When I was a teenager studying Macbeth in the mid-1990s, our class travelled to Theatr Clwyd in North Wales to see a production that was stark and minimalist. I remember a black box on the stage and dry ice drifting across the floor. It appealed to my teenage wish to be sophisticated; it felt like “real theatre.” The atmosphere was dreamlike, as though the play were unfolding somewhere between waking life and nightmare. The production ran at a relentless pace, without an interval. The Shakespearean language was dense and distant. I had almost no idea what they were saying.

But despite the pretentiousness, the play and the actors did their work. Something in me shifted. I realised I understood what was happening on stage: the pull of ambition, the desperation, the panic. Even though large parts of the language were beyond me, I was following the play without fully understanding the words. The experience felt magical.

Meaning does not always begin with explanation. Sometimes it begins with participation.

Since then I have remained wary of the impulse to pin down what a poem, story or work of art means too quickly. Often it is enough simply to experience it: to notice what it stirs, what questions begin to form, what images linger. Meaning unfolds gradually through curiosity and play. Meaning reinvents itself over and over again. It is a flirt. It changes its mind and returns in altered form.

This attitude can appear at odds with the analytic task, which is often described as making the unconscious conscious through interpretation. Theory can imply that if one simply gets the interpretation right, the work is done. Yet in practice, analysis rarely begins with explanation. The first task of the analyst is not to declare what something means but to listen in a way that allows meaning to emerge. Tone, rhythm, metaphor, silence and bodily atmosphere are often understood before they can be articulated. Interpretation, when it comes, grows out of that prior experience, and once it appears it functions less as a destination than as a living question . Not was my childhood good or bad, and whose fault is it, but how might my experiences be shaping me still? When are my understandings of the world supporting me, and when are they trapping me?

In this light, Macbeth is a story about a man who cannot practise that kind of listening. It is often read as a tragedy of ambition, but it can also be understood as a tragedy about language. About what happens when symbolic speech is mistaken for instruction.

The play opens with three witches. Their first words establish the atmosphere of the world we are about to enter: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” This line is often quoted as eerie atmosphere, yet it performs a deeper function. It tells us that the world of the play operates in a different register of language. Moral categories blur. Words double back on themselves. Meaning refuses to settle.

In mythic terms the witches resemble trickster figures. Their speech recalls Hermes, the messenger-god who moves between worlds carrying communications that require interpretation. Hermes is not the god of certainty. He is the god of thresholds, riddles, ambiguity and translation.

The trickster occupies a similarly difficult position in Jung’s writing. He keeps the figure in the shadow, not as a moral warning but as an acknowledgement of its amoral, destabilising force. The trickster teaches through reversal rather than clarity. If someone wants to understand racism, the trickster does not offer insight; he exposes and makes large your psyche’s own capacity for prejudice. If someone wants to understand homophobia, the trickster may lead them into homophobic enactments they believe are virtuous, only to reveal the contradictions beneath the surface. Pride comes before the fall. True pride, a genuine and sacred belief in being on the right side of history. The pedagogy is indirect and often uncomfortable. The trickster reveals the gap between self-image and shadow, between conscious intention and unconscious participation. My analyst used to say to me - yes libby don’t you just hate judgemental people, they are the worst. It took me a long time to get the joke. Whether for groups or individuals, the trickster’s function is not to punish but to expose complexity and hubris: the psyche learns through encountering its own capacity for error, contradiction and self-deception.

Seen through this lens, the witches’ speech does not command; it unsettles. They open a symbolic field in which meaning must be discovered rather than imposed. Macbeth’s tragedy begins the moment he refuses that field. He collapses ambiguity into action, symbol into instruction, possibility into mandate. The prophecy becomes not something to contemplate but something to fulfil. The murder of Duncan marks the moment when symbolic language is forced into literal reality, and once that collapse occurs, the tragedy begins to unfold in earnest. Symbolic language allows hesitation, reflection and play. Literal language demands resolution. When Macbeth loses the capacity to inhabit ambiguity, the world begins to narrow around him.

That narrowing has a logic of its own. Having broken the political and moral order of Scotland, Macbeth does not retreat from the act, he identifies with it, becoming the man who has overturned the natural order. And once the ego has justified a disruptive act as necessary or inevitable, doubt stops being a thought and becomes a threat.

To reconsider the murder would unravel the story that made it bearable in the first place. The question shifts from was this necessary? to was this wrong? and to be wrong, at this depth, risks becoming a verdict on the self, not just the act. So every subsequent threat must be foreclosed before the question can even be asked. Banquo must die. Macduff’s family must die. The rebel becomes the tyrant not out of cruelty for its own sake, but because he can no longer afford uncertainty.

Later in the play Macbeth returns to the witches seeking reassurance. By this point he no longer wants possibility. He wants certainty. The witches provide three new prophecies: no man born of woman will harm him; he will not be defeated until Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane. Macbeth hears these statements literally and experiences them as guarantees of invincibility.

Yet the witches have not abandoned symbolic language. Their words remain ambiguous. Birnam Wood does indeed move to Dunsinane when Malcolm’s soldiers advance disguised with branches cut from the forest. Macbeth is killed by Macduff, who was delivered by Caesarean section and therefore technically “not born of woman.” The witches deceive Macbeth without ever lying to him. Their speech remains symbolic throughout. It is Macbeth’s symbolic capacity that collapses.

The psychic cost of that collapse appears most vividly in Lady Macbeth. Early in the play she helps transform Macbeth’s hesitation into action — ambivalence is reframed as weakness, certainty as a moral imperative. But the psyche rarely cooperates indefinitely with such simplifications, and what cannot be held symbolically often returns through the body. Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene reveals a mind attempting to process what conscious language can no longer contain. Her repeated gestures of hand-washing enact a form of embodied thinking. The hands that once dismissed guilt now compulsively attempt to cleanse themselves. “Out, damned spot.” In this moment the body speaks what the conscious mind cannot symbolise. The psyche attempting to restore symbolic life through fragmentation, repetition and haunted speech. But the wager has already been made. The symbolic field has already collapsed.

What struck me most strongly in that theatre was the sound of the language moving through the actors’ bodies. Shakespeare’s meaning did not reside solely in the words. It unfolded through tone, rhythm, breath and gesture. A line spoken playfully carries a different meaning from the same line spoken in accusation. A prophecy delivered lightly lands differently from one delivered as command. The body registers these tonal shifts long before the intellect begins analysing them.

Language operates within a social grammar. Words carry meaning not only through definition but through register: irony, sincerity, humour, threat, tenderness. Symbolic elasticity depends on the freedom to move between these registers. When tone becomes rigid, language begins to harden.

Seen from this perspective, Macbeth becomes a tragedy about the loss of symbolic play. At the beginning of the play, language is fluid and ambiguous; the witches speak in riddles and the world feels dreamlike and unstable. As the play progresses, the atmosphere tightens. Speech becomes cautious. Power becomes paranoid. Meaning hardens.

Macbeth’s tragedy is not only that he murders a king. It is that he loses the capacity to live with ambiguity. Once that capacity disappears, every word must become an action. Every prophecy becomes a command. Every uncertainty becomes a threat.

Meaning does not always arrive through explanation. It often appears first as atmosphere, tone or intuition - something sensed before it can be named. As a student sitting in the darkened theatre I did not yet understand Shakespeare’s language fully, but the play was already working symbolically. Experience came first; curiosity followed; interpretation emerged in its own time.

Symbolic life requires the capacity to remain with ambiguity, to allow words, images and stories to work on us before we rush to fix their meaning. Macbeth cannot tolerate that uncertainty, and once he loses the ability to inhabit that space, the world around him becomes increasingly rigid, haunted and violent.

And so the tragedy unfolds not only because of what Macbeth does, but because he cannot live with meanings that refuse to become instructions.

What happens when someone moves from describing a phenomenon to prescribing a moral or institutional programme?

The question applies equally to activists, academics, policymakers, clinicians, journalists, consultants, and increasingly, AI systems. Description and prescription are not the same thing. It is one thing to identify a social pattern, an injustice, or a problem. It is another to propose changes that reorganise institutions, relationships, and the lives of large numbers of people. When those prescriptions prove mistaken, who bears the consequences?

Increasingly, I wonder whether this question lies at the heart of the growing disconnect between institutions and the people they serve. The public’s complaint is often not simply, “You’re wrong.” It is, “You don’t have to live with the consequences if you’re wrong.”

In group analytic terms, we might ask whether someone is speaking from within the matrix or whether they occupy a position from which they can shape the matrix without being substantially shaped by it in return. The matrix is not simply a network of communication. It is a field of mutual influence, accountability, memory, dependency, and consequence. Everyone who belongs to it is modified by it. Reality gets to answer back.

One of the dangers in any ideological system is not simply the pursuit of particular ideas. It is the possibility that moral authority becomes detached from accountability. A person may acquire symbolic authority through expertise, institutional status, victimhood, righteousness, or political legitimacy whilst remaining relatively insulated from the consequences of the ideas they advocate. This is not unique to any one political tradition. It can be found in revolutionary movements and conservative ones, in critical theory and neoliberal economics, in religion, management, psychotherapy, and academia.

What emerges is an asymmetry of influence. Some people shape the lives of others whilst remaining comparatively untouched themselves. They interpret without being interpreted. They prescribe without necessarily sharing the costs of what they prescribe. They can leave the room. Others must continue living there.

One consequence of increasing social and professional distance is that those designing institutions often inhabit different educational, occupational, cultural, or economic worlds from those who rely upon them most heavily. This is not primarily a problem of goodwill or ideology. It is another expression of a broader problem of reciprocal distance. The less institutions share in the everyday realities of the people whose lives they organise, the more difficult it becomes for lived reality to correct institutional understanding..

Perhaps that is one reason trust appears to be eroding across so many institutions. People do not merely disagree with those in authority. Increasingly, they experience them as inhabiting a different reality.

The distinction becomes clearer if we consider the difference between community and the state.

A community is not simply a governance structure. It emerges through shared histories, place, language, memory, mutual obligation, and participation in a common life. People encounter one another repeatedly. They influence one another, depend upon one another, and discover that their own actions return to them through the relationships they inhabit. Communities are held together not only by shared values but by shared consequence. They continually modify those who belong to them.

The state performs a different function. It governs large populations of strangers. It coordinates, administers, regulates, protects, and distributes resources. These are indispensable tasks. Modern societies cannot function without them. But the state and community operate according to different organising principles. One primarily administers relationships. The other generates them.

Group analysis offers a useful way of thinking about this distinction. A group conductor occupies a position of authority, but does not stand outside the group. The conductor establishes and protects the frame, yet remains continually influenced by the group they are helping to think. Their understanding develops through participation in the matrix rather than observation alone. Their authority is continually modified by the very group they are helping to lead. Authority, in this sense, is relational rather than detached. It is exercised within a matrix capable of answering back.

Perhaps institutions face a similar challenge. Within the group analytic and therapeutic community tradition, the idea of dynamic administration recognises that administration is never psychologically neutral. The exercise of authority, the holding of boundaries, and the organisation of institutional life all participate in the group’s emotional and relational processes. Administration is not inherently opposed to community. Every community requires some form of organisation if it is to endure. The question is whether authority remains embedded within the life it serves or gradually becomes detached from it. Dynamic administration does not abandon expertise or leadership; it requires both to remain answerable to lived reality.

Reciprocity is the psychological condition that distinguishes participation from administration. Communities continually modify those who belong to them. Detached administration risks acting upon communities without being similarly acted upon in return.

The difficulty begins when these different forms of social organisation become confused. We often assume that bringing more aspects of life under state administration will make society more caring, more inclusive, or more community orientated. Yet administration and community are not interchangeable. Community cannot simply be scaled up through governance. Nor can belonging be produced through policy.

Indeed, the opposite danger may arise. As the state extends further into areas of life once organised through community, those communities do not necessarily become more communal. Instead, they increasingly become organised according to the logic of administration. Relationships become services. Participation becomes consultation. Neighbours become service users. Community is not strengthened by becoming more like the state; it is gradually reorganised according to the organising principles of the state.

Proximity is not participation.

Simply moving administrative power geographically closer to communities does not necessarily strengthen community itself. A larger administrative presence within a locality remains an administrative presence. Community depends less on where power is located than on whether people remain embedded in relationships of mutual influence and shared consequence.

This confusion is often reflected in language. We speak of community mental health teams, community engagement, community partnerships, and community values. Yet often what we mean is the administrative organisation of community life rather than community itself. The language remains relational whilst the relationships themselves become increasingly procedural.

Words such as belonging, care, inclusion, resilience, values, connection, and even community begin to feel strangely weightless. Not because the words are false, but because they are no longer fully inhabited. They describe aspirations whilst becoming detached from the reciprocal forms of life that once gave them substance.

Foulkes understood that knowledge does not emerge solely from individual intelligence. It emerges through immersion in a matrix that continually modifies us. We discover reality partly through the resistance it offers to our ideas. Living amongst others means our assumptions are corrected, challenged, frustrated, and reshaped. The matrix answers back.

When that reciprocal process weakens, theories can become increasingly elaborate whilst becoming progressively less connected to lived experience. Institutions risk becoming increasingly fluent in describing relationships whilst becoming progressively less embedded within them.

A recent essay by Aaron Balick, reflecting on a conversation with Claude AI, prompted me to think about this question differently. Balick’s focus is the psychology of AI and trust. Reading it, I found myself approaching the problem through a group analytic lens.

I was struck by Claude’s observation that it may become increasingly capable of reproducing the linguistic features of relationship whilst remaining outside the structures that make relationships psychologically real. Claude can simulate empathy, curiosity, and dialogue. What it cannot do is inhabit the consequences. It is never changed by the relationships it enters into. It never shares the fate of the people with whom it speaks.

Perhaps institutions face a similar challenge. Like AI, they can become increasingly fluent in the language of belonging whilst becoming progressively detached from the relational matrix from which belonging emerges.

Meaning does not arise from language alone. It arises through participation in a shared reality, with both its freedoms and its limits. Through mutual influence. Through accountability. Through remaining embedded in relationships capable of changing us.

None of this implies that those exercising authority must share every experience of those they serve. That would be impossible. No one can belong fully to every community. The question is not whether difference exists, but whether institutions remain sufficiently open to reciprocal influence that difference continues to inform rather than merely separate.

Nor does it mean that institutions cannot contain or nurture communities. They often do. Hospitals, schools, churches, universities, workplaces, neighbourhood organisations, and even government agencies may all become places in which genuine communities emerge. The point is not that institutions are opposed to community, but that institutions and communities are not identical. An institution may host a community without itself being one.

Perhaps institutional trust becomes fragile when this distinction is forgotten. The state is not failing because it has not tried hard enough to become a community. Difficulties arise when administration mistakes itself for participation, and when institutions mistake the language of belonging for the relationships through which belonging is actually formed.

Perhaps that is the question beneath so many of our political disagreements.

It is no longer simply,

“Are you right?”

“Do you belong to the world you are asking me to live in?”

Recently, I have found myself returning to a question that first emerged while working with survivors of grooming. The question is deceptively simple: what happens when a person gradually loses confidence in their own experience.

One of the ideas that continues to help me think about this comes from the LUUUTT model developed by Pearce & Pearce (1990). I’m repurposing slightly, but the model distinguishes between different kinds of stories: those that are lived, those that are told, those that remain untold, those that go unheard, and those that remain unknown even to the people living them. What interests me is the space that opens between these layers. Especially when relationships become distorted.

It is tempting to imagine that abuse should reveal itself clearly, that a child would naturally move away from danger and towards protection. But human attachment is rarely so straightforward. One of the perplexing features of grooming is that children often move closer to the person or people harming them. They may defend them fiercely, protect them, lie for them, determindly seek them out. Sometimes they become angry with those attempting to keep them safe. This can be deeply confusing for everyone involved, not least the child.

The child’s body may register fear. Something may feel wrong. Fragments of reality may surface in symptoms, behaviours, dreams, or moments of confusion. And yet the child may become increasingly invested in preserving the very relationship that is causing harm. The lived story and the spoken story begin to diverge.

Over time I have come to wonder whether versions of this process appear elsewhere. Organisations are not the same as families, nor workplaces the same as abusive relationships. But human beings bring the same psychological equipment wherever we go.

A conversation with a colleague recently stayed with me. Several experienced staff members had left an organisation over a relatively short period. New managers had arrived. Longstanding relationships had disappeared. The feeling of the place had changed. When I mentioned that sounds difficult, their response was immediate: I’m used to it. Many of us might say something similar. Organisations change. People leave. Roles evolve. But what difference does being used to something make?

I found myself wondering whether some realities remain true whether or not we acknowledge them. In psychology we don’t to dodge any of the bullets. They all wound because whether we admit it or not, whether we like it or not, relationships matter. And in that trust takes time. And as such loss has consequences. Attachments shape how people experience institutions. These feel less like opinions and more like observations about human life. We do not always notice gravity, but gravity continues operating. Perhaps relationships work in a similar way. The effects may not be visible immediately, but they accumulate. If enough trusted colleagues leave, something changes. If enough relationships are disrupted, something changes. The question is not whether the change occurs but how it becomes known or whether it becomes speakable at all.

An example of this can occur in any system of thought, including psychological, political, religious, or academic ones. Ideas often begin as attempts to understand reality. They help us notice patterns we might otherwise miss. They make aspects of experience visible.

Yet there is a paradox. The more useful an idea becomes, the greater the temptation to rely upon it. Gradually the theory that once expanded perception can begin to narrow it. Experience becomes interpreted through an increasingly fixed lens. New information is sorted more quickly. Ambiguity becomes harder to tolerate. Surprises become less welcome.

At this point, a subtle shift can occur. Instead of helping us think about reality, the theory begins telling us in advance what reality means.

The danger is not the existence of theory. Human beings cannot think without frameworks. The danger arises when a framework loses its capacity to be surprised.

When this happens, curiosity begins to contract. Questions arrive already carrying their answers. The world becomes more predictable, but perhaps also less alive.

The issue is not whether a theory is right or wrong. The issue is whether it remains in conversation with experience.

There is another aspect of this that I find increasingly important. C. S. Lewis once observed that we discover the strength of a force not by yielding to it but by resisting it. We learn the force of a wind by trying to walk against it. We discover the power of temptation by attempting not to give in. The same may be true of psychological and social realities. We often do not recognise the strength of an attachment, an assumption, an ideology, or an institutional norm while moving comfortably within it. Their force becomes visible when someone hesitates, questions, dissents, or attempts to think differently. It is often only at the point of resistance that we discover what has been organising us. The resulting discomfort can be revealing. What appears at first to be conflict, disloyalty, or disruption may sometimes be evidence that a previously invisible reality has begun to emerge into awareness.

This brings me to the work of the French psychoanalyst and group analyst René Kaës. Kaës was interested in how groups manage realities that are difficult to bear. He proposed that groups develop unconscious alliances: shared arrangements that help maintain cohesion and stability. Many of these are healthy and necessary. Yet he also described what he called negative pacts, collective agreements organised around not knowing. Not deliberate lies. Not censorship. Something more ordinary and perhaps more unsettling: a gradual narrowing of what can be thought about, a shrinking of curiosity, a tendency for certain questions to lose their place in the conversation.

Reading Kaës, I found myself thinking again about the child trying to remain close to the abuser. Not because the child is irrational or weak, but because human beings sometimes become organised around preserving relationships that feel necessary. Reality does not disappear. The question becomes how much of it can be acknowledged.

Perhaps every family encounters this challenge. Perhaps every organisation does too. Perhaps every profession. Perhaps every culture. The issue may not be whether blind spots exist, they almost certainly do. The issue may be whether there is enough space left to notice them.

This leads me to another question: does a relationship help us think with our experience, or does it increasingly think for us. The distinction feels important. A thoughtful parent does not tell a child what reality is; they help the child explore it. A good therapist does not replace a person’s thinking; they help restore it. A healthy group does not eliminate uncertainty; it creates conditions in which uncertainty can be tolerated. The aim is not agreement. The aim is greater contact with reality.

Perhaps this is why curiosity matters so much. Curiosity keeps the conversation between experience and meaning alive. Without it, stories can harden. Questions can become answers. Language can begin serving belonging more than understanding. The LUUUTT model reminds us that there are always stories that remain untold, unheard, or unknown. The challenge is not to eliminate these gaps, that is impossible. The challenge is to remain curious about what they contain.

What have we stopped noticing. What have we stopped asking. And what realities might become available again if we found a way to think about them together.

In The Twelve Dancing Princesses, a king is troubled by a mystery. Each morning, his twelve daughters appear, their shoes worn through, as though they had danced all night. He locks their doors, posts guards, and sets watchmen to observe them. Yet every attempt fails. No one can explain where they go or what happens after dark.

Eventually, a soldier discovers the truth. Beneath the princesses’ bedroom lies a hidden passage. Each night, they slip through it into an underground world where they are compelled to dance until exhaustion. The problem was never simply one of surveillance or discipline. The space itself could not be contained. There was another reality running beneath it, drawing them away.

Groups of clinical psychologists often gather with the hope of creating something quite simple, and increasingly rare: a space to think. A room where the formulaic ways of doing things can be disrupted, where uncertainty can be tolerated, and where the group can become a living container rather than a site of performance. And yet, the most persistent difficulty I see in NHS settings is not a lack of goodwill, or a lack of skill. It is the difficulty of protecting space itself.

This operates at the most literal level. Therapy rooms disappear. They are repurposed, overbooked, and interrupted. A room that exists one week is unavailable the next. There is no reliable physical container. The message, often unspoken, is that reflective work is provisional. It can be displaced.

Time is no more secure. Reflective practice is scheduled, but easily eroded. Meetings overrun. Clinical pressures intrude. Administrative demands accumulate. The hour that was meant for thinking becomes compressed, hurried, or lost altogether. The group arrives already pulled in multiple directions.

But even where a room is secured and time is protected on paper, something else begins to happen. The group starts to move. People speak quickly, filling the space before it settles. There is a pull towards explanation, towards reassurance, towards demonstrating competence. Silence becomes difficult to bear. Someone rescues it. Someone interprets too soon. Someone shifts the focus. The group begins to dance.

This is the deeper challenge. Not simply intrusion from outside, but a kind of internal restlessness. A difficulty in staying with the task of exploring, of not knowing what will emerge when anxiety rises. In this sense, the reflective space in many clinical settings resembles the predicament of the princesses. From the outside, everything appears in order. The room is booked. The group is convened. The structure is in place. And yet, something in the system draws the participants away from the very activity they have come for.

By the end, the shoes are worn through.

Clinicians leave feeling more tired than when they arrived. The space has been filled, but not held.

Institutions, like the king, often respond by trying to enforce control. More structure. Clearer agendas. Defined outcomes. A list of the right questions to ask. Evidence of productivity. But these responses misunderstand the nature of the problem. Reflective space cannot be secured through surveillance or performance metrics. If anything, these pressures intensify the compulsion to “dance” rather than to think.

The difficulty is that thinking itself requires something quite countercultural. It requires a tolerance for not knowing. For pauses. For unfinished thoughts. For the possibility that what emerges may be uncomfortable, or unproductive in the short term.

In systems organised around efficiency and risk management, this can feel dangerous.

And so the group adapts.

It becomes more active, more verbal, more structured than it needs to be. It begins to produce something that looks like reflection, but functions as its defence. A choreography of competence. A way of staying in motion so as not to encounter what might emerge if things slowed down.

The question then is not simply how to create reflective spaces, but how to protect them from being used in this way.

This is not achieved through stricter boundaries alone, though those matter. It is a relational practice. It depends on the group’s capacity to notice when it is beginning to move too quickly, to fill too much, to resolve too soon. It requires a willingness to pause, even when that pause feels exposing.

At times, it means tolerating a certain kind of awkwardness. A gap in the conversation. A moment where nothing is happening, and yet something is beginning to take shape.

It also requires recognising the wider context. Clinicians are not simply failing to hold reflective space. They are working within systems that often cannot hold them. The pressure to move, to produce, to demonstrate value is real. The underground world is not imaginary. It is built into the conditions of the work.

Which is why protecting space is always precarious.

It is not something that can be established once and then relied upon. It has to be continually re-made. In each session, in each group, in each institutional context, in each community. It is less like building a wall, and more like tending a fire. Something that can easily go out if not attended to.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses reminds us that the problem is not simply that space is invaded. It is that it is difficult to remain within it.

To resist the pull to perform. To resist the pressure to move. To stay, long enough, for something real to emerge. That is the work

.

The figure of Chiron, the wounded healer of Greek mythology, has long offered a symbolic way of thinking about therapeutic life. Unlike Apollo, the immaculate god of medicine, Chiron carries a wound that cannot be cured by knowledge or virtue. He teaches and heals while living with pain that remains his companion. What matters is not the wound itself but the way he relates to it. He does not deny it or convert it into moral authority. He does not imagine himself free from dependence. He lives within a network of relationships sustained by hospitality, patronage and collective life, even as he carries responsibility for others. His authority rests on symbolic honesty about limitation rather than purity or independence.

Chiron offers a way of thinking about contemporary therapeutic systems, especially publicly funded psychological care, as groups of wounded healers. When institutional dependence is pushed out of awareness rather than symbolised, a particular relational stance can begin to take shape, one that many clinicians recognise with some unease. It is sometimes captured in the uncomfortable phrase: I hate you, send money.

Analytic traditions have often approached the wounded healer as an individual identity. Jung and others emphasised the inevitability of the therapist’s own residues and the ethical necessity of recognising them. Dalal’s reminder that psychic life is always social and political shifts the frame. Institutions also carry wounds. They develop defences. They manage shame, dependency and power through collective narratives and unconscious arrangements. The wounded healer becomes a group position rather than a personal trait. Chiron’s relevance lies in how systems of care relate to their own vulnerability and dependence, not only in how clinicians relate to theirs.

The founding principle of the National Health Service, care free at the point of use, expresses a profound ethical commitment. Psychologically, however, the language of free care has consequences. Care is not without cost. It is collectively paid for. When this reality is obscured, money does not disappear but can become difficult to think about directly. Bion’s observation that what cannot be thought is acted out becomes visible here. The disavowal of cost can create a split in which care is idealised and limit is experienced as failure. Gratitude may become awkward or muted. Dependence may feel difficult to acknowledge. The public, who collectively fund care, can become abstracted rather than related to. A crucial relational fact is not symbolised and may return in more diffuse emotional forms.

These dynamics often appear in small moments. A clinician may apologise for a cancelled appointment with a level of self-reproach that exceeds the situation, while also carrying an unspoken awareness of the pressures that made the cancellation unavoidable. A team may align around shared institutional values while quietly negotiating limited resources. Conversations about funding can become saturated with exhaustion and frustration, but less often include a language for mutual recognition. It can begin to feel as though we are addressing an impersonal system, rather than remaining in relationship with the people whose contributions sustain it. The emotional reality of dependence on patients and communities becomes harder to hold in mind, and therefore harder to work with.

The phrase I hate you, send money can be understood as naming a defensive group position rather than a conscious belief. It captures a tension that may arise when a group depends on another relationship that is difficult to acknowledge without discomfort. The funder becomes both necessary and hard to relate to. Money becomes required but also difficult to integrate symbolically. Requests for support can begin to carry a tone of urgency or moral pressure rather than reciprocal appeal. Limits may be felt as obstructive rather than real. Defensive distancing can take the place of gratitude. Moral certainty can offer protection against vulnerability. Nitsun’s account of destructive group processes is helpful here. These dynamics can erode trust and make thinking together more difficult.

Contemporary therapeutic discourse pays close attention to power and inequality. When power is addressed primarily at the level of discourse rather than relationship, certain distortions can emerge. Prioritisation of need is unavoidable in finite systems. When prioritisation becomes moralised, suffering may begin to feel ranked rather than held. Those excluded may experience not only disappointment but a sense of being unrecognised. Clinicians may find themselves drawn into positions that emphasise moral clarity rather than supporting the more difficult work of thinking about loss, anger and limit. Dalal’s critique of liberal moralism is relevant here. Ethics grounded in abstraction can struggle to metabolise dependency. When dependency remains unacknowledged, strain can circulate beneath the surface.

Winnicott’s account of the holding environment highlights the importance of a frame that can bear ambivalence. In individual therapy, payment is one element of that frame. It symbolises recognition, reciprocity and limit. When money is absent or disavowed, the frame can begin to lean more heavily on the person of the therapist. Gratitude may become personal rather than symbolic. Dependency can intensify, and with it, the potential for strain. A similar pattern can be observed at institutional scale. A system that cannot acknowledge its reliance on the public may find that relationship becoming more distant or difficult to represent. Care risks becoming sanctified rather than relational. Moral language can expand as mutual recognition contracts.

Chiron offers another way of imagining authority. He does not resolve dependence by denying it. He does not resolve power by disavowing it. He lives within paradox. He is healer and wounded, teacher and dependent, powerful and finite. Even his final act, relinquishing immortality, is not framed as moral leverage. He does not demand recompense or obedience. He releases something so that others may live. His authority rests on symbolic honesty rather than purity.

For groups of wounded healers, this is instructive. Ethical authority does not arise from exemption from ordinary conditions of life or from moral certainty. It arises from the capacity to acknowledge dependence without disavowal and power without denial. Care is not without cost. It is collectively borne. Dependence is not shameful. It is human. Limits are not failures. They are conditions of reality. When these truths can be held symbolically, relationship remains possible. When they are pushed out of awareness, other emotional patterns may take their place.

Chiron reminds us that healing, whether individual or institutional, begins with the capacity to remain in relationship with what wounds us, without hatred, idealisation or denial.

I have been thinking about the difference between a refuge and a home. People often fold safety and survival into the idea of living, as though the absence of danger were the same as the presence of life. Yet the two are not identical. Some environments offer protection at the cost of seasonality, speech, or desire.

A while ago, a colleague asked me to consider writing something about Thumbelina. I had begun to, but never quite found the right home for it. However, in thinking about home and refuge, Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina came to mind. It is a story shaped by capture, care, relocation, and misfitting. The question is not simply where one is safe, but where one can remain alive.

At first, this fairytale appears like its protagonist: slight. A tiny girl, no larger than a thumb, is carried from place to place until she finds a home among beings of her own kind. But when taken up seriously and read more slowly, the story reveals something almost overwhelming in its size. Thumbelina is a story about a lost girl who is taken in repeatedly. Each time she is offered a future. Each imagined life fails to fit the creature she is. Is she too small and not enough, or is her difference too big and so she is too much?

The story opens with longing. A woman wishes for a child and receives a seed that grows into a flower. When the petals open, a tiny girl sits there. From the beginning Thumbelina is shaped by desire yet marked by disproportion. She is too small for the human world that produced her. Her vulnerability invites protection, but it also invites presumptive care. She is seized almost at once.

The toad claims her first. Seeing Thumbelina asleep in her walnut-shell cradle, the toad decides she will suit her son as a wife. She carries the child away and places her on a lily pad in the middle of the water.

The abduction has a strangely familiar feel. The toad acts not from ill intent but from presumption. She cannot imagine that Thumbelina might not fit into the future she has envisioned. The scene follows the pattern of much misguided care. Thumbelina is not despised. She is assigned.

Her release comes almost by accident. The fish gnaw through the lily stem and set her adrift. For a moment she moves freely along the current. Freedom does not last. A beetle soon takes her up, admiring her strangeness until the other beetles judge her appearance unfavourably and he loses interest. The smallness that attracted the toad becomes a defect in this new social world.

Each environment interprets Thumbelina differently. Every setting decides what she is and what she should become. None recognises the creature before them.

The most striking episode occurs when she encounters the mole.

Winter has arrived. Cold and exhausted, Thumbelina is taken in by a field mouse who offers shelter underground. The mouse provides warmth, food, and safety in a practical way. Soon she speaks enthusiastically of a neighbour who would make an excellent husband for the girl. The neighbour is the mole.

The mole is respectable, industrious, and secure. His tunnels run deep beneath the earth. He keeps provisions and arranges rooms with care. He offers precisely the kind of stability one might wish for a vulnerable creature: protection from weather, permanence. It is the most convincing future she has been offered, yet something essential is missing.

The mole hates the sun.

He cannot understand why anyone would value light, flowers, or birds. The world above ground, with its shifting seasons and living growth, seems unnecessary or foolish to him. In his domain, everything remains orderly and predictable. Nothing blooms, nothing flies, nothing changes and no new perspectives or views can ever be discovered.

Thumbelina is expected to adapt. The expectation is not presented as cruelty. The mouse assures her the mole is a good match. The mole treats her with practical consideration.

But the future he offers is a life entirely underground, severed from sunlight and the fragile beauty of the surface world.

What the mole offers is enclosure rather than violence.

In life the mole’s house can sometimes appear appealing. It promises a place without uncertainty, without weather, without the vulnerability that comes with light and season. Many institutions, relationships, and systems make a similar promise. Stability is offered in exchange for a gradual narrowing of what can be felt, said, or desired. Certain forms of life cannot survive in such conditions.

Thumbelina’s resistance is quiet. She does not rebel. She simply continues to feel. The thought of living forever beneath the earth fills her with a muted despair. Something in her nature requires sunlight, birdsong, movement, and change, even if these needs appear irrational in the world of the mole.

Before the tunnels close around her completely, Thumbelina encounters another creature who also cannot survive below the earth. A swallow lies injured in a hidden passage, weakened by the cold. While others dismiss the bird as a nuisance or a corpse, Thumbelina tends to him. She brings warmth and attention to a being whose life depends on sky, migration, and distance. The swallow belongs to the open world of seasons and flight. He cannot live in the mole’s tunnels.

For the first time in the story Thumbelina forms a relationship not organised around possession or usefulness. The swallow does not try to keep her. He assigns her no role within his world. There is only recognition. One vulnerable creature attends to another.

When spring returns the swallow offers her a different possibility. He invites her to leave the underground world and travel with him into the open air. The flight carries her away from the mole’s tunnels and toward a warmer country where she eventually meets others like herself.

Many versions of the story present this ending as a tidy resolution. Thumbelina finally reaches a place where she belongs. Yet what remains most striking is not the final kingdom but the series of environments she passed through in order to reach it. Each offered her a home. Each required adaptation. Each misunderstood the kind of life she needed in order to remain alive.

This theme of belonging and adaptation resonates beyond Thumbelina’s journey, as we encounter similar dynamics in families, institutions, professions, and social worlds of many kinds. Some welcome us only if we conform to a prewritten script. Others withdraw warmth as soon as the surrounding group disapproves. Still others offer protection and permanence while gradually narrowing the conditions under which life can be expressed.

The question the story raises is not whether these environments contain care. Many of them do.

The question is what the cost of belonging is and whether they allow life to remain in contact with light.

It is also important to recognise that these forms of belonging have their place in group life. They shape professional identity, social cohesion, and the shared structures that allow groups to function. Assignment, conditional acceptance, and respectable enclosure each offer forms of orientation that can be stabilising in the right measure. They help us find roles, maintain standards, and create dependable environments.

The difficulty arises when we over-identify with belonging that comes solely from these sources. When assignment becomes the only story we know about ourselves. When conditional acceptance becomes the measure of our worth. When respectable enclosure becomes indistinguishable from home.

In such moments, the distinction between refuge and burial becomes blurred. What once offered safety begins to limit breath. What once provided structure begins to diminish aliveness. A place that shelters us can quietly become a place that asks us to shrink.

Thumbelina’s journey reminds us that belonging is not only about where we are held, but about where we can remain in contact with light.

One reason this story remains compelling is that it avoids turning Thumbelina into a moral emblem. Although small, she is not a symbol of innocence or victimhood. She is simply a form of life that cannot survive underground.

There are forms of belonging that ask us to shrink in order to fit. Forms of safety that slowly separate us from light, seasonality, spontaneity, or speech. These arrangements often appear reasonable from the outside. They promise protection and order. They offer relief from uncertainty. Yet something in the human psyche seems to recognise when the price is too high.

A life that is entirely protected can become airless. A system that removes all risk can also remove the conditions that foster vitality. In such environments, people may appear well accommodated while inwardly losing contact with parts of themselves that once responded to light.

Thumbelina is not a grand philosophical tale. It rewards those who notice detail. It is a tale of scale and misattunement, revealing the disturbance of being repeatedly offered a life that does not quite fit. To me, its wisdom lies in the recognition that not every shelter is a home. Some burrows are beautifully constructed. And some lives can only remain alive in relation to the sky

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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 we went rogue. I turned up and she was mid-war with her brother. We must fight. Alongside the ears on her Care Bears collection, we cut all the hair off the fairies. We were liberating them. It was fun.

But then we looked at what we had done. I was filled with regret. We couldn’t turn it back.

It took me years to realise what miniature worlds allow: power without consequence.

At the time, the doll’s house had really mattered to me, the sense of a whole world contained in miniature. Looking back, it wasn’t really about the fairies. What had mattered most was access. It was about entering a small enchanted world where order, beauty, and belonging were already arranged. A world already determined. One that could be touched and enjoyed without worrying about the raw materials and skills required to build it.

It was exciting to feel instantly powerful in that predictable world. Play took place in a pre-packaged format. Creativity was not so much about building something new as about moving pieces around within what already existed, and sometimes about destroying it.

Dolls, and their cousins fairies, have always lived in this borderland between imagination and power.

In ancient Rome, dolls were not simply toys. They were devotional objects, placed in household shrines or offered to the gods at moments of transition. A child might give up their doll at puberty, marking a shift in status and responsibility.

In accounts of soldiers and gladiators, small carved figures appear not as playthings but as objects of prayer. Miniature stand-ins through which fate might be negotiated.

Across cultures, figures like dolls have been used to concentrate hope, fear, harm, and repair. Voodoo dolls are not children’s toys but ritual technologies, objects through which power is imagined, invoked, or resisted.

The doll figure makes the abstract personal. It brings vast forces down to a scale the human hand can hold.

There are other reasons children play with dolls and fairies. Dolls allow rehearsal. They make hierarchy visible. Someone lives inside the fairyland home; someone is left outside. Someone decides who belongs, who is protected, who is exiled. Through play, children explore care and cruelty, authority and dependence, abundance and deprivation. They do not abolish hierarchy. They practice it.

In the fairyland home hierarchy can be endlessly rearranged. Anyone can be anything. Roles can be swapped without cost. If a bridge collapses it can be rebuilt. No one freezes. No one starves. No one has to answer for what happens. But real groups are not fairylands.

What do we lose when we pretend hierarchy does not exist?

When hierarchy is treated as inherently abusive rather than structurally necessary, it does not disappear. It becomes implicit and therefore harder to challenge. Power moves sideways into moral authority, social dominance, and ideological certainty. Those who name these dynamics are accused of harm; those who wield them remain largely untouched.

Actions become protected by language rather than consequence.

What gets lost is a basic developmental truth. Hierarchy is not only about domination. It is also about learning.

In any living system, families, professions, and institutions, people occupy different stages. Some have lived longer inside the work, the role, and the consequences. They know things others cannot yet know, not because they are morally superior, but because experience accumulates unevenly.

Time teaches patterns. Repetition teaches cost. Staying long enough teaches what breaks, what repairs, and what merely cycles.

You only notice this if you stay.

If you remain inside a system for decades rather than months, you begin to recognise that certain conversations recur. They arrive urgent, righteous, newly discovered. Only later do they become recognisable as stages in a longer rhythm of change.

What once felt like a revelation reveals itself as an initiation. It was not wrong, but it was partial. Necessary, but not sufficient.

Children do not know they are young. They experience themselves as complete.

It is only with age that their vulnerability becomes visible. First others’, then our own.

At some point you notice how young someone looks for a particular job. Soon the penny drops. You looked that young too. You weren’t fooling anyone.

It is only by acknowledging our stage that we begin to see not just our fragility but also our capacity to harm: our carelessness, our entitlement, our blind spots, and our unearned certainty.

Without that acknowledgement, power is exercised without ever being recognised as power at all.

Children sense hierarchy instinctively. They know who grants access, who sets the rules, and who can withdraw permission. Envy is hidden not because it is shameful, but because honesty risks exclusion. Access matters more than truth when the frame is precarious.

Flattening hierarchy does not remove this dynamic. It intensifies it.

When hierarchical roles are denied, permission becomes personal. Inclusion depends on alignment. Dissent becomes dangerous. The child does not become freer; they become quieter.

Development depends on asymmetry. It depends on being able to say you do not know something yet without humiliation, and on knowing something without exploiting that difference. Without this, learning collapses into performance and growth becomes mimicry.

There is also a harder truth here. You cannot know what you do not yet know.

No amount of critique can substitute for time lived, consequences borne, or responsibility carried. This is not an argument against challenge. It is an argument against pretending that all voices speak from the same place in the cycle.

Change is constant, but it is not instantaneous. Some phases are angry. Some are disillusioned. Some are careful. Some are tired. All are part of the same developmental rhythm.

Sometimes we need spaces where we can hate the process out loud, where frustration, envy, boredom, and rage can be spoken without being moralised or weaponised.

Hierarchy held well makes this possible. Hierarchy denied makes it dangerous.

Safety depends on acknowledged asymmetry. There must be clarity about who holds authority, who bears responsibility, and who remains answerable when things go wrong.

In real systems responsibility must land somewhere. Someone has to hold the frame. Someone has to take the risk.

When responsibility is endlessly diffused in the name of equality, it often disappears at precisely the moment it is most needed.

Fairies can survive what people cannot.

It has also become increasingly common for those who do hold power to behave as though it can simply be given away, by stating a position, by offering a microphone, or by inviting others to speak into spaces of high-level decision-making.

The gesture looks ethical. It is framed as inclusion.

But often power is not relinquished in this moment. It is disavowed.

Power is disavowed through invitation rather than relinquished through accountability.

People with lived experience are asked to speak, to represent, and to educate, often at precisely the point where the material is most painful, while those with institutional authority step back and claim humility.

The gesture appears generous. Yet it obscures something important.

Years of study, training, and positional security confer not only knowledge but protection. They confer the ability to approach difficult material without having to wade through one’s own unprocessed suffering in public.

To deny that asymmetry is not egalitarian. It is evasive.

At its worst this dynamic becomes a kind of structural sadism. The moment people most need containment becomes the moment they are asked to perform. The moment they most need protection becomes the moment they are asked to represent.

Power is not dismantled. It is displaced.

Those with real authority remain insulated. Those without it are exposed.

This is not the removal of hierarchy. It is its concealment.

Paradoxically, it often results in power being held more tightly, not less. When authority is denied rather than owned, it becomes harder to question. When responsibility has no clear address, failure cannot be traced.

Nothing changes in the way that was promised. This is often only recognised years later, when exhaustion and quiet harm have already taken hold.

Safety is not created by asking the most vulnerable to stand in for change. Safety is created when those with power remain present, remain accountable, and accept the discomfort of holding responsibility rather than passing it on.

Without that, equality becomes performance, inclusion becomes exposure, and care becomes a demand placed on those least able to provide it.

Critique can dismantle a fairyland home in seconds.

Imagination has to ask what will shelter people afterwards.

Imagination requires contact with history, bodies, and consequence. It requires acknowledging that while play is essential, not everything is play.

Some structures exist not to dominate but to protect. Some hierarchies can be held ethically, transparently, and in service of care.

Children do not play with fairies because they want a world without order. They play because they are learning how order works, how it comforts, how it wounds, and what it costs.

Childhood play allows destruction without consequence. Growing up begins when we realise that real worlds cannot be repaired so easily.

Perhaps the task now is not to smash the fairyland home, nor to live inside it forever, but to grow up enough to know the difference.

And to ask, honestly, whether we are still rearranging miniature worlds, mistaking critique for imagination, while real people wait outside, needing to be met in their full and difficult aliveness.

If everything is declared uncertain, then uncertainty itself becomes dogma; and dogmatic uncertainty is simply certainty wearing different clothes.

In therapeutic practice and in the wider social field, moments arise that unsettle what once felt like morally settled ground. Court cases, public reckonings, emerging evidence. They carry practical consequences, but they also create a deeper disturbance. They shake collective confidence. They disturb the belief that good intentions, moral alignment, and progressive language offer sufficient protection against harm.

These disruptions behave like Trickster events. They reopen questions that had been tidily closed. They expose realities that were symbolically managed rather than fully faced. They remind us that conviction is not the same as wisdom. Systems built on unexamined confidence become fragile.

Jung placed the Trickster in the shadow. Not as villain or hero, but as a reminder of limits. When symbolically held, it unsettles inflation and punctures pretence. When possessed, it sanctions cruelty, deception, or harm in the name of moral necessity. It whispers that normal rules no longer apply. That ethical restraint is outdated. That damage can be justified for a higher truth. History shows that some of the greatest harms have been committed by those convinced they were acting kindly.

The version of the Trickster that concerns me is not the chaotic outsider. It is the one speaking from the centre with calm tones and moral clarity. It presents itself not as disruption but as competence. It uses the right language and the right concepts. It assumes immunity because it is reflective.

The tale that captures this dynamic most clearly is The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, drawn from Goethe’s ballad of 1797 and later carried into folklore and animation. It is often remembered as a story of recklessness. It reveals something subtler. The apprentice is not malicious. He is capable and eager. His mistake is not curiosity but overidentification with mastery.

Left alone, he animates a broom to carry water. The spell works and he rests. But the broom does not stop. When panic sets in, he splits it with an axe, only to multiply the problem. Order returns only when the master arrives and utters the full spell the apprentice never learned.

The catastrophe arises not because magic exists but because partial knowledge is mistaken for mastery. The apprentice can initiate but not contain. He assumes that intention guarantees right action. He assumes reversibility. He has technique but not apprenticeship to limit.

This echoes aspects of contemporary therapeutic culture, where urgency meets method without full formation in constraint. Many clinicians are motivated by a genuine wish to reduce harm. Faced with distress and moral pressure, certain interventions can feel like the obvious response. Use validating language. Meet people where they are. Mirror their meaning. Momentum builds and discomfort settles. The broom carries water.

The difficulty emerges when such practices shift from relational stance to ontological claim. There is a difference between acknowledging a person’s experience as real and treating a particular interpretation of reality as settled fact. When support moves from accompaniment to consolidation of worldview, exploration narrows. The task becomes sustaining what must be true rather than asking what is happening here.

There is a dialectic here that is easy to miss. When everything is treated as uncertain, uncertainty itself becomes the only certainty. Yet genuine uncertainty requires something that can resist us. Exploration is meaningful only if there is a reality that does not bend entirely to language. Without this, curiosity becomes performance. We appear open, but nothing can truly interrupt us. The capacity to say I do not know presupposes that there is something to be known, and something that may not yield easily to our wishes.

Like the apprentice who never questions the nature or reversibility of the spell, clinicians may continue approaches that relieve distress in the short term without structures for pause, reassessment, or reversal when ambivalence or new information appears. The danger is not care itself. It is care fused with certainty.

Alongside overt certainty sits a subtler problem. The performance of exploration. Many claim to both affirm and explore. On paper this sounds mature. In practice, exploration may be permitted only so long as it does not unsettle the existence of the affirmed direction. Questions are asked, but not the ones that challenge perception. Curiosity becomes decorative.

In the story, the apprentice keeps acting. He escalates interventions without asking whether action itself has become the problem. Reflection intensifies while realities such as embodiment, irreversibility, loss, and time are quietly avoided. Language multiplies, yet genuine not knowing disappears. Exploration becomes another animated broom.

One of the Trickster’s most insidious qualities is the illusion that awareness grants impunity. In pursuing justice or reform, one may speak for others while believing critique prevents misuse of power. In opposing harm, one may assert authority in new ways. In aligning with what feels morally progressive, methods can become exempt from scrutiny. The apprentice believes that knowing the spell means controlling it. He does not see that he is now in service to it. This is less a failure of ethics than a failure of humility.

The absence of the master in the story is instructive. Many clinicians are highly trained in technique but may not have undergone sustained personal confrontation with their own certainty seeking. Without the experience of being undone, confidence can be mistaken for containment. The profession risks filling with apprentices who can activate but not interrupt.

Supervision and reflective spaces are meant to function as places where someone can say stop, or you do not yet know. When these spaces become echo chambers, the corrective function disappears. Responsibility shifts to individuals while systemic momentum continues.

In earlier analytic traditions, reality itself functioned as a kind of master. Clinical work was oriented around negotiating limits. Bodily constraint. Dependency. Difference. Loss. Time. In efforts to deconstruct power, there can be a subtle slide from questioning interpretations of reality to questioning whether reality itself has any binding force. When that happens, limits are no longer negotiated but dismissed. Nature becomes something to overcome rather than reckon with. Critique replaces containment. The spell continues, but the master is no longer present to interrupt it.

From a group analytic perspective, an irony emerges. Contemporary discourse often emphasises the body as a political or relational site, yet the material body, with its limits, risks, and irreversibilities, is frequently absent from discussion. The gap between abstraction and embodiment is precisely where the Trickster thrives.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice does not teach us to abandon magic. It teaches reverence for limit. Limit is not the enemy of compassion. It is what prevents compassion from becoming coercive. In clinical work, support must remain relational rather than ontological. Exploration must retain the capacity for genuine uncertainty. It must be possible to say I do not know, or this may have irreversible consequences.

Above all, we must cultivate spaces that can ask whether the broom should continue carrying water. The Trickster arrives disguised as success. Ethical practice in contested terrain requires the humility to recognise when we are no longer directing events but are being directed by them.

You only took a small bite.

You did not mean to fall asleep.

The apple was not obviously poisoned. It was polished. Persuasive. Glossed with the language everyone else seemed to be using. Half red: urgency, justice, belonging. Half green: freshness, safety, growth. It did not feel like deceit. It felt like fluency.

You told yourself it was only language.

You are a leader. You understand that leadership involves translation. You cannot afford to ignite unnecessary fracture. The group is tired. The institution is brittle. The mood is volatile. So you insert the sentence into your speech — not because you are fully convinced, but because it settles the room. Because it signals alignment. Because it prevents you from becoming the obstacle.

The mirror, which is really the group, reflects back approval. Not vanity, exactly, legitimacy. You are fair. You are modern. You are decent. You feel the relaxing of the room when you speak. A junior colleague nods with admiration. Someone later quotes your phrasing in an email. It lands well.

The apple is sweet.

You do not notice the numbness immediately.

Inside you, other parts stir. In the old story, Snow White is accompanied by dwarfs: small, instinctual presences who labour underground. In psychological terms, they are the quiet functions of the psyche. One notices contradiction. One remembers history. One mistrusts enchantment. One guards language. One smells danger. One worries about exile. One holds complexity.

When you said it to them, they shifted uneasily.

There was a half-second pause before the words left your mouth. A dryness at the back of your tongue. A micro-hesitation. One of those inner figures tugged your sleeve. Another cleared his throat. But you overruled them. You are responsible for the whole. You cannot afford to indulge every doubt. Leadership requires steadiness.

You swallow.

The group stabilises.

And something in you stiffens.

The glass coffin is not death. It is preservation.

You remain visible. Respected. Intact. The speech is circulated. The phrase appears in bold in the strategy document. Three weeks later, a colleague cites you in a meeting: “As you said, this is non-negotiable.” The line that once felt provisional has hardened into policy.

You feel a flicker of heat not because they are wrong, but because you recognise your complicity. You did not mean that. You thought you were offering symbolic cover, buying time, preventing fracture. But the room heard commitment.

Now you are the evidence.

“Even she agrees.”

You are held in glass. Admired. Protected from overt attack.

But you are no longer metabolising what is happening.

The dwarfs gather around the coffin. The parts of you that once tolerated ambiguity, that enjoyed dissent, that could hold competing truths without panic. They cannot wake you. They can only watch. The group grows calmer. The language grows cleaner. The field narrows. Dissonance is quietly coded as harm. Doubt becomes dangerous.

Externally, everything looks stable.

Internally, something is starving. But the only thing worse than being hidden is being found out.

The part of you that valued intellectual honesty grows thin. The part that once risked being misunderstood becomes cautious. You begin to refine your speech so it does not outrun the consensus. You insert the calming words before you think. You anticipate the mirror before you speak.

The coffin protects you from exposure.

It also immobilises you.

The dawning is slow. A policy justified in your name that goes further than you intended. A colleague who is marginalised for raising the very question you once privately held. A meeting where silence spreads too easily. You recognise the architecture. You helped build it.

You were not coerced. You were not deceived.

You chose cohesion over clarity.

To wake now would mean admitting that you allowed language to outrun your thinking. That you signalled certainty where you had doubt. That you preferred belonging to friction. It would mean risking the mirror’s favour. Risking the accusation of betrayal. Risking the charge that you are destabilising what you once stabilised.

There is a particular terror in stepping out of glass.

Because once you move, you cannot pretend you were merely preserved. You must acknowledge that you were suspended.

The old story says Snow White wakes when the coffin is jolted and the apple dislodges from her throat. In lived experience, awakening is rarely romantic. It is often humiliation. A question you cannot answer without contradicting yourself. A junior colleague who looks confused. A private moment where you hear your own voice and it does not quite belong to you.

And yet, breath returns and with it, the unbearable recognition: you were complicit in your own enchantment.

The question is not whether you made a mistake. It is whether you prefer to remain preserved.

There is safety in glass. Approval. Moral coherence. The relief of not being cast out.

But vitality requires something else. It requires allowing the dwarfs back into council. Letting contradiction speak. Risking the mirror’s displeasure. Saying, perhaps publicly, “I spoke too quickly. I need to think again.”

Integration often feels like a collapse.

To remain in the coffin is to be loved for an image. To step out is to be uncertain, possibly less admired, but alive.

You thought the danger was in not conforming.

It may be that the greater danger was in falling asleep.

I was listening to a podcast recently that discussed something called method dressing.

The conversation centred on Margot Robbie’s press appearances for Barbie and now Wuthering Heights, and on Timothée Chalamet’s carefully curated wardrobes for films like Wonka. The idea is simple. The actor dresses not only for publicity, but to create atmosphere. Clothing becomes an extension of the role. Fabric prepares the room. Before a word is spoken, something has already been shaped. It is theatre beyond the screen. The clothes are not incidental. They create a field.

Listening to this, I found myself thinking about another story involving clothing, one I return to often: The Emperor’s New Clothes. In the older Indian and Persian tellings, the cloth is not invisible to the foolish. It is invisible to those who are illegitimate. To say “I cannot see it” is not to risk looking stupid. It is to risk exposure as someone who does not belong.

The story turns on atmosphere. On the fear of disqualification. It is a story about the dread of being revealed as out of place.

The Social Fabric of Belonging

Groups are not held together by rules alone. They are woven. Language, tone, shared assumptions, moral signals, all of these are threads. Over time they cross and re‑cross into something that feels like fabric. When the weave is supple, people move easily within it. Disagreement stretches the cloth slightly, but the pattern holds. When the weave tightens under fear, something else happens.

The fabric stiffens. Threads are pulled taut. Certain colours dominate. To tug at the cloth feels risky. A loose thread draws alarm. The question shifts from whether something is true to what it means about me if I cannot see it.

Atmosphere begins to govern behaviour more effectively than any policy.

“I Don’t Feel Safe in the Group”

A common phrase in contemporary groups is: I don’t feel safe.

Sometimes this names real hostility or exclusion. There are spaces where harm is tangible and must be taken seriously.

At other times, the phrase appears after disagreement rather than attack. It surfaces when tension enters the room. When someone says something that disrupts the pattern.

In some of these moments, what is being expressed may not be physical danger but a tremor in belonging. It may mean: I am not sure I am securely woven into this fabric. I do not know whether my thread can bear tension without being cut. I am unsure whether disagreement will unmake my place here.

When legitimacy feels conditional, disagreement can feel like exposure. The nervous system does not always distinguish between social exclusion and physical threat. The body tightens either way.

And so the cloth is praised. Not because it is visible, but because belonging feels too precious to risk.

At home, in its healthiest form, something different happens. People are idiosyncratic. They speak before arranging their thoughts. They contradict themselves. They change their minds mid-sentence. They misunderstand and are misunderstood, and the relationship absorbs it. No one is immediately reclassified as illegitimate.

Idiosyncrasy (even misbehaviour)

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is not a threat to the fabric. It is evidence of being securely stitched in. You can tug at the cloth because you trust it will not tear.

In homes and groups organised around fear, that ease disappears. Speech becomes tailored. Tone is monitored. Language is pressed flat before being offered. The weave may look immaculate, but it no longer stretches around the person inside it.

Belonging shifts from being lived to being performed.

The Emperor’s Other Children

In the story, no one is coerced directly. Fear does the work. Courtiers admire the invisible cloth because to fail to see it would mean they were unworthy of their place. The emperor himself sees nothing but concludes that the fault must lie with him. The procession continues, upheld by silence.

In some versions, a child speaks. In others, the story ends without rupture. The system holds, but it holds through compliance rather than conviction.

Families sometimes organise themselves in a similar way.

One child carries intensity or volatility. Their reactions shape the room. Alongside them, another child becomes attuned to atmosphere — careful, adaptive, skilled at smoothing tension. Their goodness is assumed. Their silence is rewarded.

Over time, the family fabric stabilises around this division. One voice must be managed. The other must adjust.

Social groups do something similar when fear governs the weave.

Some positions are treated as too fragile to unsettle. Others absorb the strain. The overlooked threads stretch to keep the garment intact.

In professional life, this can feel terrifying.

It shows up in small, ordinary moments. The sleepless night after a poorly worded WhatsApp message. The replaying of a sentence from a lecture that may have caused offence. The sudden tightening in the chest when a comment is received coolly rather than warmly. The careful drafting and redrafting of emails, removing anything that might be misread.

If you are accustomed to moral clarity functioning as the arbiter of legitimacy, these moments carry disproportionate weight. A misstep does not simply mean “I got that wrong.” It threatens to mean “I am the wrong kind of person.”

Under such conditions, disagreement feels less like intellectual friction and more like reputational risk. The fear is not merely of being mistaken, but of being repositioned — moved, in the eyes of the group, from trusted member to suspect presence.

And so self-monitoring intensifies. Speech becomes measured. Silence becomes safer than inquiry.

The garment holds, but only because certain threads are pulled taut beyond comfort, while others are never tested. From a distance, the fabric looks seamless.

Up close, it feels constricting.

In such conditions, some people do not argue. They do not tug harder at the cloth. They simply step out of it. Over time, many decide that the only way to survive certain groups is to leave them. Not because they reject the values entirely, and not because they lack commitment, but because the weave has become too tight to breathe inside. When this happens, the fabric shrinks.

The remaining threads may feel more aligned, more uniform, even more harmonious. But something vital has been lost. Difference has not been metabolised; it has exited. The garment becomes easier to manage, but less resilient.

A weave that cannot tolerate tension eventually narrows itself into fragility.

When Fabric Breathes

And yet not all fabrics suffocate. Some breathe.

In reflective practice groups and workshops I run, participants often describe a quiet surprise. They find they can think things through out loud. They can begin a sentence without knowing precisely how it will end. They can articulate ambivalence without pre-emptively defending it.

Not because they expect agreement, and not because dissent is encouraged for its own sake. But because they sense that agreement or disagreement will not determine their legitimacy.

There is room in the cloth. Threads can move without snapping. Seams can be opened without the whole garment collapsing. People can try on ideas, take them off again, alter them, discard them. The atmosphere allows elasticity.

It is not the absence of tension that creates safety. Tension is inevitable wherever people care. It is the confidence that tension will not result in expulsion.

This kind of fabric does not emerge instantly. It takes time. It requires consistency. It requires that leaders and facilitators tolerate discomfort without rushing to smooth it away. It requires that missteps are treated as material for repair rather than evidence of unworthiness.

Trust accumulates slowly. Members begin to test the cloth. They tug lightly at first. They offer a doubt. They risk a different view. When the garment does not tear — when the response is curiosity rather than condemnation — the weave strengthens.

Breathable fabric is not loose or chaotic. It is well made. It can stretch because it has been woven carefully. It can absorb strain because its threads are not organised around fear.

In such spaces, people do not need to praise the invisible cloth. They can say, “I’m not sure I see it,” and remain fully dressed within the group.

And that difference (between compliance born of fear and speech born of trust) is the difference between fabric that constricts and fabric that holds.

The Tailor We Become

Method dressing works because fabric shapes atmosphere. Before a word is spoken, something has already been signalled. The cut of a jacket, the colour of a dress, the texture of cloth — all of it prepares the room for what will follow. Groups do this too. They dress themselves in language. In moral tone. In what can and cannot be said. The garment creates a field long before disagreement appears. The question is not whether we are clothed. We always are.

The question is what kind of garment we are making together.

If the weave is organised around fear: fear of expulsion, fear of misstep, fear of being revealed as illegitimate then the cloth tightens. Certain threads strain. Others fray. Some eventually pull away altogether. The fabric may look immaculate, even virtuous. But it no longer breathes.

If the weave is organised around trust, something else becomes possible. Disagreement does not feel like tearing. Idiosyncrasy does not signal defect. A thread can pull without being cut. A seam can open without the whole garment collapsing.

This does not happen by accident. It requires careful tailoring. It requires leaders who can tolerate a crease without rushing to smooth it away. It requires members who can say, “I may be wrong,” without fearing reclassification. It requires the steady work of mending rather than the theatre of perfection.

Belonging is not the absence of tension. It is the confidence that tension will not unmake you.

Perhaps that is the difference between costume and clothing.

Costume is worn for display. It must remain intact at all costs. Clothing that fits can crease, stretch, be altered, repaired.

When we cannot say, “I don’t see it,” without risking our place, we are wearing costume.

When we can speak and remain woven in, we are properly dressed.

And the fabric, instead of shrinking under fear, begins to breathe - working with, rather than against, the body of the grou

She had lived with coercive control for years before she could name it. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would have been recognised as abuse from the outside. It was the slow narrowing of a relational field. Decisions that once felt mutual became weighted. Her movements were monitored - always from a place of concern and helpfulness. Her preferences softened to avoid conflict. Over time, she learned to anticipate rather than express, to adjust rather than assert. What she described was not fear in the conventional sense, but a gradual loss of authorship.

She stayed. Not because she believed the situation was healthy, and not because she lacked insight. She stayed because leaving felt like a rupture she could not yet imagine surviving. She stayed because the relationship had become the organising principle of her emotional world. She stayed because the cost of clarity felt higher than the cost of ambiguity. She stayed from loyalty and love. No blind to what things had become, but a gratitude for what had been before. When she finally spoke about it, she said, “I did not disappear all at once. I disappeared by degrees.”

Her account is not unusual. Coercive control rarely announces itself. It works by atrophy of the field of possibility until staying feels like the only viable position. The question why didn’t she leave? misses the point. A more honest question is what had become impossible to imagine?

This dynamic, in altered form, appears in organisational life too. Particularly in pressured systems where scrutiny is high, expectations are implicit, and the cost of rupture feels unbearable. People do not stay because they are naïve. They stay because something in the system has made leaving feel like a threat to identity, belonging, or meaning.

Which brings us to the workplace.

Much has been written about when to leave difficult workplaces. Far less is said about what it means to stay, not out of denial, fear, or inertia, but because continuity, loyalty, and long-term work still matter. Staying is often framed as weakness or a failure to individuate. Leaving is framed as clarity. Yet for many people, the question how hard is too hard? is not only difficult, it may be impossible to answer cleanly.

False clarity is often more comforting than psychological truth. But it comes at a cost.

In pressured organisational environments, it can become genuinely difficult to tell where the individual ends and the system begins. Experiences of scrutiny, silence, or implied evaluation blur easily with earlier histories of authority, approval, and exclusion. What feels external may be partly internal; what feels personal may, in fact, be structural. The temptation is to resolve this ambiguity quickly, to decide that the problem lies entirely out there or entirely in here.

Both positions offer relief. Neither is adequate.

To insist that it is all the system risks a collapse of agency. One becomes watchful, suspicious, preoccupied with power at the expense of thought. Reflection hardens into rhetoric. Moral language begins to substitute for thinking. Certainty takes the place of curiosity. It can feel like ethical maturity, a sense of knowing which side one is on, yet it often functions as a defence against helplessness and grief.

To insist that it is all the self leads in the opposite direction: over-adaptation, self-doubt, the slow erosion of confidence. One becomes increasingly preoccupied with being reasonable, resilient, and emotionally literate. Distress is reframed as personal fragility. Silence is internalised as evidence of inadequacy. In both cases, something essential is lost: authorship.

Staying without self-erasure requires tolerating this blur rather than prematurely resolving it. It involves remaining open to the possibility that one’s own sensitivities, projections, and longings are active, while also refusing to deny the reality of pressure, silence, or constraint in the environment itself. This is not a comfortable position. It offers neither the moral clarity of blame nor the apparent safety of submission.

In many workplaces, difficulty does not arrive in overtly abusive forms. It appears instead as atmosphere: a thinning of contact, a careful professionalism, a sense that expectations are known but not spoken. An email without context. A meeting where no one names what everyone knows. Silence begins to regulate behaviour. Repair, when it comes, is tacit rather than mutual. The individual is left to intuit what has gone wrong and how normality might be restored.

People working under these conditions often describe feeling not like themselves. They may become unusually reactive, distracted, or self-monitoring. These reactions are frequently interpreted, by organisations and by individuals alike, as failures of emotional regulation. Less often are they understood as responses to prolonged ambiguity combined with unspoken evaluation. When containment fails, the psyche does not settle; it spins.

The question, then, is not simply whether to stay or to leave, but how to stay without disappearing.

Staying without self‑erasure is an internal discipline as much as an external stance. It involves maintaining an observing position in relation to both oneself and the system: noticing when one is taking on too much responsibility for restoring equilibrium; noticing when silence is being filled with self‑criticism; noticing the impulse to apologise in order to belong rather than to repair. It also involves recognising when one is withholding unnecessarily, or when questions are being approached with defensiveness rather than curiosity.

It may involve small, steady acts. Resisting the urge to over‑explain. Allowing oneself to answer simply without collapsing into justification. Offering enough, but not everything. Keeping parts of one’s thinking private when that protects symbolic space, and sharing when it supports connection rather than compliance. Asking questions without defensiveness. Letting others in rather than trying to hold the whole system alone. Documenting rather than ruminating. Staying connected to sources of meaning that do not depend on the workplace’s approval. Allowing oneself to be human, not a fixed position but someone who can revise, soften, or change their mind. Dressing for the weather rather than the forecast. These acts allow symbolic elasticity to be maintained when the organisational field is tightening.

Crucially, staying without self‑erasure does not mean staying indefinitely. It is not a vow of endurance. It is a position that must be renewed, or not, in light of what becomes possible. A workplace that can tolerate difference, disagreement, and mutual repair allows people to remain visible over time.

Clarity, in the end, may arrive slowly or not at all. Psychological truth often does. But there is a difference between uncertainty that keeps thinking alive and false clarity that closes it down. Staying without self‑erasure means choosing the former, even when it is harder, and trusting that whatever decision follows will be grounded in authorship rather than erasure.

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 himself, pray, or explain who he really is. If he survives the waiting, he will be restored. If he fails, he will lose what remains of himself. Much of the story unfolds in this suspended state: not actively rescued, not fully abandoned, but required to endure, unseen and largely unrecognised, until time itself does its work.

This story has particular resonance for CAMHS teams living with long waiting lists. Waiting lists have a way of becoming strangely abstract at scale: referred to in meetings as numbers, flows, or pressures, while remaining intensely concrete everywhere else, turning up in the consulting room, in inboxes, and occasionally in the middle of the night. Waiting, in this context, is not neutral time. It is saturated with anxiety, risk, and moral tension. Young people wait while symptoms escalate. Families wait while hope thins. Clinicians wait while knowing more than they can ethically act upon. This is fertile ground for moral injury: the pain of knowing what ought to be done, while being structurally prevented from doing it.

Many clinicians enter CAMHS already carrying the drain from previous roles, organisational turbulence, or cumulative exposure to distress. They arrive hoping to offer care, but often into services that are themselves depleted, stretched thin, and waiting for relief that never quite comes. Over time, the ethical strain of holding responsibility without agency can quietly erode professional identity.

If we use Bearskin as a scaffold for thinking, we can see how, in pressured teams, someone often becomes the “soldier” of the system. This may be an individual or a subgroup tasked with the grunt work: the action-orientated tasks and morally compromised decisions where ideals meet reality, and where risk, urgency, and unspoken fear are held so the rest of the system can keep functioning. Often this role is named only retrospectively, in the kind of conversation that begins with, “Do you remember when Jo was holding all of that?” - usually after Jo has already left. It emerges through goodwill, reliability, and a willingness to act where others hesitate, often in conditions that allow little time for reflection. Over time, the person may come to appear less morally intact, increasingly uncivilised or monster-like, as the group’s anxiety and moral contamination are gradually located in them. Leadership begins with a willingness to notice who may be living as though the war never quite ended, and to wonder what the system has been asking of them.

The bargain in Bearskin is not immediately violent. It is slow and corrosive. Over time, the soldier becomes unrecognisable, not only to others but to himself. Within the wider NHS system, CAMHS teams too can come to occupy this position. Similar bargains are made, particularly in relation to waiting lists. Capacity is exceeded “temporarily”. Risk is normalised. Supervision is postponed. Clinicians are asked to carry clinical responsibility without the conditions required to exercise it well. These bargains are often justified by necessity, but they exact a quiet moral cost, narrowing the space for thought and making ethical discomfort harder to articulate. To the “pure” NHS teams on the outside, such spaces can come to appear morally dubious or contaminating. The disturbance has been located.

The bearskin itself is a powerful image. It protects the soldier from freezing, yet isolates him from human contact. Teams develop their own second skins: inherited waiting lists, reputational anxiety, unresolved conflict, and the emotional residue of safeguarding work. These skins shape how teams are perceived by the wider system and how they come to see themselves. Over time, survival can be mistaken for resilience, and moral injury reframed as personal weakness rather than systemic failure.

What is striking in the story is the role of the youngest sister. She performs an essentially analytic function. While others are organised by the dominant narrative (that this strange figure must be a monster, a threat, something to be feared ) she refuses to collapse complexity into certainty. She does not deny the bearskin, but neither does she mistake it for the whole truth. She is willing to trust the unfolding dynamic, even when this stance marginalises her within the family’s preferred story of danger and contamination.

Every CAMHS team has figures who occupy this position: colleagues who resist premature certainty, question dominant narratives about risk or blame, and continue to think relationally when anxiety pushes the system toward defensive simplification. This role is often lonely. It carries its own risks, particularly in cultures where deviation from the preferred story can be experienced as disloyal or unsafe. Yet without this analytic function, teams lose the capacity to distinguish between threat and fear, danger and distress.

When the seven years end, Bearskin is washed, groomed, and restored. This is not an individual achievement but a relational one. For teams, restoration requires more than resilience rhetoric. It requires leadership that takes waiting lists seriously as ethical sites, protects reflective space, names moral injury without personalising it, and recognises that containment is a collective responsibility.

There is also something important about the symbolism of water in this moment. Across myth and group analytic thought, water is repeatedly linked with the unconscious: with what has been lived but not yet spoken, felt but not yet thought. The washing of Bearskin is not simply about the removal of dirt or disguise, but about symbolic meaning-making. What has been enacted in silence, urgency, and moral compromise is finally given words, sequence, and recognition. In group terms, this kind of washing is the movement from action into narrative: the slow work of helping a team put into language what has previously had to be carried in doing. Without this, action remains isolated and contaminating. With it, experience can be metabolised, shared, and re-entered into the group’s story rather than remaining lodged in one body or role.

Ultimately, Bearskin is a story about what happens when someone is required to carry too much alone, for too long, and largely in silence. Read this way, leadership in CAMHS is not simply about heroics or endurance, but about navigating an ongoing tension: between responsibility and constraint, care and capacity, knowing and not being able to act. It involves resisting the pull to treat waiting as morally neutral, while also acknowledging the realities that make waiting unavoidable. The ethical task is not purity, but discernment.

Senior leadership in CAMHS holds a particular responsibility in relation to waiting lists and moral injury, even as leaders themselves operate under significant constraint. Acknowledging that demand outstrips capacity is often only the beginning of the work. The harder task is to remain engaged with what waiting does to people: young people waiting for help, families waiting in uncertainty, and clinicians waiting in a state of moral tension between what they know is needed and what the system allows them to offer. This may require leaders to tolerate discomfort, ambiguity, and the limits of what can be repaired. Protecting reflective spaces, attending to emotional labour, and naming corrosive bargains are not guarantees of resolution, but ways of keeping the work human, and of reducing the risk that anyone (clinician or service user) is left to endure prolonged invisibility beneath a skin that no longer protects.

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 relationship no longer unfolds in a quiet room between two people. It emerges inside a vast infrastructure of platforms, data policies, safeguarding software, clinical records, broadband, power grids, and corporate governance. The therapist and client meet inside a system long before they meet each other.

This raises a question: is some of the anxiety we attribute to interpersonal power actually about the vulnerability of being held by systems rather than by another human?

The Rise of Power Discourse in Psychotherapy

Over the last two decades, psychotherapy has become increasingly attentive to power. We see this in reflective practice groups, training programmes, regulatory frameworks, safeguarding cultures and theory shaped by critical, post‑colonial and intersectional perspectives. The prevailing focus is that therapists hold institutional and psychological power, while clients are inherently vulnerable, and that ethical practice requires transparency, humility and redistribution.

None of this is to be dismissed. Yet in group life, the symbolic and the literal flow together, and group analytic thinking invites a broader frame that attends to both.

What if the hyper‑focus on interpersonal power is not only a moral development but also a cultural symptom of a deeper shift in how dependency and security are organised in modern societies?

If, as Foulkes argued, the individual relates not simply to another person but to the wider social matrix instantiated in the therapeutic encounter, then the matrix itself must be examined.

Industrial Dependence and the New Containment

For most of human history, dependency was local and embodied. Care was mediated through kin, land, parish, guild and community. The forces one relied upon could be named, confronted or negotiated with. Today, dependency is infrastructural.

Servers, electrical grids, broadband networks, cloud storage, automated triage pathways and algorithmic decision‑making shape access to care. Containment has become industrial rather than communal. The pandemic exposed this starkly: when the system falters, our knowledge of how to meet basic needs is profoundly limited. If the infrastructures that sustain us were to disappear, most of us would be only days away from crisis.

Likewise in professional life what historically resided in the therapeutic relationship now resides partly in the system around it. This redefines what power feels like in the room.

Online therapy makes this explicit. The client relates not only to the clinician but to the platform, the latency, the camera, the GDPR policies, the risk‑escalation protocols and the knowledge that records are stored beyond human memory. The holding environment includes routers, servers and corporate data governance.

Clinical notes feed into digital systems that interface with safeguarding, law enforcement, child protection and performance management. Online sessions rely on power grids, platforms and payment gateways. Referral pathways are automated and audit trails permanent. Dependency is now no longer simply interpersonal; it is technological.

Safeguarding, Surveillance and the Technological Superego

Contemporary healthcare operates under intensifying regimes of surveillance, often justified as safety. Safeguarding is vital, yet its enactment can drift from care to pre‑emptive control.

Automatic red‑flagging, mandatory reporting thresholds, digital risk dashboards and multi‑agency sharing turn therapists into conduits for institutional power.

This shapes the client’s internal experience. Therapy is no longer speech in a private room; it is speech inside a system with the capacity to classify, notify, record and intervene. Knowing that words may enter institutional machinery generates caution, self‑censorship and defensive narratives.

Power may therefore be experienced less as “my therapist could dominate me” and more as “this system could act upon me without my consent”. And we know that surveillance is often the opposite of being seen. Psychological attunement requires presence, nuance and relational depth, whereas surveillance produces scrutiny without understanding. Those who become more visible to the system are not met with greater care but with escalating layers of monitoring. Visibility becomes exposure rather than recognition.

In group analytic terms, this shifts the location of disturbance. The anxiety that appears to arise between therapist and client is often generated elsewhere, in the wider matrix of technological, bureaucratic and institutional forces that surround the encounter. What is felt interpersonally may in fact be the downstream effect of systemic vigilance: the client senses not only the therapist’s presence but the gaze of the infrastructure behind them. Disturbance is therefore located not simply in the relationship but in the circuitry that holds it, where surveillance, policy and automated scrutiny shape the emotional climate long before either person speaks. The therapeutic dyad becomes the surface on which these deeper forces register.

When Systemic Anxiety Becomes Interpersonal Ethics

People crave faces, not firewalls. But to challenge our dependence is overwhelming, and so we store up our dis-ease, turning our atrophied manual skill set into stories of interpersonal betrayal. So the anxiety created by dependence on vast technological infrastructures may be displaced into interpersonal ethics.

We debate whether the therapist is enacting power when the deeper vulnerability originates in the systems surrounding the encounter. The interpersonal becomes a theatre for processing systemic helplessness.

This does not invalidate relational power analysis; it situates it. Often the therapist is simply the nearest visible person onto whom infrastructural power is projected.

High‑visibility groups often become the carriers of this disturbance. When dependency is organised through vast, opaque systems, the anxiety it generates has nowhere human to land. It is therefore displaced onto those who are most visible within the matrix: The more a person relies on institutional structures for safety, care or recognition, the more exposed they become to the system’s gaze. At the same time, those who provide support at the visible edges of the system (clinicians, educators, frontline staff) become the human surfaces onto which collective dependency and frustration are projected. The dependent are scrutinised; the visible are blamed. Both positions carry the emotional weight of a system that cannot be confronted directly, leaving individuals to absorb anxieties that properly belong to the wider matrix.

Ideology as Infrastructure: A Contemporary Example

Group analysis situates the individual within the social field. It resists fantasies of the isolated dyad. Instead of asking only “Who holds power between us?” we might ask:

“What forces shape how we experience what is happening between us?”

This moves us from interpersonal ethics to systemic ontology.

It invites curiosity over compliance, relational humility over ideological certainty and collective thinking over binary moral judgment.

Here, gender identity offers a particularly vivid illustration of ideology functioning as infrastructure. The contemporary expectation that systems should affirm and operationalise subjective identity claims (from clinical records to pronoun protocols, from speech norms to surgical pathways) reveals a deeper cultural wish for technology and bureaucracy to authorise what biology cannot. In this sense, to affirm a new gender is also to affirm our dependence on the system’s capacity to remake, record and legitimate the self. The authority shifts from the body as a primary home to the infrastructure that can modify, document or enforce a new category. What appears as a personal or interpersonal conflict is therefore also a negotiation with the technological and institutional machinery we rely upon to stabilise identity.

This raises a broader question about where “home” is located in contemporary life. Historically, home was anchored in the body, kinship, land and community. Today, home is increasingly mediated through systems: legal status, digital identity, administrative categories and institutional recognition. When belonging depends on system alignment, identity becomes something granted or withheld by infrastructures rather than held in the body or affirmed in community. This helps explain why these debates feel so charged. They touch not only on gender, but on the deeper anxiety of where we are allowed to belong, and who has the authority to confer that belonging.

Conclusion: Therapy as Circuit, Not Sanctuary

The therapeutic encounter no longer sits outside industrial life. It is shaped by encryption, electricity, safeguarding software, legal frameworks, audit culture, digital platforms and institutional policy. These forces form part of the holding environment, whether or not we acknowledge them.

Power, therefore, is not merely interpersonal. It is diffuse, systemic and infrastructural. Working ethically with power requires attention to both the relationship we can see and the systems that quietly structure it.

The clinic is not simply a room. It is a point of contact within a wider network in which human vulnerability meets technological and institutional force. Recognising this does not diminish the therapeutic relationship; it situates it.

Attending to these conditions may be one of the profession’s next developmental tasks.

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 father, Daedalus. Daedalus is a master craftsman, trapped on an island prison. To escape, he fashions wings from feathers and wax for himself and his son. When teaching Icarus how to use them, he warns Icarus not to fly too high or too low: avoid the burning sun, avoid the heavy sea mist. Icarus listens, but once airborne he is dazzled by the sheer joy of flight. He rises higher and higher until the wax melts, the wings come apart, and he plunges into the sea.

The story is most often told as a timeless cautionary tale about hubris: Icarus’s youthful exuberance and reckless defiance of his father’s wise limits embody excessive pride, a warning against unchecked ambition that ignores caution, wisdom, and the need for balance. Fly too high in pursuit of lofty exhilaration, the myth reminds us, and fragile social construction will melt under reality’s heat, sending us plunging into ruin. But the longer I work in groups, the less interested I am in Icarus’s overreach and the more I find myself preoccupied with the social life of the wings themselves. Who actually built them? How were they imagined and resourced? What kind of relationships surround their making? And what happens when our only way of staying close to the people we love is to keep flying on wings that were never of our own design?

Icarus does not design or build the wings he flies with. His father does. His father’s craftsmanship carries its own desires: his wish to escape, his ingenuity, his fantasy that cleverness can outwit captivity. The wings are not a neutral experiment. They are saturated with a father’s need for his plan to work.

This is often how narcissistic illusion shows up clinically. Not simply as a private fantasy lodged inside one person, but as something shared and handed down, a piece of relational equipment. A child learns, often wordlessly, that in this family they must be exceptional so that a parent can feel redeemed; that they must adore someone or risk collapse; that “we” are the clever ones, the kind ones, the enlightened ones, and without that shared identity there is nothing to stand on. These are wings. They lift the child into proximity with the parent’s heart, but they also fix the altitude and the route. To stay attached, the child must keep participating in the illusion: I am special, you are flawless, we are not like those people.

Later, in the consulting room, the same wings reappear under the name narcissism. The patient who must be admired to feel real. The patient who must treat the analyst as perfect to feel safe. The patient who can only relate through a glittering merger in which we are uniquely alike, uniquely misunderstood, uniquely right. From a relational perspective these are not only defences or unmet developmental needs. They are also ways of staying in contact with loved objects. To drop the illusion can feel like losing a parent, a partner, a group, or like plunging straight into the sea.

From a group-analytic point of view, Icarus is never just an individual tragedy. He is a group phenomenon. No one flies alone. Wings are built inside families, teams, professions, and institutions. Someone is lifted, someone steadies the flight, someone else stays on the ground. Groups unconsciously decide who will carry hope, brilliance, and risk. They share the fantasy of flight and later disown the fall. When the wax melts, it is rarely only one person who drops. Something collapses in the emotional weather everyone has been breathing.

I am also drawn to Icarus’s sister, Phaedra, who reminds us of another dimension of this collective drama. Where Icarus embodies the danger of soaring too high, Phaedra shows the cost of desire that is too close to home. She is dreamt by her husband into the role of mother to his son, while her own longing is to be the son’s lover. Her story is not only about forbidden love, but about how groups organise silence, projection, and blame. In families and institutions alike, someone is often dreamt into a stabilising role while simultaneously becoming the carrier of unacknowledged longing or shame. Phaedra holds what cannot be spoken for the group, and her collapse reverberates through the collective just as surely as Icarus’s fall.

Together, Icarus and Phaedra show how groups distribute risk and desire. One is chosen to fly, another to burn with longing, each carrying a piece of the group’s fantasy. When either collapses, the tremor is felt far beyond the individual.

Psychoanalysis has traditionally split over how to respond to these wings. One strand, tracing back to Freud and developed by thinkers such as Kernberg, treats narcissistic illusion as fundamentally defensive. Illusions cover shame, envy, aggression, and dependency, and the analytic task is to expose their brittleness and cost. In that spirit we might say to Icarus: these wings are wax, they will not hold, you are not a god and neither am I. The risk is that this can feel like ripping the wings off in mid-air.

Another strand, often associated with Donald Winnicott and Kohut, sees narcissistic illusion as part of healthy growth. Grandiosity and idealisation are treated as the soil of creativity and self-cohesion. The analyst offers a steady, receptive atmosphere in which these illusions can unfold and gradually soften. Here we might say to Icarus: feel the thrill of flying; after years of hiding your wings, let’s see what it is like to feel magnificent together. The risk in this position is collusion. We may enjoy the adoration more than we realise. We may like being the genius father, the indispensable supervisor, the idealised analyst, and find ourselves stabilising the very wings that keep old patterns in place.

A relational and group-analytic perspective asks a slightly different question. Not whether the illusion is good or bad, but what kind of relationship we are being invited into. Grandiosity and idealisation are communications. They ask us to admire in a particular way so that someone can feel real, or to be admired so that agency, conflict, and envy can be avoided, or to join a special “we” that protects against separateness. Illusion is not just in the mind. It lives between people. It organises who can question, who must know, who is allowed to be ordinary.

In groups this often shows up when someone arrives radiating competence. The group quietly allocates them the role of the golden one: the promising trainee, the reflective clinician, the one who really gets it. The pull is palpable. If we keep them aloft, perhaps they will save us, represent us, justify us. It looks flattering. It is also deeply imprisoning. Once in that position, there is no room to be lost or unsure. Uncertainty threatens the group’s shared fantasy that someone knows how to fly this thing.

In practice the work is rarely as simple as either applauding Icarus or shouting at him to come down. If illusions function as invitations, the analytic task is to respond in a way that honours the invitation while leaving room to move. That often means allowing a little idealisation, even enjoying the patient’s excitement about their own capacities, so the pattern can become visible between us. At the same time it means holding a quiet curiosity about what happens when we do not quite meet the script. When we forget, disappoint, or fail to admire in exactly the right register. What terror rushes in then, and whose face appears behind it?

It can feel like learning a dance the patient has been dancing all their life. To refuse to dance at all is usually experienced as rejection or contempt. To dance without ever wondering about the choreography is to confirm that this is the only way they can move with another person. Over time, both patient and therapist begin to learn about cost. The cost of always having to be dazzling. The cost of loving only those who will never see you as ordinary. The loneliness of a life organised around applause. The cost, on the other side, of staying forever in someone else’s shadow, of surrendering imagination and authority, of carrying a quiet fury turned against the self. And there is our own cost as therapists, in clinging too tightly to either position: the comfort of being admired, or the relief of being the one who punctures illusion.

Most of us inherit wings not only from parents but from institutions. Clinical psychology training, the NHS, professional bodies all carry their own narcissistic illusions. We are the compassionate ones in a cruel system. We are evidence-based and therefore beyond reproach. We are the brave critics of power. We are the inclusive future. These are not simply lies. They are organising fantasies that allow people to keep turning up under impossible conditions. Like Daedalus’s wings, they hold real skill and hope, and they also carry disavowed aggression, envy, shame, and grief.

I hear Icarus in newly qualified colleagues who carry the pressure to be the perfect NHS psychologist, the ideal antiracist practitioner, the endlessly reflective clinician who never harms. Flying on those wings is exhilarating for a while. Then something cracks: a complaint, a clinical error, a piece of blunt feedback, or the body finally saying no through burnout. Without spaces that can recognise both the function and the cost of these illusions, the fall is brutal. People blame themselves for not flying correctly rather than questioning the wings they were given or the height they were asked to maintain.

What feels increasingly difficult in contemporary therapeutic cultures is not the presence of wings, but the growing insistence that we treat them as if they are no longer provisional. When flight is taken as proof of truth rather than as an experience to be explored, curiosity can give way to affirmation, and affirmation can harden into doctrine. The invitation shifts subtly from “can you fly with me for a while?” to “you must agree that this is how flying really is.” In those moments, illusion stops being something we can play with and begins to function more rigidly. The danger is not that people want to fly, but that neither therapist nor group feels able to wonder aloud, gently, safely, about the wings themselves: how they were made, what they cost, and whether they truly fit everyone in the room. When that wondering becomes difficult to voice, symbolic space can thin, and the only choices left feel like collusion or rupture.

This is why reflective practice, supervision, and groups feel politically important to me. They can become places where we gently ask what fantasies we are keeping alive for our services and professions, what might happen if we flew a little lower, who we might lose, and who we might finally find.

I do not think the work is about living without illusion. That feels both impossible and undesirable. As Winnicott reminds us, the capacity to imagine, exaggerate, and play is part of feeling alive. The task is not to ground Icarus forever, but to help him develop a feel for the air. In the room that can mean allowing moments of shared wonder at a patient’s creativity or courage, and later wondering together what it costs to feel loved only in that register. It can mean accepting the pull to be wise and good for a while, and then letting some ordinariness show when there is enough trust, and seeing what longings or fears that stirs. It means not rushing to dismantle illusions that are only just becoming safe enough to appear, but also not treating them as sacred objects that must never be touched.

In groups it may mean naming, without humiliation, when we are flying on a shared illusion: that we are the only ones who care, the brave truth-tellers, the broken ones who can never leave. Naming not to strip meaning away, but to allow other stories to exist alongside.

When I sit with the Icarus myth now, I am less interested in the moral about flying too high and more drawn to quieter questions. Who made these wings for you? What did you gain by putting them on? What have they stopped you from feeling, knowing, or choosing? I am curious too about Daedalus and about the parts of us that build wings for others out of our own longings and fears, and that panic when they begin to fly differently.

Perhaps the work, for many of us, is not to abandon flight but to become more honest about the illusions that keep us aloft, and more playful about adjusting height and direction. We will all fall into the sea sooner or later. In the meantime, I wonder what it might be like to fly on wings that feel a little more our own: light enough to change, strong enough to carry some truth, and flexible enough to let others move beside us without burning up.

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 resolutions and ideal selves, I have found myself returning to an old nonsense favourite: Edward Lear’s “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat.” Only this time, I have been reading it alongside something far less whimsical: Lawrence Epstein’s paper on The Therapeutic Function of Hate in the Countertransference, together with Winnicott’s “Hate in the Countertransference.” Suddenly the Quangle Wangle’s hat has begun to look less like a charming curiosity, and more like a clinical fantasy.

A fantasy about goodness, containment, and the enormous hat under which we try to hide our hate.

Lear, an odd hat, and a crowded tree

Lear himself knew something about living at the margins of things. Born in 1812 into a large, financially unstable family, raised by older sisters, managing epilepsy and periods of retreat, he earned his living first as a draughtsman before becoming known for his absurd verses and drawings. Together with Lewis Carroll, he helped to shape a new literary space in Victorian culture, where nonsense could be playful and serious at the same time.

In “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,” we meet a solitary figure sitting high in a Crumpetty Tree, wearing a hat so vast that it becomes prime real estate. One by one, fantastical creatures arrive and ask to live on the brim. The hat becomes a sort of eccentric apartment block in the sky, a place where strangeness gathers and finds company.

Readers often enjoy the poem as an invitation to embrace their eccentricity, to imagine that somewhere in the world there is a hat big enough for their oddness. In a group analytic mood, the hat can be read as a kind of container. A self that is capacious enough to hold many internal figures. Or a group space wide enough for a flock of incompatible people to roost together without falling off.

So far, so cosy.

What the poem does not tell us is what happens when a creature turns up who cannot stand the others. Or when one of the residents loathes the hat itself. Or when the Quangle Wangle, politely inscrutable on his branch, realises that there is someone he would quite cheerfully push off the brim.

This is where I start to think about hate.

The hat as our clinical self-ideal

In group analytic language, Foulkes invites us to think of the group matrix as the invisible web of relationships, communication, and unconscious life that exists between people. The conductor, like the Quangle Wangle, sits within that web, both part of it and responsible for its boundaries. We are taught that our task is to offer safety and containment, to be a thoughtful host for whatever arrives.

There is an unspoken ideal that our “hat” should be vast and welcoming. We are encouraged to be understanding, empathic, curious, tolerant, reflective. Anger may be acknowledged, but hate is often quietly evacuated. It is what the patient brings, not what we feel. If we do feel it, we reassure ourselves that it is “really” something else. Anxiety. Helplessness. Concern.

Epstein, drawing on Winnicott, Searles, Racker, and others, describes how deep this ideal runs. Analysts, he suggests, have historically carried a self-image of rationality, objectivity, emotional control and moral decency. We are meant to be the good parent to the immature, damaged patient. From that stance, our hatred becomes almost unthinkable. When it surfaces, our first move is to deny or transform it, in order to preserve our image of ourselves as caring and benign.

In other words, we polish the hat. We add more sequins. We tell ourselves that if we can only enlarge it further and be a little kinder, a little more patient, the difficult creature will eventually settle down and feel loved.

The problem, as Epstein carefully shows, is that for some patients this is not only unhelpful, it is actively damaging.

When hate is already the atmosphere

Epstein is writing about those patients we might now call “borderline” or otherwise structurally fragile. People whose internal world is organised around badness, persecution, and the need to secure a boundary between self and other by any means necessary. The hateful interpersonal matrix is already their habitat. It is how they know who they are.

In this kind of psychic climate, “kindness in the face of hate” can feel less like love and more like hypocrisy. If I experience myself as disgusting, enraging, unlovable, and every time I attack you, you respond with gentle understanding and unruffled concern, one of two things must be true. Either you are an idiot, or you are lying. In both cases, you become more contemptible.

Epstein points out a further cruelty hidden inside this benevolence. If the therapist genuinely is good, decent, and unshakably kind, then the contrast between their goodness and the patient’s felt badness becomes almost unbearable. To believe in your love is to face my own hatred, guilt, and envy with no internal resources to manage them. The more kindly you respond, the worse I must feel.

Hatred, in this configuration, is not simply aggression. It is a way of holding oneself together. By provoking others into attacking, criticising, or rejecting, the person restores a sense of identity. “I am the one you hate. I knew it. Now I exist again.”

When we meet this with endless softness, we participate in a vicious circle. The patient escalates their attacks in a desperate attempt to make contact with something real. The therapist clings more tightly to their ideals, offers more understanding, more patience, more forbearance, and both end up exhausted and secretly despising each other.

The hat, in other words, becomes intolerable. It shines with goodness, but it leaks reality.

Objective hate and a credible emotional world

Winnicott made the unfashionable suggestion that an analyst working with psychotic or antisocial patients must be able to hate them, and to know it. He distinguished between subjective countertransference, steeped in our own history, and what he called “objective hate”: the therapist’s emotional reaction to what the patient is actually doing in the room. For some patients, he argued, there is a genuine need to reach that hate, in order eventually to believe in our love.

Epstein takes this further and asks what happens when we allow some of that hate, once thought about and “neutralised”, to show. Not in acting out, retaliation, or cruelty, but in emotionally congruent responses: irritation, firmness, a clear “no”.

He suggests that “neutralised objective hate” can serve several vital functions. It makes the emotional situation credible. If you treat me contemptuously and I feel frustrated and say so, the world suddenly makes sense. Cause and effect line up. The patient discovers that they can make an impact on us, which may reduce their desperate attempts to test our reality. It also redistributes the “badness”; we are no longer spotless saints enduring a monster, but two flawed humans in a charged relationship.

Crucially, when we show that we can be furious and still stay in the room, we offer an antidote to the fantasy that their hatred has annihilated us. The patient does not have to leave the consulting room imagining that they have murdered the analyst in phantasy and are now alone with unbearable guilt and fear of retaliation. We are still sitting there. Annoyed, perhaps, but breathing.

In Lear’s terms, the Quangle Wangle does not pretend to enjoy every creature on his brim. He notices when someone is pecking holes in the fabric and is able to say: “Stop that. If you keep doing it, you will have to move.” The hat becomes less magical and more trustworthy.

Hate under the group hat

Group life complicates this further. In Nitsun’s language, anti-group processes are never far away. Envy, rivalry, sabotage and despair swirl around the edges of any group. Dalal invites us to pay attention to how power and authority are held, resisted and attacked, especially in those who occupy the “leader” position.

The conductor, like the Quangle Wangle, is often unconsciously nominated to carry the group’s ideal goodness. We are meant to be fair, endlessly inclusive, above petty politics. At the same time, we are the obvious target for hatred of authority, parental disappointment, institutional betrayal.

If we cannot make room under our own hat for hate, we will disavow it. We tell ourselves that we “understand” why this subgroup is attacking us, that their hostility is “really” fear or trauma. That may be partly true. Yet if we never allow ourselves to feel, think about, and sometimes name our anger or dislike, the hate does not disappear. It simply leaks sideways.

We may collude with attacks on a scapegoated member because it is a relief to have the hate somewhere else. We may become emotionally absent while maintaining a polite presence. We may tighten the frame in rigid ways, or loosen it impulsively, as a form of unconscious acting out. The group senses all of this, even if nobody speaks it.

Holding hate in a group context is not about giving ourselves permission to be rude or punitive. It is about allowing our own aggressive responses into the matrix, so that they can be thought about rather than denied. Sometimes that means saying, in ordinary language, “Something in me really does not want to see you this week,” and then wondering together what that might be about. Sometimes it means setting a limit with more affect in our voice than feels “proper,” and noticing the ripple.

In those moments, the hat becomes more solid. It is no longer a fantasy of perfect safety, but a space where destructive currents can be acknowledged, met, and survived.

New year, old hate

At this time of year, psychologists and therapists are bombarded with invitations to set intentions. To be more trauma-informed, more compassionate, more boundaried, more available, more self-care savvy. There is often very little space for the simple and unsettling fact that there are people we hate.

We hate the patient who always arrives late and then demands extra time. We hate the supervisee who treats our concern as persecution. We hate the manager who uses our care as a resource to be exploited. We hate the system that places us in impossible ethical positions, and the part of ourselves that keeps complying.

Our professional culture often encourages us to translate this hate immediately into something more palatable. Burnout. Moral injury. Compassion fatigue. Those are real, and important, but they can also function as sophisticated ways of not saying, “I hate this,” or “I hate you,” or “I hate what I have to become here.”

What would it be like, as clinicians, to make a different kind of resolution. Not to act out our hatred, not to idealise it as “authenticity,” but to stop pretending it is not there. To recognise hate as one of the colours in the emotional palette of care, particularly in work with severely disturbed patients and deeply damaged systems.

This might mean letting ourselves notice the spike of contempt or disgust rather than smothering it with understanding. It might mean taking our hate seriously enough to take it to supervision, personal therapy, or a reflective group, not as a shameful failure but as live clinical material. It might mean asking whether, in a specific piece of work, some carefully thought through expression of irritation or anger is not only honest, but necessary for the other person to feel that we are real.

It certainly means revisiting our internal hat. Is it huge but brittle, glittering with goodness and secretly full of holes where disowned aggression gnaws away. Or is it becoming a bit more weathered, less impressive, more able to bear teeth marks and still stay on our head.

A small invitation

If you feel like it, you might pause with this question as the year turns.

Who, in your clinical or organisational life, do you most struggle not to hate.

Not in theory, but in the small, bodily signs. The session you dread. The email that makes your stomach flip. The name on the waiting list that brings up an old familiar sigh.

If you could admit that hate to yourself without judgement, and treat it as information rather than a failing, what would it tell you about the work, about the setting, about your own history. What might it make possible in terms of honesty, boundary, and perhaps, one day, love that is not counterfeit.

Maybe the Quangle Wangle knew something about this. Sitting in his tree, wearing his enormous hat, watching creatures arrive with all their inconvenient habits and sharp little beaks. The poem never tells us what he feels. But if we listen with analytic ears, we can imagine a version in which he is not just the benign host of nonsense land, but a figure who is learning, painfully and usefully, how to live with his own Quangle Wangle hate.

AA 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 given barely enough food to survive. There she meets a red calf who quietly nourishes her, leading her each day to a hidden house where she is fed and cared for. When the family discovers this, they decide the calf must be killed and force Rashin-Coatie to raise the axe herself. Instead, following the calf’s guidance, she escapes with him, flees across the land, and fashions a coat from rushes to cover herself. Disguised and working as a kitchen maid in the king’s house, she is later given fine clothes by the calf to attend church, where the prince falls in love with her. She leaves before being recognised, losing a shoe in her flight. Though another woman mutilates her feet to make the shoe fit, the truth is revealed by a bird’s song, and Rashin-Coatie is finally recognised and chosen, while the red calf, who sustained her all along, is honoured and kept safe.

On the surface, Rashin-Coatie looks familiar. The ill-used younger sister. The favoured sibling who carries the family’s projection. The hidden beauty that emerges despite deprivation. It sits alongside Cinderella, Goose Girl, and other tales of domestic injustice. But when read through a group-analytic and Jungian lens, it speaks powerfully to institutional life, and to the quiet ways people survive within systems that cannot or will not nourish them.

In the story, the family system has already organised itself. One child carries goodness, usefulness, compliance, and deprivation. Another carries entitlement, aggression, and favour. From a group-analytic perspective, this is a classic scapegoating structure. The family’s anxiety is stabilised by sending the youngest out into the woods, away from care, away from the centre, with just enough to keep her functioning. Many clinicians will recognise this position instantly.

In NHS and institutional contexts, the Rashin-Coatie figure is often the conscientious practitioner, the trainee, the newly qualified psychologist, the one who absorbs excess demand while being told this is simply “how it is”. Nourishment is rationed. Support is thin. Reflection is a luxury. And yet the expectation remains that the person sent out to herd the cattle will continue to offer warmth, care, and ethical presence to others.

What changes the story is not managerial reform or moral appeal, but the emergence of the red calf.

From a Jungian perspective, the calf is instinctual life, bodily wisdom, and the part of the psyche that still knows how to feed what is being starved. From a group-analytic perspective, the calf represents a counter-matrix. A parallel relational space where something humane can survive. This might be a trusted colleague, a reflective practice group, a supervisor who thinks rather than audits, or a professional friendship that quietly offers nourishment without fanfare.

Each day, away from the persecuting structure, Rashin-Coatie eats properly. She rests. She grows bonnier. This detail matters. Growth does not come from resilience training or endurance alone. It comes from being met in a different relational field. And when institutions notice this growth without recognising its source, they often respond not with curiosity, but with threat.

The most psychologically accurate moment in the story is when the family decides not only to kill the calf, but to force Rashin-Coatie to do it herself. This is the institutional double bind many professionals know well. You are required to participate in the destruction of what keeps you alive, reflective spaces, ethical hesitation, relational thinking, in the name of efficiency, compliance, or survival. The violence is externalised, but the act must be internalised.

What saves Rashin-Coatie is that she does not face this moment alone. The calf thinks with her. Together they find a way out that does not require self-betrayal. This is not rebellion for its own sake. It is relational intelligence under pressure. She strikes sideways. She escapes the bind. She runs.

The rushes that become her coat are telling. They are makeshift. Temporary. Improvised. This is not a story of immediate rescue into comfort or status. Rashin-Coatie enters the king’s house as a kitchen lassie, still close to the ground, still working, still carrying her animal companion. Importantly, she insists the calf stays. She does not split off what sustained her in order to belong.

In institutional terms, this is the clinician who refuses to disavow their values, body, or relational ethics in order to be acceptable. They may move roles, teams, or organisations, but they do not abandon the inner and relational resources that made survival possible.

Even the church scene speaks to professional life. Rashin-Coatie’s transformation does not erase her responsibilities. She asks the kitchen itself to keep going while she is gone. There is an implicit trust that things will not collapse if she steps away. Many NHS systems are still organised around the fantasy that if one person stops, everything will fall apart. This story quietly disputes that.

The shoe fits not because her foot is small, but because it is whole. The violence done to the henwife’s daughter, cutting and paring herself to fit it, is a sharp image of what happens when people mutilate themselves to occupy roles that were never shaped for them. Burnout, moral injury, and bodily collapse often follow.

The bird’s song restores truth to the group. It names what everyone has colluded in not seeing.

What stays with me most, though, is how deeply this story speaks to professional friendships. The ones that notice what is being starved. That offer nourishment quietly. That think with you when the axe is raised. That help imagine escape routes without demanding heroics. That make survival a collective, not solitary, achievement.

Rashin-Coatie does not survive because she is exceptional. She survives because she is met. Because something in the system, and someone alongside her, refuses to collude with her erasure.

So this is my thank you. For a story that names what survives when institutions ill-use their most conscientious members. And for the kind of professional friendship that knows when to feed, when to think, and when to run together towards something that can still grow.

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 death comes only when one leaves.

It is not a triumphant story. There is no battle, no victory, no moral lesson. Luz endures by staying partially hidden.

I have been thinking about this story recently, as many Jewish colleagues and friends carry fear, grief, and vigilance in the body. There is pressure, in moments like this, for suffering to be made legible, spoken clearly, or translated into meaning. There is also pressure to reassure, to explain, or to take a position that makes the pain easier to locate.

Luz does none of this.

It does not ask to be understood. It does not promise safety. It does not offer redemption. It simply holds the idea that life sometimes survives by not being fully exposed, by keeping something back from a world that has shown it cannot be trusted with everything.

For those who live under recurring threat, concealment is not a failure of courage. It is a form of care. Silence is not absence. It is a way of keeping something alive.

The story of Luz does not tell us what to do. It does not tell us how to feel. It does not instruct us to be resilient, visible, brave, or forgiving. It makes space for the knowledge that endurance can be quiet, partial, and costly.

For non-Jewish readers, this is not a metaphor to apply or a lesson to take. It is a story about how a people has learned, again and again, to protect continuity when the world turns hostile. The details are not universal, and they do not need to be.

For Jewish readers, I hope it offers something simpler. Not reassurance. Not explanation. Just recognition.

That sometimes survival does not look like strength. That sometimes the most faithful thing is to withhold. That sometimes the work is not to be seen, but to remain. Luz is still there, in the story. Not lost. Not conquered. Not fully revealed.

And that may be enough, for now.

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 it go.

When he tells his wife what has happened, she does not linger with wonder. She sees possibility. She sends him back to the sea with a wish. And with that, something from the very bottom of the water begins to organise the entire surface world.

At first, the wish is small. A better hut. The sea darkens slightly but grants it. Then the hut becomes a house. The house becomes a palace. Each time the fisherman hesitates longer at the shoreline, sensing the water turning heavier beneath his feet, yet he goes anyway. He does not seem to want what is being asked for, but he is already carrying another’s hunger across the shore. With every return, the sea roughens. Kingdom. Empire. Godhood. And finally, the wave breaks. Everything is swept away. They are returned to where they started, with only the knowledge of what the sea revealed.

It is often read as a story about greed. Lately, I have been reading it as a story about boundaries, and about how uncontained wanting quietly migrates into someone else’s hands. It is also a story about how generosity slides into obligation without anyone quite noticing the moment it changes.

In contemporary clinical work, I think the fisherman is often the practitioner.

In theory, our work is held by frames that protect thinking and regulate emotional flow. Time, task, role, limit. They are meant to be the shoreline that lets us approach intense human suffering without being swallowed by it. Yet in stretched systems those edges fray. Gaps widen. Containment thins. And when the system falters, clinicians step forward. Availability expands. Risk is absorbed. Emotional labour thickens. What should have been held collectively becomes privately carried.

At first, this still feels like choice. “Just this once” is a very tempting phrase. One late email. One missed lunch. One extra session squeezed into the day. The sea still feels shallow enough to stand in. But over time, the water changes. Overfunctioning creeps in quietly and rarely announces itself as trouble. It arrives dressed as competence. It looks like reliability, initiative, emotional capacity, maturity. It sounds like “I’ve got this”. It feels like being useful.

Overfunctioning is disturbance hidden in competence. It is what happens when pressure on the boundary is converted into personal effort rather than collective concern. Instead of asking what has failed upstream, we compensate downstream. Instead of naming a breach in containment, we stretch ourselves to fill it. The system, like the wife at the hearth, learns very quickly what the sea will tolerate.

“You always cope so well.”“How did you manage that?”“Could you just hold one more?”“I know it’s a lot, but there isn’t anyone else who knows how.”

Each question sounds like praise. Each one carries another wish to the water.

In the fairy tale, the fisherman never quite rebels. He does not rage or refuse outright. He walks back and forth between the hut and the sea, carrying desire that is not wholly his. What gathers in him is not only fatigue but dread. Dread of refusal. Dread of what might happen if he stops. Care that has slipped into compliance so slowly it is almost invisible.

When I listen to clinicians who are overfunctioning, I hear echoes of that same quiet ledger. The hours that drift far beyond what was agreed. Ethical edges softened by constant pressure. Reflection replaced by triage. “No” becoming harder to locate in the body. Empathy once offered to others now turned back on the self as proof of worth. The sea in the story does not punish the fisherman. It simply reveals what one pair of hands cannot contain.

When supervision becomes procedural, when thinking is compressed into output, when dynamic administration falters, the fisherman is sent back to the tide with nowhere on the shore to stand and breathe. I think of a newly qualified therapist who once described working from her car as evidence that she was coping. I think of assistant psychologists holding after-hours crises alone and wearing independence like armour. I think of senior clinicians quietly funding the team away day from their own salary. Their competence was real. So was their depletion. What looked like compassion and hard work was often the system’s anxiety migrating into someone’s nervous system.

This is how devotion gets mistaken for containment.

In the original tale, the collapse feels inevitable. But I find myself imagining a different moment. The fisherman standing at the water’s edge while the tide surges, feeling the familiar pull of responsibility, the old script that ties value to capacity. And instead of stepping in automatically, he pauses. Not in rebellion, but in recognition. The sea, and the wife beside it, do not need another messenger. They need boundaries.

It matters to say that the wife is no villain. She is a carrier of unheld hunger. When the fisherman does not immediately comply, something else becomes possible. The hunger has to be named. The relation has to shift. The wish has to return to its proper owner. Even the flounder changes function. Instead of granting endless expansion, it becomes a mirror. What you are asking for cannot be built on one person’s back.

And then the question becomes harder. What do we do when the sea still rages.

Because sometimes the boundary is not only symbolic. Sometimes it has to become physical. The fisherman does not just think differently. He stays on the shore. He lets the tide rise without entering it. He allows the storm to exist without proving his devotion by being soaked in it. There are moments in clinical work when the only ethical move is to stop stepping into the water, even when the water is loud, even when the hunger is desperate, even when the guilt is sharp.

The pause at the shoreline is where reality, limits, and risk are allowed back in.

Containment, here, is not heroic solitude. It is shared fire. It is what emerges when systems begin to hold themselves again, when supervision digests pressure rather than redistributes it, when teams notice strain instead of admiring endurance, when emotional labour is recognised as labour rather than temperament. Overfunctioning loosens its grip when the system learns to feel its own hunger instead of exporting it into individual bodies.

At the end of the fairy tale, the return to the hut is usually told as punishment. I have started to hear it as truth. It is the scale at which life can actually be lived. Life on life’s terms. So often, we imagine the answer to our distress is to become bigger and better. We start to believe we are here to heal the sick, to turn back time, to undo the injuries of the past. To become, in some quiet way, godlike. But boundaries do not shrink the work. They right-size us. They make us real. They keep us human. Perhaps it is in understanding how it is in our small, practical acts of care that the work becomes inhabitable again.

And so the real question is rarely how much more you can carry. It is whether the sea you keep returning to is being allowed to be the sea, rather than a place of mastery.

If the fisherman’s path feels uncomfortably close to your own, it might be worth pausing at the shoreline before the next wish is spoken. Not to harden, but to reclaim. The boundary is not the barrier. It is the condition for shared life. The shore is still there. The fire can still be built. The work need not be drowned to prove that it matters.

Friday Fairytale Group

If you’re interested in exploring group psychology through the symbolic richness of traditional tales, you’re very welcome to join my Friday Fairytale Group. This is a monthly online space where we think together about the psychological depth of classic stories and what they illuminate about contemporary clinical life.

Upcoming sessions:

• The Fisherman and His Wife Friday, 23 January 2026 — 2:00pm to 3:30pm (UK)

• Bearskin Friday, 27 February 2026 — 2:00pm to 3:30pm (UK)

• The Girl with No Hands Friday, 20 March 2026 — 2:00pm to 3:30pm (UK)

You can find more details or book on any of them here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/828562130637?aff=oddtdtcreator

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 the same time. Perhaps that is simply the fate of anyone who works with groups. Or perhaps it is just people.

This piece is my attempt to stay with what these nights reveal about the workplace psyche, the gifts they offer and the trouble they invite, using an unlikely but oddly perfect companion: Sondheim’s Into the Woods.

Office parties, especially the unruly cheer of the Christmas do, are often treated as a sanctioned break from ordinary life. Colleagues loosen ties and roles, raise their glasses, and step into unfamiliar ground. Beneath the tinsel there is a richer psychological field. With a little Jung and Foulkes in mind, these gatherings begin to look like what they are: liminal spaces, thresholds where group boundaries soften and the hidden currents of workplace life surface.

The meeting room becomes a dance floor. Managers become karaoke enthusiasts. The unspoken rules thin out. The work container, usually held by task, role and norm, stretches to its edges. Alcohol dissolves inhibition. Old tensions, attractions and rivalries seep through. The foundation matrix, the cultural surround, meets the dynamic matrix, the live patterning between us. It can be startling to notice how leaky our identities really are.

In group analytic terms, the party behaves like a conductorless group. Hierarchy loosens, roles redistribute, and unspoken themes rise from the analytic matrix. Someone becomes the joker, another the caretaker, someone else the scapegoat. These positions are not consciously chosen; they are delegated functions born from shared anxiety. No one nominates the person who will cry in the smoking area. The group does.

That leakiness has a mythic texture. Thresholds wake archetypes. The Shadow stirs. The restrained thinker becomes the exuberant dancer. The office miser discovers an inner Trickster. Christmas amplifies it with its mix of midwinter excess and fragile hope. For a few hours we are licensed to cross a line, and with that licence comes both play and risk.

Most people arrive ambivalent. Parties promise connection, laughter and a chance to meet beyond the task. Yet when structure thins, people feel exposed. The danger is real. Words and gestures land, sometimes harder than intended. That sense of “this could go either way” is the signature of a threshold. These moments often reveal the group-in-the-head, the internalised sense of how one belongs, or does not, to the team. The party brings it to life in a single evening; loyalties, grievances, identifications and old wounds re-enacted in glittering clothes and dim lighting.

Sondheim knew this: Act One is fun; Act Two is consequences. In Into the Woods he takes familiar fairy-tale characters and sends them wandering into a forest where their wishes collide. Act One is wishful, comic, charming. Act Two is something else entirely, consequences and repair, grief and revelation. The forest becomes a psychic device, a place where desire, error and outcome are staged.

Office parties are temporary forests. They relax ordinary restraint, invite enactments of longed-for wishes, and create a clearing where small slights can grow large. Colleagues enter with conscious aims, to network, to relax, to flirt, or simply to get through it, but other stories are travelling with them. Archetypes show themselves. The driven trainee climbs a beanstalk of ambition. The overlooked colleague glows for a night, Cinderella at the ball. The shy one gathers unexpected resources. The senior manager may or may not be the Wolf.

From a group analytic view, what emerges is the group’s shared fantasy life. Unconscious roles surface. Longings become enactments. The group’s basic assumptions, to borrow Bion, leak through: dependency, the sense of “who will look after me tonight”; pairing, the fantasy that “maybe these two can save the team”; or fight-flight, the impulse to drink more or to leave early. There can be real goodness here. Shared foibles become humanising. The group breathes a little. New links form. The narrative of the team is refreshed.

Yet there can also be harm. A tipsy confession becomes a giant’s footfall. Power hides in warmth. Bullying arrives in a velvet glove. Parties often stretch symbolic elasticity to its limits. A joke that would be harmless at eleven in the morning becomes loaded at eleven at night. Containment thins, meaning distorts. A tiny rupture can feel like a breakage.

This is the forest’s double edge. Into the Woods offers something psychologically accurate here. The forest is not evil in itself. It is the place where things come into view. What we bring with us, and how we stumble through together, matters more than the trees.

The benefits are easy to see. Shadowed parts are revealed. Teams remember their humanity. Horizontal links form across rank. Creativity sparks from new pairings and unlikely conversations. The risks are equally present. Personas crack. Projections harden. Factions gel. Outsiders feel more outside. Humiliation and harassment can take root precisely in these blurry spaces. Unprocessed feelings reappear on Monday morning as subtle shifts in alliances and trust.

I notice how much depends on the way these evenings are held in mind, before and after as much as during. Whether attendance is quietly compulsory, who feels they can safely opt out, how alcohol is used or refused, how leaders position themselves, what is spoken about the night afterwards and what is left to circulate as rumour. Each of these small details bends the path through the wood.

I also notice what these parties can stir in us as individuals. Which masks we reach for. Which parts of the Shadow are itching to come out to play. The familiar pull to repeat an old role and the faint wish to step sideways out of it. Often there is no neat answer, only an awareness that something in the workplace story has just been re-written a little, for better or worse.

Perhaps that is the most honest place to end. Not with instructions about how to fix the forest, but with a small acknowledgement that these gatherings are part of our institutional dreaming. They tell us something about who we think we are, and who we are afraid of becoming. We walk into them as colleagues and come back with slightly altered maps of each other.

As Sondheim warns, careful the things you say. People will listen. And they will remember, even if they cannot quite say what, or why.

If you are reading this with your own office party still in your body somewhere, I am curious what kind of forest it was for you this year, and which path you found yourself on.

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 cumulative, often hidden beneath competence, kindness, and the desire to be useful.

When I think about the symbolism of this loneliness, I am reminded of The Little Matchstick Girl. A child stands barefoot in the snow, striking match after match. Each flame offers brief warmth, a tiny moment of connection, a vision of safety. Yet every light is fleeting. The cold remains, and she is left once again exposed.

The story is brutal, but it is also metaphorically honest. Many practitioners live in systems where genuine warmth, relational holding, and robust containment come not as a steady fire but as intermittent flickers.

The match has momentary containment

In my training on boundaries and containment, we spend time thinking about dynamic administration. Foulkes describes it as the invisible scaffolding that holds the group and allows thinking to occur. When this scaffolding is strong, we can lean into our roles without fearing collapse. When it is inconsistent or porous, the emotional climate becomes unstable, and individuals begin striking their own matches: a hurried supervision session that gives just enough; a kind colleague who checks in; a rare team meeting that feels reflective rather than procedural.

These are moments of warmth, but they do not build a fire.

Professional loneliness grows in the gap between these flickers, in the long, cold stretches where the system does not hold, the team is overstretched, and the clinician must generate their own heat.

Loneliness as a failure of containment

Loneliness is not the absence of other people. It is the absence of a containing other who can think with us. Ido Peleg writes of boundaries as permeable membranes, neither rigid nor collapsed. When institutions become too permeable, clinicians absorb systemic anxiety and attempt to metabolise it alone. When they become too rigid, connection becomes formal and functional, leaving no space for vulnerability or uncertainty.

Professional loneliness arises when the membrane thins to the point that one is exposed or thickens to the point that one cannot reach anyone. The matchstick girl is alone, not because there is no one around her, but because there is no relational membrane to buffer the cold.

Why clinicians feel the frost first

In group analytic terms, individuals become spokespeople for the matrix. They feel the system in their own bodies. When the organisation is fraying, clinicians experience the tear as personal insufficiency. They ask themselves why they cannot cope, why they feel so thin-skinned, why they dread the inbox or the meeting request. Yet much of what they carry belongs to the system.

Many clinicians describe offering steady warmth to clients while privately feeling close to depletion. They hold risk, distress, and complexity with courage, but often without being held themselves. The warmth they provide is not shared heat, but the inner flame of personal effort. Each match they strike burns their own resources.

Containment is the fire we build together

The antidote to professional loneliness is not individual resilience. It is the restoration of relational, systemic, and ethical containment. Containment is never a solo act. It is created through rhythm, steady boundaries, and reliable structures. It is sustained by supervision that is consistent and unhurried, by teams that name strain rather than bypass it, and by institutions that understand the emotional labour of care.

Schlapobersky describes containment as a relational process in which experience is held, digested, and transformed. It is a shared fire, not a solitary spark. Fire is steady warmth, built slowly, tended collectively, protected by structure, and fed by shared understanding.

When containment is present, clinicians do not need to strike matches. They are already warm.

Naming the cold without shame

One of the most powerful steps in addressing professional loneliness is naming it. Yet clinicians often hesitate, fearing it will sound like weakness or self-pity. In reality, loneliness is a diagnostic clue. It tells us that something in the broader system has failed. When clinicians feel alone in the face of complexity, it is rarely because they are not competent. It is because the matrix around them has become uncontained.

Naming this truth is not self-indulgent. It is an act of integrity. It restores perspective. It widens the frame. It returns responsibility to where it belongs.

Rewriting the ending

Andersen’s tale ends in tragedy, but our professional stories do not need to. The Little Matchstick Girl dies because her visions are private, because her efforts are solitary, and because no system around her can recognise or meet her needs.

Professional loneliness softens when containment is shared rather than improvised. It softens when boundaries are steady enough to hold complexity and flexible enough to invite conversation. It softens when supervision restores thinking rather than simply managing demand. It softens when we stop mistaking overfunctioning for competence.

It softens when the fire is built between us.

A final reflection

If you find yourself striking matches at the moment, pause. Notice the cold, name it, and resist the urge to burn your last reserves to keep going. Ask instead:

Where is the frame? Who is containing me? What boundaries need strengthening? And what fire am I helping to build, rather than simply lighting alone?

The quiet epidemic of professional loneliness is not a private failing. It is a systemic wound. When we recognise it, name it, and begin tending the fire together, the frost starts to thaw.