TOMASZEWSKI PRACTICE

What happens if you see effects rather than symptoms? Looking at symptoms ask you to consider causes, and almost inevitably results in a pathology; noticing effects leaves you examining what something does, and whatever that may be, it may very well not be pathological. In fact, the degree to which psychotherapists invent pathologies for their clients becomes clear. As does, of course and often surprisingly, the revelation that a pathological symptom may be doing something very helpful. Freud describes all of this; it's nothing new. However, it seems as if something may have beocme lost in translation - into English, and over time.

People who have had complex or difficult lives often find themselves feeling alone even when things are going well. Here are some thoughts about why, and a simple procedure that might help. Unless, that is, you like feeling alone. Some people do.

1.     At the really bad end of life you can experience extreme social, economic and emotional pressure. Your focus narrows to what you perceive as immediate threats. Thoughts of the future become unbelievable or unreal (which sometimes protects them): your sense of time contracts. The past seems to merge with the present. There is no luxury of deliberation because there can’t be. You need to be like this.

2.     At the amazing end, things are different. Your sense of time opens out. Play, care, and curiosity become more possible. Plans can be made. Relationships can be tended. Faith, hope, and trust return as ways of being in relation to a future that has not yet arrived and that feels worth moving toward.

3.     People occupy different bands of this scale. Someone who has moved from very bad conditions to generally good ones carries the full width of that range in their neurobiology. The bandwidth is wide. Someone who has lived near the good end throughout operates within a much narrower band. Neither can fully see how much the other’s range is shaping the way they respond. 

4.     Pockets of care, play, and bonding exist at every point on the scale, including the really bad end. They are not exclusive to safety and comfort. But at the bad end they are can be more compressed, harder to access, shorter, more easily disrupted and unlikely to feel predictably available. 

5.     Someone who works their way from the bad end to the good end may still, under pressure, find themselves responding from the bad end. For example, something unexpected happens, or someone you love needs help. You decide what to do quickly, without telling anyone. Your nervous system, weighted towards appreiating life as it played out many times while it was forming, when you were young, misreads the present situation as needing emergency action. There's nothing irrational going on: just something out of synch. 

6.     Fast problem-solving was necessary when life was consistently difficult. Acting quickly, deciding alone, not waiting, not consulting — all of that was crucial. Bringing tall of this into a relationship at the good end disrupts communication and bonding. The speed that once provided protection now gets in the way: it isolates and disrupts. What is needed is the capacity to slow down when the danger is not, in fact, real.

7.     Saying "I’m not sure" or "I don’t know" is your ticket out of this kind of trouble. It creates a holding pattern. It heads off the fast-response loop learned in the past and makes space to include someone else in whatever decisions get made.

Ask questions you can't imagine asking, especially ones that feel pointless. Think about what to ask, now. Get some help from somebody else.

What happens may surprise you, whatever the answer.

This way the future feels different. You might imagine something else.

Curated pops up all over the place. I just found it describing some clothes in a summer sale. Curated seems more and more to mean 'so you don't need to think about it'. That's not good.

Mind and body have been opposed and reunited in countless ways, giving rise to ideas like soul, spirit, self. Neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, and Cristina Alberini have spent decades gathering evidence for something Shakespeare imagined:

The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing – of nothing. Hamlet: IV: ii

Something material, a body. Something of nothing, a king who exists only as a projection of the body – an event we might call a story. Instead of mind and body, think of one ongoing event of registration and expression. Think of a dream as a film. It is something like that.

Your mind – a conscious representation of your body in all its fluctuating states, always emotional, never objective – is never detached from what the body carries. The two are not in dialogue. They are one thing, differently expressed.

In some families, perhaps many, every generation someone “disappears.” Not always so you’d notice at the time, but later you look back and they’re gone: no marriage certificate, no place on the family tree, or you mention someone and everything people have to say about them sounds exceptional. They were wonderful or terrible, as if all they had ever been was a rumour.

“Disappearing” is an effect of forgiveness.

We think of forgiveness as resolution: the moment when division ends and people come back together. But forgiveness as it is usually practised is something else. It is a way of managing a feeling, and managing a feeling means protecting the arrangement that produces it, which means making inconvenient things vanish. People, evidence, history. The feeling is preserved. The person is gone.

This is not necessarily a moral failing. It is often biology.

Mind and body have been opposed and reunited so many times that the opposition itself has become hard to see. Soul, spirit, consciousness: these are the names we give to the space we keep reopening between them. But there is no space. There is one ongoing event of registration and expression, and you are it. Your mind is a conscious representation of your body in all its fluctuating states: always emotional, never objective. What you think you know about yourself is always a version of what your body already knows, and your body is often well ahead of you.

The space we imagine between mind and body is not neutral. It is where we put what we cannot bear to know. And what we cannot bear to know, we forgive: meaning we agree, collectively, not to speak of it. Forgiveness is the condition of unconditional love, the price of belonging. Anyone who becomes inconvenient to the story a family, a nation, or an institution tells about itself may have to vanish: discredited, idealised, or simply abandoned. The imagined space between mind and body is the same space in which division is constructed and maintained. It is not a description of how things are. It is a mechanism for keeping things as they are.

Families and groups that operate this way are not rare. The bonding chemistry that makes human connection possible also creates a need for an enemy as much as a friend. Inside the bonds of unconditional love, loyalty can mute you. Anyone outside the group who might otherwise support you can come to seem like a threat if they question it. This is not tribalism as pathology. It is one way belonging works, and it can produce the same results in families, institutions, nations. Someone has to “disappear.”

To change is to inhabit a different state of body, which is how we know it through our state of mind. The nervous system does not respond to argument. It responds to experience, and experience means risk, and risk produces dread. Dread doesn’t always announce itself as dread. More often it subtly structures a life: the staying in bed, the wasted hours, the reaching for something to blur or blunt how you feel. Love is where the biology is oldest and the grip is strongest. Being in love is not a consistent feeling. It is a state that includes feelings that are sometimes painful and hard to tolerate. The problem is the pursuit of the feeling of love: the need for it to be warm, reliable, and pain-free. That pursuit is indistinguishable from dependency. You sacrifice your interests not for the person but for the feeling. A group that needs to be forgiven needs exactly that: not accountability, but the neurological relief that forgiveness briefly provides. Like the relief an addiction promises.

A clinical aside: the concept of codependency has always struck me as a particularly optimistic label. It implies that once you can see the formation clearly, you can decide to leave it. But the whole point is that you can’t. Not through decision. Not through insight. This is a wider problem than codependency. The therapeutic and self-help cultures that dominate how we talk about change are overwhelmingly identification-based: name what you are, find others who are the same, and the recognition itself becomes the cure. Codependent. Narcissist. Avoidant. Anxious. The labels multiply because the hunger for them is genuine — people are in real pain and want to understand why. But identification closes difference down. It gives you a story about yourself that feels like knowledge, and that feeling of knowledge is itself a relief, which means it operates exactly like the dependency it claims to diagnose. You are no longer in an unbearable situation. You are a person with a condition. The situation remains.

This happens in families, institutions, nations. The identification produces the enemy it needs, and the enemy confirms the identification. Seeing yourself in others isn’t a recipe for coexistence; it is the basis of division. The nervous system doesn’t respond to good advice, or to correct labelling. Change of this kind takes years, and it takes the kind of relationship — therapeutic or otherwise — in which something genuinely unexpected can happen to a body that has learned to expect the worst. Naming what you’re in is not the same as getting out of it.

The mind may lose touch with something that has hurt it. A person, a group, a nation may believe it can forgive and forget. But the body knows. It will rebel, flooding you with anxiety when you try to proceed as if things have changed, when nothing has really changed. Repression and dissociation are not failures of memory. They are the body’s way of managing what the mind cannot yet bear to know. Trying to forgive is always, physically, like pressing on a bruise.

Change comes not through insight but through the body’s encounter with something it did not predict: the moment when what it expected turns out not to be there. Not through resolution. Not through the closing down of difference. But through the willingness to stay with what cannot be resolved.

We have to keep becoming. But not by making each other “disappear.”

Why don't people change? Well, they do, but the dread that accompanies doing something differently is almost impossible to withstand, and it doesn't always announce itself as dread. More often it subtly structures your life towards staying in bed, wasting time, or using something to blur or blunt how you feel.

Love is the most difficult diversion. Not because it is an obstacle to change but because it is often the structure that makes change unthinkable. When we love someone, or believe we do, our bodies need that arrangement to hold fast: to stick. To change is to threaten the bond, and threatening the bond can feel more dangerous than whatever the bond is costing you. So you stay stuck.

Being in love is not a consistent feeling. It is a state that includes feelings that are sometimes painful and hard to tolerate, and those feelings are not a sign that something has gone wrong. They are part of what love actually is. The problem is the pursuit of the feeling of love: the need for it to be warm, reliable, and pain-free. That pursuit is indistinguishable from dependency. You are no longer negotiating with another person; you are managing a feeling, and managing it means protecting it, which means protecting the arrangement that produces it, which means never changing anything. You sacrifice your interests not for the person but for the feeling. Sex, substances, busyness work the same way, but love is where the biology is oldest and the grip is strongest. These aren't obstacles to change so much as its silhouette. They show you exactly where the fear is.

To change is to inhabit a different state of body, which is how we know it through our state of mind. Mind and body are not two things but one ongoing event of registration and expression. Your mind, a conscious representation of your body in all its fluctuating states, always emotional and never objective, may lose touch with something that has hurt you. You may believe you can forgive and forget. But your body knows. It will rebel, flooding you with anxiety when you try to proceed as if things have changed, when nothing has really changed. What felt like the only option, or the best one, turns out to have been a response to a danger that no longer exists.

What are you protecting, and what is it costing you?

There comes a point in psychotherapy where you might feel you have more freedom in your life, and things are working the way you want. After a lot of effort, you begin to understand how your life works. You might be starting to see changes: better relationships, deeper friendships, more satisfying work.

When you think about ending therapy at that point, it's worth considering something similar that happens in other areas of life. A band that has made it and sells millions of tickets for a tour. An actor who suddenly finds themselves on the A-list. They might let go of the manager, the producer, the director who nurtured them through a number of low-budget films. All of these decisions might be right, but perhaps not quite yet.

Consolidation and reconsolidation is where therapy really earns its money, just as good management, good production, and good direction do. The point at which you feel free to act is often the point where you most need help continuing with the reinvention: finding out how to sustain yourself in ways you certainly didn't in the past, doing these things for real rather than in rehearsal. Psychotherapy should always be real, but the extent to which it can become a rehearsal of the future rather than a repetition of the past is worth thinking about carefully.

The business of long-term therapy costs money. Sometimes it can be the most valuable thing you will ever do to continue with psychotherapy beyond the point where it feels as if you need it. Within that, there is plenty of room for a psychotherapist to exploit the people they work with, continuing well beyond the point where it is truly necessary. Who knows what is truly necessary? That is a question that needs to be asked and talked about carefully, when it feels as if something needs to change.

If you're frightened, edgy, wired, and I tell you there's a bear behind you, you'll spin round and look for it. Tell you the same thing when you're relaxed and laughing and you'll think I'm joking. The difference isn't the information; it's where you are when it arrives. In FEAR, RAGE PANIC-GRIEF, the nervous system isn't weighing possibilities. It's collapsing them. Anything is possible, as long as it's likely to be bad.

Here's a novel idea for anxiety. Most ideas in psychotherapy involve trying to resolve something. The resolution occurs by thinking about whatever seems irreconcilable. Forget about that. Just do something - anything. The feeling of your body in motion is a feeling of resolution. Then, see what you think of.

Hating yourself can become a habit when you are so alone, or feel so alone, that there is no one you can safely hate.

There's so much speculation about child development, some as if children constantly need bundling into a kind of adult-bound lift. Press the button to the top floor: MATURITY. 

This is very understandable. You could say that children are, at the same time, physically immature versions of adults and that they are not. Only believing the former misses the point of what brain activity, at any point, is doing. This will, hopefully, be the best brain activity, with the brain in its best form for that activity, for the task of becoming an adult person. Piaget says something like this, as does Jensen.  A child's thinking is organised differently from an adult's.

Parents: resist seeing what your child is doing now as a deficient version of what they need to do in the future. 

Encouraging that kind of activity rather than goading a child to behave as if they are older is the best thing, I think. The momentum of aging is a strange old thing.

The prefix ‘para’ means alongside. It is a useful beginning to a word or phrase to keep in mind now, when so many informal, private, or secret organisations exist alongside official ones. Their presence often points to convergent groups, ones in which predictability replaces accountability.

These are not always organisations in the ordinary sense. They are closer to ecologies. People gravitate together out of self-interest, joining with those they anticipate, predict, will most likely give them what they want, and roles emerge that function less as positions than as elements in a shared environment.

Jeffrey Epstein, for example, appears less as a solitary figure than as a node within a para-political ecology that included figures such as Peter Mandelson. Information circulates through such ecologies informally, sometimes illegally, detached from formal responsibility. It is gathered, traded, and distributed according to need rather than rule.

At least, that's what I've noticed.

There are all kinds of things we can say about evidence. Evidence always has to be presented, for example — or ‘produced’. It’s then usually reproduced, as we can see in the case of the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Psychotherapists are used to having facts presented to them in the manner in which the American public — at the same time, in 2026, as the rest of the world — is by the current administration: with determination, moral force, justification, and often efforts to locate them in a broader context. More production that Spielberg, Kubrick, or Cameron could ever handle.

What else can we say? The broader context also includes a scepticism about news, a belief that any image can be changed or created from scratch artificially (artificial intelligence arrives shortly after we grow used to CGI). It includes the regurgitation of phrases like “fake news” by a television personality now a president.  A hell of a production.

And we can see that if we don’t allow ourselves to be caught up in this production by, let’s say, forces unknown (which I find it helpful to call whatever seems to be motivating a client to do all they can to convince me of something — without that client realising it — as well as what they are aware they are doing), we see things we are told are not the case, were not the case, and never were the case. Dorothy does this at the end of the Wizard of Oz.  If we think carefully, we recall that whatever is being denied might be what we saw before all the things we saw and heard trying to convince us otherwise.

So, a thought to kick off 2026; a kind of New Year’s resolution. Can we resolve to identify, with all the ruthlessness of the Trump administration, everything that might erode our confidence in what we perceive? What produces that erosion?

Let’s begin here, by focusing our attention for a moment on artificial intelligence. AI is perfectly suited to post-confidence life. An answer for everything. ‘Because that matters’, as its various incarnations are keen to say in answer to any question.

What matters is not a matter for software derivatives of Peter Thiel, clever man though he is, or wheoever else has the money to bankroll AI.

What matters is that each of us does all we can to enhance our capacity to judge, by learning from sources that seem to conflict, fight and aim to cancel each other - or themselves - out. No single source or person. Make sense of that. This used to be called getting an education, which obtaining an answer from ChatGPT is certainly not.

Mindfulness is not a relaxation technique. It is a practice that can lead to a deeper awareness of what is happening to you and how you are responding to it. Its aim is not to calm the nervous system but to notice experience as it happens.

For some people, practices involving stillness and sustained attention reliably feel awful.

This is not paradoxical, and feeling like this does not mean you need to persist with them. If heightened alertness has become your familiar route to feeling safe, then reducing external demand or stimulation can be disregulating. You may feel more activated in order to feel more stable.

Mindfulness also removes you from the effects of external structure. Your attention is no longer occupied in doing something. Internal sensations, thoughts, and affects that are usually managed through activity or distraction become more noticeable. Anxiety increases not because mindfulness is being done incorrectly, but because it exposes material that has not yet been integrated.

Mindfulness often intensifies interoception. Awareness of breathing, muscle tone, or visceral sensation can be activating if you have grown used to bodily states signalling danger, pain, or loss of control. Imagine a very frightened child trying to keep as still as possible, trying to make no noise, even to avoid being heard breathing, and you may be able to imagine where this response comes from.

None of this means mindfulness does not work, nor does it mean you should persist with it. Instead, you need to find the best possible ways of slowing down and feeling stable through engagement, movement, rhythm, structure, and relationship. If somebody tells you that you need to stop doing things because you are avoiding feeling what is happening to you, or thinking about it, they may have a point. But a certain level of dissociation is actually desirable unless you lead a life without unreasonable demands.

If you want to live a better life, begin by working out what makes you feel safe without exhausting you. Listening to the sound of the wind in the trees or the rain on the pavement may feel very different from focusing on your breath. How you do these things matters. Staying with a sound you are focusing on, without getting lost in a story generated by it, creates a context in which the body can slowly relax. This is different from the undecided switching off that can happen when you zone out.

Focusing outside yourself in this way achieves a limited but important kind of control. You are doing something you have chosen to do. The context changes. Your attention is no longer directed at something you experience as threatening.

Practices of sustained inward attention in which you distance yourself from the world’s distractions are not for everybody. Unfortunately, they have come to be widely regarded as necessary. They are not. Believing they are is a repugnant kind of moralising we could all do with less of.

There are lots of ways to think about what we call transference. One simple way is this: it’s a kind of emotional persistence that can make us less attentive to what’s actually happening now.

Suppose I get into a relationship because it feels right. It feels powerful, convincing, even wonderful. That might mean I’m stepping into the best relationship of my life. But it might also mean I’m chasing a particular feeling I already know well. If that’s the case, the feeling itself starts determining a relationship. I may not slow down enough to really notice who this person is, how they relate, or where the difficulties might be. And the things I miss at the beginning are often the very things that matter later on.

There is a phase I have come to recognise in the lives of some people who have struggled with food, appetite, or bodily regulation. I did not notice it early in my work. In fact, I only began to see it after following a small number of people for many years. The time it took me to recognise it was roughly the time it took them to arrive there.

I did not hear about this phase in advance - I didn't predict it, either. I saw it happening. Addiction workers will be familiar with the broader context: difficulties that emerge in midlife are often preceded by others, sometimes displaced, sometimes socially sanctioned. But what I am describing does not quite fit the idea of substitution. It appears later, often after a long stretch that might reasonably be described as stable. People may have months or years behind them in which the original problem no longer governs daily life, and yet something persists. It is as if life continues to be lived in the shadow of what happened.

This period is often mistaken for depression. It is not that. What I have seen is something closer to a prolonged exposure: a sustained encounter with ordinary life once the earlier means of regulation has fallen away, in which feeling is no longer buffered as it once was and a sense of power is no longer reliably restored; a long stretch in which life is lived without the buffer that once held it together, and without any clear replacement for it. There is often a sense of hopelessness, but it sits alongside something else, harder to name. A faint superiority, perhaps. Or a sense of being set apart. The person does not feel well, but neither do they feel simply defeated. They appear to be waiting, without knowing quite what for.

At this point, explanations tend to proliferate. Family stories, trauma narratives, developmental accounts. None of these are necessarily wrong, but in practice they rarely help. The search for reasons can become an activity in its own right, one that never quite closes. The problem is not that meaning is irrelevant, but that explanation begins to behave like metaphysics: each answer generates another question, each cause another cause. It starts to resemble an argument about God. Not because the question is foolish, but because the form of the argument makes it impossible for anything to change.

It is more useful, I have found, to attend to how the difficulty is happening. What is being organised in the present? What is someone trying to maintain, regulate, or avoid, even if they would not put it that way? This is not a search for origins, but for function. It is a way of staying with effects rather than causes.

There are, of course, occasions when psychological symptoms turn out to be constrained or driven by biological conditions that were not initially visible. Equally, there are presentations that appear biological and are not. The point is not to deny biology, but to avoid granting it explanatory authority where it does not resolve what is at stake. In the phase I am describing, biological findings rarely settle the question.

This period matters. If it is lived through without being supplemented, something often begins to loosen. Life, oddly, starts to happen with less effort. By supplement I mean something quite specific, close to Derrida’s sense: a prosthesis that adds power or coherence at the point of absence, but in doing so also replaces it. The supplement supports, but it also stands in. It fills a gap while preventing that gap from being lived.

Alcohol is an obvious example, but there are others that are less readily named as problems. Exercise can function as a means of restoring bodily mastery. Faith can supply certainty where uncertainty has become difficult to tolerate. Marriage can stabilise identity through another person. Parenthood can confer moral authority, purpose, and direction. None of these are pathological in themselves. They become problematic when they are recruited too quickly, when they serve to restore a sense of power before the underlying organisation has shifted.

When that happens, the supplement begins to organise life. It has to be protected. Others are drawn into it. What looked like recovery hardens into a structure. A life may function well enough, but something in it does not quite move. The consequences are rarely limited to the person alone.

This is why the phase is so exposed. It offers little in the way of consolation or mastery. It does not feel powerful. But it is also the point at which something else becomes possible: not explanation, not resolution, but a reorganisation of how power, dependence, and vitality are lived. Whether that happens depends, in large part, on whether the space is tolerated, or whether it is filled too quickly with something that looks like a solution.

It is worth noticing how able a person is to live with uncertainty, and what takes place while they do so. I have often seen that when doubt appears, the person is already doing something quite unexpected, and often not deliberately, to test another’s behaviour. They hold back from saying anything (or feel unable to say something), yet they do not change their mind. The other person continues with what they are saying or doing long enough for their behaviour to become clear.

We often think of time as a sequence, but in ordinary life it happens more like an accumulation. Certain feelings gather and persist, while others fall away. We take on emotional traces from people around us because we are built to register and retain what affects us most. Over time, a feeling can become so familiar that it seems permanent. Guilt is a good example. It often signals that another feeling has been pushed aside. A person may feel guilty about being angry at how a parent treats them. The anger is present, but it conflicts with the belief that one should not feel it. “They did their best” becomes a way to block the anger, and the guilt remains. It is not guilt in isolation, but guilt about anger, and about the fact that the anger feels forbidden.

One thing above everything else. Learn every detail of the process - technically. Read Shapiro's book from cover to cover and take it all in. Then do what anyone would usually do after learning a skill (because EMDR is a skill): playing the piano, flying, playing cricket, speaking, walking, learning in your first five years of life how to be yourself (as Cristina Alberini writes - every EMDR practitioner should know Alberini as much as Shapiro; don't let EMDR become a professional silo). Get on with doing EMDR out of whatever you make of yourself.

There's a point at which it needs to stop being a technical exercise. It's the point at which you have taken in as much as one can know and begin doing all of that as yourself, rather than somebody else. What makes one bowler in cricket different from another? They all play to the same laws of cricket and do essentially the same thing ... throw a ball 22 yards. 

The best bowlers are receptive to what is happening. They can imagine what will happen accurately and seem to make that happen by staying close to their projection, because they have somehow taken in the state of the game, the state of the batter they are bowling to, the weather and goodness knows what else, as well as anybody else. At the same time they hold onto a relation ship with the standard (cricketing) protocol.

I always begin with the standard protocol and if I diverge at all I know its a divergence and I have a sense of why. 

Anything else, it's just not ... EMDR (cricket).

Okay. Having overcome my resistance, look at what Shane Warne says around 2:10 minutes into this clip. If you don't like cricket just see if you can understand why I think this, as much as anything else, describes how to do EMDR differently while still doing EMDR. 

Nobody writes more sharply about the pain of separation than Hélène Cixous. In her novel, Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem, she writes of why Jewish people did not leave Germany even before the war that started in 1938 when, already, the country had grown so hostile to them.  The profound imminent pain of separating from yourself, of relinquishing your identity, of being forced to relinquish it, is unimaginable unless you have experienced it. It is as intense as the panic an infant begns to feel when separated from its parents.

She writes: 

"The perspective of becoming another is a torment that no candidate escapes, that is to say, to disinvest from one day to the next the (German) becoming in which one had installed one’s habits of being, one’s language, one’s memory since the beginning of one’s memory, with the familiar characters of one’s memory, from the Kaiser to Liebknecht, Brüning, the whole Goethian fashioning of all points of view, in order to leap into a totally unknown mental combination, and thus to feel the particular pain that accompanies every metamorphosis, makes more than one vacillate and even shrivel up. It’s like drinking an alchemical potion and undergoing an operation of grieving for the whole person, a horror, for one was attached to oneself."

(Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem, pp96-7)

Reading this novel other truths come to mind.

For instance, how much writing is a 'thing'. Ideas are not simply written up in a novel; of course not. Writing happens as much as painting does for somebody working on a canvas. Too often people imagine writing as one might a catalogue photograph of a finished painting - the relationship is very similar. Writing ceases to be a thing in istelf but merely a record of thoughts, of information, of facts, of details. The narrative takes over - transmission gives way to transition.

Cixous's shifts between and withinin scenes, from one character's thoughts to another, can feel dislocating. Life is dislocating. Her transitions occur in how someobody does something rather than why, or at least the common psychological why.  The excerpt I have included above is a description of what happens, how something happens, not why something happens. Why would you need to know any more? Cixous' intensity makes her work sometimes almost unreadable. She writes almost unchecked, as rawly as a child feeling, but with more experience and intelligence than any other living author I have found.

Many people seem to imagine themselves as writers, now or in the future. How much more to imagine oneself a reader? Readers have already begun writing without realising it. You read and then you write. If you don't read, you will never write.

Some thoughts about ‘regulating’ your nervous system (aka starting to relax).

Your autonomic nervous system shifts in response to what you do, what you perceive, and the meaning your brain assigns to events.

Here are the main ways we can influence it (you can’t directly control it, like you might flex a muscle):

1. Breathing
Slow, steady breathing can activate the vagus nerve. This doesn’t override the system; it shifts its setting.

2. Attention
What you pay attention to  (for more on this, see my piece on ‘surprise’ and active inference) alters the way you unconsciously predict what to do, and how you judge what threatens you and what will help you. If you (as in the sum total of you, mind+body) stop treating something as dangerous, the autonomic balance changes. For example, if your perception of public speaking shifts from ‘threat’ to ‘challenge’, your heart rate and gut responses usually soften accordingly.

3. Relationship
Being with someone or something safe, steady, and attuned to you changes your autonomic state — a biological effect, not a metaphor. For many people this is one of the most reliable regulators as long as the change is a positive one. However, if you are suffering from pronounced traumatic responses (including the ones you experience with CPTSD) or recognise yourself as neurodiverse the effect can be quite the opposite. Get in touch with me if this is you, and I can suggest some alternatives.

4. Movement
Move! Even small movements signal to the system that the body is not trapped. This can reduce sympathetic arousal (ie make you feel less wired). Rhythmic, repetitive movement is often very helpful.

5. Memory and expectation
The nervous system reacts to what it (it being an extension of ‘you’) expects to happen next, not just to what is happening now. Changing expectation changes autonomic response.

You can’t change how you feel directly, as if you are pressing a button. However, you absolutely can change the conditions surrounding you (context), what you pay attention to (like driving with your eyes on the traffic ahead of you rather than the back of the car in front of you), action (being completely still usually doesn’t help), breathing (slow and regular, most likely), meaning (it is never fixed - it is always something to be contested), and relationship (an affectionate cat is better than an indifferent partner).

These influence the system because they change what the brain predicts and prepares for. Your nervous system is constantly guessing what is about to happen and preparing your body for it; when you change your actions, context, and focus, you change those guesses, and the physiology follows.

A more scientific note: in active inference, autonomic regulation is not a matter of issuing commands to the body, but of changing the brain’s predictions about the body’s state. The autonomic nervous system adjusts heart rate, breathing, and visceral tone to reduce the mismatch between what is happening in the body and the state the brain expects to inhabit. When you slow your breathing, shift your posture, or enter a calmer relational environment, you change the sensory data the brain has to explain. The brain then updates its model of what is going on and what is likely to happen next, and the autonomic system recalibrates accordingly. On this view, ‘regulation’ is not top-down control but an ongoing loop in which actions and perceptions shape predictions, and predictions shape physiology. Autonomic activity remains ‘automatic’, but it is automatic in relation to your behaviour, context, and expectations - which you can modify, and so influence indirectly.

Remember: simply asking 'are you thinking something negative about yourself now?' when your client considers a target is usually enough to get a very helpful negative cognition (NC). Also remember transference. For example, that question could be phrased as 'I wonder what you think I'm thinking about you now?' as a way to get there. 

A 'cognition' is always contextual, which is why the same cognition is sometimes activating and sometimes not. This is why the NC has to be taken from the now of the activation, not from a pre-existing list or an intellectual enquiry.

EMDR works by engaging the live, affectively loaded formation (the particular set of feelings, expectations, bodily tensions, and learned responses that come together in that moment, shaping how the person interprets what is happening), not an abstract, declarative belief.

Active inference helps us see that rationalised histories obscure the real sources of distress, that affect in the present gives a truer account of a person’s life, and that EMDR works best when its “targets” are understood as unresolved predictions rather than past events.

As a psychotherapist I am interested in an approach to history that is sympathetic to active inference and, in a similar way, to psychoanalysis. Active inference emerges from concerns that are not far from those that shaped psychoanalysis: how a person maintains continuity, how conflict is managed, how feeling becomes organised, and how the mind protects itself from what it cannot yet bear. 

What would an approach to history taking that acknowledges this look like?

I keep trying to find out. Rarely, beyond asking for some information I regard as essential (generally things relating to domestic stability), do I take a history as some kind of organised act. I work with what happens in the room when someone talks through how they feel their way through life as it is happening, rather than ask for an account of their life. I pay attention to feeling as it intensifies and diminishes; as affect shifts in valence; as hedonic tone registers differently. I let the past show itself in the moments where a person’s predictions begin to fail. People say things that don’t make sense - moments from that person's history flash up - and I take what they say seriously. 

Active inference describes how we keep ourselves steady by staying close to what is familiar. I see that every day. Much of the work lies in noticing when someone reaches beyond those familiar limits, often without meaning to, and something not yet integrated becomes visible.

Creating narrative becomes a regulatory gesture. Narrating works on unruly, sometimes unbearable, affect and fragmentary, apparently discontinuous experience to produce a form of inner continuity that a given historical culture recognises as a “life.” We tell stories not only to describe what happened but to change how it feels, retroactively giving meaning to our sensus through the effects of what we believe “makes sense.” (Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, Derrida’s différance, and Lyotard’s differend: each a different expression of how meaning arrives late, after the event, reorganising what was felt before it can be fully known, or cannot yet be said at all.)

When you ask somebody to tell a story about an event that happened to them, you do not simply hear the passing of an event (“when I was five I met this man called Mr Farage”). The story does not end there. ("when I was five I met this man called Mr Farage and he was really creepy"). A narrative emerges that turns their experience of that event into something intellectually coherent (in emotional terms, satisfying). Events are made to “make sense,” a phrase that comes from the Latin sensus, meaning the faculty of perception and feeling as one process. What we call “making sense” entered Late Middle English (c. 1400–1500) as a description of how we meet the world, or how the world meets us, and only later became a measure of psychological order.

Study Aquinas’s sensus communis (common sense) or Locke’s, Kant’s or Vico’s, and you find that each writer has in mind an aim that, for each of them, “makes sense” … because of what none of these men could possibly have known made sense to them in the first place. We continue to live in the space of their conceptual neuroses.

Making sense promises relief. If something makes sense, it can be placed. It no longer imposes itself as something unfinished. This is why so many narratives rely on insight: not to reveal the past, but to tame it.

These narratives produce the kind of inner continuity that Walter Benjamin saw in the psychological novel, where an individual is presented as if unfolding continuously, without fragmentation, without the breaks and interruptions that actually shape a life. They offer meaning where there was once emotional difficulty, and that difficulty usually comes from conflicting aims, unresolved affect, and the pressure of experiences that were too much to feel at the time. They organise events so that the discomfort of contradiction is eased. They create a version of the past that feels tolerable, even if it is not accurate.

As Benjamin told us, these narratives are false continuities. He warned against the idea that history moves in a single line, and he wrote that the task is not to string events together like the beads of a necklace but to seize upon the flashes in which something else, something discontinuous, breaks the surface. The true picture of the past appears only as an image that flares up in a moment of danger.

This is the kind of past that matters in the room. Not the consequent, rational sequence, but the sudden disruption of something that has not settled. By recording what unfolds as it happens, and by following the affective changes without forcing an interpretation, I try to offer a homeostatic setting in which a person can revise their predictions safely. I am not there to correct their history. I am there to help them feel the difference between what once felt necessary and what might now be possible.

It matters because it lets me work with the real sources of a person’s difficulty as they appear in the present, rather than with the intellectually coherent story they use to keep those difficulties at a distance.

It matters in EMDR (I am an EMDR consultant) because the work depends on accessing the unresolved prediction and its affective charge, and this approach allows that material to surface and be reprocessed safely, since the sources are not past events but the ongoing effects of those events, continuing to manifest now, much as before.

'Why are we doing this?' and 'what are we doing?' are two very different questions. It is easy to confuse them, but each question sends you in a different direction and will produce very different effects (if you work with me you know I'm usually more interested in effects than causes). 

'Why are we doing this?' distances you from whatever you are doing. It drives you to explain, consider your motives, and to find meaning. 'What are we doing?' keeps you closer to the task at hand. Either question may be vital, but probably at different times.

Knowing the difference is as important as anything else in any kind of psychotherapy.

What's the effect of you? The effect of you walking into a room might be for you to shrink into yourself. The effect of you saying something might be for you to stop speaking. The effect of you seeing yourself might be for you to try not to see yourself. These might all be because of how you experience yourself. It's a kind of locked-in state: a life lived behind glass, watching yourself reflected on the inside. What can we do about this?

The smallest action lived blind to your reflection puts you on the other side of the glass. Keep doing it, and you will find that the glass was only ever the habit of watching yourself.

This is a rather self-conscious piece of writing.

A thought I play around with: EMDR only 'works' if whoever's doing it is following the extremely good and thorough guidelines (rules) established by Shapiro while remaining faithful to their own character and their modality (which is hopefully sympathetic to their character). It's an intense enterprise, EMDR. When things don't line up as I've described here things become senseless. Unintense. The tensions that working like this creates can be enormous. They open you up.

Some things to think about if you think about integration:

Parallel / multiple - narratives are useful in the end, but hold off from them as long as possible. This is probably a thought in the same space as Freud's about trying to remain in touch with the latent and mainfest content of dreams; about the effects of what he describes as secondary revision; of what Fred Moten says about recognising differences as the road to real intimacy; and so on. Integration that loses the distinct qualities of whatever comes together ends up senseless. You could call 'whiteness' senselessness.

Integration might happen when tensions or intensity diminishes.

What holds together this thing you want to call integrated?

Some notes for a talk about identity. To think towards identity from the body: physically rather than metaphysically. 

To think from the body rather than about it: an invitation to think about identity as something alive and changing, shaped by memory, anticipation, and the body’s own demands. In psychotherapy we often look for what we have in common, but it is just as important to notice how we differ—how each of us feels, perceives, and responds in our own way. Recognising difference does not divide us; it allows contact to remain real. Difference is not something to reconcile but something through which contact stays alive.

Memory and the Body
"I am how I remember myself."
Each of us is formed through experience: how I think about myself, how others think of me and how I receive that, how I see others behave in relation to me and how I receive that. My nervous system, its actions shaped by every event I have lived through, predisposes me to feel and act in certain ways. What my body demands of me may be different from what another person’s body demands in the same situation. It depends on all the life lived so far, for each. To recognise this is to see that identity is never fixed. It is always a relation between histories.

Effect and Contact
"The way that I do things is everything."
Intentions and motives always point towards behaviour. What matters is effect. What is the effect of what I do? As Lyotard reminds us, effect often reveals meaning more readily than explanation. Every action has an impact that may be different from what I meant. In clinical work, this means staying curious about difference—about how what I say or do is received. We cannot know in advance. The way I do things either opens or closes the space between myself and another.

Surprise and Change
"How I do what I do is how I remember myself."
The way I anticipate behaving, the way I am moved to behave by how I feel, depends on what my body—my nervous system and all that supports it—determines. The brain predicts before it perceives (Friston). Surprise can be the most powerful form of change, yet real surprise cannot be given. It must be discovered. A system reforms when it reconfigures itself. Try not to think in terms of fixed patterns or forms. We have a nervous system; but what we feel and think emerges from that and isn't possible to systematise. Think instead of formations that reform, always moving, always alive. This is what we meet in one another: not fixed selves but living, changing forms of inter-relationship. To recognise difference is to stay in contact with that life.

Drift: the ways in which a person seems to have changed their intentions, or their account of past events, since they last spoke about them – without ever saying so. This may or may not be deliberate.

It’s never good.

I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t drift at least a fraction of the time. To account openly for the tiny fluctuations in how we feel about something – past, present, or future – in all that we say becomes harder the further we get from infancy. Early emotional transparency gives way to adult self-editing allied to self-regulation. Language becomes the vehicle of both communication and concealment. If we feel differently, we will undoubtedly think differently. This will always register in language, even if it does so in silence – in the spaces between those events we call words, or however else we break with whatever's been the same.

When does drift become lying – gaslighting? This must be the moment in which what is said clashes with what has been said. Whether or not that clash is intended is another matter.

Some people notice drift and are panicked by it (capitalised 'PANIC' being Panksepp’s way of thinking about the intense feelings of connection and separation). They are good people to know. Life is regularly troubling for them, because they know from experience that unacknowledged difference is always likely to create a problem. Others find it less alarming. Their lives – lived more securely, less disrupted – tell them that someone who drifts without realising may correct themselves.

Unfortunately, this more secure type of person may also have found a way of living untroubled by their lack of difference. Secure people tend to be oblivious. It’s what gets called privilege – which is accurate but not particularly helpful when you realise that getting anybody to respect their privilege means asking them to acknowledge something they have never thought existed.

Drift is a strong sign of something. A psychotherapist’s task is to understand their own tendencies to drift (that is, to have had a lot of psychotherapy), and to notice it in their clients – and in their clients’ reactions to drift.

The greatest thing that might happen in therapy of any kind, surely, is surprise. If you read about active inference — which I have forced myself to do (active inference itself might explain why it was such an effort: my dismay at failing to understand mathematics, in spite of loving the idea of it, aside) — you’ll find it is grounded in a mathematical expression of surprise that describes what the human brain does with all it does not expect. Formally, surprise can be written as −log p(sensory data | model) — that is, the mathematical expression of how improbable an event is, given what the brain expected. The lower the probability of something happening, the higher its ‘surprise value’. Taking the negative logarithm of that probability converts improbability into a positive quantity that the brain, and indeed any living body, can minimise. In biological terms, surprise signals the degree to which the body must reorganise itself in order to maintain equilibrium.

This is, of course, a humanised and metaphysical description — fantastical, but sometimes unavoidable if we are not to go mad. I always seem to go on a metaphysical trip before I do anything real. It is rather like the way I used to watch videos of Shane Warne bowling in the Ashes before turning out for my village team and believing, having studied him, having soaked up his philosophy, that I might bowl like him. Either kind of probability — the mathematical one or that fantasy — is, frankly, improbable.

The brain cannot directly calculate this improbability.

The brain, of course, simply does what it does, and we call it calculating improbability. In truth, it is more like a kind of neuronal storm, with surprising effects. This is where Friston’s mathematics meets the rougher texture of life. Instead of calculation, what occurs is a biological struggle to recover balance — a dynamic process in which the body reorganises itself in response to what it did not foresee. What the mathematics tries to imagine is not a mechanism but a living process: the continual effort of the body to remain within a tolerable range of the unexpected. Surprise, in this sense, is both a threat and an opportunity — a sign that one’s expectations no longer fit and that a new form of balance must be found.

The problem therapists face is that you cannot really induce surprise. A spontaneous connection a client makes between, perhaps, two events from their life and what that means to them now may become the root of a small psychic earthquake, out of the rubble of which a new way of feeling, and then thinking about oneself, might emerge. That is what is needed, but it is unlikely to occur through anyone asking, ‘How does that make you feel?’ What is needed, at least when the moment is right, might be something more along the lines of, ‘You know, I am not your dad.’

EMDR, drawing on psychoanalytic free association, offers a few ways of allowing this to happen. First of all, and most therapists will know this already, doing nothing can sometimes have a surprising result. The client and the therapist both expect something to happen next (and I think the Boston Change Process Study Group write about this somewhere), and then it does not happen. Something else does. The connection between ‘something else’, or ‘somebody else’, and surprise is something I recently wrote about in a paper for the British Journal of Psychotherapy.

Improvisation is essential for surprise to occur. When I improvise, I am barely able to imagine what will happen next, and I doubt that others are much the wiser either. This is what makes improvisation so daunting. Yet improvisation grounded in scholarship, experience, sound supervision, and familiarity with the foundational and ongoing principles of whichever modality one follows makes improvisation less daunting, and more fruitful.

Think about how musicians improvise. There is always a common field, even in what gets called free jazz, from which people operate: an intuitive sense of what others are doing. Someone like Miles Davis, and I agree with him, thought these things were better made explicit.

So. Surprise! Surprise yourself, as the psychoanalytic dictum does not say, and see what happens.

Shapiro says to ‘let it go or blank it out’ between sets. You’ll hear various things said about this when you are being trained or supervised. Whatever you hear there, just listen to what your client says — and try it. Try it as you might say, ‘go with that.’

Both approaches seem in keeping with the foundational ethos of AIP. If you read the paper by Gordon Bower (1981) that Shapiro refers to in her large and very useful book on the basic principles of EMDR, you’ll find that he regularly refers to free association — the psychoanalytic principle Freud called the ‘fundamental rule’ (or, whatever happens after you let your mind go blank).  Bower doesn’t mention Freud, which is understandable. Doing so can sometimes feel like wearing funny ears to a party. But I’d rather always wear those ears than fail to acknowledge one of EMDR’s most valuable resources: psychoanalysis.

The negative cognition is a 'self-limiting or self-denigrating belief'. It's the nasty haze of past experience through which the present is mediated. If it's there you won't have to go looking for it - it will be right there in the room with you and your client, mediating their experience of you. You just need to invoke it.

EMDR can be thoughtfully combined with other forms of psychotherapy, provided that the distinctive structure and aims of each model are respected. 

All approaches can enrich - and sometimes complicate - the others' insights when allowed to co-exist without being forced into fusion. Thinking multiply while working, for example, psychoanalytically by noticing transference or deferral while conducting standard EMDR protocol, doesn’t blur differences but deepens understanding of the therapeutic relationship - between therapist and client, and within the client’s relationship to self.

In practice, I sometimes shift from one modality to another within a session, but never without explicitly marking that change (‘Shall we try some EMDR now?’). This requires fidelity to both traditions - their languages, lineages, and exploratory depth.

You might see one of those outside your window when you are on holiday.

Or it could be the intense space between people that we call relationships.

What happens when we explore intensity instead of thinking about avoidance or disorganisation?

I think I am suggesting (or, in the way these posts follow on, because the next post you read will be the post written before this one) that attachment theory, in spite of some very fine work, makes it too easy to see relationships as structural. People do not live structurally. Theory easily falls into an exercise in pattern recognition, applying principles; but the best minds I have encountered - writers like Lyotard, Derrida, Wood, and Moten - tell us again and again that metaphysics is a busted flush. Explanatory systems, whether they’re Bowlby’s, Kant’s, or Hegel’s - comforting as they are - must give way to what life really has to offer: chaos and volatility.

What we sometimes call understanding is often simply relief.

If you want organisation, formation is all you will find. Unstructured but discernible, rather like a shoal of fish swimming or a murmuration of starlings.

Freud’s emphasis on plurality, deferral, and fluidity reminds us that what is hidden doesn’t disappear — it persists and unsettles (which may be why his ideas are often avoided or dismissed). Being outside awareness, the resulting affective force may be recruited - helpfully, lovingly, but also to inspire fear, paranoia, or denial.

What happens if you think about attachment as intense feelings involving a connection?  That is, not to think about the people who are connected (attached) ... but the intense feeling of this strange thing connecting them: their relationship. When the connection feels intense do they experience the relationship as strong? Or do they feel the opposite? What kind of intensity dominates in a strong, safe-feeling relationship? Playfulness, joy? What do they feel in an intensely unsafe feeling relationship? Panic? Insecurity? If they feel secure their lives may thrive. If they feel insecure life will feel more difficult. A student, for example, will probably find their academic work harder to understand. This is because their brains function differently when they feel insecure.  Different emotional states are accompanied by different forms of being. Thinking may be harder or easier. Focus may be narrower or broader. Learn about these states and what the body (including, of course, the brain) does in them. 

Many things happen when you do nothing. Doing nothing might also be or become 'I don't know'. Think of all of the expectations a client might have of you, of what is about to happen next, and of how the future might be. Doing nothing, if even for a moment or two, and not as a pause while you gather your thoughts (which would mean you were doing something), provides space for an unexpected discontinuity. Who knows then what might happen next.