Category: Emotional Healing

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Emotional Healing Reclaiming the Self

The Machinery of Silence: Recognising Subtle Psychological Harm

Some forms of harm leave no visible trace. They arrive quietly, through tone, timing, and unspoken rules, gradually reshaping a person’s sense of self. There are no dramatic scenes, only the slow erosion of expression. Over time, one learns to minimise their needs, doubt their memory, and apologise for existing “the wrong way.” This isn’t conflict or disagreement. It’s an atmosphere that makes someone smaller, day by day.

How Subtle Harm Operates

This kind of harm often travels through micro-signals: a look that diminishes, a sigh that shames, a “correction” that subtly rewrites events, or a shifting of goalposts so one is never quite right. The message is consistent: You’re too much. You’ve misunderstood. You should be easier. The result is predictable: self-doubt, hypervigilance, and a carefully curated self designed to avoid repercussions.

What the Body Remembers

Even when the mind rationalises, the body keeps score. Jaw tension, shallow breathing, disturbed sleep, loss of appetite or comfort eating, and difficulty making decisions are not signs of weakness. They are data. An internal alarm that something in the relational environment is quietly costly to one’s integrity.

Psychological Consequences

Left unaddressed, this atmosphere erodes self-trust and narrows life. People may withdraw from friendships, silence their creativity, and abandon activities that once brought meaning. Over time, it becomes harder to distinguish genuine accountability from coerced conformity. Shame often sits at the centre, quiet, corrosive, and convincing.

Why This Matters Clinically (BACP Lens)

Within the BACP Ethical Framework, several principles speak directly to this:

  • Non-maleficence (do no harm): Practitioners must avoid colluding — even unintentionally — with patterns that keep clients small. Recognising the machinery of silence is part of safeguarding psychological safety.
  • Autonomy (respecting self-direction): Supporting clients to name their experience, set boundaries, and make choices honours their self-governance.
  • Related principles include Beneficence (promoting wellbeing), Fidelity (building trust), and Self-Respect (practising reflective limits and care as therapists).

In clinical work, our BACP stance is not extra, it is the scaffold. We hold non-maleficence by avoiding subtle collusion with shrinking patterns, and we centre autonomy by restoring the client’s naming, boundaries, and choice. With fidelity and beneficence pacing the work, and self-respect maintained through supervision and limits, we create conditions where one small, safe step can be taken and kept.

Clinical Considerations for Therapists

  1. Name the Process, Not the Person: Focus on patterns (“You notice the rules keep changing”) rather than labels. This preserves agency and reduces defensiveness.
  2. Stabilise Self-Trust: Invite clients to track their bodily cues, sleep patterns, appetite, and stress levels. Use brief grounding techniques (e.g., paced breathing, 4–6 breaths) to re-anchor in sessions.
  3. Reality Testing: Use collaborative recall and journaling to counter memory erosion (“Let’s write what happened, as you experienced it, and what changed afterwards”).
  4. Boundaries as Intervention: Support clients in practising one small boundary at a time — time limits, delayed responses, and topic limits. Emphasise safety planning where needed.
  5. Supervision & Parallel Process: If you notice the machinery of silence in your own responses (e.g., hesitancy to ask clarifying questions), bring it to supervision. This protects both Non-maleficence and Self-Respect.

Guidance for Readers and Students

  • Attend to Patterns, Not Episodes: Is there a recurring theme of minimising, correcting, or shifting expectations?
  • Use One Trusted Witness: A friend, mentor, or therapist who can hold your account without rushing to fix it helps restore perspective.
  • Start Small: Recovery doesn’t begin with confrontation. It begins with a private truth (“This costs me”) and one small protective boundary.
  • Rebuild Autonomy: Reintroduce activities that reflect your values, such as journaling, physical movement, time spent in nature, and creative pursuits. Autonomy strengthens when life allows you to make your own choices.

Moving Toward Repair

Recovery begins with a modest yet firm ‘yes‘ to one’s own reality. It rarely starts with explosions. It starts with clarity, continuity, and compassion. When people can track their emotions, name what they see, and take one small action to protect their dignity, the machinery weakens. The aim is not to win an argument about truth, it is to live in a way that honours it.

Categories
Creative Therapy & Reflection Creativity and Healing Emotional Healing Emotional Wellbeing Reclaiming the Self Reflective Practice

The Things They Never Own

Many people suffer in silence, not because there is nothing to say, but because there is too much.

The image of a quiet suitcase, half-open, speaks for what words often cannot: the careful packing away of blame, denial, coldness, and control. The way shame is stitched into the lining while the outside remains polished and respectable. A suitcase, oval and elegant, sits quietly on the floor, open, but not exposed. Inside, small words rest where clothing might once have been avoidance, denial, protection, anger, blame, cold, abandon, integrity. Etched faintly inside the lid is one word that ties them all together — shame.

This image invites us to pause.

It asks what we hide, what we carry, and what we present to the world. The suitcase becomes a metaphor for the psychology of abuse, not just physical, but emotional, psychological, and relational. On the outside, it is polished and respectable; it looks harmless, even appealing. But open the lid, and we glimpse the defences, the distortions, and the pain that lie beneath.

For those who have experienced or witnessed abuse, this image speaks without needing to explain. The abuser often appears charming, warm, attentive, and admired. Beneath the surface, however, lie layers of avoidance, denial, and blame. They pack away their shame, disguising it beneath a façade of control.

 

Integrity, that fragile quality of wholeness, lies buried under the weight of self-protection. And yet, the suitcase is only semi-open. It suggests that the truth is never completely hidden. With awareness, with courage, with compassion, the lid can lift further — revealing not only the harm but also the possibility of change.

 

The task for the viewer is not to judge, but to see: to notice the dissonance between what the world sees and what lies inside; to recognise how often manipulation wears a smile. And to reflect on our own suitcase, what it holds, what remains unspoken, and what we are ready, or not ready, to unpack.

Reflection

For therapists, readers, and students alike, The Things They Never Own invites a deeper kind of seeing, one that goes beyond the surface.

Every person carries something unseen: defences, wounds, memories, inherited survival strategies.

Take a quiet moment to reflect or journal:

  • What does your own suitcase contain?
  • Which emotions or defences might you have packed away for protection?
  • What might you be ready to unpack, and what still feels too heavy to open?
  • How do you recognise the difference between what the world sees and what lies inside?

In therapy, supervision, and reflective practice, these questions remind us of the delicate balance between visibility and safety. To open the suitcase, even slightly, is to begin the work of integration and healing. When we dare to look inside with honesty and compassion, what was once hidden in shame can begin to transform into understanding.

May we learn to open only what we are ready to hold, and to hold it with gentleness.

 

Categories
Emotional Healing Self-Reflection & Growth Shadow Work Uncategorized

The Hidden Friend: Meeting the Shadow with Compassion

The hidden friend image created by Jenny McClymont

We often view the shadow as a flaw that needs to be fixed or eliminated. But what if it’s a friend who is awkward, loyal, and longing to be seen?

The parts of ourselves that we try to get rid of don’t vanish. They wait in memories we don’t want to remember, in reactions that seem too enormous, and in the space between who we are and who we think we should be. The shadow isn’t only our pain; it’s the context that has been lost, the story’s missing page.

For a lot of us, it’s not fear that keeps the darkness hidden; it’s tiredness. We often tire of appearing confident when we genuinely feel confused or weak. And sometimes, when you’re tired, a crack opens just enough to let something tangible come out.

Shadow work is more about getting together than mending things and paying attention. Naming. Sometimes all you have to do is say, “I feel this way too.”

You don’t have to explain everything you find in the dark. You only need to be willing to stop looking away. The darkness isn’t as scary when you are there and show compassion. It becomes a portal, not to perfection, but to being whole.

Categories
Creative Therapy & Reflection Emotional Healing Personal Growth & Shadow Work Shadow Work Uncategorized

Shadow Stories: What We Bury, What We Reclaim

The inner architecture of the unconscious image by Jenny McClymont

Inside each of us is a place where things we’ve forgotten live. Not lost, set aside. These are the experiences, emotions, and feelings that used to feel too weighty, too messy, and too misunderstood to share. We have learnt how to hide them well over time. They sit silently in the dark, influencing us from behind the scenes.

This shadow isn’t merely a place to hide fear or shame. It also contains parts of our brilliance, such as creativity, instinct, vulnerability, and desire. The sections we thought were too much or not enough. These are the sections adjusted to fit what was acceptable. “Sometimes, these hidden parts of ourselves were tucked away so early that we aren’t even aware they’re missing. But we can feel the holes, whether it’s through detachment, reluctance, or the deep aching of something we can’t identify.

As children, we learnt quickly what to display and what to hide. We slowly came up with a notion of who we were “supposed” to be by getting a gold star here and a harsh phrase there. But being alive has its costs. And if we only do what is appropriate, we merely live half lives.

Depression, withdrawal, and perfectionism may not be adversaries; instead, they may be there to help you. Old ways that used to keep us safe. When we approach them with inquiry instead of criticism, we start to see that they were trying to help. Now we can pick something different.

To get back our complete selves, we don’t need to shout from the rooftops; we need to open the door calmly. A page of writing, a painted smudge, or a whispered truth, these honest things bring the hidden ones back home. “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious,” remarked Jung.

Your shadow isn’t something to be ashamed of. It’s your story, long hidden, now asking to be told with compassion and honesty.