Considered, long-form thinking on the issues that bring people to counselling — expat life, family patterns, recovery from coercive control, and the work that becomes possible in later life.
There is a version of expat life that gets sold to us — croissants on a sunny terrace, foreign vowels rolling off the tongue. That version exists. But it tends to live in the first year or two, and what often comes after is something quite different.
Read the article →This is not a piece about diagnosing your mother or father. It is about the particular shape that adult life can take when you grew up with a parent who was unable to see you as a separate person with your own inner world.
Read the article →People often arrive expecting fury, and find doubt instead. The aftermath of coercive control is rarely about anger. It is about reassembling the apparatus by which you know what is real — and that takes time.
Read the article →There is a quiet assumption that counselling is for the young. But later life brings its own substantial themes — and a depth of reflection that can make this stage one of the richest for the work.
Read the article →A pair of companion pieces written some years ago — more theoretical in tone, drawing on Miller, Mahler, Winnicott, Bowlby and Malan, and on Angela's own clinical work. They explore the idea of the "false self" and its origins in both narcissistic parenting and childhood bereavement.
"I sometimes think that every person who pursues a career in psychotherapy must have had a parent with a narcissistic personality." A reflection on the inner life of the child of a narcissistic parent, and how counselling can help.
Read the article →How the false self can form not only in response to a narcissistic parent, but as a child's way of coping with bereavement — illustrated through a deeply moving piece of clinical work, shared with permission.
Read the article →If any of these articles have resonated, please do get in touch. The first session is free and entirely without commitment.
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