Engage Counselling - Engage With Life Blog

When The Body Takes The Wheel

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:00:00 GMT

Image: Kyraxys / Pixabay

There is a moment, in fear, when you stop being the one deciding what you're doing or saying. The body has already moved. Your mouth has said things you didn't mean. Your thinking only catches up afterwards, often confused about what just happened.

Data floods into us without pause, through every sense at once: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and the "spidey sense," the felt sense from your body. All of it funnels up through the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, the part we share with everything on the planet, including reptiles. Sitting in there is a small structure called the amygdala, and the simplest way to think about it is as a smoke alarm. What it does next, and why, is worth understanding properly.

A risk assessor, always on, always scanning, reading everything coming in before your thinking brain ever sees it. This happens before you are conscious of it at all, which is why it has its own name in the research: neuroception, the nervous system's own appraisal of safety or danger, running underneath awareness, before thought.

And the instant it decides something is dangerous, it acts. It doesn't waste time telling you about it. Below is the same system in four parts: the senses that pick up the danger, the lower brain where the alarm sits, the modern brain that goes offline, and what happens to the body once it does. Tap each one open.

Tap each part to open it.

1 The senses How danger gets noticed, before your thinking brain sees it. +

Don't Tell Me What To Do

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 14:00:00 GMT

Photo: José Franco / Pexels

You know that internal feeling of “don’t tell me what to do” when confronted by certain phrases or tasks? Or that moment when you’re about to do a thing, then someone tells you to do the thing, and now you can’t. If you are living with ADHD or Autism, you may know the feeling I’m referring to, and it may be causing more difficulty than is needed. It’s what is referred to, pathologisingly, as Pathological Demand Avoidance, or PDA. And it is very common.

You ask your partner to get the clothes out of the washing machine. No big deal, just a simple request. And it doesn’t happen, there may even be some push back. So you escalate to “Just get the clothes out, will you? It’s not that hard.” And it doesn’t happen, even more intensely than before. This is what a Pathological Demand Avoidance profile can look like from the outside. From the inside, it’s a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do when they read danger: it reacts. The demand isn’t the request or the task. It’s the sensation of having your own will taken out of your hands, of losing autonomy.

I’ll note here that people with a PDA profile prefer to use terms such as Persistent Drive for Autonomy or Preferential Desire for Autonomy, which I think are far more accurate and sensible terms.

What’s actually happening

PDA sits within the autism spectrum for some people, and alongside ADHD for many more, and the mechanism underneath it is anxiety, not defiance. A request, even a welcome one, even one the person themselves has been wanting to act on, can register as a loss of autonomy. The nervous system reads being told to do something as a removal of autonomy, and reacts automatically. (See: When the body takes the wheel.)

This is worth thinking through, because it runs against most of what we’re taught about getting people to do things. Firmness doesn’t help here. Repetition doesn’t help. A reward for compliance doesn’t help, because it’s still built on the same architecture, do the thing, get the approval, and approval is itself a kind of demand for someone whose threat response triggers on being observed and evaluated. What helps, is removing the shape of the demand while keeping the actual request intact.

In the ADHD case, where it’s present alongside PDA or on its own, adds a working memory and attention system that loses instructions in long preambles, that struggles with abrupt transitions, that reads a flat tone as anger. Put the two together and you get someone whose system is working hard, near-constantly, just to handle the ordinary traffic of a conversation.

None of this is a character flaw. It is what the nervous system is doing, whether the person wants it to or not.

Language that doesn’t inadvertently demand

The single most useful shift is what’s sometimes called declarative language, stating an observation or your own experience, rather than issuing an instruction. “I’m ready to head off when you are” carries the same information as “let’s go now.” One of them asks nothing of anyone. The other one does, whether or not it was meant to.

A few ways this plays out in practice:

Observe rather than instruct. “I noticed the invoice is still sitting there” does the work of “you need to do the invoice” without the demand attached to it.

Offer a choice, even a small one. “Would Thursday or Friday suit better?” hands back a measure of control that a fixed deadline removes. The content barely changes, but the felt experience of it can alter substantially.

Take the “you” out where you can. “I wonder if the roster could get sorted before the weekend” or “shall we have a crack at this” turns a directive into something closer to a shared problem. It sounds like a small trick. It isn’t, because it changes who the demand is aimed at, and the answer, for a nervous system on alert, is “not me,” which now feels safe.

Ask for help rather than issue a request. “I’m stuck on this, any chance you could take a look” activates something closer to a helping response than a compliance response. Same outcome with a different route to it.

Warn before a transition, and then wait. “We’ll probably wrap up in ten minutes or so” gives a brain mid-hyperfocus room to disengage on its own terms, rather than being cut off. And then, having said it, leave the silence alone. The processing happens in the space where you wait, and the person will get there. Swapping around multiple topics, with “demands” means a person is completely overwhelmed, unable to keep up or comply, feels useless, and has a fear response of either fight, flight, or freeze. Panic is also possible in this scenario.

Notice the demand words themselves. Must, need to, have to, now. Small words, and each one carries more weight than its size suggests. “Might be worth” or “whenever suits” says the same practical thing without the trigger sitting inside it.

The phrases that override

There’s a second category that’s less about tone and more about structure. Certain phrases assert one person’s frame as the only valid one and remove the other person’s say in it, and they do this regardless of how gently a tone they’re delivered in, or how necessary the task may be.

What you need to understand is…

You have to…

Why can’t you just…

Because I said so…

It’s not that hard, just…

None of these are cruel. Some of them get used with real warmth behind them. But structurally, each one closes a door that a nervous system already primed for threat was watching closely. The alternative isn’t to abandon clarity, or to stop holding a boundary when one is genuinely needed. It’s to keep the content and remove the override. For instance, “I’m ready to help whenever you get to it”, or “This one’s got a few steps, want to think it through together?” The request remain, boundaries remain. What changes is whether the other person’s autonomy is felt to be maintained.

Try it yourself

Tap a card to see the demand flipped into its declarative equivalent.

“You need to…”

Occam’s Razor, Occam’s Broom, and the Shape of Anxiety

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:00:00 GMT

You may have heard of Occam's razor. How about Occam's broom? Bear with me as I attempt to link how these concepts apply to anxiety, confirmation bias, and psychotherapy.

Occam's razor is a principle most of us have encountered, even if we cannot place the name. It states, roughly, that the simplest explanation is usually the right one; do not invent more causes than you need to account for what you observe. If the cat knocked your glass off the table, you do not need to imagine an intruder. The principle is a rule for clear thinking, and it has shaped science, medicine, and philosophy for centuries.

Occam's broom is less famous. The term was coined by the Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner, and later given wider currency by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who used it to skewer the rhetoric of conspiracy theorists and propagandists.¹ It names the opposite tendency: the habit of sweeping inconvenient facts out of sight so that a tidy account can survive. Where the razor cuts away unnecessary complexity, the broom clears away inconvenient evidence. The razor disciplines honest thinking; the broom describes motivated dishonesty, or at least motivated blindness. You keep the theory, you remove the facts that challenge it.

Both matter in everyday life. But in the context of anxiety, the broom is doing a great deal of work, mostly without our knowledge.

How Anxiety Sweeps the Floor

Anxiety is not simply a feeling. It is, among other things, a perceptual stance; a way of noticing the world that is shaped heavily by threat. When anxiety is present, attention narrows toward potential danger, and ambiguous information gets interpreted in the most threatening direction available. The neutral expression on a colleague's face becomes a sign of disapproval, the slight tightness in your chest becomes evidence of something serious, and the silence after a text message becomes confirmation that you have said the wrong thing.

This is the broom at work. Your anxious mind does not experience itself as selecting a negative version of events; it experiences itself as simply seeing what is there. The filtering happens before the information reaches conscious awareness, so nothing presents itself as a claim to be examined; everything presents itself as fact. You cannot apply the razor to a theory that has not announced itself as a theory.

This matters because it means insight alone rarely shifts anxiety. You can understand intellectually that you are catastrophising, and the next anxious thought still arrives pre-formed, carrying the full weight of certainty. The knowing does not change the seeing.

Where Confirmation Bias Comes In

If the broom is how anxious perception gets established, confirmation bias is how it stays in place. Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out, remember, and credit information that supports what we already believe, while discounting information that does not.

In anxiety, this runs in a particularly efficient direction. When the feared outcome does not occur, the credit doesn't go to the absence of actual threat; it goes to the precaution taken. You cancelled the social event and felt relief, and the relief confirms that the event was indeed dangerous. You checked the lock three times and nothing bad happened, and the safety behaviour gets the credit rather than the reality. Disconfirming evidence is not just ignored; it is converted, becoming more evidence for the original belief.

The result is a belief system that is, in practice, unfalsifiable, because every outcome confirms it.

The floor stays swept, and you never notice the sweeping.

Two Readings of the Same Thought

The same piece of information can be handled in two very different ways. The broom takes it as fact and sweeps aside whatever does not fit; the razor treats it as a claim and lets the evidence weigh in. The difference is easiest to see side by side. Open a step on each side below to compare.

Open a step on each side to compare.

Occam's broom

Sweeps positives under the rug.

1 Data arrives as fact, not claim +

Standing On The Beach

Fri, 22 May 2026 14:00:00 GMT

Photo by Дмитрий Тяжкороб / Unsplash

There can be a kind of flatness that brings people into the therapy space. Not exactly despair — More a sense that nothing is solid. Work feels directionless. Your relationship feels conditional and insecure. The things that used to matter haven’t disappeared so much as gone quiet, and what’s left is a low, persistent question: what, exactly, is the point of any of this?

It’s tempting to call this depression and move on. Sometimes that’s accurate, and treating it as such is sensible. But sometimes what’s sitting in the room is something else: a person who has looked clearly at the world and found that the usual answers don’t hold up. Career doesn’t quite land. The standard cultural scripts, the ones about working hard, settling down, building something, all start to feel a bit thin when you actually examine them. The sense that there’s something wrong with you is the trap many of us fall into when in fact, this philosophical clarity may be closer to reality than the scripts you are chasing.

It’s also, I’d argue, a very contemporary problem, and not only at the individual level. Albert Camus, writing in the middle of the last century, described what he called the absurd: the gap between our demand for the world to make sense and the world’s complete silence on the matter. We want meaning. The universe doesn’t supply it. The universe doesn’t care. That gap doesn’t close, no matter how hard we think about it.¹

What’s changed since Camus’s time isn’t the gap. It’s that the gap has become a kind of public condition, visible at the level of whole societies, not just individual lives. It’s become so “baked in” that we don’t notice it. Institutions that used to supply a sense of coherence such as governments, religions, the media, have lost a great deal of their credibility, and nothing especially solid has replaced them. In particular is the loss of the belief and trust in each other as vested interests serve to profit only themselves. The result isn’t a society that has collectively faced the absurd and found its own version of revolt. It’s more a society that is struggling to understand, blaming themselves or each other, and all the while going along with the game.

You can see this play out in a few different ways. There’s the retreat into irony, particularly among younger people, where keeping everything at a slight comic distance becomes a way of never being caught caring too much about anything that might let you down. Or being anti-everything in a hardened rejection of all, wanting to burn everything but with no clear sense of what to replace it with. Those are understandable as a defence but the trouble is that it tends to harden into something structural: the irony stops protecting sincerity and starts replacing it, until sincerity itself starts to look a bit embarrassing — the protest begins to look formulaic and predictable. Ignorable.

There’s also the retreat into the great panacea of consumption, an economy that runs on the promise that the next purchase, the next update, the next experience will be the one that finally fills the space. This doesn’t resolve anything either. It just makes the question easier to avoid noticing, for a while, until the next thing is needed.

And then there’s a colder response, one that’s harder to look at directly: when nothing feels legitimate, when no institution or shared story seems to be holding anything together, destruction itself can start to feel like the only honest act left. Burn it down, because at least burning it down is real. This is nihilism (the conviction that nothing carries any weight or value at all)² with momentum, and it’s where the absence of meaning stops being a private ache and becomes something with consequences for everyone around it.

None of these responses are exactly wrong, in the sense that they’re all reactions to something real. The silence Camus described is genuinely there. Institutions genuinely have lost credibility in ways that aren’t always unjustified. Money is consumed at a rate proportionate to its creation through every stage of life. The question is what gets done with that recognition, and so far, as a culture, we don’t seem to be doing much with it beyond distraction, detachment, or destruction.

So what do you do with that, once you’ve noticed it, in your own life if not in the culture at large?

Camus’s answer was not to look away, and not to manufacture a consoling story either. He thought both of those moves were a kind of surrender. What he proposed instead was something he called revolt. Not revolt as in burning things down, but as a stance: you see the absurd clearly, you don’t pretend it isn’t there, and you go on living and creating and caring about things anyway. His image for this was Sisyphus, endlessly rolling his boulder up the hill, watching it roll back down, starting again. Camus’s point wasn’t that Sisyphus finds a way to make the boulder meaningful. It’s that Sisyphus is still the one pushing it. The task doesn’t change. But what he brings to it is his. He has created a meaning. Taken ownership of his story.

The task doesn’t change. But what he brings to it is his.

This is where, for me, narrative therapy becomes useful in a way I didn’t expect when I first started this work. It can sit so perfectly within the framework of philosophical thought, of the existential experience of life.

One of the central concepts in narrative therapy is paying attention to what we call unique outcomes: moments that don’t fit the dominant story a person tells about themselves. Someone says nothing ever works out for them, and then mentions, almost in passing, a time something did. Someone says they’re incapable of connection, and then describes a moment, brief, maybe years ago, where they weren’t. These moments don’t disprove the larger story. They don’t magically turn “nothing works out” into “everything will be fine now.” What they do is show that the story isn’t total. There was a crack in it. Something didn’t fit.

That’s Camus’s revolt, in miniature, something I think is worth noticing, that it’s the opposite move to the cultural responses described above. Irony keeps you at a distance from caring. Consumption distracts you from the question. Destruction answers the silence with more silence, just louder. The unique outcome does none of that. It’s small, specific, and it stays with the difficulty rather than escaping it. It steps to the side of the game.

There’s another idea in narrative therapy called the absent but implicit, and it’s the one I keep coming back to with clients who are sitting in this flatness. The idea is that when someone says nothing matters, that statement carries an echo of what would matter, if it were there. You can’t feel the absence of connection unless connection has some kind of value to you. You can’t feel that nothing means anything unless meaning is something you were looking for. The flatness isn’t indifference. It’s closer to grief for something that hasn’t arrived, or has been lost, or was never quite available in the first place.

Camus made almost exactly this point. The absurd isn’t a flat, neutral observation. It’s passionate. Someone who genuinely felt nothing wouldn’t experience meaninglessness as a problem at all. The fact that it feels like a problem is, in a strange way, the evidence that something in the person is still very much alive and asking.

That last point matters in so many ways. If the flatness carries an echo of what would matter, then naming that echo is itself a discovery. Not a finding in the sense of recovering something that was lost intact and putting it back. More like locating a thread that was there all along, underneath the flatness, and discovering it can be picked up again. Beneath the surface, you are there, waiting to become. The small successes that we notice work the same way. Once noticed, they don’t stay isolated. Our brains take the new awareness and build connections to other moments as it seeks to illuminate the patterns. Other evidence begins to emerge, and slowly a second story starts to take shape alongside the first one. Not instead of it. Alongside it. That is you beginning to be empowered.

This is also where narrative therapy goes further than Camus was inclined to. He was right that the silence doesn’t resolve, and that no amount of re-authoring repairs a culture’s institutions or makes the universe start supplying meaning where it didn’t before. But within a life, a thickened story is power. It changes what’s available to act from. Someone who can see their own unique outcomes, who can name what the flatness has been pointing towards all along, has more to work with than someone who only has the negative, dismal dominant story. That’s a profound difference. It can be the difference between staying stuck in the flatness and finding a way to move within it.

What it can do, then, is change the relationship to the boulder, and change what the climb itself can hold. A life that’s been more fully told, with its unique outcomes noticed and its absent-but-implicit values named, isn’t a life that’s solved anything in a final sense. At first, the repetition is still there. The work, the relationships, the daily grind of getting up and doing it again, none of that disappears. But there’s a real difference between carrying a boulder you’ve stopped looking at, and carrying one you’ve turned to face, with some sense of why it matters to you that it gets carried at all. This is where choice becomes our greatest tool.

My assessment is that this is closer to what’s actually on offer, for most of us, most of the time. Not a cure for the absurd, either personal or cultural. But not simply enduring it either. It’s a finding who you are, what your preferences are, and, step by step, creating a world that you enjoy, one that works for you, regardless of the absurdity which surrounds you. A worthy goal.

References and further reading

¹ Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus (J. O’Brien, Trans.). Penguin Modern Classics.

² Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Nihilism”, plato.stanford.edu/entries/nihilism

A note for anyone who recognises the title of this post in another context: Standing on the Beach, a 1986 compilation by The Cure, includes a track inspired by Camus’s novel The Stranger. The connection between existentialist literature and popular music runs deeper, and longer, than people often assume.

To bring my own ideas and therapeutic style to these posts, I use AI to assist with referencing, drafting, editing, and checking that the thinking is academically sound. The writing remains largely my own.

Carrying it doesn’t have to be a solitary task

If any of this resonates, and you’d like some support in working through it, get in touch.

Get in touch

The Chemical Imbalance Myth

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:00:00 GMT

Photo: Amir Moharrami / Unsplash

For decades, if you went to your GP feeling down or depressed, you were probably told some version of the same thing: that your brain had a chemical imbalance, probably involving serotonin, and that medication would correct it. It was a convenient explanation that seemed to make sense, and so it stuck. By the early 2000s it had moved from clinical shorthand into everyday language, the kind of thing that people took as a given when discussing mental health.

But we now know that the evidence never really supported it.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

In 2022, Professor Joanna Moncrieff and colleagues at University College London published a systematic umbrella review in Molecular Psychiatry, a comprehensive analysis drawing together decades of research on serotonin and depression.¹ Their conclusion was unambiguous: there is no consistent evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin levels or reduced serotonin activity. Studies examining serotonin in the blood, in the brain, and via the genes that regulate it have failed to produce findings that support the hypothesis. The review has been downloaded more than a million times. Notably, the RACGP's own clinical news platform published the findings directly, with Moncrieff as author, in the same month the paper appeared.³

The response from the research community has been significant. In 2023, thirty-six senior researchers published a formal critique in the same journal, raising methodological objections.² Peer critique of this kind is exactly how science should work. What those thirty-six researchers could not do, however, was effectively refute the original claim. Even those most critical largely concede that the simple chemical imbalance narrative was never well-supported by the evidence. The debate concerns the finer details of serotonin research, not whether the explanation offered to patients for thirty years was accurate.

It was not.

The debate concerns the finer details of serotonin research, not whether the explanation offered to patients for thirty years was accurate.

How the Story Shaped the Treatment

This matters for a specific reason. The explanation shaped the treatment. If depression is a chemical problem, the obvious response is a chemical fix. Antidepressant prescriptions have risen sharply across Australia over the past three decades, to the point where around one in seven Australians now takes them, with 92% of those scripts written by GPs.⁵ That figure sits uncomfortably alongside the fact that the foundational rationale for that level of prescribing has not held up to scrutiny.

The clinical landscape is beginning to shift. In November 2025, the RACGP added a new section to its First Do No Harm guide addressing long-term antidepressant use.⁴ The guide notes that most clinical guidelines recommend antidepressants for only six to twelve months for an episode of anxiety or depression, while the average duration of use in Australia is four years. It directs GPs toward careful review, shared decision-making, and non-pharmacological management wherever possible. It is not a repudiation of prescribing. It is, however, a formal acknowledgment that the default has been running well ahead of the evidence.

Naming the Gap

The work of organisations like the Not Broken Project, co-founded by Professor Jon Jureidini and Alfred Health psychiatrist Dr Paul Denborough, is oriented precisely toward this gap: naming what the evidence shows, and advocating for better non-pharmaceutical support for people experiencing grief, loneliness, sadness, and distress linked to life circumstances.⁶ These are not edge cases. They describe a significant proportion of the people who present to GPs and to counsellors each week.

Much of what gets labelled depression is, on any honest account, a human response to human experience. Grief after loss. Loneliness following a relationship breakdown or a significant life change. The slow accumulation of stress, disconnection, or meaninglessness that builds when life has gone in a direction that does not fit who you are. A workplace devoid of limits or humanity. A life lived discordant to your values. And so on, and on.

None of that is a malfunction. Framing it as one is not only scientifically unsupported; it can actively discourage people from the kinds of help that would actually serve them.

What Counselling and Psychotherapy Actually Do

Counselling and psychotherapy work with the actual content of a person's distress. They help you make sense of what has happened, understand the patterns that keep you stuck, rebuild connection with yourself and others, and find your way toward a life that feels liveable. For many people experiencing what gets called depression, this is the real treatment.

None of this means medication is never appropriate. There are people for whom it plays a genuine and useful role, often for a specific period, and in conjunction with therapy, and nothing here is intended as advice about any individual situation. My assessment is that the story used to justify widespread, default pharmaceutical treatment of emotional distress was not built on solid evidence, and that the people most likely to have been ill-served by it are those whose suffering had its roots in circumstances that no pill was ever going to change. What follows from that is equally important: greater investment in talking therapies, and broader public understanding of what counsellors and psychotherapists actually do, are not optional additions to a mental health system built around medication. (And we've not mentioned how much cheaper an antidepressant is than effective therapy.) For a significant proportion of people, they are the more appropriate first response.

If that sounds like where you are, there is help that is designed for exactly that.

References

Moncrieff J, Cooper RE, Stockmann T, Amendola S, Hengartner MP, Horowitz MA. The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Mol Psychiatry. 2022;28:3243–3256. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0
Bartova L, Lanzenberger R, Rujescu D, et al. Reply to: “The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence.” Mol Psychiatry. 2023;28:3153–3154. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-023-02093-0
Moncrieff J, Horowitz M. Depression probably not caused by chemical imbalance: Study. newsGP (RACGP). 22 July 2022. racgp.org.au
RACGP. Long-term use of antidepressants without careful review. First Do No Harm guide. November 2025. racgp.org.au
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Mental health services in Australia: medications. 2024–25. aihw.gov.au
Not Broken Project. notbrokenproject.com.au

Does any of this resonate with you?

If your distress has roots in life circumstances, there is help designed for exactly that. I'd be glad to talk.

Get in touch

English as a Problem Language

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Photo: James Balatan / Unsplash

Something is shifting in the English-speaking world, and it's not especially easy to put your finger on. It's not a single event. It's more of a slow deterioration — a background anxiety that keeps rising, a sense that things are more divided, more exhausting, more hopeless than they used to be. The sense that it's getting worse, that "it's all crazy," is becoming something I hear daily in therapy sessions. The 2026 World Happiness Report has put some numbers to what a lot of people have been quietly feeling. For the second year running, not one English-speaking country made the world's top ten happiest nations. Finland first. Iceland second. Denmark third. Costa Rica fourth. Australia fifteenth. The US twenty-third. The UK twenty-ninth. We are, as a group, falling behind — and the people falling fastest are the youngest.

The Data

The World Happiness Report, published annually by Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre in partnership with Gallup, measures how people rate their own lives on a scale of zero to ten. Since 2012, the global average has been climbing. Most of the world — Europe, Latin America, East Asia — is doing better than it was. The Anglosphere (those countries that speak English as a primary language) is moving in the other direction.

The sharpest decline is among people under 25. In the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, happiness among young people has fallen by almost a full point on that ten-point scale over the past two decades. Across 85 out of 136 countries surveyed, young people today rate their lives more highly than the same cohort did twenty years ago. In the Anglosphere, the reverse is true. The six largest drops in youth happiness since 2011 have all occurred in English-speaking countries.

That is so significant, such a strong pattern, that there has to be an underlying, systemic reason.

Is Language the Mechanism?

I've been sitting with this question for a while. Not formally — more as a background observation that something about the English-speaking world felt different. More frayed. More reactive. Significantly more negative. And I kept noticing the contrast whenever I was in Japan.

I go often, and have done for decades, and I've been fortunate enough to pick up enough of the language and culture to move through it with some genuine familiarity rather than as a visitor looking in. And what strikes me, consistently, is a quality of atmosphere that's hard to name precisely — less braced, perhaps. Less like the ground is always shifting underfoot.

There are plenty of reasons for that. Culture, history, social structures quite different from ours. But the thing I keep coming back to is this: Japanese acts as a natural barrier against most of what floods through an English-language feed. Not because the problems don't exist, but because the content doesn't travel as effectively across a language most people can't easily use. The feed stays largely local. The atmosphere it creates stays largely Japanese.

Ours doesn't.

What English does — and I think this is the crux of it — is hold the door open to the United States. Not deliberately, and not as anyone's policy. Just structurally, as a consequence of sharing a language with the world's most algorithmically dominant content ecosystem. American fake news arrives in our feeds because we can read it. American bots — many of them Russian-origin operations specifically targeting US domestic politics — wash through into our conversations because the platform doesn't know or care that we're in Melbourne or Auckland rather than Michigan. American culture wars, American political grievances, American anxieties about American problems land on us with the same force they land on Americans, despite the fact that most of it has essentially nothing to do with our lives.

And the thing is, it doesn't arrive labelled as American. It arrives looking like news, like fact, like the shared reality of the English-speaking world. Its repetition makes it seem more real. Its presentation is as universal fact, not as geographically limited. There's no "12% of young people in Australia…" kind of indicator. It's all presented as a universal statement of fact. Look for it. It's easy to spot once you know what you're looking at.

I couldn't prove any of this for years. It remained for me an observation that felt like it was probably pointing at something real.

Then the 2026 data landed.

The World Happiness Report now shows what I'd been sensing but couldn't verify. Social media exists in Japan. Smartphones are everywhere. Economic anxiety is not a uniquely Anglo problem. And yet the research finds the link between heavy social media use and declining wellbeing is notably stronger in English-speaking countries — even controlling for how much people use social media and which platforms they favour, young people in the Anglosphere are doing worse than the numbers alone would predict.

Language, I suspect, is at least part of the reason. It's not a filter we're missing. It's a pipe we didn't know we'd agreed to. Every dysfunction our neighbour experiences is yelled down that pipe to us in an endless torrent of fear-inducing, opinion-as-fact, hyperbolic spin. And it has an impact.

The Bot Problem

There's another dimension to this that tends to get less attention than it deserves. A meaningful proportion of what circulates through English-language social media isn't organic human conversation at all. Russian state-linked operations — and others — have made a sustained, well-documented investment in sowing discord within English-speaking democracies, with the United States as the primary target. The approach isn't especially subtle once you know what you're looking at: fabricated accounts, amplified divisions, narratives calibrated not so much to persuade as to exhaust and demoralise. Americans share these posts. Australians encounter them. They get picked up, passed along, and quietly absorbed as an accurate picture of the world.

Once a distorted or entirely fabricated story has circulated widely enough, it starts shaping how real people feel about their community, their institutions, and their country. The ambient distrust, the sense that everything is broken or corrupt or irredeemably divided — some of that reflects genuine problems. Some of it has been carefully manufactured. Most people, most of the time, are not in a position to easily tell the difference.

If your primary language is Japanese, or Thai, or French, you're not immune to any of this. But the main delivery mechanism runs on English.

What This Looks Like in the Therapy Space

In my practice, I see this fairly regularly, though it doesn't arrive with a clear label. People don't generally come in saying their feed has distorted their worldview. What they present with is anxiety, or a low-grade anger that seems somewhat unmoored from their actual circumstances, or a conviction that things are far more dangerous and broken than their direct experience of daily life would actually support. They've taken on a story — often, in this context, an American story — about the state of the world, and it's sitting in them like something true.

That's not a trivial thing. Prolonged exposure to content designed to provoke and catastrophise doesn't simply affect your mood in the moment. Over time, it shifts the baseline. It changes how the nervous system reads neutral situations. It subtly degrades trust — in institutions, in strangers, in the possibility that things might actually be all right, or will be so.

The 2026 report found that the most damaging pattern isn't simply heavy use — it's passive, algorithmically-driven use. Sitting in the scroll. Watching what the platform decides to serve you next. That's Instagram. That's TikTok. That's the autoplay queue, and Reels. Platforms built around direct communication and connection show a much weaker association with declining wellbeing. The algorithm that decides what you see next is, it turns out, not especially interested in your welfare. It's interested in keeping you watching. And of course that's about using you to make money.

The algorithm doesn't care about your wellbeing. It cares about your attention, and your advertising revenue potential. And the most reliable way to hold attention is to keep you anxious, outraged, or afraid.

This Isn't Hopeless

None of this is meant to be dispiriting, though I appreciate it might read that way. It isn't hopeless.

The point is that a lot of what people are experiencing as personal — their own anxiety, their own hopelessness, their own sense that the world is in freefall — has a structural explanation. And structural explanations are more useful than personal ones, because they point toward something you can actually do.

If you notice that certain apps reliably leave you feeling worse, that's worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. If you find yourself holding convictions about the world that don't quite square with your actual, lived experience of the people around you, it's a reasonable thing to wonder where those convictions came from.

And if separating the signal from the noise is starting to feel genuinely difficult — that's not a personal failing. It's the predictable result of spending time in an environment that has been quite deliberately designed to make it hard.

You don't have to disengage from the world. But there's something to be said for deciding, with some intention, how much of it you let in — and from where.

References

Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B., & Wang, S. (Eds.). (2026). World Happiness Report 2026. Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford / Gallup.

Burn-Murdoch, J. (2026). Why are young adults in the English-speaking world so unhappy? Financial Times.

Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation. Penguin Press. (Contributor to World Happiness Report 2026.)

Is the noise getting to you?

If a persistent anxiety, a low-level dread, or a growing distrust of just about everything is sitting in the background of your days, it might be worth talking it through with someone. Not to be given a tidy answer — but to find a bit of your own ground again.

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Lion's Mane - the claims and the reality

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Photo: Rod Ramsell / Unsplash

My digital spaces have recently been swamped by ads and testimonials for lion's mane extract, and claims of significant benefits to those living with complex trauma. For people in that situation, some of those claims will sound particularly appealing: better memory, reduced anxiety, clearer thinking; a brain that just works better. This post is an attempt to look at it as objectively as I can.

What is lion’s mane extract?

Lion’s mane (Hericium erinaceus) is an edible mushroom with a long history in traditional East Asian medicine. It’s been used for centuries — primarily in China and Japan — to support digestive and neurological health. Today it’s most commonly sold as a powdered extract in capsules or tinctures, and it’s become one of the more heavily marketed supplements in the nootropic — or “brain-boosting” — category.

The part that’s genuinely interesting, scientifically, is what’s inside it. Lion’s mane contains two groups of bioactive compounds — hericenones (from the fruiting body) and erinacines (from the mycelium, or root structure). Both have been shown, in laboratory and animal studies, to stimulate the production of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) — a protein involved in the growth, maintenance, and survival of neurons ^[1]. Importantly, erinacines are small enough in molecular structure to cross the blood-brain barrier — something NGF itself cannot do when administered externally ^{[2, 3]}.

That’s not nothing. But it’s also a long way from a clinical treatment.

Why complex trauma makes this conversation interesting

Complex trauma — particularly trauma experienced early in life — has well-documented effects on brain development. The hippocampus, a region central to memory, contextual learning, and the regulation of threat responses, is one of the areas most consistently affected. Research has found reduced hippocampal volume associated with childhood maltreatment, with the strongest effects seen in the dentate gyrus and CA3 subfields — precisely the areas where adult neurogenesis (brain growth) occurs ^[4]. The underlying process involves suppression of neurotrophin expression and impaired neuron regeneration under chronic stress conditions ^[5].

This is where lion’s mane becomes theoretically relevant. Erinacine A has been shown in animal models to elevate NGF expression specifically in the hippocampus — not broadly across the brain, but in this particular region ^[6]. Animal studies have also found increased hippocampal neurogenesis following lion’s mane administration ^[7]. In principle, then, these compounds could support some of the neuroplasticity conditions that trauma recovery depends on.

That’s a reasonable hypothesis. It is also, currently, just a hypothesis.

No clinical trials have tested lion’s mane in trauma populations. The human research that exists — mostly small studies in healthy adults and older people with mild cognitive concerns — shows modest and inconsistent effects. The leap from “may support hippocampal neurogenesis in rodents” to “helps people recover from complex trauma” is a large one, and marketing language tends to obscure that gap rather than acknowledge it, in order to gain your dollar.

What it may genuinely offer

If we set aside the overclaiming, an objective look at the available evidence suggests lion’s mane extract may offer the following:

Modest cognitive support — one randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot study found that a single 1.8g dose improved processing speed in healthy young adults, and 28 days of supplementation showed a trend toward reduced subjective stress ^[8].
Mood regulation — a small, uncontrolled pilot study found improvements in anxiety and depression measures, alongside increased circulating BDNF levels ^[9].
Sleep quality — noted in multiple reviews as a potential benefit, and relevant given how central sleep disruption is to trauma presentations ^[10].

These are not trivial things for someone living with complex trauma. They’re also not a treatment, and they won’t do what therapy does.

My assessment is this: lion’s mane may help create some of the neurobiological conditions that support recovery — alongside what we know more confidently, like regular exercise, adequate sleep, and meaningful therapeutic work. It is not a substitute for any of those.

If you decide to try it

The research that exists has generally used doses of 1–3 grams per day, with studies up to 5 grams per day finding no significant adverse effects. It appears well tolerated in most people, though rare allergic reactions have been documented, and anyone taking prescription medication should check with their GP or prescriber before starting, as formal drug interaction data in humans is limited ^[11].

A few things worth knowing before you buy:

Fruiting body vs. mycelium matters. The erinacines — the compounds most relevant to neurological effects — come from the mycelium. Many cheaper products use mycelium grown on grain substrate, which substantially dilutes the active compound content. Products that specify mycelium extract and provide information about erinacine content are generally more reliable.

Buy Australian where you can. Australian-manufactured supplements are subject to Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) oversight, which provides meaningful assurance about what’s actually in the product. Many imported products — particularly those sold through social media — are not subject to equivalent regulation, can be bulked up with other products, or simply contain an insufficient dose to be of any potential benefit. They’re not worth it.

Read the advertising carefully. If a product promises to “rewire your brain,” “eliminate brain fog,” or “treat” any specific condition, those are marketing claims, not clinical ones. A responsible manufacturer will describe potential benefits without making therapeutic claims the evidence doesn’t support.

A note on craving solutions

People who live with complex trauma often spend years searching for something that will finally make the difference. That’s not a character flaw — it’s a reasonable response to suffering that has often been minimised or misunderstood. It’s also evidence of a drive to support yourself and to give yourself the best chance into the future. But it does mean the wellness industry has a ready and motivated audience, and some of what gets marketed into that space deserves more scrutiny than it receives.

Lion’s mane is not the worst of that. It’s a real food, with a real history, and some genuinely interesting — if preliminary — science behind it. It’s unlikely to harm you, and it may offer modest support. The choice of whether to try it is individual, and it’s a reasonable one to make.

What I’d gently caution against is letting the hope it represents substitute for the harder, slower work of trauma recovery. That work is irreplaceable. Anything that supports it is worth considering. Anything that promises to replace it deserves scepticism.

References

Kawagishi H, et al. Erinacines A, B and C, strong stimulators of nerve growth factor (NGF)-synthesis, from the mycelia of Hericium erinaceum. Tetrahedron Letters. 1994;35(10):1569–1572.
Li IC, et al. Neurohealth properties of Hericium erinaceus mycelia enriched with erinacines. Behavioural Neurology. 2018;2018:5802634.
Martínez-Mármol R, et al. Hericerin derivatives activate a pan-neurotrophic pathway in central hippocampal neurons converging to ERK1/2 signaling enhancing spatial memory. Journal of Neurochemistry. 2023;165(6):791–808.
Teicher MH, Anderson CM, Polcari A. Childhood maltreatment is associated with reduced volume in the hippocampal subfields CA3, dentate gyrus, and subiculum. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2012;109(9):E563–E572.
Teicher MH, Samson JA. Annual research review: Enduring neurobiological effects of childhood abuse and neglect. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 2016;57(3):241–266.
Tsai-Teng T, et al. Erinacine A-enriched Hericium erinaceus mycelium ameliorates Alzheimer’s disease-related pathologies in APPswe/PS1dE9 transgenic mice. Journal of Biomedical Science. 2016;23:49.
Brandalise F, et al. Dietary supplementation of Hericium erinaceus increases mossy fiber–CA3 hippocampal neurotransmission and recognition memory in wild-type mice. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 2017;2017:3864340.
Docherty S, Doughty FL, Smith EF. The acute and chronic effects of lion’s mane mushroom supplementation on cognitive function, stress and mood in young adults: a double-blind, parallel groups, pilot study. Nutrients. 2023;15(22):4842.
Vigna L, et al. Hericium erinaceus improves mood and sleep disorders in patients affected by overweight or obesity: could circulating pro-BDNF and BDNF be potential biomarkers? Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 2019;2019:7861297. (Pilot study; no placebo group.)
Cha S, et al. A review of the effects of mushrooms on mood and neurocognitive health across the lifespan. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 2024;158:105548.
Contato AG, Conte-Junior CA. Lion’s mane mushroom (Hericium erinaceus): a neuroprotective fungus with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial potential — a narrative review. Nutrients. 2025;17(8):1307.

Would you like to explore evidence-based approaches to trauma recovery?

Feel free to get in touch.

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Early Vs. Later Trauma: How timing shapes healing

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Photo: chris paul / Unsplash

If you're in therapy — or thinking about starting — you may have wondered why healing feels so different for different people. Why some people seem to be finding their way back to themselves, while others feel like they're building something they've never quite had. One of the reasons for this has to do with when trauma first began. Understanding this difference won't speed up your healing. But it might help you be more patient, and more compassionate, with yourself.

These aren't rigid categories — many people find themselves somewhere in between, or relating to parts of both. This framework is meant to offer language for experiences that can be hard to name, not to put you in a box.

Early Trauma — Before You Had a Stable Foundation

If trauma began during the foundational years of development — before you had a formed sense of self, before you had language to make sense of your experiences, or before you had any sustained experience of safety — your nervous system was still being built as the trauma occurred. The responses your body learned weren't layered on top of something healthy. They were wired in as the baseline.

What might feel different

No clear memories of feeling truly safe
Trusting others or feeling calm in your body feels foreign — not lost, but never quite learned
A sense of always having been "different" from other people
Emotions that feel overwhelming or completely shut off
Difficulty knowing what you need or want

What healing looks like

Learning safety and trust for the first time — not "getting it back"
Building basic emotional regulation skills from the ground up
Discovering what your authentic self feels like
Learning that relationships can be safe (this often takes longer)
Developing a sense of your own worth and identity

Why it's different: Your brain was still forming when trauma occurred, so survival responses got wired in as "normal." Therapy often focuses on building new neural pathways — creating patterns of safety and connection that weren't able to form in the first place. This isn't about fixing something broken; it's about building something new.

For some people, healing means reclaiming what was lost. For others, it means building what was never there to begin with. Both journeys are brave, and both lead somewhere real.

Later Trauma — After You'd Built a Foundation

If trauma happened after you'd developed a more stable sense of self — after you had some experience of safety, connection, and who you were — the disruption lands differently. There's something that was working, and then something changed it.

What might feel different

Remembering what "normal" felt like before
Feeling like you "lost yourself" or became someone different
A clear "before and after" in your life
Frustration that you "should" be able to get back to how you were

What healing looks like

Restoring your nervous system's capacity for safety
Processing specific traumatic events and their impact
Reconnecting with parts of yourself that existed before
Rebuilding trust in yourself and others
Therapy often focuses on working through what was disrupted and returning to patterns that existed before

Why it's different: Your brain had already formed basic templates for safety and connection. Trauma disrupted these systems, but the foundation was there. Healing can sometimes involve "remembering" what safety felt like — finding your way back to something real, even if it feels distant right now.

The Space Between

These categories aren't a clean divide. Development doesn't work on a strict timeline, and trauma often doesn't either. Some people experienced early trauma and also had later trauma layer on top. Some had protective relationships early on that softened the impact, even if trauma started young. Others had later trauma that was severe enough to shake foundational parts of themselves.

If you find yourself relating to both descriptions, that makes sense. You don't have to fit neatly into one category to find this framework useful.

Both Paths Are Valid

One trap worth naming: people with early trauma sometimes minimise their experience because they can't clearly remember it, or because it just felt like "normal life." And people with later trauma sometimes feel guilty, as if their pain is less valid because they did have a foundation at some point. Neither of those comparisons is fair to yourself.

Neither is "easier" or "harder" to heal from. Both require patience, support, and time. Your unique experience deserves understanding, and healing is possible regardless of when trauma began.

Finding the Right Support

A trauma-informed therapist will understand these differences and tailor their approach accordingly. They won't expect you to have skills or memories you never had the chance to develop, and they won't rush you to "get back" to somewhere you might never have been.

Recovery isn't about going back to who you were before trauma happened. It's about discovering your capacity for safety, connection, and being present in your own life. Your nervous system has a remarkable capacity to grow and change, no matter when trauma occurred. The brain retains plasticity throughout life — which means healing isn't just possible in theory.

Sometimes it just needs the right support and understanding to learn — or remember — what safety feels like.

Does any of this resonate with you?

Whether you're building something new or finding your way back, you don't have to navigate it alone. I'd love to support you.

Get in touch

Why Do My Relationships Keep Hurting?

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Photo: Sasha Freemind / Unsplash

If your relationships often feel painful, chaotic, or unfulfilling — if you keep finding yourself in the same dynamics with different people — it may be time to look at something that runs much deeper than the choices you're making. One of the most powerful, and most often unconscious, influences on how we love and connect is our attachment style.¹ Understanding it takes courage. But it also opens a door.

Where These Patterns Come From

Attachment styles develop in childhood, shaped by our early experiences with caregivers — specifically, how they responded when we were scared, hurt, or in need.² From those early interactions, we build what researchers call internal working models: deeply held templates for how relationships work, whether we are loveable, and whether others can be trusted to be there for us.

The important thing to understand is that these patterns were not mistakes. They were adaptations — ways your nervous system learned to stay safe in the relationships you depended on. The difficulty is that they tend to follow us into adulthood long after those original relationships have ended, quietly shaping who we choose, how we behave, and why things keep going wrong in ways that feel familiar and bewildering at the same time.

The good news: attachment patterns are not fixed. With awareness, support, and new relational experiences, they can shift — even profoundly.

Secure Attachment — The Foundation We're All Reaching For

Securely attached people tend to feel comfortable with both closeness and independence. Secure attachment typically develops when caregivers were emotionally attuned and consistently responsive — not perfect, but reliably present.² People with this style tend to:

Trust others without losing themselves
Express needs and feelings openly and respectfully
Move through conflict without the relationship feeling like it's on the line
Feel comfortable with both togetherness and time apart

It's worth noting: many people who didn't have this foundation in childhood can develop what researchers call earned secure attachment — a more grounded way of relating built through therapy, meaningful relationships, and sustained self-reflection.³ This is genuinely possible, and it's often what the therapeutic journey is pointing toward.

Anxious Attachment — When Love Feels Like a Threat

If you have an anxious attachment style, closeness is what you long for — but it's also terrifying. You may find yourself chronically worried about whether your partner really loves you, whether they're about to leave, whether you've said something wrong. The reassurance comes, but it doesn't settle. You're scanning for signs of withdrawal even when things are fine.^5,6

This style often develops when caregiving was inconsistent — sometimes warm and responsive, sometimes not — leaving the child in a state of constant uncertainty about whether their needs would be met.⁷ The nervous system learned: I have to stay alert. I have to work harder. Love is something that can disappear.

Why haven't they replied? Did I say too much? I just need to know we're okay. If they'd just tell me we're okay, I could relax. Why won't they just tell me?

Behaviours that may show up:

Over-texting or obsessing over a partner's responses
Preoccupation with a partner's mood or tone
Difficulty tolerating distance or silence
Emotional outbursts followed by shame
Over-accommodating to avoid conflict

The exhausting loop: seek reassurance → feel briefly settled → anxiety returns → seek again.

Avoidant Attachment — When Closeness Feels Like Loss of Self

People with avoidant attachment often pride themselves on self-sufficiency — and genuinely believe they don't need much from others. But beneath that is something more complicated: emotional closeness was learned to be unsafe, so the nervous system now treats it as a threat.^8,9 When a relationship deepens, something tightens. The urge to withdraw kicks in.

This style often develops when caregivers were emotionally distant or rejecting — not necessarily cruel, but unavailable in the ways that mattered. The child learned to suppress their needs rather than risk the pain of reaching out and finding no one there. I'll manage alone. Needing people only leads to disappointment.

I was fine before this. Why does it feel like they want so much from me? I just need some space. If I could just have a bit of space, I'd be okay.

Behaviours that may show up:

Shutting down or withdrawing during conflict
Difficulty expressing feelings or needs
Ending relationships when they start to feel serious
Distrusting others' intentions or motives
Feeling suffocated by a partner's needs — even when those needs are reasonable

Disorganised Attachment — When You Want Love But Can't Trust It

This is perhaps the most painful pattern to live with — and the most important to approach with compassion. If you recognise it in yourself, please read this gently: this is not a character flaw. It is a survival response to an impossible situation.

Disorganised attachment develops when the person who was meant to be your source of safety was also frightening or unpredictable.^10,11 This creates a fundamental bind that the child's nervous system cannot resolve: I need you to survive, and you are the source of my fear. The result is an attachment system that never gets to organise itself around a coherent strategy.

In adult relationships, this often looks like desperately wanting connection while simultaneously pushing it away — craving closeness but feeling unsafe the moment it arrives. The internal world is one of deep conflict: I want love, but I don't trust it. I need you close. I need you to go away.

I love them. I can't do this. I need them. Why can't they just leave me alone? I'm going to ruin this. I always ruin this.

Behaviours that may show up:

Explosive arguments followed by withdrawal and shame
Sabotaging relationships that start to feel safe or close
Intense fear of abandonment alongside an inability to tolerate closeness
Difficulty regulating emotions
Deep struggles with self-worth and self-blame

This pattern is strongly associated with early trauma — which means it deserves not judgment, but care.

Do I Fit Neatly Into One Category?

Probably not — and that's completely normal. Most people recognise themselves in more than one style. You might be predominantly anxious in romantic relationships but avoidant with friends. You might have grown up mostly secure but experienced trauma later that shifted things. Attachment is not a fixed category you're assigned at birth; it's a living pattern that varies across relationships, contexts, and time.

What's more useful than finding your "type" is starting to notice when a familiar pattern kicks in — that particular tightening in your chest when a message goes unanswered, the urge to pull back just as someone gets close, the sense that love is something you have to earn or can't quite trust. That noticing is where change begins.

Why This Matters — And What Therapy Can Offer

These patterns were adaptive. They helped you survive emotionally. But if you're reading this, you likely already know that they're now costing you something — the closeness, the stability, the kind of love that doesn't leave you exhausted or alone.

Therapy offers a particular kind of space for this work.¹² Not just insight — though understanding your pattern matters — but the lived experience of a relationship where new things are possible. Where you can notice the old pull to withdraw or cling, and choose something different. Where the nervous system slowly learns that it doesn't have to work so hard. Where you begin to respond rather than react.

That is the work. And it is quiet, and gradual, and genuinely possible.

References

Bowlby, J., Attachment and Loss, vol. 1: Attachment (Basic Books, 1969).
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E. and Wall, S., Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978).
Roisman, G. I., Padrón, E., Sroufe, L. A. and Egeland, B., 'Earned-secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect', Child Development, 73/4 (2002), 1204–19.
Siegel, D. J., The Mindful Therapist (Norton, 2010).
Bartholomew, K. and Horowitz, L. M., 'Attachment styles among young adults: a test of a four-category model', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61/2 (1991), 226–44.
Mikulincer, M. and Shaver, P. R., Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change (Guilford Press, 2007).
Cassidy, J. and Shaver, P. R. (eds.), Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications, 3rd edn (Guilford Press, 2016).
Fraley, R. C. and Shaver, P. R., 'Adult romantic attachment: theoretical developments, emerging controversies, and unanswered questions', Review of General Psychology, 4/2 (2000), 132–54.
Dozier, M., Stovall-McClough, K. C. and Albus, K. E., 'Attachment and psychopathology in adulthood', in J. Cassidy and P. R. Shaver (eds.), Handbook of Attachment, 2nd edn (Guilford Press, 2008).
Main, M. and Solomon, J., 'Procedures for identifying infants as disorganised/disoriented', in M. T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti and E. M. Cummings (eds.), Attachment in the Preschool Years (University of Chicago Press, 1990).
van IJzendoorn, M. H., Schuengel, C. and Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., 'Disorganized attachment in early childhood: meta-analysis of precursors, concomitants, and sequelae', Development and Psychopathology, 11/2 (1999), 225–49.
Wallin, D. J., Attachment in Psychotherapy (Guilford Press, 2007).

Do you recognise any of these patterns in yourself?

This kind of self-awareness takes courage. If you'd like support exploring what's underneath and finding a different way forward, I'd love to work with you.

Get in touch

How Fear Shapes What We See - And What We Do

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Photo: Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps / Unsplash

Fear is one of the most powerful forces in human experience. And one of the most misunderstood. We tend to think of fear as a response to something dangerous — and it is. But what happens when fear becomes the lens through which we see everything?

When Fear Becomes the Filter

When we are in a state of fear, our perception narrows. The brain, working exactly as it was designed to, scans for threat — and finds it everywhere. Positives fade into the background. Nuance disappears. What remains is a world that looks overwhelming, dangerous, and hostile.

This isn't weakness or irrationality. It's biology. The part of your nervous system designed for survival has taken over, and in doing so, it has quite literally changed what you are able to perceive. A neutral comment becomes a slight. A quiet moment becomes the calm before the storm. Safety feels like something that exists for other people.

The Wrong System Is Running the Show

Here's what's important to understand: the nervous system that activates under fear is designed for emergencies. It's brilliant at getting you out of immediate danger. It is not, however, designed for navigating the complex terrain of relationships, decisions, careers, or daily life.

When this survival system is running the show, you're not thinking from your values. You're not making decisions from your preferences or your wisdom. You are reacting — to perceived threat. And reactions driven by fear rarely take us where we actually want to go.

The result? Things go wrong. Relationships suffer. Opportunities are missed. Decisions get made from a place of self-protection rather than genuine choice.

The Meaning We Make — And the Loop It Creates

Humans are meaning-making creatures. When things go wrong — even when they've gone wrong because fear was steering — we don't just notice the outcome. We internalise it. We turn it into a story about who we are.

I always mess this up. I can't trust people. I'm not safe. Something is wrong with me.

And here is where fear becomes truly entrenched. Because once we've made that meaning, the fear doesn't need a new trigger — it has evidence now. The loop closes. Fear shapes perception, perception shapes action, action shapes outcome, outcome confirms the story, and the story feeds the fear.

Over time, this loop can leave us in one of two places: hiding — contracted, withdrawn, unable to engage with life fully — or in angry defence, warding off a world that feels relentlessly threatening.

Neither is living. Both are exhausting.

You Can Step Out of the Loop

The good news is that this cycle, as powerful as it feels, is not who you are. It is a pattern — one your nervous system learned, often for very good reasons, often a long time ago. And patterns can change.

Understanding how fear shapes perception is the first step. Not to dismiss the fear, but to recognise it for what it is — a signal, not a truth. When you can begin to see fear as something happening in you rather than a reliable report about the world, something shifts. Slowly, you begin to act from something deeper than threat. You begin to act from your values, your preferences, your genuine self.

That is when life starts to open up again.

The thinking behind this post

The thinking in this post draws on some heavyweight ideas. Joseph LeDoux's work on the fear brain, Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory, and Aaron Beck's cognitive research all point to the same uncomfortable truth: when fear is running, the rest of us largely isn't. The meaning-making piece owes a lot to the Narrative Therapy tradition of Michael White and David Epston — the idea that the stories we tell about ourselves are constructed, not carved in stone.

Do you recognise yourself in this loop?

If you'd like support finding your way out of it, I'd love to help.

Get in touch

Reclaiming Your Story: Building a Self Beyond the Watchful Gaze

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 06:04:06 GMT

The Weight of Being Seen
If you're reading this, you might know the exhausting experience of living under what feels like constant surveillance—not necessarily from cameras or authorities, but from an internalised sense that you're always being evaluated, measured, and found lacking. This invisible jury follows you everywhere, whispering about what you should be doing, how you should look, what counts as acceptable.
For those carrying complex trauma, this feeling runs deeper than social anxiety. It's woven into the very fabric of how we learned to survive. We became experts at reading rooms, anticipating reactions, shape-shifting to meet others' expectations—all while losing touch with what we actually wanted, needed, or valued.
The philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about how power structures don't just control us through force, but by making us feel constantly observed and judged. When trauma happens early and repeatedly, especially in relationships that were supposed to be safe, we internalise this surveillance system. We become our own prison guards, our own harsh critics.
But; You can learn to step outside this panopticon. You can build a sense of self that isn't dependent on external validation or approval.

Starting with Your Nervous System
Before we can challenge old patterns or craft new stories, we need to help your nervous system feel safe enough to explore. Dr. Stephen Porges' research on the polyvagal theory shows us that our autonomic nervous system is constantly scanning for safety or threat. When we've experienced complex trauma, our system often gets stuck in states of hypervigilance (fight/flight) or shutdown (freeze).
Small steps toward regulation:

Notice your breath without trying to change it. Sometimes just witnessing is enough.
Find your feet on the ground. Feel the support beneath you.
Look around and connect with each of your classic 5 senses - Hearing, Taste, Touch, Sight, Smell.
Practice the gentle exhale—let your out-breath be slightly longer than your in-breath.

These aren't cure-alls, but they're foundation stones. When your nervous system feels more settled, you have more access to choice, creativity, and authentic preference.
Reclaiming Your Agency
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as an example offers us a powerful concept: psychological flexibility. This means being able to stay present with whatever you're experiencing—including difficult emotions or memories—whilst still moving towards what matters to you.
Agency isn't about controlling outcomes or never feeling afraid. It's about recognising that even in difficult circumstances, you have choices about how you respond. Sometimes that choice is as simple as deciding to be curious instead of critical about what you're experiencing.
Questions to reconnect with your agency:

What would you try if you knew you couldn't fail?
What would you do if no one was watching?
What small step could you take today toward something that feels meaningful to you?
How do you want to treat yourself in this moment?

Your agency might feel rusty from disuse, underuse, or may not ever have been fully developed. Start small. Notice when you choose kindness over self-criticism. Celebrate when you speak up for a preference, even about something tiny like what to have for lunch.
Discovering Your Preferred Story
Narrative therapy reminds us that we are not our problems—we are complex beings who have experienced problems. The stories we tell about ourselves matter immensely, especially when trauma has convinced us that we are fundamentally flawed, dangerous, or unworthy.
But you get to be the author of your own story. Not the only author—we're all co-creating with others and with circumstances beyond our control—but you have significant authorial power over the meaning you make of your experiences.
Exploring your preferred story:

What values have you held onto despite everything you've been through?
When have you surprised yourself with your resilience or creativity?
What would people who truly see and appreciate you say about your character?
If your trauma had to shrink down and take up appropriate space in your life story (important but not dominant), what else would become visible?

Your preferred story doesn't have to be glamorous or perfect or deny real struggles. It can include chapters about surviving, healing, learning, growing, and discovering what you actually care about when you're not constantly managing crises.
Good Enough Is Revolutionary
Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the concept of the "good enough" parent—someone who meets a child's needs adequately without being perfect. This idea is radical for those of us who learned that anything less than perfection was dangerous.
Good enough parenting of yourself means:

Noticing your needs without immediately dismissing them as selfish
Meeting some of your needs some of the time (this is actually excellent!)
Forgiving yourself for being human and therefore imperfect
Celebrating small wins and incremental progress
Holding yourself with the same compassion you'd offer a good friend

You don't need to become a completely different person to deserve love, safety, and belonging. You don't need to heal perfectly or quickly. You just need to keep showing up for yourself with curiosity and kindness.
The Practice of Becoming
Building a self after complex trauma isn't a destination—it's an ongoing practice. Some days you'll feel more solid in who you are. Other days the old surveillance system will activate, and you'll feel like you're performing for an invisible audience again. Both are normal parts of the process.
What matters is developing the capacity to notice when you've slipped back into old patterns and gently guide yourself back to what feels authentic. It's learning to ask: "What do I actually want?" and crucially, trusting that your preferences matter.
You Are Already Enough
The self you're building isn't something you need to construct from scratch. You're excavating, uncovering, and reclaiming parts of yourself that were always there but had to go underground for safety. Your curiosity, your capacity for joy, your unique way of seeing the world, your ability to love—these weren't destroyed by trauma, even if they were buried for a while.
You are not a project to be fixed. You are a person learning to live authentically in your own skin, on your own terms. That's epic work, and you're already doing it just by showing up, just by wondering if something different is possible.
The watchful gaze that once felt so threatening can gradually transform into your own gentle, curious attention—the kind that notices without judgment, that sees without demanding change, that simply witnesses you as you are: complex, resilient, and worthy of your own compassion.

Remember: Healing isn't linear, and you don't have to do it alone. Professional support can be invaluable in this journey, especially from therapists who understand complex trauma and these therapeutic approaches.

References
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777-795.
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2011). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J. B., Bond, F. W., Masuda, A., & Lillis, J. (2006). Acceptance and commitment therapy: Model, processes and outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(1), 1-25.
Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence--from domestic abuse to political terror (3rd ed.). Basic Books.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.Porges, S. W. (2018). Polyvagal theory: A primer. In S. W. Porges & D. A. Dana (Eds.), Clinical applications of the polyvagal theory: The emergence of polyvagal-informed therapies (pp. 50-69). W. W. Norton & Company.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
White, M. (2007). Maps of narrative practice. W. W. Norton & Company.
White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. W. W. Norton & Company.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. International Universities Press.

The Scapegoat Role in Families and Groups: Why One Person Gets the Blame

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:57:21 GMT

In families, workplaces, or social groups, one individual is often unfairly singled out as the scapegoat. The scapegoat role involves being blamed for the mistakes or problems of the group, while others avoid accountability and maintain a false sense of order.
This dynamic is more than simple conflict. It involves emotional abuse, projection, and gaslighting, leaving the scapegoat carrying shame, hurt, and a distorted self-image. Understanding the psychology of scapegoating is an important step towards healing and breaking the cycle.

Black sheep among white sheep symbolising scapegoat role, scapegoat psychology, and family scapegoating.

Characteristics of the Family Scapegoat
Blame and Responsibility
The scapegoat absorbs the guilt and shame of the group, often blamed for issues they did not cause.
The “Identified Patient”
In family scapegoating dynamics, the scapegoat child is labelled the “identified patient.” They are seen as the problem, sometimes pushed into assessments or treatment while the wider family dysfunction is ignored.
The Emotional Dumping Ground
Scapegoats act as the container for unacknowledged emotions and problems. Anger, fear, and disappointment are all projected onto them.
The “Black Sheep”
Often called the “black sheep of the family,” the scapegoat is made to feel different, flawed, or unworthy of acceptance.

How the Scapegoat Role Develops

Narcissistic Families
In narcissistic family systems, scapegoating is common. A narcissistic parent projects their disowned shame and faults onto a child, preserving their own fragile self-image.
Family Equilibrium
By focusing blame on one person, the family system maintains the illusion of harmony. Responsibility is avoided, but the cost is the scapegoat’s wellbeing.
A Threat to Image
A child who shows independence or growth may feel threatening to a parent’s self-image. Casting them as the family scapegoat restores control and stifles their development.

The Psychological Impact of Scapegoating
Emotional Trauma
Being the scapegoat creates lasting scars of shame, rejection, and mistrust. These can grow into complex trauma, anxiety, or depression in adulthood.
Internalised Beliefs
Scapegoats often absorb the family narrative, believing they are inherently flawed or broken.
Relationship Difficulties
As adults, those raised as the scapegoat may struggle to form healthy connections, sometimes repeating patterns of dysfunction in relationships.
Rebellion and Anger
While scapegoats may carry deep inner pain, they often express it outwardly through anger or rebellion—a defence against further harm.

Healing From the Scapegoat Role
Recognising the scapegoat role is the first step in recovery. Therapy, self-compassion, and developing new relational patterns can help break the cycle. Healing from scapegoating often involves:

Releasing internalised shame
Naming and challenging family roles
Learning healthy boundaries
Re-authoring one’s own story, free from projection and blame

By understanding scapegoat psychology and how these patterns operate, individuals can begin to move from pain into growth, building authentic relationships where responsibility is shared rather than shifted.

References

Carey, M. (2020). Family Roles in Dysfunctional Systems. Psychology Today.
Lundy, J. (2018). The Scapegoat Child: How Narcissistic Families Assign Blame. Journal of Family Therapy, 40(3), 345–360.
Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and Family Therapy. Harvard University Press.
Brown, B. (2015). Rising Strong. Spiegel & Grau.

How Social Media Anxiety is Shaped by the Placebo and Nocebo Effects

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 14:00:00 GMT

Social media is part of daily life for billions of people. It connects us, entertains us, and keeps us informed. But it can also significantly influence our mental health—especially anxiety levels—through subtle psychological mechanisms.
Two concepts from psychology and medicine, the placebo effect and nocebo effect, offer a powerful lens for understanding how social media shapes emotional states. Placebo effects occur when positive expectations improve subjective experience, while nocebo effects result in negative outcomes driven by negative expectations¹².

Social Media and the Placebo Effect: When Expectations Reduce AnxietyThe placebo effect occurs when we experience real mental or physical benefits simply because we expect something to help. Studies have shown that positive expectations can trigger beneficial neurobiological responses—such as endorphin and dopamine release—even in the absence of active interventions³⁴.
In social media contexts, placebo-like responses can happen when:

We follow uplifting, motivational accounts and genuinely feel inspired because we expect to be.
We engage in supportive online communities, increasing feelings of safety and connection.
We consume calming content (e.g., guided meditations, nature scenes) and experience reduced stress—partly due to positive anticipation.

Social Media and the Nocebo Effect: When Expectations Fuel AnxietyThe nocebo effect is the reverse—when negative expectations lead to increased discomfort or distress⁵.
On social media, nocebo-like responses might include:

Feeling anxious before opening an app because you expect bad news or conflict.
Worrying about social judgment or rejection, triggering stress before anyone reacts.
Repeated exposure to alarming or fear-inducing content, priming your nervous system to feel unsafe.

Research indicates that negative expectations—particularly influenced by media, social modeling, and prior anxiety—can induce real symptoms and heighten perception of threat⁶.
A recent Australian study highlighted how social media posts about vaccine side effects can trigger nocebo symptoms in others—even when individuals weren’t actually ill⁷.
Studies also show that observing others experiencing symptoms can amplify nocebo responses—a pattern that’s relevant to social platforms where content is widely shared and emotionally charged⁸⁹.

Why the Placebo–Nocebo Lens Matters for Digital WellbeingOur nervous system doesn’t always distinguish between physical threat and perceived threat. Social media is packed with cues that can either calm us (placebo) or heighten anxiety (nocebo). Because algorithms amplify emotionally loaded content, our brains can become conditioned to expect certain outcomes—good or bad—from each scroll session.
This aligns with broader evidence that social context, expectations, and observation play impactful roles in shaping our subjective experience, whether the content is physical or digital¹⁰¹¹.

Practical Strategies to Manage Social Media AnxietyUnderstanding the placebo/nocebo dynamics can help protect your mental health:

Curate your feed for calm: Actively follow content that makes you feel uplifted and supported, reducing negative anticipation.
Check your mindset before scrolling: Notice if you're expecting stress or validation—your expectations shape your experience.
Limit exposure to nocebo triggers: Reduce time on accounts or topics that routinely increase anxiety.
Pair social media with grounding habits: Use deep breathing, walks, or stretching to reset your nervous system after use.

Positive social modeling has also been shown to reduce nocebo responses—exposure to peers describing neutral or positive experiences can counteract anxiety-driven symptom reporting¹²¹³.

The Bottom Line on Social Media and AnxietySocial media isn’t inherently good or bad—it’s a tool. Yet the placebo and nocebo effects demonstrate how our expectations of it directly shape our mental state. By consciously managing what we expect and what we engage with online, we can harness the placebo effect to foster calm and connection and diminish the nocebo effect’s capacity to escalate anxiety.

References
1. Evers, A.W.M., Colloca, L., Blease, C., Annoni, M., Atlas, L.Y., Benedetti, F., Bingel, U., Büchel, C., Carvalho, C., Colagiuri, B., et al. (2018). Implications of placebo and nocebo effects for clinical practice: Expert consensus. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 87(4), 204–210.
2. Colagiuri, B., & Quinn, V.F. (2017). The power of expectations: Placebo and nocebo effects in everyday life. International Review of Neurobiology, 138, 31–64.
3. Benedetti, F., Mayberg, H.S., Wager, T.D., Stohler, C.S., & Zubieta, J.-K. (2005). Neurobiological mechanisms of the placebo effect. Journal of Neuroscience, 25(45), 10390–10402.
4. Price, D.D., Finniss, D.G., & Benedetti, F. (2008). A comprehensive review of the placebo effect: Recent advances and current thought. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 565–590.
5. Colloca, L., & Miller, F.G. (2011). The nocebo effect and its relevance for clinical practice. Psychosomatic Medicine, 73(7), 598–603.
6. Häuser, W., Hansen, E., & Enck, P. (2012). Nocebo phenomena in medicine: Their relevance in everyday clinical practice. Deutsches Ärzteblatt International, 109(26), 459–465.
7. Faasse, K., & Petrie, K.J. (2013). The nocebo effect: Patient expectations and medication side effects. Postgraduate Medical Journal, 89(1055), 540–546.
8. Vambheim, S.M., & Flaten, M.A. (2017). A systematic review of the placebo and nocebo effects in experimental pain studies. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 562.
9. Faasse, K., et al. (2019). Social modeling of nocebo side effects: Influence of an online social network. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 122, 1–6.
10. Enck, P., Bingel, U., Schedlowski, M., & Rief, W. (2013). The placebo response in medicine: Minimize, maximize or personalize? Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 12(3), 191–204.
11. Benedetti, F. (2014). Placebo effects: Understanding the mechanisms in health and disease. Oxford University Press.
12. Colagiuri, B., McGuinness, K., Boakes, R.A., & Butow, P.N. (2012). Positive and negative expectations in social modeling of placebo and nocebo responses. Journal of Pain, 13(11), 1116–1122.
13. Colloca, L., & Barsky, A.J. (2020). Placebo and nocebo effects. New England Journal of Medicine, 382(6), 554–561.

How to choose a therapist in Sydney

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 22:29:58 GMT

In Australia, there are differences in the qualifications, training, and scope of practice between psychotherapists, counsellors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and clinical psychologists. Here's a brief explanation of the differences:

Psychotherapist: A psychotherapist is a professional who provides therapy to help individuals deal with emotional, behavioural, and psychological issues. Psychotherapists may have different qualifications, including psychology, counseling, social work, or multiple therapeutic models. Many have completed a Masters degree in Applied Psychotherapy. They typically use talk therapy to help clients explore and resolve their issues. Psychotherapists are equipped to assist with a wide range of psychological issues, including deep-rooted psychological issues, including childhood trauma.
Counsellor: A counsellor is a professional who provides guidance and support to individuals who are experiencing personal, social, or emotional difficulties. Counsellors may have different qualifications, including psychology, social work, counseling, or mental health nursing. They typically use talk therapy to help clients explore and resolve their issues.
Psychiatrist: A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who specialises in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental health disorders. Psychiatrists can prescribe medication and and occasionally use a range of treatment approaches, such as psychotherapy, to treat mental health conditions.
Psychologist: A psychologist is a mental health professional who has completed a minimum of six years of university education in psychology and holds a Master's or Doctorate degree in Psychology. Psychologists can work in various areas, including clinical, counselling, forensic, health, and organisational psychology. They are trained to assess, diagnose, and treat a range of mental health conditions and may use a range of therapeutic approaches based primarily on CBT.
Clinical Psychologist: A clinical psychologist is a psychologist who specialises in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of mental health disorders. They have completed additional training and supervised practice in clinical psychology and have expertise in certain treatments for mental health conditions.

While there is some overlap between the services provided by these professionals, each one has a different scope of practice and level of expertise. Psychotherapists and clinical psychologists are equipped to handle a range of mental health conditions, including deep-rooted psychological issues. Psychiatrists are best equipped to handle more complex cases, particularly those involving medication management. Counsellors may work with individuals who are experiencing less severe mental health issues or require support for personal or social problems. Psychologists have a broad range of expertise in psychology and may work in various areas, including research, assessment, and treatment.

Dealing with uncertainty in coronavirus times

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 03:12:55 GMT

We are living in a time of great uncertainty. Life as we know it is being upended by coronavirus. You may be afraid of losing your job, of not being able to pay the rent or mortgage, of your elderly parents becoming ill ... of yourself becoming more isolated, more anxious, more depressed, more angry - and finding you have no way to deal with it.

The world we live in is constructed around social, cultural, and legal rules that inform how we live, work, and view ourselves. Sometimes we fit the rules easily, and are confident and successful. Sometimes we find we don't fit easily or we don't fit at all. That makes life hard, it often makes you anxious, depressed, and to varying degrees, traumatised.

Many people seeking therapy, or who are in therapy, are very well aware of this, and the struggle to find meaning and strength in oneself that is such a part of their healing work. I've noticed a strong pattern in my own practice where people in therapy for trauma or anxiety are reporting that they had anticipated feeling very anxious about the situation, but in fact were remaining calm. In fact, they often report, they feel, for the first time in many cases, the most calm person they know! It's the result of those individuals having spent time and effort getting to know their own situation, and having skills and resources to draw on to deal with anxiety before it happens.

But what happens to otherwise healthy people when the social construct begins to collapse? That reality we're used to is for most of us, at the very least, reliable. It may be reliable in your favour, or reliably difficult to live in, but its constancy allows you to predict what may happen in various situations. We become reliant on it, used to it, habituated to its standards. And now it's been turned on its head. Things are now uncertain.

Uncertainty creates anxiety, an ancient survival mechanism to ensure we are on alert for danger, and actively seeking solutions to our current dilemma. Our bodies become finely attuned to anything that may be dangerous, and we seek more than ever to assert control over what's going on around us and to remove any element of unpredictability. That need to control one's environment is a hallmark of anxiety, as it can serve to relieve anxiety.

How do you know if how you're feeling is anxiety? You may feel physical effects, such as a racing heart, shortness of breath or quick shallow breathing, restlessness, feeling tightly wound and tense. Psychologically, you may feel unrealistic fear, obsessiveness, catastrophising thinking, endless "what if ... " scenarios that repeat and repeat to the point of being obsessive. You may also begin to withdraw, to find yourself avoiding people or situations to hide yourself away.

So how can you best deal with the uncertainty of the current situation?

Acceptance - acknowledge that life is uncertain, and that any sense of control is as easily lost as the weather is changeable. Nice for those to whom this comes easily. For the rest of us, it involves sitting with our feelings around uncertainty, giving ourselves permission to feel uncertain, and knowing that it's normal for uncertainty to create anxiety. It's a built-in, hard-wired function of our bodies that gives us all sorts of physical and psychological reactions. It's amazing what some knowledgeable self-awareness can do!
Self Compassion - acknowledge that you're human, and that as a human you're likely to be affected by uncertain times. They'll make you anxious, and can make you act in ways you prefer not to act. It's the classic "don't beat yourself up," and by forgiving yourself, by allowing yourself to be, you will find further freedom from the fear of uncertainty. Your response is natural, your awareness can put you in control again.

Gratitude - make a point of seeking out those things that you're grateful for. The brain has a natural tendency - a bias - towards the negative (another survival trait) which is significantly provoked in a time of crisis. It can be made less harmless by acknowledging what you have - really noticing it - and being able to be grateful for it. This can in fact boost your mood with a dose of serotonin, and make you want more things to be grateful for with a hit of dopamine. It's a great way to hack your brain!
Kindness - we humans are social animals and part of being social is the ability to make that society cohesive. One in-built mechanism we have is the desire to be kind, or to do things for others. Altruism of this kind makes us feel good because we're doing something that benefits all of us - we get rewarded in our brains, and the person we were kind to gets to be grateful. It's a nice little wheel that can spin back to reward us with another's generosity. And it makes the world a better place!
Control what you can - being aware that there's little you can do to affect the outcome of Covid-19 except for sitting at home can make you feel like you have no ability to have an impact on anything. That's when you can focus on what it is possible to affect, and to do so. Be aware of your reactions to what's going on, and think on what you can and can't control. While you can accept that over which you have none, you can pinpoint those things that are within your world. Set yourself routines - get up at the same time each morning, get dressed for work (at least the top half) if working remotely, have meals at set times - that kind of thing. IN a household, set a time for everyone to de-stress from work and school, then at a certain time swap to fun things. Note how quickly you can adapt once you've set the new pace in your life.
Know that it won't last! - look beyond now to the other side and imagine all the things you'll be able to do again, and with more appreciation of the small things!

It's quite remarkable how people are reacting to the current situation. Be aware of your own reactions, notice them, and work on the little things to help you maintain a sense of balance. I suspect people will be finding that it's the little, simple things that are actually most worthy of our attention.