I ask: how would you speak to a dear friend who shared this with you?

The answers come quickly. And in a distinctly warmer tone. Their natural compassion and warmth hits hard in contrast to their treatment of themselves once they clock it.

Then I invite them to turn that warmth inward.

Laughter, tears, and wry recognition often follow. Sometimes something quieter – a long pause as the dissonance settles. The realisation that how they’ve been speaking to themselves is not their voice and not their values.

Most of us already know, intellectually, that we’re harder on ourselves than we would be on anyone we love. What’s less obvious is what to do with that knowledge – how to get from understanding it to actually living differently. Telling yourself to be kinder doesn’t work. It’s about as helpful as being told to relax.

Compassion Journalling came out of my own need for nurturing support. I developed it during a family crisis, when I needed to stay resilient and had no one to offer me the grounding I so desperately needed. I started writing in two voices – one expressing whatever was present, however raw, the other responding with the attuned, non-judgmental attention I might offer a struggling client or friend. What surprised me was how quickly that second voice began to feel like mine. Not a performance. Not an aspiration. Not my fixer voice either – just a warm, holding presence that drew on everything I’d known and learned. I began to integrate it within me.

You can read the full origin story here.

That practice – two-pen dialogue – is at the heart of the four-week course I’ve been running for several years. We write in two colours, two voices, and over time something shifts. The conversation stops being on the page alone.

We don’t only write. We use poetry, hand mapping, lovingkindness practice – turning that same quality of attention toward the body, the heart, whatever is ready to be heard. We write collaboratively. We work with the inner critic – not to silence it or reframe it by force, but to listen for what’s underneath it and respond from felt sense. Reframing, when it comes, comes naturally. It’s never required.

“The setting you created allows inner world wisdom to emerge. I felt less alone – other people have similar thoughts, the things people do not talk about in daily life. A beautiful setting to share.” – Elisabeth

The course runs over four Tuesday evenings, and something about that rhythm – returning weekly, carrying the practice into ordinary life between sessions – is part of how it works. Each participant receives a 58-page Compassion Journal Companion, and graduates are invited to continue through monthly Compassion Circles.

No previous writing experience needed. Just an openness to explore.

Compassion Journalling – A 4-Week Course
Tuesdays 2nd–23rd June 2026 | 7–9pm BST |
Online via Zoom | Limited to 8 participants | £225

Find out more →
Book your place→
Read what past participants say →

my grubby but indispensable journal

I’ve been circling the edges of this Substack since January – writing when something was alive, going quiet when work got busy. I’ve been watching the subscriber count tick up, thanks in part to generous cheerleading from others (Alice Bramhill, and Morgan Clementine – thank you) while I pondered what I was actually doing here.

I think I now know.

So here’s what Self-Centred is, as clearly as I can say it.

The personal essays are the heart of it. Once a month, roughly – sometimes more if something won’t leave me alone. They’ll be about whatever is genuinely alive to me: late diagnosis and what it keeps revealing, walks on Exmoor, what I’m reading, what I’m resisting, the gap between the compassion I offer in my practice and the compassion I withhold from myself. Not so much lessons – more dispatches.

The notes will be shorter, more frequent, less polished. Observations from facilitation and life. A poem that cracked something open. A question I don’t have an answer to yet. The kind of thing I’d say to a colleague or friend over coffee.

Wednesday Write-Together is a weekly space – 5:30–6:30 pm UK time – where I offer a prompt and we write alongside each other. No performance, no sharing required. Just an hour to turn toward yourself. Some weeks I’ll be there with a full session, some weeks I’ll offer a light prompt and hold the space. You can take inspiration from what I offer, or write on what most matters to you. I’ll let you know when I’m away.

Everything stays free for now. In September I’ll introduce a paid tier – for people who want more: a monthly themed workshop session, additional pieces, community space. I’ll tell you what that looks like well before it happens.

What I won’t be doing: posting to a schedule I can’t sustain, manufacturing content to feed an algorithm, or performing consistency I don’t feel.

What I can promise: writing when something feels true. Showing up for Write-Together most weeks (barring holidays and illness). Building something I actually want to be part of – and share with you.

If that sounds like your kind of thing – please pull up a chair.

First Wednesday Write-Together: 20th May, 5:30 pm UK. Free to join. Zoom link | Meeting ID: 833 4751 2590 | Passcode: 012406

One other thing: my next Compassion Journalling course runs across four Tuesday evenings – 2nd, 9th, 16th and 23rd June, 7–9 pm UK time. Small group, 8 places, (3 already taken). We’re exploring self-compassion through writing. If you’ve been curious about the practice, or want to return to it, booking and details are here. And as always, reach out if you have any questions.

Compassion Journalling is a four-week small-group course built around creative and reflective writing practices. It’s not about fixing yourself or performing self-care. It’s about developing a genuine relationship with your own compassionate voice – one that can meet your struggles with curiosity and care rather than judgment.

Want to get a feel for it first?

Join me for an informal live session on Monday 12th May at 7pm BST where I’ll walk you through the course and answer any questions you have. No preparation needed – come as you are.

Join the Live Q&A

Ready to book?

The June course runs 2nd-23rd June, Tuesday evenings, 7-9 pm UK time (BST), online via Zoom. Limited to 8 participants. £225.

Book your place

What past participants say:

“This course provided a gentle, safe space to explore the importance of being compassionate to ourselves through the power of writing. Kate is an excellent facilitator and I felt attended to and held throughout the course. I came away feeling lighter and much more aware of the need for compassion to be present in my life – for me. I also loved writing the joint pantoum with our small and lovely group.”

— Alexandra Harrington

“I really would recommend trying it if you have any interest in building or repairing your inner dialogue with yourself. Insightful and fun.”

— Hamish

I have been wanting to see the Exmoor wild ponies for three years – ever since they arrived in my life through my MSc dissertation, research into Gottman's Four Horsemen as a framework for understanding the way we communicate with ourselves. (More on that at the end, if you're curious.)

The ponies came to represent the self-centred us we can come home to, once we free ourselves from self-criticism, self-contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. For three years they had lived in my imagination as mentors – the unbranded, freely-moving selves I was helping others, and myself, to find. The weekend before last, my husband Carl and I finally went on a rare weekend away together.

I should say: I have not been well. Post-COVID lungs, exhaustion and ongoing symptoms I haven’t yet got to the bottom of. Even climbing the stairs has been a lot of late. It felt a lifetime ago that I was kayaking down the Thames so our short trip felt significant both physically and psychologically to me.

What The Map Couldn’t See

Google Maps estimated one hour each way. It did not factor in the incline, the uncertain ground, the gorse – dense, high, and entirely invisible on any map or my own fear of heights and lack of fitness – that made the terrain something other than the gentle moorland stroll implied. The walk took six hours in total, including breaks and the return and I loved almost every minute of it. Despite being impeded further by wearing my daughter’s walking boots, too new and slightly wrong, housing feet that already struggle in the tamest of shoes. I am genuinely proud that I reached the summit. I want to say that plainly, because the old me would be embarrassed by such a slight success and shamed by the level of challenge I found it.

On the way up, I thought about the gap between the map and the territory – like a course outline ill-informed by the refinement of delivering it, between the living, breathing, unknown resistances of the people experiencing it. All theory and no practice is inauthentic. You can’t hand someone a route you haven’t trialled and tested yourself. The road has things to tell you that the map cannot see.

What Surfaced on the Climb

It would be tidy to say the walk was healing and I felt renewed connection to myself, my husband and the beautiful nature we were part of. It would be partly true but I would be omitting – and I say this with love – the live demonstration of the Four Horsemen between my beloved and me, and within us both too.

Carl, despite being 60, looks mid-40s and is very fit, whereas, although I am a mere 49 years of age, I am considerably less so. He cycles 40 miles a day despite his own health challenges and was thrilled that this had earned him an effortless climb. He was trying to be supportive but he was also defensive, hot on any perceived criticism and anticipating my giving up or being unhappy with him for saying it was an hour’s walk. I was sanguine towards him about the unexpected level of challenge, although his defensiveness rankled mine. Any criticism was initially angled inwards, together with moments closer to contempt – at the stark contrast between how he meets his physical challenges and how I collapse into mine. Between where I want to be healthwise and where I am. Our different neurotypes served to sharpen the edges of ordinary misunderstanding, the way they too often still do, despite it being our 19th year together. Underneath it all: love. His genuine, unfailingly nurturing love shown through concern and sometimes overly cossetting attentiveness and care. I could see that and by the summit we were laughing and rebonded in the shared challenge and connection.

My focus since graduating has been building and refining Compassion Journalling as both standalone offering and foundation for the Four Horsemen course borne out of my research work. You build self-trust and resilience before you take on the harder work of looking at how the Horsemen move through you. I had last updated the outline for this course over a year ago.

The Ponies

We were pointed in the right direction by some fellow walkers who had spotted us from a distance – Carl triumphant on the summit marker, the two of us caught kissing. The ponies, it turned out, were a little further down.

And they were branded with an anchor. I was both shocked and unsurprised.

I watched my symbol of self-liberation, still owned. Marked but unbroken, free-moving creatures I had been carrying in my imagination for years.

I felt the honour of sharing space with a pony brunching on gorse and spring flowers, as if one and the same before noticing the whole herd. I was overwhelmed with excitement, like a little girl. Until I noticed one pony beneath the others, lying very still.

The pony’s tail moving only twice, and barely. The herd was gathered around and nearby. Two of them nose to nose – co-regulating I was sure.

I felt their worry and grief. I didn’t want to invade by getting any closer. My certainty arrived fully formed, that she was dying and they were keeping watch. I told Carl it was time to go, that we should leave them be. I tried to hide my tears but Carl responded to my stark change in mood by providing an alternative story. He was kind but equally sweeping in his assessment that it was just napping. I felt irritated and patronised, as if dismissed for what I knew to be true.

I still don’t know what was actually happening. That pony might have been dying. Or resting. The herd gathered might have been witness to upcoming loss, or to something else entirely. I made my story and held it hard, and that says more about me in that moment than the pony.

Suffice to say, we finally saw the ponies. I loved it but it was bittersweet.

The Way Back

We took a gentler route back. The gorse gave way to wildflowers. And then, entirely unexpectedly, we found the Periwinkle tea room – with a gallery to its side, the kind of picturebook place you only find by going the wrong way.

We bought necklaces for our three daughters. Carl, who rarely gets a treat, had a slice of vegan gluten-free cake.

I had a less rare but very welcome slice of my own. We took photographs of the wildflowers we’d walked through to get there.

The descent was less steep but still agony for my feet who were quietly insistent on me listening to what they have been begging me a lifetime to hear. I underplayed the pain– I was happy and felt connected to Carl and myself. I was grateful – but every step was placed deliberately, in negotiation with my poor feet, and the state of them when we got home told their own story.

Animal First

Since coming home I have ordered shoes from a company called Freet. It came with a little card about following the perfect design of the human foot. Wide fit, properly wide. Not shoes I’ve squeezed toward. Not shoes that hobble. I found it unexpectedly moving as if it was affirming my feet’s permission to be.

I am an animal before I am anything else – before I am a professional, mother, woman shaped by what I was told I should be. The journey took six hours with blisters, borrowed boots, and a long painful lesson in how being self-centred is about centring oneself in our bodies as much as our minds.

I also came home agreeing to Carl’s long term dream for a campervan, which I had previously considered as a threat rather than a promise. We came back closer than we left, which is welcome and somewhat unexpected, and we are determined to do more adventuring, just the two of us.

Back in London, a visit to our vet – for entirely unrelated domestic chaos – happened to turn to the ponies. She thought it likely the pony was an expectant mother, the herd close protecting the arrival of the yet unbranded foal. I don’t know if that’s true. But its potential promise sits differently in my body.

April’s Other Threads

There was more to this month – bullet journalling as a tool for self-mapping rather than productivity performance, experiments with understanding my own dopamine wiring, the ongoing question of how to be present on Substack without it becoming another performance of engagement. I’ll write about these. What would you most like to hear about?

And if you’ve been to Exmoor, or if you have a three-year appointment you haven’t yet kept – I’d love to know about it and how you might make it happen for you.

Gottman’s Four Horsemen – criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling – were originally identified as predictors of relationship breakdown.

My MSc research explored what happens when we apply that same lens to the way we talk to ourselves. More on the course that’s emerging from that work soon.

As I step down as co-editor of Lapidus International Magazine, we’re looking for the next editor(s) to take it forward.

Lapidus International is the leading organisation for writing for wellbeing in the UK – championing the use of writing to support health, connection, and community. The magazine is a key part of that work.

The role is voluntary, and it can be taken on individually or as part of a team.

Tomorrow Alison Cable (my co-editor) and I are holding an open meeting – a chance to ask questions and find out what the role involves before deciding whether to put yourself forward. You don’t need to be a Lapidus member to apply.

📅 Tomorrow – 6 pm UK time. Free Time Converter

🔗 Find out more about lapidus.org.uk.

💻 Join: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83771100467 Meeting ID: 837 7110 0467

Please share widely – this could be a brilliant opportunity
for the right person or people.

A warm reminder that the Embodied Lovingkindness & Compassionate Body Dialogue workshop is tomorrow, Friday 1st May, 10–11:30 am UK time. Free to subscribers. Zoom link in my subscriber chat.

No experience needed.

Please have paper and a choice of two different coloured pens handy for the two-pen dialoguing. (One pencil, one pen also works and if you forget, I have adaptations you can make.) Any concerns, questions or accessibility needs, please reach out: kate@self-centred.com.

One small update: I’ve decided to keep this as a live-only space – it feels more aligned with the intimacy of the practice. If you’re unable to make it, I’m sorry – I’ll have something more accessible for international friends in future.

Rose Wylie, Study for Red Twink, 2002 (one of my favourites).

I saw Rose Wylie’s exhibition yesterday with a friend. I chose it to help foster our commitment to joy and playfulness within our own creativity; it left my friend cold, and me flu-like, filled with internal conversation to navigate and unpick.

I’d been wrestling with something before I even arrived – the fact that I encourage my participants to take themselves seriously as writers, whatever their literacy level, and yet resist identifying as a writer myself. It was , in a short course about being a creative through Substack, who mentioned visiting the exhibition with her daughter. Something in its playfulness appealed to me as playfulness is a quality I want to make more space for in my personal practice.

The Gate-Keeping Dilemma

I was both admiring and a little envious of how playfully and seriously Wylie takes her art, appreciative of the energy in some of them and at the same time mistrusting as to whether some of the pieces actually constitute art. If an imaginative child’s pictures were given the weight of size and the standing of the Royal Academy, would critics necessarily know the difference? Or, like seeing the beauty and meaning in the everyday, does the very act of taking them seriously – of giving time and space to reflective consideration of these art pieces, some modern historical first-hand recollections of recent history – make them culturally important?

We entered into some large naive renderings of planes that felt so flat and child-like, oppressively naive – my first instinct was to feel vaguely insulted that I had paid £22.50 a ticket to witness someone’s childish imaginings. I felt a little embarrassed. I had treated my friend to this outing, designed to inspire us both and excite conversation, and it felt self-indulgent, the visual art equivalent of publishing personal writing without considering the reader.

RW Party Clothes (Rose Wylie), 2016

The interpretive blurb described this figure as wearing red lipstick and a 1950s-style conical bra. Looking at her, I couldn’t see either. The lips read black and there is no definition to suggest her breasts in any form, natural or conical. If the official text is getting the image wrong, it makes me question its authority. The internal barometer gauging whether this exhibition exemplified empowering expressive art versus the work of self-indulgent chancers was wavering a little further toward the latter.

To find myself judging myself for both inclinations – gate-keeper and Emperor’s New Clothes victim – makes this exhibition worth reflecting on. I offer these reflections in relation to my own struggles identifying as an artist, specifically a writer, and not as an attempt at serious art criticism – unlike the small huddles of serious-looking artists and critics sharing their insights in low, self-consciously considered tones clustered around the gallery. I don’t think they were part of the exhibit, but they added to its potential for satire.

Picasso is often quoted as saying: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”. Although he was problematic as a man, I cannot deny his talent or how his series of bull paintings show his compulsion to find simplicity and child-like energy in form.

Pablo Picasso, The Bull, 1945

In a Cowslip’s Bell with Music, 2020, King Alfred, 2015, German Botanical Drawing, 2016,

Crown Imperial (From the Garden), 2015.

This botanical series complicated my thinking further. I appreciate the humour in the titles – ‘In a Cowslip’s Bell with Music’ has a Shakespearean reach that the image alone doesn’t quite meet – and yet, as purely visual art, I find myself pondering what to do with it. I can’t help imagining somebody buying it for enormous sums to hang in their house, at the expense of their own and perhaps their children’s art. And yet, I am uneasy, there’s enough vision here to suggest the lack is in fact mine.

What Worked For Me

And yet. I could see and appreciate the energy in others:

Bathing Costume, Green. Glamour Personified. 1950.

Here the collage technique does something traditional rendering couldn’t – the figure gains embodiment through positioning rather than form. The fragments of paper create a curve that feels present, alive, three-dimensional in a fresh way that the drawing alone might not have achieved.

Running bird and silver birch. 2007.

Theis and the next picture have an undeniable energy for me. I can feel the bird’s sense of agency and purpose in escaping the fold of the page, and the paper doll, so static in nature, gains personality and purpose on the page.

Pink Skater, Will I Win, 2015

This image is playful, feeling both joyful and liberatory, and yet the child-like representation and the infantilised portrayal of the woman brought up conflicting feelings, feeding my fear of exposure through self-delusion.

It feels churlish to note this, like I am raining on her happy parade and yet, it brought up, not judgement of the subject per se, but fear of ridicule in me.

The Need To Contextualise Art

I found myself explaining my choice of exhibition after the first two paintings to my friend – we’re both writing for wellbeing practitioners, so I reached for context to bridge the gap between what we were seeing and what I’d hoped she might see. The first room wasn’t encouraging. She looked politely bemused. I felt the mild social embarrassment of someone who has chosen the restaurant and watched their guest push its offerings around the plate.

Wikipedia – that most democratised of authorities – defines art as work expected to evoke a worthwhile experience through emotional power, conceptual ideas, technical proficiency, or beauty. Standing in front of those first planes, I found myself assessing it, almost with an imaginary tick box. Worthwhile to whom, after all? By whose measure?

For me, art as a process is my primary intention and I see its deeply therapeutic benefits daily but, for it to travel beyond individual experience – to touch the viewer rather than the artist alone – it needs to resonate. These weren’t with either of us. Yet.

Air Raid, 2015-2017

I didn’t take pictures of any of the aircraft paintings. They didn’t speak to me – until I read the context. And then I felt ashamed at my internal judgments, as if I was robbing her of agency, at the validity of her childhood memory of aerial bombardment being documented and heard. As a historical first-hand account, it contained power and has a right to be witnessed and its terror affirmed. It reminded me of child’s shoes included in war exhibits, and Anne Frank’s house and writing that meant so much to me.

The RA website waxes lyrical:

“Wylie paints freewheeling pictures, often with words loosely scrawled across them, that are gloriously big and crude, and full of a certain dry British humour that sends up any whiff of orthodoxy or pretension.”

Wylie herself is credited with saying “What I absolutely very much like is for them to get into museums where everybody can see them”. I find myself agreeing, and also disagreeing. Working my way through the hallowed exhibition halls with my £22.50 ticket (small concessions are available), I found myself contemplating using some of her work in workshops with independent living and housing trust clients, perhaps alongside artworks from a prisoner exhibition I enjoyed some time ago. Unlike the prisoner exhibition though, this one is only accessible to the privileged which seems a shame.

THE THERAPEUTIC POWER OF ART

Jacky Power – poet and trauma-focused psychotherapist – has been a quiet encouragement here: sharing process poetry not as a route to prizes or publication but for therapeutic benefit, offered openly. James Crews, in conversation with fellow compassion-led poet Julia Fehrenbacher, modelled something similar – his specific reservation about sharing unfinished poems, his years focused on editing anthologies, and his recent return to his own work in Breathing Room, all felt quietly familiar. I relate strongly to this instinct. My work as a therapeutic writing facilitator and co-editor of Lapidus magazine has been genuinely absorbing – but somewhere in the richness of holding space for others, my own creative writing quietly moved to the back of the queue. This exhibition, and the conversation it started, felt like another small nudge to moving it forward again.

What Is Art?

What is art? If it’s to get you talking, it didn’t work for my friend – but it resulted in my conversation with this page in the hope of engaging with you.

A workshop is forming in my mind for anyone who finds themselves judging their own inclinations before they’ve even picked up the pen – exploring who gives us permission to take ourselves seriously as creators, and how the most important permission is the one we give ourselves. Caleb Parkin – poet and contributor to Lapidus magazine – shared these ekphrastic prompts with permission to use and share widely. Over a cuppa after the exhibition, my friend and I picked a picture and answered the following prompts one by one. They create a ten-line growing poem building one word at a ti

me. Why not pick a picture in this article – or one of your own – and have a go:

1. The most important word from the title (1 word)

2. An important texture in the painting (2 words)

3. The most striking colour from the painting (3 words)

4. Some sounds the poem is making (4 words)

5. One thing we love about this painting (5 words)

6. What we’d change about the painting (6 words)

7. A question we’d ask the artist about the painting (7 words)

8. A question we’d ask someone in the painting (8 words)

9. A question we’d ask something in the painting (9 words)

10. Write a new information sign for this painting (10 words)

Whatever this exercise produces for you – a fragment, a single line, something unfinished – please feel free to share it in the comments below. You don’t have to have arrived anywhere to share it on the page.

Source: Book of Symbols, Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS)

Dear subscribers and followers,

A warm welcome to those of you who have recently joined, and big love to those who’ve been here since January. I’m very grateful you’re here.

Back in February I mentioned a free workshop as a thank-you. Here it is.

Embodied Lovingkindness & Compassionate Body Dialogue Workshop 1st May, 10–11.30 am (UK time)

This standalone workshop is an invitation to accept and welcome all parts of yourself – the valued parts, the neutral parts, and the parts you find most challenging.

Informed by Internal Family Systems and Compassion Focused Therapy, we’ll move through two practices together. First, a guided lovingkindness meditation – cultivating warmth towards different aspects of yourself. Then, compassionate two-pen dialogue – tuning in to what your body needs, and offering space to the parts that feel loud through pain or discomfort, or that have quietly grown silent.

This is an invitation to soften, and let your embodied wisdom guide you.

Date: Friday 1st May Time: 10–11.30 am UK time Cost: Free to Subscribers

If you are following and not yet a subscriber, you’re also very welcome to join. There is a paid option through my website but, given you can subscribe for free, you might choose to sign up here.

This workshop is also my gift to the community of Alice Bramhill – AUDHD coach, psychotherapist, and author – in grateful thanks for her generous and wholehearted support of my work. If you've found your way here through Alice, you're very welcome.

Warmest wishes to you all,

Kate

A note for friends across the pond – I know 10 am UK time is 5 am Eastern and a big ask for those in other parts of our small world, and I'm sorry. I'll record the session and share it with you afterwards. The next workshop I offer will be later in the day with you and other international friends in mind.

I just wanted to move away from the big tech machine and the always-available pull of contractual, fear-driven connection.

Meta and LinkedIn: secured and locked down. Email: migrated to Proton Mail – personal and professional. Google Drive: in progress, moving across to Proton Drive. Less functionality, but a layout I’m warming to. These things take longer than a single hyperfocus-driven afternoon.

What I didn’t factor in: the research spiral. I spent longer than I’d like to admit debating and prevaricating, only to lurch into impulsive action – the kind of hyperfocus where you forget you’re attached to a body and need to stop for a wee. It wasn’t even the work I’d planned for the day. No matter.

The ADHD tax isn’t just the time. It’s choosing between twelve imperfect alternatives when your brain needs one obvious right answer that doesn’t exist.

What actually helped: getting an overview with Claude’s assistance, then deciding – based on my own whys, budget, and practical needs – that good enough was the goal, not perfection.

What genuinely surprised me: I dropped a quiet heads-up on both the school parents’ WhatsApp and my street group – no recruitment drive, just a brief note that I’d be leaving WhatsApp (or whatever) and where I could be found. Eleven parents from the forthcoming sixth form group have already migrated to Signal, with appetite to meet up in person – just people on a shared path, no fundraising or helicopter parenting agendas in sight. Many from the street group have expressed interest in doing the same. I wasn't trying to organise anyone. I just wanted to move away from the big tech machine and the always-available pull of contractual, fear-driven connection – the kind where you stay because leaving feels rude, or because you might miss something, or because you've been quietly recruited into someone else's agenda.

I’m not done. But I’m less of a product than I was six months – even six days – ago, and I didn’t let it encroach on my birthday and Mother’s day celebrations combined. That feels like something.

If you want the practical detail – what I moved to, how – drop a comment, new friends on Substack. Happy to share.

After two years co-editing Lapidus International Magazine, I'm stepping down from my voluntary editorial role. Before moving on, I'd like to share a piece first published there – the story of how I came to develop my Compassion Journalling practice, and how it has helped me build self-trust and the courage to explore my voice here.

If you’re curious about Lapidus International or interested in getting involved – including taking on a voluntary editorial role – you can find out more about the organisation here and read the latest issue, on the theme of relationship, here. For any questions, get in touch at magazine@lapidus.org.uk

Plunged into full-on emergency mode, after weeks of sleep deprivation and emotional firefighting, the weight of my own grief and fears began to sink in. I longed for a mentor, a therapeutic guide, and a mother’s holding – none of which were available.

It had been over three years since my mother’s death and many more since she’d been able to nurture me in the way I now needed. Our family was facing a very different grief: the sudden death of a child, a close friend to one of our youngest, a death that blindsided us and felt all too close, shattering our sense of safety.

The shock ricocheted through us and our community. The once near-certainty that our children would reach adulthood and likely outlive us was gone. My partner and I did what we could to create a nest of safety for our children in a world that had just shifted on its axis. I questioned whether it was selfish, or even feasible, to continue my studies. The work had been centred on reflective inquiry into internal conflict; already challenging, without a crisis unfolding that would touch every part of our family.

During that time, I happened across papers on Dialogical journal writing as ‘self-therapy’: ‘I matter’ and The Compassionate Mind that offered both a method and a renewed sense of purpose. Alongside continued reading on Compassion Focused Therapy, I began to explore what compassion and wisdom might be available within me – drawing on everything I had witnessed, read and absorbed. I reflected on which qualities of voice I could trust within every part of myself. These reflections became the foundation for an inner presence I would begin to turn to and build a relationship with through dialoguing with the page.

It helped me stay resilient during a time when I needed to remain strong and emotionally resilient for my family. It became the practice I now call Compassion Journalling, and I have been adapting and sharing with others ever since.

The approach involves writing in two voices – one expressing whatever fear, anger, or shame was present, the other offering a steady, compassionate response. Often, the voice speaks little, simply affirming the underlying fear and effort behind a struggle. My inner wise

voice meets the rawest parts of me, not with judgement or solution, but with a spaciousness that makes me feel nurtured and held.

Its quiet power was building self-kindness within me: I felt seen, listened to and accepted from within, both radically new and a form of reclamation. Through regular dialogue journalling, I came to recognise the compassionate wisdom and steady support as parts of myself. I was building a self-regulating internal space grounded in clarity and emotional safety.

Through this written dialoguing, my writing began to change. I noticed how I spoke to myself: through language, through how I treated my body, through quiet, persistent habits of dismissal and neglect that passed for coping. And I met myself with kindness.

As my relationship with this wise version of myself developed, I felt a shift. My confidence was growing, and I was able to hold space for myself. Crucially, it helped me stay present through the difficult circumstances enveloping me.

This crisis forced me to confront not just immediate loss, but the accumulated griefs I’d been carrying. At the time, I was already exploring different forms of grief, including the many ways we lose connection with ourselves and others. I began to notice how those griefs lived in my body. And as I did, my writing was changing from simply expressing to becoming a form of listening and holding space for myself.

I wanted to communicate more authentically – not just outwardly, but within myself. That desire led me into a deeper relationship with signals I’d long ignored: exhaustion, fear, resentment, and the cost of living disconnected from my body. These were the places I had felt silenced or compromised by others’ reactivity, leaving me disconnected and unheard.

This disconnection had deeper roots. Years earlier, I’d been diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) – a condition that disrupts communication between brain and body, often emerging in the wake of trauma or prolonged stress. Forced to confront the cost of living from the neck up, since then my focus has been learning to manage my energy and build a sustainable life and practice.

Grief doesn’t always show up as tears. Sometimes it arrives as bone-deep exhaustion. As a near-constant gnawing in the gut. As involuntary movements – a head or limb jerking or giving way. Anything from full-body fitting to, once, although still conscious, being able to move only my eyelids. As shame. My body breaking down in ways I couldn’t predict or control, and the fear that my fracture lines were laid bare. I now understand FND as a response to internal conflict, exhaustion, and undiagnosed neurodiversity I had worked relentlessly to hide. At the time, I had no real concept of anxiety within myself. It didn’t fit with my external identity of calm competence – endless, unflappable multitasking. In fact, I kept raising the bar each time something began to feel too easy.

I’m learning just how many forms grief can take and how layered they can be. There’s the grief of death, but also the grief of fragmentation, of not being seen or understood. Some of my earliest griefs weren’t traditional losses. They were about feeling unrecognisable to the people I most wanted to connect with. That kind of grief leaves fragments of self, exiled inside.

In my own life, those griefs have included the slow, silent loss of my voice as I learnt to adjust, perform, and suppress parts of myself. There’s the loss of misrecognition, mine and others’, in the face of unacknowledged neurodivergence and trauma. And the gradual loss of my mother’s voice through the aphasia that accompanied her rare form of dementia.

Even chosen loss leaves its mark: walking away from inherited loyalties to protect peace, knowing that what’s unprocessed may return later in the ache of missed repair.

Despite my continued efforts, I still livefrom the neck up too often, a survival strategy I haven’t fully outgrown. In truth, it is often fear of the next reckoning rather than genuine self-care that first brings me back into line. But my body, when I let it, helps keep my goals sustainable, relationships healthy and work self-aligned. Sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully, it reminds me I’m not paying attention. Rather than fearing my body, I am slowly and inconsistently learning to welcome it as a trusted ally that always tells the truth, never too ashamed or afraid to see.

For the first time, I felt I was caring for myself without shame. There was no fear of being self-indulgent, no urge to over-correct through rigorous self-interrogation. My compassionate voice held the best of my mother’s nurturing approach and my own, combined with that calming, grounded presence I admire in Carl Rogers’ work that is fully attentive and free from judgement.

In my personal practice, I think of this voice as my inner mother, though I

encourage participants to reflect on what image would feel most aligned for them. For me, it evokes the qualities of unconditional care and wisdom I was seeking. For others, it might be a wise friend, an elder, or simply their own most grounded self.

Having piloted the process with small groups, I now offer community courses, creating extended and inclusive multi-sensory versions that incorporate other therapeutic arts, designed to resonate across different life experiences. And I have noticed something that seemed subtle at first, but proves essential learning for my own practice. My wise, compassionate voice, the one that can feel so integrated and steady, starts to fade if I begin to let go of the structure of my journalling process in the belief it’s now fully part of me. It isn’t that the practice fails; it is that I stop actively developing my compassion-building muscle and fall back into old habits of stonewalling my body and defensive self-talk riddled with criticism and contempt.

This practice is teaching me that healing isn’t something I can arrive at but an ongoing relationship with myself. Compassion Journalling continues to be my anchor; it helps me attune to and trust my internal wisdom. It reminds me that self-nurture doesn’t lead to selfishness or complacency; it builds the resilience I need to show up with authenticity, boundaries, and compassion.

An Invitation

Take a few minutes to reflect on how you typically speak to yourself when facing a challenge.

• Jot down some phrases you might say to yourself – without judgement, just noticing.

• Now imagine a dear friend came to you with the same challenge. What tone would you use? What words? Write these down too.

Notice any differences between. What might it feel like to offer yourself even a small portion of that same kindness?

Leave a comment

Feel free to share what came up in the comments, or keep it for yourself – both are welcome.

Found poem created from this post:

Neither silent or snarling

I've been modelling compassion outwardly 
while living with an often-present 
gnawing undercurrent
of resentment and fear. 

Since this morning something's shifted. 
I feel myself unfurling.

Today I feel myself softening.

Not because the world is less cruel – it isn’t – but because I’ve noticed how much rage and helplessness have been leaking into my closest relationships.

Yesterday evening my husband had an illumination about his own behaviour, and it made the space needed for me to see mine. I’ve been modelling compassion outwardly while living with an often-present gnawing undercurrent of resentment and fear – the kind that erodes self-trust and takes a physical toll. As I continue to recognise and soothe my over-activated threat system*, I’m seeing more clearly how an underlying hypervigilance and defensiveness shape my responses, often out of step with my values.

I’m tired. I’ve been craving solitude – autonomy of space and thought – and noticing how easily I override that need. My work centres compassion. Now I’m practising turning that lens inward – not to fix myself, but to stay with what’s actually happening.

I’m still in recovery from self-erasing people-pleasing, learning how it continues to shape my relationships – with others and with myself. I’ve been asserting boundaries more firmly, often feeling righteously angry. And despite being fluent in relational and non-violent communication, I can hear now how resentment and desperation sometimes marinate my words. I see the difference between holding boundaries and exerting them – between being internally rooted and becoming reactive, scrappy, cornered. I want to be neither silent nor snarling, but steady enough to stay present.

I want to be clear: I’m still angry.

I’m angry at the men – and women – who subjugate and rape on this small planet, stripping others of agency, selfhood and shared resources. I’m angry at patriarchal, colonial cultures and the systems that quietly enable harm while protecting the most powerful and shaming those who speak. And I’m angry at myself – at the parts of me I allowed to be silenced, and at the belief that adding my voice would be meaningless, or would simply make me ill and under fire again.

What’s shifting – at least today – is my relationship with all of that anger. Its intensity is still building, but it’s no longer destabilising me. I feel self-centred – not shut down, not raging – but present. Less shackled by fear. Less driven by the need to anticipate harm, manage others, or silence myself.

The boundaries I speak about in my work, I’m practising holding rather than performing, and I’m noticing how this is softening my personal relationships too. I feel myself unfurling, reconnecting with my partner with more generosity and nuance – and through modelling that self-integration is messy and ongoing, not a destination, my clients have told me it makes them feel safer to accept their own.

This shift shaped today’s Compassion Circle. In a challenging seasonal and political moment, I’m responding to a need I recognise in myself and others: for softness without collapse, for self-nurture that isn’t escapism. That includes making myself my own client – marking time and space to explore my voice on the page, to maintain internal coherence not as an achievement, but as a practice.

*When I refer to an over-activated threat system, I'm drawing on Compassion Focused Therapy (Paul Gilbert). For those who like visual representations, I've included the image I created below:

Further References:

Gilbert, P. (2013) The Compassionate Mind: A New Approach to Life Challenges. 3^rd edn. London: Robinson.

A short YouTube video explaining the framework.

Promises to Self 
...a 'found poem', from an extract from my Compassion Journal

Wary of starting with expectation–
a duty to create, fulfil promises
to anyone but myself.
Creating a strategy feels like a booby trap.
A great road to self-gagging.
Might stop me writing at all.
By definition, any Substack called
Self-Centred
can't be driven by
likes, reposts, subscribers.
I don't want the pressure of the calendar,
hooked into creating content
when it puts me out of whack
with my own internal rhythms.
Pressure to create content
rather than connection.
Forget algorithms and "shoulds."
My head, heart & guts will guide
building connection
with myself and you.

The Tension

I love my role as a therapeutic creative writing facilitator – creating spaces that help others build self-trust and amplify their voice. But there are aspects of my own practice that betray that goal: over-planning to anticipate every need – real and imagined, emails revised endlessly to prevent imagined offence. Over-delivering to purchase connection. As a late-diagnosed neurodivergent woman, I recognise this pattern. I'm ready to let this fear-driven behaviour go.

This Substack is part of my goal to become Self-Centred. And the irony and potential pitfalls aren’t lost on me.

Every piece of Substack advice says: create a strategy, promise a posting schedule, build your offer suite, optimise for engagement.

My body-self wisdom says: Nah.

My gut says:This feels like self-gagging.

My heart says: I want connection, not performance.

My mind says: But shouldn’t we have a plan?

This is the coherence work. Noticing when external advice (even good advice) creates internal discord. And asking: what am I actually here to do?

What I’m Centring Instead:

• Writing from present experience – what’s alive in me now

• Modelling the mess – process, not just polish

• Trusting what emerges – found poems, tangents, unresolved questions

• Permission to stop – if this becomes another performance, I’ll pause.

The promise: I’ll write when I have something true to say. I won’t manufacture content to meet a calendar.

The invitation: You’re warmly welcome. Pull up a chair.

Your Turn

Optional Prompt:

• Where are you trying to strategise yourself into connection?

• What would happen if you centred your own rhythm instead?

(No need to answer publicly – this is an invitation to notice, not perform but you are welcome to share in the chat if you would like to.)

Explore building self-trust and developing your compassionate voice?

I’m running a 4-week Compassion Journalling course in February, exploring how to build relationship with yourself through two-pen dialogue. It’s about listening to what’s actually true, not what should be: https://www.katepoll.co.uk/#compassionjournalling