Emotional principles

One of the characteristics of trauma that may seem confusing from the outside looking in, is that the more traumatised we are, the more we defend trauma. However, when we understand how trauma works, this seemingly paradoxical stance reveals itself to be entirely congruent with the emotional mechanics of trauma. The more traumatised we are, […]

Over the course of my emotional principles blogs, I’ve outlined some of the laws of emotional mechanics that govern our lives. One of the laws that eluded me for a long time—there are no doubt more—is that every interaction happens as a quid pro quo. Every time something happens that isn’t consciously what you want, […]

In 1998, using a personal development tool called the Enneagram, I broke into my unconscious and started to clear its toxic contents. It’s taken me ever since to articulate it, but this is perhaps the First Law of the Unconscious: that which you make conscious cannot remain unconscious. By this, I mean that once you […]

We never see the S-bends of life coming until they loom out of the fog on a narrow mountaintop road. It’s too late. We’re committed. We’re going through a zig-zag no matter what. After years of personal development and healing, I’m pleased to report that life conspires to keep us on the road. The more […]

Carl Jung stated that “Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our lives and we will call it fate.” Despite this powerful—and, in my experience, accurate—warning, very few people embark on the process of making the unconscious conscious. The reality is that no one, including myself, ventures into the unconscious except by necessity. […]

I’ve just been punching a cardboard box in the garage. Why? Because I’ve got something against cardboard boxes? I’ve taken up cardboard box-punching as a hobby? No. Because I’ve just had a major emotional breakthrough, which always triggers feelings of rage and compensation. Rage and compensation are the inevitable by-products of breakthrough. It’s your task […]

Everybody loves to hate emotional ‘stuckness’—those painful situations when life isn’t going the way we want it to, we seem powerless to alter the situation and there’s just no sense of forward movement. What’s to love about where you are? Nothing. Most of us hate it. It might be a house move that’s stalled. A […]

When we survey the seething maelstrom of human behaviour, it’s hard to see it as anything other than random. Even if we restrict ourselves to our own life and those closest to us, it may still seem that what we’re witnessing is haphazard. Yet this is a false randomness. When we achieve clarity, we find […]

We all have problems. Our problems seem unique, never-ending, insurmountable—as if Life had deliberately singled us out for special treatment. In a way, it has. Because that’s all Life is—problem-solving. Whatever Life puts in our way, the next step is always inconvenient. That’s how Life works—by constantly testing us to see what we’re made of. […]

I love this photo by Minh Pham of a lady on a giant chessboard clutching the queen. The queen is, well, the queen of the chessboard. She rules the roost. While the sceptre represents the king, the heart represents the queen—the symbol of love. For me, the queen’s unlimited movement across the chessboard represents her […]