Look for the LONGING under the protest

It’s easy, in the face or a partner or spouse shouting at us to shout back, or stonewalling us, to “pick, pick, peck, peck, prod, prod” to try and stimulate a response (then they roar) and whole thing escalates into an alarming row often over something apparently little e.g. loading / unloading, the dishwasher. It

For me, the perfect relationships are the ones in which the imperfections are handled well.

For me (and in the context of pretty much any relationship: friend, partner, child), the perfect relationship is one where the imperfections are handled well. When I am presented with anything that feels “picture perfect” (like this window box in a Chelsea flower show show garden) I find myself thinking “in my LIfe this level

Winnicott the shit out of parenting. Be a gem…

I found myself replying to a friend (who had declared themself fed up with reading “mums advice” from “people who think they know it all and that they are perfect”), with something that, on reflection, felt perhaps it may be helpful to also share here so here it is: “Winnicott the shit out of parenthood.

Sometimes the smaller picture is more calming

Sometimes it is soothing to widen one’s perspective to take in the bigger world and then a problem we face can seem small in comparison and we relax and find calm and inner peace……and sometimes soothing is found by really narrowing our perspective and focussing in tight on those things which give us a sense

Think of emotions as motorcycle couriers trying to get a message to you

I think the trouble starts when some of us have been taught by those who cared for us growing up that certain emotions are bad or negative when the fact we have them at all means they must serve some useful purpose otherwise evolution would have got rid of them a long time ago.  Rather than working like mad

Microbiome: The buzzword of the moment but what exactly is it?

  A biome is “a large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat such as a forest or tundra.”  We offer a habitat for microorganisms e.g. bacteria, virus and fungus, which form our microbiome. Whilst microbes that cause athlete’s foot, body odour or bad breath are annoying most “pay their rent”:

Change how you think of change

Struggling to get started on changing some aspect of your life? Perhaps adopting DiClemente’s and Prochaska’s way of looking at change will help.  Rather than thinking of change as a single act their research suggests it is a process with a number of stages including lapses along the way (please refer to photo above). A

Ideas for how to manage cravings

In my experience working with people caught up in runaway comfort eating (aka emotional eating or binge eating) the best way to manage cravings is to get to the bottom of what is driving the craving and address THAT. To do this, when a craving comes, stop, pause and notice what happened immediately before the

How to add a new habit

Relying on motivation or willpower alone to make a change in life is often not enough to embed new behaviours e.g. those required for better health. In this talk Bill Fogg suggests making our existing habits the trigger for us to automatically do the new behaviours we want and to start small with a new

Your brain takes a shower whilst you sleep

This 11 minute TED talk reveals research that shows that when we are asleep our brain (literally) washes away waste products created by metabolising the nutrients brought to it by its blood supply. One of these waste products is amyloid beta which, if left to build up into plaques, is implicated in the onset of