The first Christmas I spent back in England after my marriage ended, I sat in front of the mirror and didn’t recognise my own face. Not in a dramatic way – no breakdown, no tears. Just a strange blankness. The make-up I’d applied automatically for nearly two decades suddenly made no sense. I didn’t know where to start.

I wasn’t seeking comfort. I was seeking function. What moved me to finally ask for help wasn’t the mirror moment, or the marriage ending, or even the continent I’d crossed with a small child and a determination to make everything fine. It was my daughter picking up my pint of vodka orange one day – assuming it was juice – and taking a sip.

I wasn’t falling apart visibly, I was falling apart invisibly, and I’d got so good at it I hadn’t noticed how threadbare I had become.

What followed was a long and twisty 18 years: Functional Neurological Disorder, a false bipolar diagnosis, years of being offered frameworks I tried hard to make fit. What I didn’t have – and couldn’t have imagined needing – was any understanding of the emotional systems running me. At the time, they felt unknowable and deeply threatening. My sole interest in my emotional states was keeping them in check.

The me then would have felt humiliated and shamed at even the idea of treating myself with compassion. I equated self-love with narcissism and self-delusion – at least for myself – and was driven by proving to myself and others that I was the antithesis of that.

The Three Systems

Paul Gilbert’s Compassion Focused Therapy identifies three emotional regulation systems. I’m sharing them here because understanding them helped change how I relate to myself. They form one of the foundations of the Compassion Journalling course I created.

All three systems are necessary. None is the enemy. But they can fall badly out of balance – and when they do, we tend not to notice, because the imbalance becomes the status quo and feels part of our character.

🔴 Threat System – Protection & Safety
Emotions: anxiety, anger, fear, disgust
Body: tense, racing heart, shallow breathing, tight chest
Thoughts: scanning for danger, worst-case scenarios
Purpose: fight, flight, freeze, fawn

🔵 Drive System – Achievement & Progress
Emotions: excitement, determination, striving
Body: energised, focused, activated, forward-leaning
Thoughts: planning, comparing, pursuing goals
Purpose: achieving, acquiring, never enough

🟢 Soothing System – Rest & Connection
Emotions: contentment, calm, safety, care
Body: relaxed, warm, settled, gentle breathing
Thoughts: present-moment awareness, kindness
Purpose: self-nurture, psychological resilience

Looking back, I can see exactly how my systems were running. Threat was the engine underneath everything – not the dramatic, visible kind, but the low-level hum of don’t expose yourself, don’t drop the ball, don’t do anything that might impair your ability to mother, to be enough, to keep the people you love close. It was a full-time surveillance operation, and I was both perpetually watched and on guard.

Drive sat on top of it, performing. Perfect mother. Perfect daughter. Perfect employee. Enough – but not too much. Capable, unflappable, the person others could lean on. Drive felt like the solution to Threat. If I just kept achieving, kept overdelivering, kept being useful, I’d be okay.

Soothing barely existed. Or rather: it felt dangerous. What I thought was self-soothing was more stonewalling – shutting myself up with food and alcohol, driving myself to exhaustion where I could conk out for a few hours rather than glide into restful sleep.

Being truly known wasn’t even a desire. Not even by myself. Hidden trauma and neurodivergence lurked, misunderstood as monsters to be guarded against. What was soothing system suppression, I called coping, adulting, being good.

With no robust soothing system, the threat system was in overdrive, the drive pushed to physical and psychological breaking point. Without any regulation, there was no real rest, no coming home to yourself.

A Practice: Visual Mapping

This exercise comes from my Compassion Journalling course. It takes ten minutes and asks nothing other than a little honest noticing.

Draw three circles or shapes – one for each system. Use size, colour, or imagery to show which feels most active in you right now. Some people draw Threat as jagged red lines, Drive as forward-pointing arrows, Soothing as soft green curves. There’s no right way. Let your hand decide.

Then sit with what you’ve drawn.

Which system is doing most of the work right now? Which is barely present? What would it take – even slightly – to bring a little more soothing to the fore?

If you feel activated while doing this: try grounding. Notice five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, one you can taste.

Please note: this isn’t about eliminating Threat or Drive. Both have their place. The practice is learning to restore Soothing when we need it – not judging ourselves for having the other two.

What Changed

ADHD diagnosis gave me a framework that finally made sense. And somewhere in the process of understanding my neurology, I found I could extend that same curiosity – gently, slowly – to my emotional systems too.

Self-compassion wasn’t the first thing I reached for. It was the last thing left after other things hadn’t worked. And even then, I came to it sideways – through writing, through the two-pen dialogue I developed to help me hear my own voice without flinching.

The misconception I held longest was ‘I don’t deserve it.’ ‘I don’t need it’ came a close second. I had Drive. I had performance. I had function. What would sekf-nurture add, except risk and self-delusion?

What it added, it turns out, was the ability to thrive, not just survive.

I’ll write more about what it actually took to move from Threat to Soothe – the full journey, the mess of it, what broke and what didn’t – a longer story for another time.

For now: which system is most alive in you today?

My Compassion Journalling course – a four-week facilitated programme and six-week self-study version – is grounded in CFT, Kristin Neff’s self-compassion research, and therapeutic writing practice. If this resonates, you can find out more at katepoll.co.uk. For more about CFT, here’s a video and book worth exploring:

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

The Three Circles of CFT (YouTube)

If you find it easier to be kind to others than to yourself, the abundant research (and my own lived experience) shows you are not alone. Drawing from Compassion Focused Therapy and Kristen Neff’s self-compassion research, the course offers creative and reflective tools to respond differently to underlying fears of self-criticism, complacency and other common barriers to self-compassion, gently challenging these internalised voices and ‘truths’ with curiosity, care, congruence and clarity.

Over four sessions you’ll begin to develop a different relationship with your inner critic, explore what drives your responses to yourself and others, and build a sustainable self-compassion practice that’s genuinely yours.

Each participant receives a 58-page companion guide, weekly trackers, and resources for ongoing practice.

Graduates are invited to continue deepening their practice through monthly Compassion Circles.

A structured and flexible course exploring self-compassion through creative writing, embodied practice, and psychological frameworks:

You'll Explore
Week 1 – Foundation and attuned listening
Week 2 – Developing your compassionate voice
Week 3 – Fierce compassion and self-nurture
Week 4 – Integration and sustaining practice

🔗 Full Course Outline (click to download)

What's Included

• Four live sessions via Zoom
  (link sent the day before the course begins)

• A 58-page Compassion Journal Companion to support your practice beyond the course

• Between session chat for in-between session support

• Invitation to monthly Compassion Circles for graduates

What Participants Say
"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

"The way you listen and engage with us is so warm. You're very skilled at taking what we say, honouring our truth and adapting it to suit the rest of the group, while still honouring what each person said."
– Saskia

More testimonials→

Upcoming online course Via Zoom, June 2nd–23rd June 2026,
Tuesdays , 7–9pm BST

Book your place→ Limited to 8 participants | £225

You can read more about what led to me developing Compassion Journalling and my other compassion building tools in Writing Myself Back.

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 →

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.

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.

This 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 judgements, 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 time. 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 offer it up in the comments below. You don’t have to have arrived anywhere to share it here.

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.