Life Matters Counselling & Psychotherapy Centre

26/11/2025

15/11/2025

15/11/2025

A powerful creative portrayal of a grief journey.

08/11/2025

~Jonathon Shedler~
It was my depression. It was my anxiety. It was my avoidant attachment. It was my trauma. It was my [insert pretty much anything that makes “it” something other than ourselves].

We are the authors of all our thoughts and actions. We claim only some as ours, and disown others.

When we claim them, we say “I”: “I feel anxious.” When we disclaim them, we say “it”: “It wasn’t me, it was the alcohol.” “It came out wrong.” The devil made me do it.” “It’s my nervous system.”

This was one of Freud’s earliest recognitions. He literally used the words “I” and “It” to describe the parts of ourselves that we claim and disclaim—in German, Das Ich and Das Es. Thet were later mistranslated as Ego and Id.

When we say “It’s my nervous system,” we are seeing defenses at work. Anxiety is no longer part of “I.” It is disclaimed and becomes “It.”

Thus, Freud’s famous line: “Where It was, I shall be.” It means, what I previously disowned, I will come to recognize as mine.

07/11/2025

05/11/2025

“What’s Underneath” - Andrea Gibson

In this week’s episode of What’s Underneath, poet Andrea Gibson opens up about how after years of living a life dictated by extreme anxiety and hypochondria,...

05/11/2025

Get Andrea’s new book, YOU BETTER BE LIGHTNING: http://bit.ly/andreagibsonybblCheck out all of Andrea’s books: https://bit.ly/andreagibsonshopDo you love But...

05/11/2025

Psychiatry has a way of removing agency from the individual.

A newer branch, metabolic psychiatry, aims to do the opposite – restoring agency through something as concrete as changing one’s diet, and with it, one’s metabolism.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. After removing carbs and going fully ketogenic (very high fat, moderate protein, almost zero carbs), I noticed profound psychological shifts: less mental clutter, less emotional volatility, less anxiety, and far less rumination.

So when I came across this X post from Masterjohn, PhD, it immediately caught my eye:

“Depressed and can’t stop ruminating? An inability to stop ruminating is driven by insufficient methylation of dopamine, which makes the brain too sticky.”

I respect Chris’s work deeply. He’s helped thousands understand how nutrition and metabolism shape mental health. And I fully agree that the state of our bodies profoundly affects the state of our minds.

But there’s another dimension to rumination that deserves equal attention – one that’s psychological rather than biochemical.

While diet and nutrients can set the stage for clearer thinking, they don’t explain the act of rumination itself. Neither do they technically cause or end it.

Once the body is nourished and the brain treated as it’s designed to be, what remains is still a psychological process.

Biology can open (or close) the door – but psychology has to walk through it.

And that path begins with a simple but radical insight:

Rumination isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you do.

Therefore, the psychological solution to rumination is to stop doing it.

Read how below in today's Substack article.

05/11/2025

27/10/2025

Most people assume psychiatric drugs work like antibiotics: you have an infection, you take penicillin, the drug kills the bacteria, and you get better. It sounds reassuring to think depression, anxiety, ADHD, or psychosis work the same way; that there is a defect in brain chemistry and a drug to correct it. And no wonder this belief pervades our culture, when the drugs themselves are branded as “anti”-depressants, “anti”-psychotics, and “mood stabilizers.”

But that is not how psychiatric drugs work. The real story is simpler – and far less flattering – than the narrative psychiatry has built around them. [...]

> Full article (my guest post on Roger McFillin's Substack) in the link below. It's free