Articles, Essays, and a Book or maybe TWO ...
BOOKS
A psychotherapist I was supervising had a dream, in which I had written two books - Pilgrims and The Story of My Life. I took this dream as a requirement that I should write these books, and the first, Pilgrims, was published by Random House in 2005 - you can click on the link above to find out a little more about it, and I have included a couple of the early chapters.
A Boyhood - The Biography of a System
My second book is currently a complete manuscript and I expect it to be available on Amazon in 2025. One part psychological memoir and one part popular psychology, A Boyhood is written for the men who were fleeced of their souls in childhood, and for the women who are trying to understand and love them. The format allows for an unflinching account of the monstrousness of normalisation and its collateral damage, after my having first cultivated an emotional bond with readers through a story that is both personal and universal, that both breaks the heart and lifts the spirit. I do so by piecing together the torn-out pages of my own boyhood - pages my family and the institutions that surrounded them would have had me torch. I show, through memoir and psychology, how our system separates a boy from his own nature, innate morality, and inner life, robbing him of essential ways of relating to the world, to others, and to himself. The innate emotional literacy of boys is perhaps the most valuable gift we can nurture in any child, boys and girls equally, but instead we all pay a heavy price for the dysfunctional standard of masculinity society holds boys to. The world teams with immature, emotionally impaired, destructive men stumbling their way through relationships and the world like children lost in the dark. But there is a door, a way through. And that door is still open.
ARTICLES
I wrote this article for the magazine The Psychotherapist in 2008. It seems to me it has stood up well over time. I wrote it after fifteen years of training people to become psychotherapists in London. They were either undertaking diplomas or M.A.s in psychotherapy and counselling.
I came to the conclusion, pretty early on in this work, that you can't train a person into being a psychotherapist. Rather, a person needs to undertake an apprenticeship over a period of something between ten and twenty years - more like twenty - in which they are working as a psychotherapist, learning from their patients, from undergoing their own therapy, and from the kind and honest guidance of a master of the craft. This is because psychotherapy is a craft, not a science and not an art - although it requires both. Click on the link above.
Conversations with No Subject
Thoughts on the therapeutic dance.
I wrote this article for The Psychotherapist in 2009. It seems to me psychotherapists are trained to intervene, when 99% of the time it would be better for them to accompany. I try to make that point in this article.
I was interviewed by Ed Marriott ofThe Observer newspaper, and the article was published in the newspaper's Society suppliment on Sunday May 1st 2005. The topic of the interview was my book Pilgrims.