Dr. Libby Nugent: Clinical Psychologist

14/03/2026

13/03/2026

Thrilled to share that I'm on the latest episode of Just One Thing for Parents with the wonderful Dr Bettina Hohnen!

This is a special long-form conversation (the first for her new series of deeper dives) and is with me and fellow clinical psychologist Dr. Anna Hutchinson. We explore the big rise in mental health and neurodiversity diagnoses: what's might be driving it, what it means for children, families, and society, and the balance between the real help diagnoses can offer (validation, reducing shame, understanding ourselves better) and their limitations or risks in our current systems.

🎧 Episode 64: A Long-Form Special: Living in the Age of Diagnosis
Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6E8hUyNNKR9Blv7NkkYkiv?si=SqeBpQKSTtCyadsoRXlssA

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https://open.spotify.com/episode/6E8hUyNNKR9Blv7NkkYkiv?si=SqeBpQKSTtCyadsoRXlssA

Just One Thing for Parents with Dr Bettina Hohnen · Episode

12/03/2026

What happens when we try to remove hierarchy from complex systems?

In my experience it rarely disappears. Instead, it becomes implicit.

Power moves sideways into moral authority, social dominance, and ideological certainty. Responsibility becomes harder to locate. And the people most exposed to risk are often those with the least institutional protection.

This short Symbolic Currents essay began with a childhood memory about cutting the hair off a set of Flower Fairies. It ended up as a reflection on hierarchy, responsibility, and what happens when power is disavowed rather than owned.

Full piece below.

When I was a child, I desperately wanted the Flower Fairies fairyland home. A girl round the corner had one. I would go to her house and play reverently, careful not to break anything. I was afraid that if I wanted it too much, or said the wrong thing, I wouldn’t be allowed to play at all.One day ...

11/03/2026

10/03/2026

09/03/2026

Fairy tales are often treated as children’s stories. But historically, they were something quite different.
Long before psychology had textbooks, communities used stories to think about fear, rivalry, loss, and transformation. Myths and fairy tales acted as symbolic containers for experiences that were difficult to approach directly.
In this short talk I explore how stories function within groups, drawing on group analytic theory and the idea of the matrix. When a story enters a group, it can become a shared symbolic object and is something members think with, rather than simply interpret.

The story of the Minotaur is one of the most enduring myths of the ancient world. At its centre is a labyrinth, a monster, and a thread.Why has this story co...

08/03/2026

06/03/2026

In mythology, tears are often supposed to have a redeeming and healing effect. If you have ever dealt with people who have become petritied by suttering, you know how redeeming it is if they can cry. Once a person reaches a certain climax of suffering, very often he or she cannot cry or break down anymore. They simply harden in horror. And then there is danger ahead.

Marie-Louise Von Franz

06/03/2026

https://www.youtube.com/live/Za8s21enW5A?si=70Bl66z3wP1Bm24X

Watch this subscriber exclusive event in full at https://www.unherd.com/liveWhat are ‘ancient technologies’ and could they save the West from its identity cr...

05/03/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1BxdJYJ4ux/?mibextid=wwXIfr

In Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Anne Lamott reflects on her parents with a mixture of candour and gratitude. By her own account, they were volatile, opinionated, and at times emotionally inconsistent. Yet she draws from that experience a conclusion that isn’t bitter. She says she learnt that you can survive being loved imperfectly.

That claim goes against a powerful cultural story. We’re encouraged to believe that flawed love damages us beyond repair. Therapy language, sometimes helpfully and sometimes not, can make it seem as though any parental failing leaves a permanent wound. Lamott doesn’t dismiss harm. She has written elsewhere about addiction, shame and the long shadow of childhood. But here she’s making a quieter point. Imperfect love isn’t the same as the absence of love.

Most parents are difficult in some way. They bring their fears, their limitations and their unresolved anger into the home. Similarly, they can misjudge, overreact and withdraw. If love had to be pure to count, very few of us would have received it.

But to say you can survive being loved imperfectly is to recognise resilience. Children don’t need flawless devotion. They need enough steadiness, enough care, enough moments of being seen. The psychoanalyst D W Winnicott wrote about the “good enough” mother, arguing that healthy development depends on reliability that is sufficient more than perfection. That idea was radical in its time and still feels relieving now. It acknowledges that frustration and disappointment are part of growing up.

Lamott’s passage also carries an admission in that she suggests that at some point she felt the strain of her parents’ shortcomings. To describe them as very difficult is clearly not neutral. There’s history in that phrase and yet she resists the temptation to cast herself solely as injured. She claims endurance which moves the story from damage to survival.

Many adults spend years untangling what they received at home. Some discover deep harm but others find something more mixed: affection intertwined with unpredictability, encouragement alongside criticism. The emotional state that follows is often ambivalence. You love them and resent them, you defend them and yet are tired of defending them. That complexity can feel disloyal to admit.

Lamott describes it without drama. Her tone implies that imperfect love is the rule, not the exception. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect growth from those who care for children. It just means we stop measuring our past against an impossible standard.

There’s also humility in her observation. If we survived being loved imperfectly, it follows that we will love imperfectly too. That recognition can soften the harshness with which we judge ourselves. bell hooks wrote that love is an action and a practice. Practices are learned slowly and enacted by flawed people. We get things wrong but try again.

The fear many of us carry is that imperfection equals failure. Lamott’s phrasing refuses that fear. Survival here doesn’t sound triumphant. It sounds ordinary. You grow up, carry scars and some strengths. You learn what you want to repeat and what you don’t.

There’s relief in admitting that love doesn’t have to be immaculate to matter. It can be awkward, inconsistent, shaped by personality and circumstance. It can irritate as well as comfort. And still, it can sustain you.

To survive imperfect love is to accept that human beings rarely give one another exactly what is needed at every moment. They give what they can.

© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved

Image: Zboralski