It is the end of a busy week, and I am having difficulty getting up to my alarm on a Saturday morning. I am due to be picked up in approximately ten minutes by my mother and we plan to drive to the city’s largest market. We are meeting my mother’s best friend and her daughter who I consider family. We have a strict list and schedule for the day ahead. The number one priority, my mother tells me, is to locate The Tomato Man. Once we have achieved this, we can get coffee, pastries, and the other ingredients required to make kasundi (a dish similar to a relish). It was tradition for us to get tog ..read more

If you’ve heard of it at all, you probably have some misconceptions about EMDR (short for “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing” therapy). It has a bit of a reputation, probably due to the complex and somewhat unusual nature of the therapy itself. The most popular misconception is that it is a kind of hypnosis that erases unwanted, distressing, or traumatic emotions and memories, and it’s only used for trauma or PTSD. But this isn’t really the case (and there’s good reasons we don’t want to completely erase ‘negative’ emotions such as sadness and anger). In short, EMDR can help you ov ..read more

It was day four of my trip to Stockholm. Standing on the train studying the shine of a woman’s hair draped dramatically down the back of her floor-length mohair coat, it took me until then to pinpoint what I’d been grappling with since I stepped off the plane: Stockholm makes me feel ugly and inadequate. It was my first time in Sweden and, after spending eight months in a traditional one-thousand-person town in Italy’s deep south, it was jarring to return to the reality of our very globalised, very consumer-led, world. I’d apparently forgotten about hip wine bars, salons, spas, and designer br ..read more

If you see purple, green, and white colours around town today, this is because this day, March 8th, 2024, is the annual International Women’s Day (IWD), and there is a lot for us all to pause and think about. You may receive an email about IWD today from human resources. Maybe you hear IWD mentioned on the radio, or see it written on a chalkboard or a badge pinned to someone’s shirt. You might not think much of it, or may roll your eyes and see it as an arbitrary day. Perhaps you think the gap is closed because you know women who make more money than men, and from what you can see, we live in ..read more

When you think about it, the premise of the adult intimate relationship is ambitious: two or more individuals join forces and try to figure out how to live in a cohesive and complementary manner. A lot of my friends and family members are in relationships, and every time I inquire about these dynamics, the majority of their replies reference the positives in their relationships and omit the negatives, which are also at play. This response, coupled with the depiction of relationships in popular culture and film, often confuses me about my personal experience and expectations around my intimate ..read more

After catching up with everyone after my year abroad, I am getting constant questions. What was it like? Where were you? What did you do? I find it difficult to answer these questions. Too much occurred to summarise it in words.  Instead, I find myself reaching for my phone and showing these people photos I believe  best summarise the 2000-person beachside Italian town I spent the better part of the year. As I watch their face light up, nodding at the phone, an old idiom occurs to me: a picture tells a thousand words. But does it? I am sure the words are there inside me; I am a write ..read more

Have you ever felt guilty for not feeling like having sex when a partner does? Or, have you ever felt rejected and anxious when you’re on the receiving end of the old, not tonight, I’m too tired? Psychologists have a name for when one person’s sexual needs do not line up with their partner/s. It is a situation they call the ‘sexual independence dilemma’, and is an extremely common situation to find yourself in. It is important not to panic or interpret this out of sexual synchronicity as a sign you are out of love too. It can be easy to forget that in a relationship, you are still separat ..read more

I watch my nephew tell his little sister to go away; a woman yells at the parking inspector over a ticket; a man punches another man in the jaw on television, and my neighbour, has her finger pointed furiously at her partner. These are all examples of aggressive behaviour. While direct aggression is unbecoming, the one thing we can agree it does well is communicating that we are not happy with the situation or person we are aggressing. Aggressive behaviour understandably has a bad reputation, while its silent and deceptive cousin, passive aggression, often flies under the radar. First recognis ..read more

Welcome to Part 2 of my recommended list of summer reads. In case you missed it, you can catch Part 1 here, where I discuss books on relationships, coming of age, long and shorter reads, and more. Read on for some more suggestions relating to stories far from, or near to, home, meaningful and thought provoking stories, and others! For All The Smokers And Former Smokers Nicotine – Gregor Hens: Gregor Hens’ unconventional memoir is both a love story and a breakup letter to the cigarette. With comedy, insight and precision, the author analyses every aspect of his dependency and offers a brillian ..read more

Whether it’s the recent summer sun that flooded through my living room windows, or today’s unseasonal torrential rain, summer always makes me want to become horizontal on the couch (or at the beach, weather permitting!)  with a good book in my hands. This made me think about all the amazing books I’ve read this year and all the incredible books I have not read yet. It also occurred to me that all books engage with psychology in some way because all books have characters that we learn the inner workings of, and can hence prompt us to reflect on our own experiences. And not just an enjoyabl ..read more