Whitestone Therapy

I have been glued to one story alone this week. That of Professor Jason Arday, until this week the Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to find the comedy in it. Arday became the youngest black professor at Cambridge University ever, at the age of 37, on the crest of a personal story of disadvantage and "overcoming the odds" that saw faculty heads swooning. A story that involved being non-verbal until 11, illiterate until his late teens, autistic, dyslexic, eventually battling through to learn to read, write and speak, obtaining the PhD and eventually being beckoned to the hallowed halls of Cambridge itself. Was there any hardship young Arday did not face, I ask myself? I've seen many clips on X in the last week, including the gushing coverage at the time of his appointment, given those circumstances. It was obviously a cause for institutional celebration. However….it seems Arday has very much…how shall we say it…in...

  Being a therapist is strange work at the best of times, and over the last year I've been thinking about my practice, how I work, and what I believe about therapy. For me, months and years tend to blur into epochs, and each epoch seems to have its own emotional tone. Certain difficulties seem as though they appear in bunches, and that shapes what you come to feel is the emotional heartbeat of each epoch. That in turn seems to shape how I feel about therapy. Whether this is because the world has changed, people accessing therapy have changed, or because this therapist himself has changed, I couldn't say with confidence. Probably ‘all of the above’. In this current epoch, running a smaller practice, I find myself dealing with questions of meaning and belonging much more often than I would have expected a few years ago. This includes topline categories like anxiety and depression, but this would sell it short. I think what I detect is really a kind of 'structural loneliness...

And so… the government is going to ban under-16s from the main social media platforms. The reaction has been about what I would expect. Plenty of privacy concerns about age verification (which I share). Worries about state authority over digital life (very much shared). Scepticism about whether teenagers will simply find workarounds (many will). Parents' groups split. The tech companies issue statements about safety while lobbying against any specific measure that would reduce their reach. Of course these are all valid concerns. But the debate mostly centres on the question of whether the ban will work, which is downstream of the crucial question that the policy actually has to answer: Are platforms appropriate developmental environments for children at all?  I find myself in favour of the ban, despite not liking bans much and thinking that the means of implementation will probably fail on their own terms. Worse, I expect the solutions will include an overreach allowing monitoring ...

I wanted to post a bit of a midyear update here. I may ramble slightly, so forgive me for that as I look at the year so far. For those here mainly for therapy-related content, you are fully excused if you skip this one. First, a little housekeeping. I am away for the first week of July, and possibly for a week in August too, though that is not yet confirmed. I will keep clients updated directly about any changes to availability. Some people have very kindly asked about my health, and I'm happy to say it is still improving after a few months of sickness from Sep last year. Many days now I barely think about the tremor at all, which feels like real progress. I feel it more when stressed, so the main risk for me is still overdoing things. I remain stubbornly prone to mistaking “feeling a bit better” for “excellent, let’s reorganise the entire house, the website, the profession, and possibly Western civilisation before lunch.” So I'm trying, with mixed success, to pace myself…  Ann...

On therapeutic restraint, and why some experiences need company before they need meaning.  The consulting room is one of the last genuinely private spaces left in contemporary life. Phones are almost always tucked away. There’s no script. No transcript. No audit trail beyond what the therapist chooses to write down afterwards. Two people meeting in a room, with the door closed, doing something almost no one else will ever see. I remember being struck by this in training, when I first watched the Gloria tapes - Rogers, Perls, and Ellis each working with the same client in the late nineteen-sixties, filmed for teaching purposes. The footage felt almost…well… transgressive. The curtain lifted on something that normally happens out of sight. Most therapists go their entire careers without ever watching another therapist work, except perhaps in role-plays during training, which for a lot of us is many years in the rear-view mirror. We do this job in isolation, behind closed doors, and m...