a lot of rooms. I’ve seen a lot of moments like the one with the inspector. What I didn’t have then was the understanding to say why it works. Now I do. And it’s changed how I think about everything I do in the therapy room.

The girl who picked up the drum

A primary school, somewhere in England. A child sits at the edge of the circle, arms folded, watching. She hasn’t joined in with a group activity since arriving at the school several weeks earlier. The teacher knows. The SENCO knows. Everyone in the room is quietly aware of it, which is part of the problem.

The circle has been running for fifteen minutes. The room has found its pulse. Something shifts in the quality of the sound, less self-conscious, more collective. And then, without announcement, without anyone noticing until it’s already happened, the girl picks up her drum.

Her teacher tells me afterwards she’s never done anything like this before.

What I witnessed wasn’t a child making a decision. It was a body recognising that it was safe.

This is the thing about withdrawal: it’s almost never a choice. The nervous system has assessed the environment and found it unsafe, or not safe enough, and it’s pulled back to protect itself. That stillness, that folded-arms distance, is a biological response. And you can’t talk someone out of a biological response. Reassurance, encouragement, instruction: none of it reaches the part of the nervous system that made the decision to withdraw. That decision wasn’t made consciously, and it won’t be reversed consciously.

What can shift it is a change in what the body is actually experiencing in the room.

A different door

Hull’s approach to facilitation was built around a principle he called GOOW: get out of their way. The facilitator’s job isn’t to produce the outcome but to remove the obstacles to something that wants to happen naturally.

What the research now tells us is why this works. When a group finds a shared pulse, something measurable happens between the people in the room: nervous systems start to synchronise. Not metaphorically. The shared rhythm creates shared ground, and on that ground something like connection becomes possible, not because anyone decided to connect, but because the body found its way there first.

Slow, regular rhythm is one of the most direct signals of safety the nervous system knows. It communicates beneath the level of thought. It doesn’t ask the mind to do anything.

That’s the key. Most of what we offer people, in schools, in therapy rooms, in relationships, makes demands on the thinking mind: follow this, evaluate that, explain yourself, demonstrate that you’ve understood. For someone whose nervous system is running a protection response, those demands aren’t just difficult. They’re genuinely out of reach. The thinking mind is among the first things to go offline when the body feels unsafe.

A drum circle, properly held, asks none of that. You don’t need to know how to drum. You don’t need to perform or evaluate yourself or prove anything. You need only to feel the pulse and let your body move with it. That’s not a lowered standard. It’s a different door entirely.

The training director

A drum circle for 250 people in a corporate setting. In one part of the room I notice a man surrounded by four women. He’s demonstrating to them, showing them what to do, leaning in, gesturing at their hands. They’re watching him, not the group. Their attention is turned inward, towards him, towards their own performance, away from the collective pulse. The energy in that section is flat.

I signal that section to stop while the rest of the group continues. They lower their drums. Suddenly they’re listeners rather than performers. There’s nothing to get wrong, nothing to prove. The only thing available to them is the sound of 245 other people finding a groove. I watch their faces change. The self-consciousness drops. The heads come up.

I count them back in. All five are now with the group.

The man was the company’s head of training. His professional identity was so thoroughly organised around the role of teacher that it kicked in automatically the moment he held an instrument and had people around him. He couldn’t stop teaching long enough to join in. And his teaching, well-intentioned as it was, was the precise obstacle to the connection the exercise was designed to create.

What I did wasn’t correct him. I changed the conditions so that the mode he’d defaulted to became, briefly, impossible. And in that gap, something else could happen.

I think about this a lot in the therapy room. Not with training directors, but with couples who arrive locked in a loop they’ve been running for years: the same argument, the same positions, the same outcome. Both of them, in their own way, are doing what the training director was doing: performing a well-rehearsed role so automatically that the actual person in front of them can’t get in. The loop isn’t stupidity or stubbornness. It’s a survival pattern, usually learned long before this relationship existed, running on automatic because the nervous system hasn’t yet found reason to do anything different.

You can’t argue a couple out of that loop any more than you could have argued the girl into picking up her drum. The work, before anything else, is creating conditions in which the loop has less to grip onto.

What the inspector was picking up

Back to the woman with the clipboard.

What she was responding to wasn’t the children’s musical ability. It was the quality of the room. A group of ten-year-olds who had genuinely settled into something together, genuinely absorbed and at ease, were producing something that her nervous system could feel. Safety is contagious in that way. When people are truly present with each other, it extends beyond the group. It reaches the observer.

Her tears weren’t a sentimental response to a nice lesson. They were her body’s recognition of something real.

And that field had a source. It doesn’t arise from nowhere. It arises from a regulated adult holding the conditions carefully enough that the people in the room can find their way into it. That’s as true in a therapy room as it was in that school hall. Whatever I’m offering, my own nervous system is always part of what’s on offer. If I’m not settled, the room won’t be either.

Feeling safe in therapy: before the work, the ground

The girl who picked up the drum didn’t do it because someone had set joining in as a goal. She did it because something in the room had shifted enough that her body no longer needed to stay defended. Belonging followed safety. It didn’t precede it.

That sequence matters, and it applies well beyond children. An adult who’s spent decades managing relationships from behind a carefully constructed persona needs the same thing first: a room where the nervous system can gradually find it doesn’t need to be quite so vigilant. A couple who’ve been hurting each other with the same argument for years can’t access the tenderness that’s usually still there somewhere until the bodies in the room feel safe enough to put the armour down.

This is what I understood in those drum circles, and what I’ve carried into every room I’ve sat in since. Before narrative, before insight, before any of the work that requires a settled and thinking mind, the question is always the same: what is this room actually like for the nervous system of the person sitting in it?

Everything else follows from that.

If you’re wondering what it might feel like to work with me, you can read more about my approach here or get in touch for a free introductory call.

May 13, 2026
Your Child Doesn’t Need Fixing. They Need You.

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.

Children & Young People — Therapy in Bude

The Garbled Handbook

May 11, 2026
The Garbled Handbook

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.

May 7, 2026
Men’s Mental Health Matters. But Whose Version of Men Are We Talking About?

Iron John and the Inner Warrior

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.

It isn’t.

March 18, 2026
Anxiety: Your Body Is Trying to Tell You Something

Right now, as I write this, I am picking my nails, pulling at my beard, pushing my thumb into the palm of my hand. This is the first paragraph of an article on anxiety, and my body knows it. Something is building, something I am not quite sure about, something that could be hard. And yet I know that once I get going, I will be fine.

That is anxiety. Not a disorder. Not a malfunction. Information.

If you have arrived here after searching the word “anxiety,” you will have passed through an overwhelming wave of diagnoses, categories, techniques, potions, mindfulness scripts and breathing exercises, all of them premised on the same assumption: that anxiety is something wrong with you, something to be reduced, managed or cured. This article is not that.

A natural phenomenon, not a disorder

When we name something a disorder, curiosity stops. We label it, file it, fix it. We begin to relate to it from a cognitive distance, as though it were happening to us rather than in us, as though it were an intruder rather than a messenger. Every nervous system response is a natural phenomenon. Anxiety is no exception. It is your body doing something for a reason, and the most useful question you can ask is not “how do I make this stop” but “what is this telling me, and is it still relevant?”

It starts in the body, and it starts early

My earliest memory of anxiety is vivid. I am three or four years old, in my aunt’s garden, digging with a red-handled metal fork. A bee appears. I know bees sting, so I step back. Flight. But the bee seems to follow me, so I pick up the fork and wave it in front of me. Fight. I end up running around the garden, fork raised, a bee apparently in determined pursuit. My nervous system was doing exactly what nature designed it to do: read a signal, generate a response, and move me towards safety.

Not long after, I refused to go to the school canteen. It was noisy, full of older children, nothing like the warm familiarity of home. I sat down in the classroom and cried. Eventually, my father came. He took my hand and walked me into that tin-shed of a room with its hundred children and crashing acoustics. He sat me next to a girl I felt safe with, and that was enough. My nervous system settled because the relational context had changed. I was not broken. I was responding. And what settled me was not a technique or a strategy; it was the felt safety of another person.

How a response becomes a pattern

Well into my twenties, I was still having a physical reaction to bees and wasps. I would freeze, shut my eyes, try to pretend I was not afraid, though my body told a different story entirely. It had logged that early experience and kept the file open.

Then, as a primary school teacher, a bee got into the classroom. Children were shouting, running, and screaming. I was the adult in the room. I found a glass and a piece of card, captured the bee, opened the window and let it go. From that day on, my body stopped reacting as it once had. The pattern broke, not through a technique or a course of treatment, but through action in a relational context, being the person someone else needed me to be.

This is how anxiety works. It begins as a genuine response to something real. Over time, the nervous system learns to anticipate, to fire early, to stay on alert in situations that echo the original one, even when the actual danger is long gone. It is not irrational. It is a pattern, wired in for good reasons, and it can be rewired.

When anxiety takes over

I have been a performer most of my adult life, and I learned early on to recognise performance anxiety as excitement, energy I could channel rather than suppress. But I have also had social anxiety so severe that I could not easily speak to people. My response was cigarettes and a great deal of beer, enough to get me through the door. It helped in the short term, but it did not touch the anxiety itself. If anything, the anxiety grew, became less predictable, harder to read.

And then there was The Gambia.

The breaking point

I was leading a group on an African drumming trip when one of the group members became seriously ill and died. After contacting the insurers, arranging accommodation, and ensuring everyone got home safely, I was calm, practical, and present, the person the situation required. That evening, I sat in the bar with a friend, and we talked it through. Everything felt steady.

Then I got up to walk to the toilet, and I fainted.

I came round to find four men carrying me through the streets, aloft, running, shouting, taking me to the nearby hospital, the same hospital where she had died. Passing that room again felt surreal. The rest of the night passed in that same ward. When the doctor discharged me the following morning, I asked him whether I was going to die. He said no. He said I had had a panic attack.

My nervous system is wired for movement, organisation and decisive action under stress. That is what it did, and it did it well. But it has an overload point. What I understand now, looking back, is that I might have reached that point later, or not at all, had I allowed myself to share the weight with my friend that evening rather than holding it alone, telling him not just what had happened, but how it felt to be the one responsible. The nervous system settles in the presence of another person. That is not a weakness. That is how we are built.

What actually helps

There are no universal techniques. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What matters is noticing: noticing what your body is doing, and finding a way to shift the energy in whatever way works for you in that moment. Scrolling on your phone is a mild anxiety symptom. What can you do as you swipe through that essential video of a dog rescuing a duck from a raging river? Notice it, stop, go for a walk in the park. When you find yourself checking your emails every thirty seconds, bake a cake. When your attention scatters, try focusing on one thing or one person, completely and without distraction.

As a pianist, I used to shake my hands and flex my fingers for a full minute before sitting down to play. It was my way of moving the energy through rather than sitting on it. More recently, in Zoom training sessions, I found my attention drifting, my hands rubbing together, unable to engage with what was in front of me. I bought a fidget toy. It worked: a small, quiet outlet for the energy, and I could stay present.

The question worth asking yourself is this: Is the anxiety pulling you into the present moment, or is it pulling you out? The answer usually tells you something about what it needs.

A word, if you have been given a diagnosis

A doctor may have diagnosed you with an anxiety disorder, recommended CBT, or prescribed medication – or all three. I am not here to dismiss any of that. What I am suggesting is something that can sit alongside it: a more personal curiosity about what is actually happening in your body, and what stories your mind is constructing around it. Anxiety is often protecting you from something. It is worth asking what that is, and whether the protection is still necessary, or whether it belongs to an earlier chapter of your life.

What your body already knows

For most of us, most of the time, anxiety is not a disorder. It is a nervous system doing its job, a body that learned something once and has not yet been shown that things have changed. It is information, sometimes urgent, sometimes subtle, always worth attending to.

Your body generated this anxiety. It is quite capable of living with it, channelling it, moving it on.

You do not need to make it go away. You need to listen to what it is telling you.

March 17, 2026
AI Therapy in 2025: Helpful, Misleading, or Both?
Many people now turn to AI chatbots or social media for mental health advice before speaking to a professional. This article explores how these tools can both help and mislead, and how therapy can offer a grounded space to make sense of what you discover online.

A client once told me their chatbot had confirmed that all their symptoms pointed to a genetic mental illness.

They had lived for years in fear of a parent and were now beginning trauma recovery. It is true that long-term trauma can sometimes affect physical and mental health, but this person was already in therapy and beginning to find hope.

Bringing those fears into therapy became a turning point. Together, we looked beneath the surface and found an old belief that they might be permanently damaged. Through connection and understanding, that belief began to lose its grip.

Healing from trauma takes time. It is not about finding quick explanations but about helping the body and mind feel safe again. Progress grows from patience, persistence and secure relationships, whether through family, friends or therapy.

How we arrived here

By 2025, most people begin their search for mental health information online. It has been building for decades:
- 2000s: Search engines and symptom checkers such as WebMD start to shape how people understand illness.
- 2013: Crisis Text Line launches and text-based support becomes normal.
- 2020: TikTok turns into a global space for mental health conversations.
- 2023: The platform adds direct links to professional resources.
- 2024: AI chatbots start offering “therapy” at any hour.
- 2025: Research shows that many viral mental-health videos still spread false or simplified information.
With so much advice online, confusion is understandable.

Bringing AI into therapy

In my practice, I encourage people to talk about any source that has influenced how they think about their well-being. That might be a book, a video, a podcast, social media content or an AI app.

These tools are not new in spirit. Self-help books have offered neat solutions for decades, sometimes helpful and sometimes misleading. AI is simply the latest version of the same search for guidance.

If a client mentions a resource, I may look it up or ask for a short summary so that we can make sense of it together. The aim is not to judge but to understand how it fits into their personal story. Whatever a person brings into the room, we explore it within the safety of a real relationship.

Using AI with care

Technology will keep changing, but healing will always depend on human connection.

AI can be a useful reflection tool, a way to clarify thoughts or rehearse conversations, yet it cannot replace the experience of being understood by another person.

The goal is not to reject AI altogether but to learn to use it thoughtfully. When clients and therapists speak openly about what is helpful and what is not, the digital world becomes a little safer and a little kinder for everyone.
October 13, 2025
A Tutu and a Football: What This Image Tells Us About Gender and Freedom

Is this a boy in a tutu, or a girl playing football?

Tutu and football created by the author

I created the image above and the short video GIF below after some parents had related to me stories about non-gender conforming children. The most powerful was a boy who is an expert on the BMX bike track but insists on wearing a rainbow-coloured tutu while he rides, regardless of the impracticality of such attire.

I am a Counsellor for adults and children, and as such, I spend a lot of time discussing identity and authenticity. I don’t care what a client has in their pants. They can dress as they like, speak as they want; all I am interested in is getting to know the person on a deeper level than the superficial aspects of gender, appearance, or any label imposed from the outside.

GIFs created by the author.

What matters to me is how they feel about themselves when they wake up in the morning. Whether they are living in alignment with who they truly are, or whether they are exhausted from performing a version of themselves that others expect. My work is about creating space where people can take off their masks and discover that, underneath it all, they are already enough.

GIFs created by the author

What is your reaction?

Do the images above make you smile or cringe? Do they bring some discomfort or a feeling of warmth?
Does your reaction surprise you? Is it in keeping with your attitudes? Is there shame, disgust, or a quiet sense of delight?

It’s worth noticing these first responses. They often arise from unconscious bias. These are quick, automatic judgments we’ve absorbed without ever choosing them. We all have them. They come from years of cultural conditioning. Stereotypes and inherited stories have taught us how boys and girls should look and behave.

The important thing isn’t to pretend these reactions don’t exist, but to get curious about them. To ask ourselves: Where did this feeling come from? Does it reflect my true values, or just the messages I was given?

When we examine our biases with honesty and compassion, we create the possibility of change. We can choose to loosen their hold and to respond to others, especially children, not with judgement, but with openness and respect for their unique expression.

Childhood Memories of Not Fitting In

As a small child, my mother worried that I cried too much. Social pressure led her to speak with her Priest.
“He cries too much, should I toughen him up?”
His reaction was immediate and firm.
“No! He could grow up to be a poet or a musician, let him be.”

From that point on, my mum was on my side, unlike most of the males in my life. Brothers felt they had to protect me or teach me how to be a proper man. Dad thought I was gay.

It was enough. There was at least one person who let me develop my creativity, my sensitive skills, piano playing, knitting, drawing and painting.

Additionally, it helped that I grew up in the 1960s, when sensitivity, peace, and love were popular ideals as a reaction against male aggression. Popular role models such as Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie inspired me to dress as flamboyantly as I liked without any sense that it was unmasculine.

In school and wider society, I felt out of place, like an alien, but at home, I could be myself, get lost in a drawing or learn all the Cat Stevens songs on the piano, be allowed to play the church organ and crack out a version of A Whiter Shade of Pale.

GIF created by Author

Culture and society create unseen pressure.

Psychologists have spoken about a Boy Code and a Girl Code, which society has passed on to children. This is beginning to break down. We are starting to appreciate the damage done to the mental health of both boys and girls by these rigid expectations.

The Boy Code teaches boys that strength means silence, that feelings are a sign of weakness, and that they must always be in control. Boys learn to wear a mask of invulnerability, to deny their softer emotions, and to measure their worth by dominance and performance.

The Girl Code is equally suffocating. Girls are taught to be pleasing, accommodating, and effortlessly perfect. They are rewarded for quiet compliance and punished, often subtly, for assertiveness, ambition, or anger. They learn early that their value is tied to how they look and how well they take care of others.

When we enforce these codes, whether consciously or not, we deny children the freedom to discover who they truly are. We push them to abandon parts of themselves that don’t fit the script.

But these scripts are only stories we’ve inherited. They aren’t truths. And they can be rewritten.

Every time we respond to a child’s authentic expression with curiosity rather than correction, we chip away at these old narratives. Every time we let them wear what they want, play how they want, and feel what they feel without shame, we make space for something freer and healthier to emerge.

We are not here to mould children into our idea of what they should be. We are here to help them unfold into who they already are.

Compliance has benefits, but it also incurs costs.

For me, Grammar School was a place I learnt to comply, but I had the benefit of a homespace where I could be myself. My first year there I was being sedated because I was hyperactive, mouthy and generally an energetic pain in the butt.

I learnt that no one was interested in my views or opinions, and creative ideas that flowed out of me didn’t fit in with the curriculum, so they were not valid.

I was a boy, so I was required to study the sciences. I was very clear that my main interest was in writing, drawing and playing music, but those were female pursuits. I was told I was too clever for that. My views were disregarded. I complied reluctantly.

The cost of that compliance was that I lost interest in all academic pursuits. I entered Grammar school as top of the class in most things. I limped out of the sixth form with a single A-level in Maths.

My compliance, however, was only partial. I survived the school system but gained very little from it. At 18, my true education began. I went to London and explored my passion for music, developing a lifelong career in creative pursuits.

Peers who complied with the system reaped the benefits of gaining university admission. The cost they often paid was that they found themselves in a career they had no interest in. All of their passions and interests had been relegated to hobbies, if they survived at all.

Looking back, I can see that compliance was never neutral; it was always a matter of perspective. It demanded that we trade parts of ourselves to fit in. For some, it was curiosity. For others, it is creativity or confidence. We learnt to measure our worth by how well we could follow the script, not by how fully we could live as ourselves.

This is why I feel so strongly that we must question the old codes, whether they come dressed as tradition, discipline, or common sense. Behind every child who “learns to behave”, there may be a young person quietly losing touch with what makes them alive.

GIF created by the author

Breaking the script

Many years ago, I worked alongside an inspired Reception class teacher. I worked in a Year 6 class. She had an outside space which I could see from my classroom. She was much more experienced than I, and one day we had a conversation about gender conformity.

I had a boy in my class who liked to wear his hair very long, all the way to his waist. He kept it beautifully combed and tied it back when necessary.

I had noticed a boy in the reception class who came out into the play space every morning wearing a beautiful Snow White dress. He stood tall in the dress and played happily with the other children.

I never saw any of their peers bat an eyelid. They were accepted. I raised it with the reception class teacher, wondering if there was anything I should do.
She said something along the lines of
“Don’t make it weird. They are both happy as they are.”

The changes in society in recent years feel to me like society is increasingly “making it weird” to express yourself in any way that moves beyond the binary stereotypes of male and female.

I go on a Couples counselling Course, and I hear an experienced Counsellor say

“Well, it’s true, in my experience, all men are like this and all women are like that.”
They don’t seem to realise how they are allowing their own and society’s expectations to walk into the room with the clients.

My experience is quite different because my expectations are different.

Our role, whether as teachers, parents, or therapists, is not to project our own discomfort or inherited ideas onto others, but to hold space for people to be exactly as they are.

When I think of that little boy in the Snow White dress, I’m reminded how unselfconscious children are until someone teaches them to feel ashamed. They don’t make it weird, we do.

Perhaps the simplest and most radical thing we can do is to stop policing the edges of what we think is acceptable, and instead learn to meet each person with curiosity rather than assumption.

When we let go of the script, we give others permission to do the same. And that, I’ve come to see, is where real belonging begins.

The golden key of acceptance.

Boys and girls suffer mentally from gender stereotyping. If you tell someone there is something wrong with them, their mental health suffers.

Their experience of themselves is not being accepted as true. It instils self-doubt and anxiety. Gender stereotyping is about control, not about caring.

The experience of belonging to a family, community, village, or school group is essential for mental well-being. True belonging does not come from compliance.

If you are masking, pretending, or hiding parts of yourself in order to fit in with your family or any other group, then you will never get a true sense of belonging.

A sense of connection comes when we are accepted exactly as we are, when we learn to accept ourselves with all our quirks and wrinkles and feel free to show our authentic selves to those around us.

“True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.”

― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

How can we liberate ourselves and our children from the gender binary?

The tyranny of gender politics is plain to see. A small minority, Queer, Intersex and Trans people are subject to cruel and oppressive treatment.

Teachers, parents, and therapists may feel constrained in fully supporting the free expression of sexuality or gender identity. They mistakenly believe they are protecting children from harm.

Yet our silence or discomfort doesn’t protect anyone; it simply reinforces the message that there is something shameful in difference. We have a responsibility to examine honestly our own fears and assumptions, to learn from those with lived experience, and to offer children the unconditional acceptance they all need to thrive.

Stop making it weird.

A boy who likes to paint his nails or wear tutus is not weird. A girl who likes her hair short and wears clunky boots is not a threat to society.

The biggest threat to a healthy society is our insistence on policing the space between gender stereotypes. This insistence threatens our own fragile sense of certainty about how the world should look.

When we cling to rigid categories, we lose our ability to see people as they truly are. We flatten their complexity into something easier to label and control. But human beings are never that simple.

If we want a healthier, more compassionate culture, we have to be willing to step into the discomfort of not knowing, of letting others define themselves in ways that may unsettle us.

Because in the end, it’s not children’s freedom that endangers us. It’s our refusal to allow it.

Let’s stop making it weird. Let’s start making it normal to accept each other exactly as we are. Our children are watching and learning from everything we do.

Further Reading

Cordelia Fine — Delusions of Gender
(Debunks myths about innate gender differences)

Lise Eliot — Pink Brain, Blue Brain
(Explores how experience and culture shape brain development)

Julia Serano — Whipping Girl
(Looks at the policing of gender expression)

Bell Hooks — Teaching to Transgress
(On liberatory education and honouring difference)

Ken Robinson — The Element
(On nurturing creativity rather than conformity)

July 7, 2025
The Art of Kintsugi: Healing Through Acceptance
How the Japanese Practice of Golden Repair Guides Us Toward Wholeness and Transformation

First Published on Medium 18/12/2024 John Walter 📣Therapy and creativity

Image created by the author using Midjourney

Kintsugi is an art form that celebrates breakage and repair as part of an object’s history rather than as something to disguise.

As a therapist specializing in trauma, I often work with individuals who have reached a crisis point after trying to hide or suppress their traumatic experiences.

Healing begins when we explore the emotions surrounding these events and understand that embracing our authentic selves involves acknowledging the learning and growth that come from processing these feelings.

Like with Kintsugi, we acknowledge our history as an integral part of ourselves.

I had the experience of losing my daughter to suicide six years ago. It catapulted me into almost constant therapy for recovery, but it also became a wake-up call and launched me into training as a counsellor. An act of extreme trauma also became a point of transformation in my personal journey.

What is Kintsugi?

screenshot from wikipedia re Kintsugi

Behind Kintsugi is Wabi-sabi, a Japanese philosophy that finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence and authenticity. Kintsugi is the art of repairing broken pottery with a lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum. Something broken becomes celebrated as an art form.

We can learn to see our “cracks” and “scars” not as defects to be ashamed of or hidden but as unique parts of ourselves which have contributed to our growth.

The process of healing ourselves can be compared to repairing broken pottery with precious metals. By celebrating the scars that come from healing trauma, we honour our history as an integral part of who we are. This perspective allows us to embrace our imperfections, recognize our resilience, and find beauty in our journey toward wholeness.

Image by the author

What are your broken pieces?

Do you hide them away or accept them as part of your rich history? Have you a trauma, a loss or a significant life transition point that could do with being re-examined and polished up?

There is a perceived stigma in society around imperfections and vulnerability. Social media promotes a particular idea of perfection, flawless appearances, unerring decisions and emotional invincibility. This becomes a pressure that leads us to hide parts of our true selves, fearing judgement and rejection.

We use terms like “dark secrets” or “skeletons in the cupboard” to describe parts of ourselves that must be kept secret from others.

Being abandoned

My first wife left me in true abandonment style back in the 70s at the ripe old age of 24. No note, no attempt at contact, just an empty flat when I returned home one night and the bizarre experience of being contacted by a local solicitor a year later to sign divorce papers.

My confidence was knocked for six. I had no idea anything was wrong. We ate food together, slept and had sex together. What was missing? Obviously, something was missing for my wife, but she chose to leave without explanation rather than articulate it.

I quickly drowned my sorrows with excessive drinking and fairly wild sexual adventures. I was ashamed of not being what a husband should be, yet I had absolutely no idea of what that was. I tried to put a brave face on as if I was having the time of my life, but the truth was I was broken and struggling from day to day.

Images created by the author.

Kintsugi and the therapeutic process

Kintsugi:
1. Find the broken pieces
2. Prepare them for repair
3. Apply the gold lacquer and glue them back in place
4. Allow time for drying and setting
5. Polish the finished article
Therapy:
1. Recognise the hidden and broken parts of ourselves
2. Seek help through therapy, support groups or self-reflection
3. Accepting our history, developing self-compassion, and choosing a new pathway.
4. Allowing time and space for healing to take place
5. Get used to living as your new authentic self
The things to watch out for

Unlike Kintsugi, the therapeutic process is not singularly linear. With a ceramic pot, you would gather everything together at the start and work through each stage with all the parts.

In therapy, it is more likely to be a process where each broken part becomes visible and is processed individually to some degree. Spurred on by your success with one issue, you reach back, and another becomes visible.

Is it ever complete?

There is usually a constant supply of difficult circumstances in life. With each episode, we develop resilience and self-awareness. The more we work towards living authentically, the more we notice places where we unconsciously hold ourselves back.

Looking at My School Days in a New Light

One piece of my life that remained unexplored for many years was my journey through grammar school. Society viewed it as a failure, and so did I. Now, as I pick up those memories and polish them off, I see them quite differently, much like a Kintsugi repair that transforms brokenness into beauty.

I entered Year 7 at age 11, was at the top of my class and was captain of the rugby team. However, I was also hyperactive and quite confrontational, always wanting explanations for everything. At the time, these behaviours were seen as symptoms of anxiety, and I was treated with strong sedatives that effectively switched my brain off. Even when the medication ended, I remained disengaged. It seemed that was what they wanted: a compliant student who didn’t question the system.

I went through the motions, attending classes but not truly participating, and left school at 18 with a tattered collection of qualifications. For years, I saw this as a personal failure. But now, reexamining this “broken” piece of my past, I realize that I inadvertently gave myself space to explore my interests and passions by not fully engaging with the socially prescribed education system.

Those seven years, once viewed as a time of struggle and failure, were when I developed my artistic vision and sensibilities. My musical passions were forming, and I was reading widely — unfettered by the need to adhere to curriculum guidelines. While some school friends who were fully engaged with the system found themselves locked into debilitating career paths and yearning for retirement, I have happily bounced around in teaching, musical facilitation, and psychotherapy.

Now, past retirement age, I ask myself why I would ever retire. I love my passions: work, music, and writing. Like a piece of pottery repaired with Kintsugi, the cracks and imperfections of my past have been filled with the gold of experience and self-discovery. Because of these so-called flaws, I have become more whole and authentic, and I will continue pursuing what I love for as long as I can.

Using the lessons

In the end, Kintsugi teaches us that our brokenness doesn’t diminish us, it defines us. Each crack is a testament to our struggles, how we have survived, the lessons we’ve learned, and the strength we’ve gained.

These moments, though painful, give our lives depth and texture, just like the gold-filled veins in a repaired pot. Looking at my own life, I see that every failure, every loss, and every misstep has shaped me into who I am today.

It’s not about erasing the past or pretending the cracks aren’t there; it’s about honouring them as part of our story. So, as we gather our broken pieces, let’s remember: the beauty isn’t in perfection but in the courage to keep piecing ourselves back together, over and over again.

www.johnwaltercounsellor.com

Get in touch if you want help piecing yourself back together.

Image created by the author

An in-depth study of the connections in this article is found in Tomas Navaro’s Book (link below)

Navigating Emotional Healing in Therapy

Navigating Bereavement: A Counsellor’s Personal Journey Through Loss and Healing
December 18, 2024
Does Online Therapy Work?
What I’ve learned after years of working with clients across the UK and Europe

My first-ever therapy client wasn’t in a room with me. It was March 2020. They were too frightened to leave their home following a traumatic local event, and the pandemic made meeting in person impossible. We worked by phone.

Neither of us knew if it would work.

Twelve months later, when we ended well, I knew something I hadn’t known before: the room isn’t what makes therapy real. The relationship is.

The honest answer: yes, with the right therapist

Online therapy works. The research backs this up, and so does my clinical experience. Studies consistently show outcomes for online counselling are comparable to in-person work across a wide range of concerns, including anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, and trauma.

But the research also shows what practitioners already know: the single most important factor in any therapy isn’t the modality or the platform. It’s the therapeutic relationship. Whether you’re on Zoom or sitting in a consulting room in Cornwall, what heals is being genuinely met by another person.

Online therapy doesn’t change that. In some ways, it deepens it.

What changes online, and what doesn’t

When clients work with me online, I can’t read the room in the same way. I’ve learned to listen more closely to tone, pace, and timing. Small shifts in how someone is breathing. Hesitations. The moment someone’s voice changes.

The body is still present, even through a screen. And often, clients are more settled in their own body when they’re at home: on their sofa, with a favourite mug, with their cat nearby. Small things that help the nervous system feel safe. When safety increases, therapy deepens.

What doesn’t change is the quality of attention, the pace of the work, or the depth of what can be explored. I work with the same relational, depth-oriented approach online that I use in person. Psychodynamic. Person-centred. Attentive to how the body holds what the mind hasn’t yet found words for.

Who tends to do well with online therapy

In my experience, online therapy suits people who:
- Have chosen their therapist deliberately, often after searching and reading carefully
- Want to work without travel time eating into their week
- Live somewhere with limited local options, as many people in rural Cornwall do
- Feel more able to open up from a familiar environment
- Are managing a busy life and need the flexibility
That deliberate choice matters more than people realise. When someone has searched, compared, reflected, and then decided to work with a particular therapist, they arrive already invested. That investment shapes the work from the first session.

What online therapy can’t replace

I’ll be direct about the limits too. Some clients need in-person work, at least to begin with. If someone is in acute crisis, or if their trauma responses are strongly somatic and they need to feel another regulated nervous system physically present, in-person sessions may be more appropriate. We’d discuss that in an initial consultation.

For couples, the picture is more nuanced. Online couples work is possible and I do it regularly, but the dynamics require careful management. I’ll always be clear about whether it’s the right fit.

A note on how I work online

Sessions are on Zoom. I don’t record sessions. If a client wants a written summary after a session, I can create one using secure, ethical tools, and only with their explicit consent.

I’m based near Bude in North Cornwall, and I work with individuals and couples across the UK and Europe. If geography has been stopping you from accessing the kind of therapy you’re looking for, it doesn’t have to.

The short version

Online therapy works because therapy has always been about the relationship, not the room. What matters is finding a therapist whose approach fits what you’re carrying, who you feel you can trust, and who will stay with you as the work gets harder.

If you’re wondering whether online therapy might be right for you, the best next step is a short introductory call. No commitment, no pressure, just a chance to see if it feels like a fit.

Book a free introductory call

Online sessions for couples and individuals across the UK and Europe.

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October 15, 2024