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I’ve moved to substack and written a new piece Staying 'Without Self‑Erasure' about what it means to stay in difficult systems without disappearing. It explores coercive control, organisational pressure, and the work of maintaining authorship when the relational field narrows. You can read it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/drlibbynugent/p/staying-without-self-erasure?r=1m1fm8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

I have been revisiting the fairy tale Bearskin  in preparation for an upcoming workshop. It is a story that helps me think about what it means to arrive depleted, and about the ethics of waiting when people, and systems, are under strain. In the tale, a soldier returns from war with nothing. He has lost his home, his place, and his usefulness to the world he once served. Offered an impossible bargain, he agrees to live for seven years wearing a bearskin, unable to wash, groom

Following some research for my group analytic training, I have found myself thinking differently about online therapy and about the current preoccupation with power in psychotherapy more broadly. I am beginning to wonder whether some of what gets framed as “power dynamics in the therapeutic relationship” may actually reflect a wider cultural tension about our dependence on technological and institutional systems. Online work makes this unusually visible. The therapeutic relat

Sometimes in clinical work a particular myth starts to preoccupy me. For a while it was Rumpelstiltskin. Lately it has been the Greek myth of Icarus. One familiar psychoanalytic reading comes from Stephen Mitchell’s 1986 paper The Wings of Icarus, which uses the myth to explore narcissistic illusion. I have been reworking it through a more contemporary group-analytic and institutional lens. For those who do not know the story, the myth of Icarus is really a story about his fa

As the new year rolls around, many of us drift into a familiar ritual of self-appraisal. We think about who we have been, who we are becoming, and how we want to position ourselves in the world. For those of us who work clinically, this often includes a quieter question. Not just, “How can I be more compassionate or effective,” but, “What am I really like in the room with my patients, supervisees, or groups, and what do I do with the parts of me I dislike.” In this season of

A note of thanks, and a reflection on institutional life A friend recently shared with me the old Scots tale of Rashin-Coatie. Some stories do not arrive as arguments or interpretations. They arrive as recognition. They put words, images, and movement to something you already know in your body. Rashin-Coatie is a folk tale about a young girl who is ill-used within her own family. While her older sister is favoured, Rashin-Coatie is sent out into the woods to herd cattle and g

There is a story in Jewish tradition of a city called Luz. It is not defended by walls. It is not announced on maps. It survives because it is not fully given over to the world. In the midrash, Luz is a place where death does not enter. Not because the people are spared suffering, and not because time is suspended, but because the city itself cannot be fully found. It is known only through transmission. You arrive there by being told, not by conquering. Some versions say that

I keep returning to the old tale of the fisherman and the flounder. It turns up in supervision and in my own thinking at moments when effort feels endless and strangely unquestioned. In the story, a poor fisherman casts his net into grey, restless water and pulls up not an ordinary fish but a talking flounder. Flounders are creatures of the seabed, almost invisible against the sand until they are disturbed. This one is enchanted and pleads to be set free. The fisherman lets i

Working in private practice, office parties are mostly a non-event. Yet they still wander into my consulting room: in reflective practice, in supervision, in the stories colleagues tell with both fondness and dread. During my years in the NHS and social care, I always felt conflicted about them. I rarely looked forward to going, but usually ended up having a good time once there. It is a familiar paradox, loving groups and fearing them, drawn to belonging and wary of it at th

Professional loneliness has become one of the quiet epidemics of our time. It shows sometimes through dramatic burnout, but more often, you find it in the small, private moments when practitioners realise they are holding far more than their frames were built to contain. It is the loneliness of shouldering clinical risk in overstretched services, of making decisions without adequate consultation, of offering containment that one is not receiving in return. It is subtle and cu

Recently, I have found myself, like so many others, drawn to two stories. The first is The Traitors , where celebrities are siloed in a castle, accuse, betray, and splinter into Faithfuls and Traitors. The second is the fate of Ophelia. More specifically, Taylor Swift’s retelling, which transforms Hamlet’s collapsing lover into a survivor. In Hamlet , Ophelia becomes a vessel for the anxieties, desires, and conflicts of those around her, denied her own stable subjectivity. In

“Lies, my boy, are known in a moment. There are two kinds of lies, lies with short legs, and lies with long noses.”— Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio  (1883) A discussion has been circulating online recently about what counts as “honest” when describing one’s NHS experience. The question seemed simple: is it misleading for a clinical psychologist to write, for example, “ten years’ NHS experience” on a professional profile if only one or two of those years were post-

A reflection on Antigone, the NHS, and the moral task of mourning in group life. Much attention in psychoanalysis (and by extension, group analysis) has been given to the Greek myth of Oedipus.  We are fluent in the language of the Oedipal triangle: the child caught between love and law, desire and prohibition, longing for union and fear of punishment.  The myth has become almost synonymous with psychic development, shaping how we think about authority, rivalry, and individu

Halloween approaches, and with it the invitation to sit with what lingers. In psychotherapy, we are asked to host the unburied: losses that have no grave, traumas that speak in symptoms, ancestral echoes that arrive unannounced. Samuel Kimbles (2021) calls these “suffering ghosts”, unacknowledged cultural and familial histories that demand psychic reckoning. The task is not to banish them but to transform suffering into kinship. This requires a mind that is both porous and bo

I recently came across a comment by Rupert Lowe, a figure often associated with right-wing conservative politics in the United Kingdom. Unexpectedly, I found myself agreeing with much of what he said. His remarks were not about immigration or the usual theatre of culture wars, but about work – the relentless, anxious, and precarious life of the small business owner. He spoke of a Parliament full of people who “don’t get it”, who have never run a business, never lived the 24-h

We live in a time of strong opinions and urgent calls to action. The pace is fast. The stakes feel high. And the invitation to respond publicly, quickly, and with certainty is relentless. But in this climate, where does our relationship with not knowing go? In a culture that prizes certainty, our professional and group lives are shaped by the same pressures: the pull to know, to define, to align. These forces can eclipse our capacity for genuine dialogue. In group life, espec

In the old versions of Cinderella, before the glass slipper and the pumpkin coach were polished into Disney sheen, there is grief. The...

It has long been debated in clinical literature that children suffer not from hostility but from neglect . Winnicott suggested that the...

In Indian folklore,   vetalas   are spirits that dwell in cremation grounds and are said to animate the dead. Although unsettling, they...

Over the past eight years, I have increasingly relied on online spaces for community, communication, and care in my professional world....