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Malka Ceh, PhD, MSc, cNPA

Author: Malka Ceh

  • The Rebellion Against a Life Lived Unnoticed

    The Rebellion Against a Life Lived Unnoticed

    I have never been an Osho fan because I routinely harbored a deep distrust of popular culture, and at one point, everywhere I looked, there were Osho books. So, it made me indifferent to even checking who or what Osho stands for. (This is not what makes me a rebel.) Anyway, the mighty algorithm gave me a second chance. It recently pushed a few clips of the man onto my feed, and I have no choice but to admit I often do find myself on the same page with what he’s saying. I still haven’t bitten into any of his many books (btw, isn’t the discrepancy between the speed of his speech and the obvious speed of his writing remarkable), but my curiosity is piqued, and I am following his legacy’s channels. As such, I was offered an Osho Times piece on the difference between revolution and rebellion, and I actually clicked with the distinction.

    Osho argues that what we usually call rebellion has, throughout history, been revolution. However, revolution is a collective phenomenon. It’s people organizing against an existing order, overthrowing it, but then just replacing it with another. So, what revolution brings is a change in the people in power. The structure of the struggle, however, survives; what turns is only the wheel. Those who were outside move inside, a new opposition forms, and eventually somebody starts talking about another revolution. Rebellion, Osho says, happens elsewhere; on the individual level. It begins with awareness: with becoming more conscious of how you live, what you are being guided by, what you agree to, and what you have come to call your life simply because you have been living it for long enough. Its concern is less with defeating somebody than with ceasing to live a compliant life, blindly accepting everything that is handed to you.

    I find that distinction hard to dismiss, especially at the moment. There is plenty around us that makes revolution seem appealing. Society increasingly asks you to take a side. Political conflicts, cultural conflicts, wars, identities, technologies, diets, parenting, sex, work: almost anything can become a position from which you are expected to declare yourself. Polarization offers ready-made camps and then invites you to choose one. At the same time, another force is at work. You are expected to keep becoming more productive, more informed, more employable, more efficient, more responsive and, preferably, more interesting while doing it. Technology saves time, and the saved time is promptly filled. You learn to work faster, so more work becomes possible. You reach yesterday’s limit, and tomorrow’s limit levels up.

    During the past few decades, we have lived through the digital revolution, the internet revolution, the smartphone and social-media revolutions, and now the AI revolution. Each promised, in one form or another, to free something: information, communication, time, creativity, labor. Much has indeed changed. Yet, did life become any better? I feel that only the machinery has become faster, and we have become expected to keep pace with it. If you ask me, Osho has a point about the wheel.

    What do we do? I would say that you can keep waiting for society to get to its senses. And may the odds be ever in your favor. You can also choose rebellion. Per Osho, rebellion is individual, not collective. It is not a struggle for political power, nor an attempt to replace one ruling order with another. It is a change in consciousness: becoming more alert, more aware of how you live, and less governed by habit, conditioning, and the crowd. Also, rebellion is affirmative. It begins with a “yes” to life, to yourself, and to living with greater awareness rather than automatically repeating what has been handed to you.

    This reads much like what happens in psychoanalytic conversation. For an hour, you stop. There is no feed to catch up with, no task to finish, no argument to win, and no particular result you are expected to produce. We sit down and talk about you and your life, with enough time to stay with a subject instead of moving immediately to the next thing.

    We might begin with something that happened during the week. A conversation has stayed with you, and you are not quite sure why. You notice that you reacted more strongly than the situation seemed to justify. You have made a decision and remain uncertain about what made you take it. You find yourself thinking about somebody you have not seen in years or realize that something you once wanted very much no longer interests you. Sometimes a memory comes up. Sometimes we notice the same kind of situation keeps occurring, or that two experiences you once thought unrelated may have something in common. There is no fixed list of subjects. We may talk about a relationship, a fear, an irritation, an ambition, a fantasy, a decision, a habit, a memory, a conflict, an idea, or an ordinary event with zero importance at first glance. You are more than free to arrive without anything in particular to discuss. Then we begin with whatever comes to mind and follow it.

    My role is to listen with a different kind of attention that is usually allowed in an ordinary conversation. I listen for connections, repetitions, contradictions, shifts in feeling, and assumptions that you may have missed. I ask questions when there may be more to understand, and I use psychoanalytic knowledge to consider possible relationships in what you describe. Sometimes that means staying with one detail for longer than you normally would, and other times it means returning to something you mentioned weeks earlier. Often, we find new ways of looking at an experience. The work consists largely of examining what is already there, but closely enough for its meaning to become more visible.

    It is almost unfashionable to spend an hour in this way. We are taught to justify attention by what it produces. We concentrate in order to solve a problem, acquire a skill, finish a task, improve our performance, or reach a goal. The same logic has entered much of what we now call personal development. You are encouraged to understand yourself so that you can perform better, regulate yourself so that you can become more effective, or work through a difficulty so that you can return to functioning as quickly as possible. Psychoanalytic conversation can certainly have practical consequences. If you understand your motives, reactions, and recurring patterns better, you make different choices. You may become less puzzled by yourself and others, or notice possibilities that were previously difficult to see. Yet practical improvement is not the reason for doing it. You are allowed to examine your life because it is your life, and attend to yourself just because. Who else is going to?

    It’s very easy to slide into moving through life without paying attention to what you are actually living. This is where Osho’s idea of rebellion struck me as surprisingly familiar. It’s about becoming less governed by habit, conditioning, and the pressures of the crowd, and more conscious of your own life. Psychoanalytic conversation cultivates exactly this rebellious way of existing. For an hour, the madness outside loses its priority. You examine what you experience instead of rushing to respond in a way the world told you to. You stay with a feeling long enough to hear it; you consider a choice, a relationship, a memory, or a reaction without turning the examination into a plan for improvement.

    That last point especially matters. I find it sad how we’ve become so used to conditioning any kind of self-reflection with a mental-health problem. Today, you need a diagnosis, a crisis, or at least a performance problem or a personal development goal to pay any serious attention to yourself. And sure, all these purposes have their merits. But I am convinced you are also allowed to invest your consideration in examining yourself and your life for its own sake. This was my vision for starting psychoanalytic conversation practice. I want it to give you the time and the company of someone trained to notice all that otherwise just passes by. Yes, the result can sometimes be useful in a practical sense. But the idea is to simply develop self-attendance, self-awareness, self-acquaintance, and self-understanding.

    The world will continue to make claims on your attention. Technology will continue to accelerate, public life will continue to demand reactions, and work will continue to find new ways of expanding into whatever time remains. You cannot put a stop to all of that. You can refuse to let it occupy every part of your life. My work is a rebellion in that limited sense: against passing through years without once looking closely at them, against knowing everything that happened and very little about what it meant, and against treating your own experience, your own self, and your own life as something to attend to only when it becomes a problem.

    This is how I am starting the rebellion, simply as that one hour in which nothing outside is more urgent than you. You are invited to join me.

  • Having Children Is Becoming a Question. Good.

    Having Children Is Becoming a Question. Good.


    Having children is a fairly enormous commitment to make because it seems to be what comes next. Some of us have looked at the job description and decided we’re happy without it. More people are choosing not to have children, although that choice is only part of the wider rise in childlessness. Others postpone parenthood until it no longer happens, struggle to find a suitable partner, or face economic insecurity and the difficulty of combining paid work with care. Worries about climate and the future add another reason to hesitate [1–6]. Across many high-income countries, people are having their first child later, and more people in successive generations remain childless. In some countries, falling birth rates are driven especially by adults without children continuing without them [1,3,5,7–9].

    The broadest agreement in the research is that parenthood now feels more costly and less compulsory. Effective contraception has made it more possible to decide whether and when to have children. Women’s education and employment, urbanization, and changing values have also altered the conditions in which that decision gets made. Individual choice carries more weight, and voluntarily remaining childless has become more acceptable [1,6,10–12]. Ask people why they don’t want children and the answers are often perfectly straightforward: they like their freedom, don’t want the work of caregiving, or can’t afford it. Some doubt they would be good parents. Others simply don’t see children fitting into the life they want [13–17]. How much more mysterious does that need to be?

    To understand the change, we can look at what prevents people from becoming parents as well as what makes some of us prefer a childfree life. Postponement and practical barriers explain part of it; differences between generations and the motives of deliberately childfree adults explain more [1,3,17]. Uncertainty about the future, climate concerns, and changing ideas about what a good life includes now also shape whether people without children intend to have a first child [5,18,19]. There is quite a lot going on behind a birth rate.

    First, can you actually make parenthood work?

    For many people, the conditions they would need to become parents feel out of reach. They may want children very much and still be unable to make the decision work. Unstable employment, difficulty finding suitable housing, changes in relationships, and weak support for families all contribute to postponing a first birth [1]. “We’ll do it when things settle down” is an understandable plan. It also depends on things eventually settling down.

    Which obstacle matters most varies between countries. In Spain and Italy, partnership instability and postponement are particularly prominent [4,20,21]. In East Asia, the expectations attached to marriage can be a problem in themselves. Young adults may avoid marriage because they see married life as incompatible with work and autonomy, while having children remains closely tied to being married [22,23]. If becoming a parent means signing up for a version of married life you don’t want, that is a considerable extra demand. In Finland, the most commonly reported reasons for not having children concern finances, relationships, and work or studies [24]. In Britain and Sweden, lacking a suitable partner is among the most prominent reasons people remain childless at later ages [7,25].

    All in all, people seem to become more responsible about whether they are fit to bring a being into their life. Stable employment increases intentions to have children, and access to housing has a strong influence too [26]. A missing partner remains a leading barrier; wanting a child doesn’t conveniently produce someone you want to raise one with [25,27]. Weak policy support encourages further delay [1,28]. Meanwhile, postponement raises the risk of eventually being unable to have children despite wanting them [29]. Waiting can be a sensible response to your circumstances and still have consequences you never chose.

    Some of us like our lives without children

    Then there are those of us who prefer being childfree. Studies of different sizes repeatedly identify freedom, autonomy, preserving a desired lifestyle, and reluctance to take on intensive caregiving as central reasons [13,14,30–32]. The word “lifestyle” can make this sound rather frivolous, as though we’re discussing a preference for a particular brand of sneakers. We’re talking about how you spend your days and how much say you have over them. That is your life, and you’re allowed to care about it.

    Money is part of the calculation, alongside the time and energy parenting takes, the sacrifices involved, and what becoming a parent would mean for your sense of yourself [15,16,21,32]. You can understand the commitment perfectly well and decide you don’t want it. Must every available responsibility be accepted? Some of us would quite like to finish the ones we already have. Women often describe motherhood as especially draining because childcare remains unequally divided even where people strongly endorse gender equality [26,33,34]. Equality sounds lovely. Who is actually doing the work? That helps explain why access to abortion and childcare, along with men’s participation in domestic work, matters more for women’s intentions to have children than for men’s [26,35]. If you expect to do more of the work, you have good reason to pay attention to the arrangements.

    Ideas about obligation are changing too. Postmaterialist values, which give greater weight to self-expression and quality of life, and individualist values are associated with weaker beliefs that people have a duty to reproduce [12,36]. Recent Finnish generations report lower ideal numbers of children, with much of that decline coming from more people who are still childless saying their ideal number is zero [37]. Zero is a perfectly intelligible answer. It doesn’t require a tragic backstory.

    And what kind of future are we offering?

    Economic insecurity now comes with broader doubts about where things are heading. People who expect the next generation to have a worse future than the present one are less likely to become parents [18]. In Sweden, declining intentions to have children since 2012 have coincided with rising uncertainty and a shift from “definitely yes” toward “probably not,” especially among younger adults and people without children [5]. When the decision concerns another person’s entire life, wondering what awaits them seems fairly reasonable.

    Climate concerns contribute to that hesitation, although they are not the main reason for most people. Some cite overpopulation and ecological strain, or worry about the quality of life a future child would have, when explaining why they want fewer children or none [38–40]. Representative research from Finland, Estonia, and Sweden finds that highly climate-concerned adults without children are less likely to intend to have them. The difference comes more from choosing no children than from wanting a smaller family [19].

    The influence of climate concerns remains moderate compared with the familiar practical obstacles. In Poland, employment and housing matter more overall, although climate prospects and abortion rights influence women’s intentions in particular groups [26]. You can be worried about the planet and unable to afford a suitable home at the same time. The concerns don’t have to take turns..

    “Choice” can be a messy word

    Historical and cross-national research consistently finds rising childlessness across recent generations [3,8,41–43]. There is strong support for several explanations operating together. In a number of countries, most adults still see parenthood as ideal, and a substantial share of childlessness follows postponement, missed timing, insecure partnerships, or other constraints [2,21,27,44]. We can welcome greater freedom to remain childfree while recognizing that some people never got the parenthood they wanted. Treating every childless person as though they made the same decision would erase quite a lot of their lives.

    Economic and partnership barriers have stronger evidence behind them than any single cultural explanation. Large reviews, national surveys, and studies following generations repeatedly identify employment, housing, partner availability, and conflict between work and family life as robust factors associated with becoming a parent [1,20,24,26,43]. Evidence for climate concerns is growing and credible, especially among people without children, but it is newer and more mixed than the evidence concerning costs, gender inequality, and postponement [19,26,45,46].

    Even the categories get awkward. Research cannot always neatly separate people who have chosen a childfree life from those who are undecided, delaying parenthood, or prevented by their circumstances from having children [10,15,47,48]. The boundary between choice and constraint can be unclear, and it can move over a lifetime [15,41,49]. “I don’t want children under these conditions” leaves room for both. It is still an answer worth taking seriously.

    The findings also differ in how firmly they are established. The rise in childlessness across generations is well supported [2,3,42,43]. There is strong evidence that economic and partnership barriers reduce entry into parenthood, and that protecting autonomy and a preferred way of life are common motives among childfree adults [13,14,16,32]. Evidence that unequal parenting burdens discourage parenthood, especially for women, is moderate [26,28,33,34]. Evidence for climate concern as a growing reason to remain childfree is somewhat weaker [19,26,38,39]. Those differences matter if we want to explain what is happening rather than pick whichever explanation makes the liveliest headline.

    Across these findings, parenthood is becoming something people assess more closely and take for granted less. Whether it happens depends increasingly on a secure relationship and financial stability, as well as whether it fits the life someone actually wants. More people are choosing against it as the costs of parenting rise and opting out becomes more legitimate. Uncertainty about the future further widens the distance between wanting children, putting them off, and deciding not to have them [5,6,41]. Having children deserves that level of consideration. So does choosing a life without them.

    And whatever your reasons for not having children, you have zero obligation to explain them to your shrink. You don’t owe us a discussion of why you didn’t get a cat, a dog, a hamster, a snake, a bird, or a giraffe either. I do hope you didn’t get all of those. If you did, please schedule a session.

    References

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    [19] Bastianelli, E. (2025). Climate change worries and fertility intentions: Insights from three EU countries. Journal of Marriage and Family, 87(2), 659–675. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.13048

    [20] Lozano, M., Vidal, S., & Adserà, A. (2026). Pathways to childlessness in Spain: Exploring the intersection of partnership and employment trajectories. Population Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2026.2682465

    [21] Tanturri, M. L., & Mencarini, L. (2008). Childless or childfree? Paths to voluntary childlessness in Italy. Population and Development Review, 34(1), 51–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2008.00205.x

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    [23] Choi, K. H., & Qian, Y. (2023). The rise of the childless single in South Korea. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 15(3), 526–541. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12507

    [24] Lehtoranta, L., Klemetti, R., Majlander, S., Heino, A., Gissler, M., & Lundqvist, A. (2023). Wishes and obstacles to having children – Results from the nationwide Healthy Finland survey [Conference abstract]. European Journal of Public Health, 33(Suppl. 2), Article ckad160.1538. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckad160.1538

    [25] Schytt, E., Nilsen, A. B. V., & Bernhardt, E. (2014). Still childless at the age of 28 to 40 years: A cross-sectional study of Swedish women’s and men’s reproductive intentions. Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare, 5(1), 23–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.srhc.2013.11.001

    [26] Kurowska, A., Matysiak, A., & Grabowska, M. (2026). Beyond usual suspects: Revisiting barriers to childbearing decisions in a low fertility setting. Population and Development Review, 52(1), 94–134. https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.70046

    [27] Rotkirch, A., & Miettinen, A. (2017). Childlessness in Finland. In M. Kreyenfeld & D. Konietzka (Eds.), Childlessness in Europe: Contexts, causes, and consequences (pp. 139–158). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44667-7_7

    [28] Minello, A., & Russo, C. (2025). The good parent: Emerging themes and gender convergence in narrating fertility choices. Family Relations, 74(4), 1747–1766. https://doi.org/10.1111/fare.13185

    [29] Schmidt, L., Sobotka, T., Bentzen, J. G., Nyboe Andersen, A., & ESHRE Reproduction and Society Task Force. (2012). Demographic and medical consequences of the postponement of parenthood. Human Reproduction Update, 18(1), 29–43. https://doi.org/10.1093/humupd/dmr040

    [30] Carmichael, G. A., & Whittaker, A. (2007). Choice and circumstance: Qualitative insights into contemporary childlessness in Australia. European Journal of Population, 23(2), 111–143. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-006-9112-4

    [31] Smith, I., Knight, T., Fletcher, R., & Macdonald, J. A. (2020). When men choose to be childless: An interpretative phenomenological analysis. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 37(1), 325–344. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407519864444

    [32] Ciesielski, P., & Bakiera, L. (2024). Childfreeness in Poland – group description and reasons behind not wanting to have children. Current Psychology, 43(39), 30644–30654. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06461-z

    [33] Símonardóttir, S. (2024). “Unless I could be like the typical dad”: Exploring parenthood through the perspective of the voluntarily childfree. Acta Sociologica, 67(4), 463–477. https://doi.org/10.1177/00016993241260608

    [34] Erkaya, M., & Ustunel, A. O. (2024). A qualitative study on the marital experiences of childfree couples in Turkey. International Journal of Systemic Therapy, 35(1), 80–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/2692398X.2023.2240680

    [35] Rezaei, Z., Sharif-Nia, H., Gholamnia-Shirvani, Z., Behmanesh, F., & Ahmadzadeh Tori, N. (2026). Personal, social, and economic determinants of voluntary single-childedness and childlessness among urban couples in Babol, Iran: A cross-sectional study. International Journal of Reproductive BioMedicine, 24(2), 145–156. https://doi.org/10.18502/ijrm.v24i2.21054

    [36] Erfani, A., Jahanbakhsh, R., & Kalantari, A. (2020). Fardgerāyi va niyāt-e bārvari [Individualism and fertility intentions]. Journal of Population Association of Iran, 15(29), 239–264. https://doi.org/10.22034/jpai.2020.243925

    [37] Savelieva, K., Nitsche, N., Berg, V., Miettinen, A., Rotkirch, A., & Jokela, M. (2021). Birth cohort changes in fertility ideals: Evidence from repeated cross-sectional surveys in Finland (MPIDR Working Paper No. WP 2021-010). Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. https://doi.org/10.4054/MPIDR-WP-2021-010

    [38] Helm, S., Kemper, J. A., & White, S. K. (2021). No future, no kids–no kids, no future? An exploration of motivations to remain childfree in times of climate change. Population and Environment, 43(1), 108–129. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-021-00379-5

    [39] Blanton, N. (2025). “It’s all up in the air”: Reproductive decision-making in a changing climate. Sociological Spectrum, 45(5), 274–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/02732173.2025.2507363

    [40] Miller, A., Ernst, E., Curry, M., & Valdez, A. (2025). In-conceivable futures: Climate change and reproductive decision making among childfree North Americans. Social Currents, 12(3), 231–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/23294965241300718

    [41] Albertini, M., & Brini, E. (2021). I’ve changed my mind. The intentions to be childless, their stability and realisation. European Societies, 23(1), 119–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2020.1764997

    [42] Leocádio, V. A., Verona, A. P., & de Miranda-Ribeiro, A. (2022). Contributions of sociodemographic changes to the increase in permanent childlessness in Brazil: A cohort decomposition analysis. Population Research and Policy Review, 41(5), 1951–1973. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-022-09725-3

    [43] Hayford, S. R. (2013). Marriage (still) matters: The contribution of demographic change to trends in childlessness in the United States. Demography, 50(5), 1641–1661. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0215-3

    [44] Ravanera, Z. R., & Beaujot, R. (2014). Childlessness of men in Canada: Result of a waiting game in a changing family context. Canadian Studies in Population, 41(1–2), 38–60. https://doi.org/10.25336/P6J02Q

    [45] Whyman, T. (2024). Natalism, natality, and the climate crisis: An Arendtian argument against ‘green’ anti-natalism. The Journal of Value Inquiry. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-024-09994-5

    [46] Szalma, I., & Szczuka, B. J. (2025). Reproductive choices and climate change in a pronatalist context. East European Politics and Societies, 39(2), 332–352. https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254241229728

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    [49] Graham, M., Hill, E., Shelly, J., & Taket, A. (2013). Why are childless women childless? Findings from an exploratory study in Victoria, Australia. Journal of Social Inclusion, 4(1), 70–89. https://doi.org/10.36251/josi63

  • When Your Therapist Thinks Being Childfree Is the Problem

    When Your Therapist Thinks Being Childfree Is the Problem

    Imagine booking an appointment because you’re starting to feel like shit after almost every conversation with your partner. They make jokes at your expense and accuse you of being oversensitive when you object; lately, you’ve caught yourself rehearsing perfectly ordinary sentences before saying them. Somewhere in the first session, your therapist asks about children, and when you explain that you’re childfree, and a new possibility suddenly interests them: perhaps your relationship has lacked the shared purpose that a family would provide. By the end of the hour, you’re defending your decision against parenthood while your partner’s behavior has disappeared from the discussion. Quite a result for someone who didn’t even attend.

    You might entertain this suggestion for longer than you otherwise would. The person offering it has qualifications, presumably knows something you don’t, and has met you at a moment when your confidence in your own judgment is hardly magnificent. Perhaps there really is something you’ve overlooked. Asking about children is ordinary enough, after all, although the route from “I don’t want any” to “that explains why your relationship is miserable” deserves a few questions of its own. The fact that you need help doesn’t make every theory offered about you worth considering.

    When an assumption becomes an interpretation

    The assumption underneath the leap is that a complete adult life eventually includes parenthood, and anyone who declines must have misunderstood the assignment. You’ve probably met the person who assures you that you’ll understand real love once you have children, apparently writing off every attachment you’ve managed so far. The term for this is pronatalism and can enter the consulting room through theories that treat parenthood as a developmental achievement. As psychotherapist Emma Palmer discusses, some older accounts of women’s development gave motherhood a central place in psychological maturity. A therapist working from those assumptions may start wondering what went wrong before asking what went right.

    You can see how judgments about a proper life become judgments about happiness in an experiment by psychologist Leslie Ashburn-Nardo. In the study, 197 university students evaluated a fictional married adult who had chosen to have either no children or two. The childfree adults were judged less psychologically fulfilled and elicited greater moral outrage. Nobody had measured these fictional people’s happiness, obviously; what the experiment captured was how observers imagined it. When someone confidently predicts that you’re unfulfilled, then, it’s worth asking how much they know about your experience and how much they’re supplying from their expectations.

    What happens when you ask childfree people?

    Researchers who ask childfree people about their lives have rather more relevant information. In a 2021 study of 981 Michigan adults, Jennifer Watling Neal and Zachary Neal found no statistically significant differences in life satisfaction between childfree adults and the other parental-status groups after accounting for demographic differences. Their study also did something that sounds elementary but matters enormously: it distinguished people who didn’t want children from people who had wanted them but couldn’t have them. Counting everybody with zero children together obscures whether that situation represents a disappointment, a temporary arrangement, or exactly the life someone wants.

    Of course, you’re entitled to be childfree and unhappy. You can make a reproductive decision that suits you beautifully and still have a dreadful relationship, which is why arriving at therapy shouldn’t require a preliminary demonstration that your life choices have produced uninterrupted contentment. If having no children feels like a loss, there’s something to explore; if it doesn’t, an assumption of reproductive grief supplies you with an imaginary disappointment while the actual difficulty waits. The therapist still needs to establish what is troubling you and why their proposed explanation fits. You shouldn’t have to bring a happiness study to get back to your partner’s habit of humiliating you over dinner.

    Whose wishes is the treatment serving?

    There is another distinction worth keeping clear: being unhappy about your life and being worn down by other people’s objections to it. Suppose your parent keeps calling you selfish for refusing to give them grandchildren. You love them, so their disapproval hurts, even though your decision is settled. You may dread visiting because you know the subject will return before you’ve finished your coffee. By the time you bring this to therapy, there’s plenty to discuss about the relationship and what happens to you in it. A suppressed wish for parenthood would need evidence beyond the fact that these encounters upset you.

    If the therapist responds by encouraging you to reconsider having children, your parent’s campaign has acquired a professional ally. You came looking for help with a painful demand and find yourself discussing whether you should satisfy it, perhaps because the therapist finds your parent’s wish so understandable that your refusal begins to seem like the problem. Understanding another person’s expectations doesn’t require fulfilling them, and being upset by criticism doesn’t mean the criticism has uncovered a truth you were avoiding. Producing another person is a fairly substantial concession to make for a calmerThanksgiving.

    The interpretation you’re not allowed to disagree with

    The conversation becomes especially difficult when every attempt to clarify your position confirms the therapist’s interpretation. You explain that you’ve considered parenthood carefully and don’t want it, which is described as rigidity; when you object, the objection becomes resistance. You could spend the hour examining yourself with almost indecent thoroughness and still fail to qualify as reflective, because the only acceptable discovery is that the therapist was right. Under those conditions, you have very little room and even the possibility that you know something about yourself becomes suspicious.

    I’m a psychoanalyst, so I’m interested in the possibility that people misunderstand their own motives. That includes the person offering the interpretation. A claim about your unconscious needs support. Sometimes an interpretation hurts because you recognize something you’ve been avoiding. But other times it hurts because a person you hoped would understand you is insisting on an account that feels alien. The discomfort itself settles nothing. You should be able to ask how the therapist reached their conclusion and receive an explanation grounded in what you’ve said or done, with room to consider what might make that explanation mistaken.

    Eventually, you may begin editing what you say. You don’t mention that lonely evening because you can already imagine where that will lead, and you become careful about admitting doubts in your relationship lest they reappear as evidence of your inability to commit. You may even catch yourself presenting a suspiciously cheerful account of being childfree, despite having booked the appointment precisely because you wanted somewhere to speak honestly. Now you’re managing the therapist’s impression of you as well as whatever brought you into treatment. It’s exhausting enough doing this with relatives; paying someone for the opportunity adds a particular insult.

    A basic requirement of the job

    A therapist’s understanding of a healthy adult life should accommodate parenthood and childfreedom on equal terms, without awarding extra points for reproduction. They can ask whether you want children, since having none doesn’t tell them whether that is a choice; once you’ve explained that you’re childfree, however, they have their answer. You owe no explanation of how you arrived at that decision, and you shouldn’t have to request that it stop being treated as unfinished business. Unless you choose to discuss it, the subject is closed. You have already supplied the information; persuading your therapist to accept it should never become part of your treatment.

    If a therapist makes a pronatalist assumption, the mistake has already happened; you don’t have to object repeatedly before it qualifies as one. They should acknowledge it and correct it immediately. Examining the bias that produced it is their professional responsibility, and you have no obligation to spend your sessions helping them develop a less provincial understanding of adulthood, or to give them further chances to get this right. You came for help with a relationship in which you’re being belittled. That already provides plenty to discuss, and your therapist should be able to get on with the work without adding a baby to the mess.

  • When Religious Upbringing Becomes Abuse

    When Religious Upbringing Becomes Abuse

    I value inclusiveness and tolerance, but I’m increasingly worried about the horrible things we can end up enabling in their name. Religion, along with pseudoscience and conspiracy madness, can get a remarkably gentle reception when we’re anxious to show how open-minded we are. We can end up tolerating harm to people who have no voice and power in the matter. How considerate of us, volunteering someone else’s safety. Doesn’t our willingness to call harmful beliefs harmful matter far more than whether the ones holding them feel sufficiently respected?

    Too often, religious upbringing crosses into abuse, because belief is used to intimidate, control, humiliate, isolate, exploit, or physically endanger a child. Abuse also occurs when religious beliefs and institutions enable sexual violence, medical neglect, or coercion over a child’s developing identity. These harms deserve the same scrutiny as abuse in any other setting. Humiliation is destructive and a child’s need for protection should have the same urgency in any circumstance [1,2,3].

    First of all, religious upbringing teaches you to distrust your own mind. A child is taught that anger is wicked, doubt is dangerous, sexuality is shameful, and obedience determines whether they deserve love. Those demands become internal prohibitions: you may continue to condemn yourself long after the people who taught you to do it have lost their authority over you. Clinical accounts of religious emotional abuse describe how it can affect your sense of self and your relationships, including your understanding of God [4].

    Look at what the beliefs and practices require of a child, especially what happens when the child resists. Calling abuse a distortion of religious teaching doesn’t let the teaching off the hook. If a teaching justifies domination or makes a child responsible for an adult’s violence, we need to question the teaching itself. Calling it sacred settles absolutely nothing. An adult can sincerely believe every word and still be dangerous to a child.

    What research shows about religious abuse

    We have research documenting religion-related abuse in families, congregations, and institutions; this is hardly something critics of religion have dreamed up. Recurring forms include withholding necessary medical treatment, harming children in attempts to expel supposed evil, and abuse by people whose religious position gives them exceptional access to children and authority over them. These patterns appear both in reports to mental health professionals and in cases encountered by legal and social service agencies [1,2].

    Within families, religion can also give adults the language to intimidate children and justify harming them when they need care. Clinical accounts describe how religious emotional abuse can leave people struggling to manage their feelings and caught in dysfunctional relationships, with the harm continuing across generations [2]. Research measuring spiritual harm identifies familiar features of these environments and their effects: protecting the religious system, controlling leadership, endorsement of violence, gender discrimination, a threatening image of god, and personal distress. The measures cover both abusive environments and psychological distress [3].

    Research among Christian adults has associated biblical literalism and some combinations of religious motivation and social conformity with greater scores on a measure of child abuse potential. That’s a measure of characteristics associated with risk, so we can’t use it to claim that someone has actually committed abuse (Rodriguez & Henderson, 2010). Broader findings linking religious involvement with better adolescent adjustment (Hardy et al., 2019) offer no defense of an abusive practice. A population average can’t tell you whether the child in front of you is being harmed.

    Emotional degradation and spiritual intimidation

    Religious emotional abuse can involve persistent humiliation, threats of divine punishment, enforced submission, and the suggestion that ordinary feelings reveal an evil or defective self. A parent’s disapproval can become, supposedly, God’s judgment. Now you’re in trouble with the creator of the universe, which is quite a lot to put on a child. If you’re taught that the authority condemning you can also read your thoughts, even the privacy of your own mind offers no escape [4, 8].

    Guilt can concern a specific action you can take responsibility for. Shame can become a judgment on your whole self, leaving you feeling defective even when you can’t identify anything you’ve actually done wrong. Critical analysis of Christian shame describes how teachings about human unworthiness can contribute to an enduring sense of personal defectiveness [8]. In an abusive upbringing, you may get little help distinguishing harm you’ve actually caused from a thought or feeling an adult has forbidden. Wanting something can become an offense all by itself. You haven’t done a damn thing, and you’re already guilty.

    It gets especially damaging when the threats keep coming and your safety or belonging depends on doing as you’re told. A child who is repeatedly terrorized with damnation, compelled to confess private thoughts, or punished for questioning authority may learn to monitor their inner life as a source of danger. The child’s age and dependence on the adults making those threats matter, along with the wider pattern of treatment. We-all-grew-up-with-it is a statement about how common a practice is. And it tells us nothing about whether it is harmless.

    Physical abuse and medical neglect

    Beatings and other harmful punishments remain abusive when adults describe them as religious duties. God doesn’t get to sign the permission slip. Retrospective research has associated religion-related physical abuse with poorer later psychological functioning than physical abuse without a religious component. Science doesn’t establish that religion independently caused the difference, but it gives us reason to examine what being told the violence is divinely sanctioned adds to the experience [9].

    Religious beliefs can even motivate adults to withhold necessary medical care or subject a child to dangerous practices intended to remove supposed evil [1, 2]. Child-protection research documents severe injury and deaths in cases involving accusations of witchcraft or spirit possession [10]. The adults may describe themselves as fighting evil while the the one being (sometimes brutally) hurt is the child they’re supposedly saving. The child is treated as the source of the danger. You end up needing protection from the very people you depend on to survive, while being told that something inside you is to blame.

    Coercive conformity and attacks on identity

    Religious control can reach into friendships, education, sexuality, and the freedom to consider a different life. And nobody has to hit you for disagreement to become dangerous; the threat of losing your family or community can do enough. Research with survivors of religious conversion practices describes entrapment sustained through spiritual, social, and practical dependencies [11]. When you’re dependent on the people making those threats, agreeing with them may be the safest option available. Calling that a freely chosen commitment is quite a stretch.

    LGBTQ people may encounter teachings that portray their sexuality or gender as evidence of corruption, brokenness, or moral danger. Survivor research describes erasure, rejection, psychological distress, and profound conflicts over belonging in religious settings. Research on conversion practices also identifies religious trauma and moral injury associated with efforts to change or suppress identity [12, 13]. The demand can make acceptance conditional on rejecting an intimate part of yourself. You get to belong as long as you agree that something about you needs erasing.

    Teachings about a woman’s duty to submit can also make it harder to refuse abuse and give the people demanding her obedience a religious justification for it. Research in Zimbabwe’s Johanne Marange Apostolic Church describes religiously protected practices of forced and teenage marriage to old men [14]. Research in white evangelical settings shows how purity culture makes girls and women responsible for male sexual behavior while limiting the language and support available to identify abuse [15]. In these settings, talk of religiously prescribed submission answers the question on what happens if she says no. You know the answer.

    Sexual abuse and institutional betrayal

    When the person sexually abusing you has been presented as a god’s representative, making sense of the betrayal comes with an additional, grotesque complication: you’ve been taught to revere them. Population research has documented childhood sexual abuse by adults in religious organizations, while survivor research shows how reverence for authority and community silence can obstruct recognition and disclosure [16, 17]. The religious setting can give an abuser access to a child and make the abuse harder for that child to recognize. Being presented as God’s representative is a considerable advantage when you want your authority to go unquestioned.

    Purity teachings can deepen self-blame when survivors have been taught to regard their bodies as temptations or to understand sexual contact primarily in terms of lost purity. In the evangelical settings examined in survivor research, institutional and ideological pressures restricted survivors’ ability to name what had happened and seek help [15]. You may end up experiencing someone else’s violation of your body as evidence that you are contaminated or have done something wrong. The perpetrator gets the protection; you get the shame.

    Then there’s what the institution does when someone tells. Disbelief, protection of leaders, and hostile responses to disclosure may undermine the survivor’s trust in the community and in their own judgment. Research on clergy sexual abuse describes harm that extends into meaning, identity, and the person’s relationship with the sacred, alongside other psychological consequences [18]. An institution that protects its leaders at a child’s expense has made its priorities clear.

    Understanding the continuing harm in psychoanalysis

    In psychoanalysis, we look at how an authority you once had to obey can become a part of your own thinking. Different concepts help us examine that process, without assuming everyone’s experience follows the same script [4, 19].

    Psychoanalysis has a term for an internal moral authority that keeps attacking you: the punitive superego. With that kind of authority, admitting a mistake and making amends may never feel sufficient. In a religiously abusive upbringing, your parents’ condemnation can take on god’s supposedly permanent, all-knowing authority. You can reject the doctrine intellectually and still feel that wanting something, or disagreeing with someone, puts you in danger. Disbelief doesn’t cancel years of indoctrination. In psychoanalysis, we examine whose prohibitions you still feel bound by and how obeying them became a condition of feeling good or lovable.

    Recognizing abuse gets especially complicated when you love the person responsible. A child depends on caregivers and usually loves them regardless of anything, including abuse. Blaming yourself can be a way to keep believing that the person you depend on is good. Religious explanations of sin, disobedience, and deserved punishment can make that response seem morally necessary. In adulthood, acknowledging abuse may consequently threaten a bond that once made life feel survivable. Loving the person who hurt you doesn’t make the harm insignificant, although it makes acknowledging it considerably harder.

    Then there’s anger, which may have landed you in trouble long before you had any idea what to do with it. If anger at parents or religious authorities was condemned, you may have learned to suppress it or turn it against yourself. Exaggerated compliance can also conceal anger you couldn’t afford to show. We can explore whether these responses once helped keep you safe, then examine what they cost you now, including difficulty setting limits or recognizing exploitation. We work out together how this fits your experience.

    It can be hard to recognize abuse when you’ve been taught to see it as discipline, care, or religious duty. Philosophical analysis of religious trauma shows how a community’s concepts can obscure the meaning of harm, including harm to children [20]. When humiliation is considered humility and protesting gets you accused of sinful rebellion, the vocabulary has been arranged in the abuser’s favor. Psychoanalysis can help you distinguish your experience from the explanation you were required to accept.

    These expectations may also enter the relationship with your analyst through transference: expectations formed in earlier relationships can shape how you experience this one. An interpretation may feel like a verdict, and disagreeing may feel like disobedience that could get you rejected. The analyst therefore pays attention to their actual authority, including their own wish to be trusted or agreed with. You need to be able to question an interpretation and expect mistakes to be acknowledged. You’ve had enough practice with supposedly infallible authorities.

    Restoring the capacity to think and choose

    Through all of this, we keep sight of what was actually done to you. Your unconscious expectations don’t make you responsible for an adult’s abuse or an institution’s failure to protect you. If you’re still being harmed, getting you safe comes first. Research with conversion-practice survivors underlines the importance of support both in leaving coercive environments and after departure [11].

    Recovery often involves learning to distinguish your values from inherited threats and to allow any thoughts and feelings without treating them as moral failure. You may also need to mourn lost relationships or years spent trying to please an authority that promised protection while causing harm. You get to be angry about that, including when somebody would much prefer you to say it made you stronger. Forgiveness is optional, and nobody should require you to reconcile with the people who hurt you or produce an uplifting account of the experience to prove you’ve made progress.

    Religion warrants direct criticism wherever its teachings or institutions enable abuse. Understanding how you adapted to that abuse can help explain why it still holds authority over you, even after you’ve rejected the beliefs that justified it. Psychoanalysis gives you space to say what happened and how you feel about it, without having to excuse anyone or having to distort your feelings. By talking about those experiences, we work through. That can be painful work; cleaning a wound often is, but it’s what allows it to heal.

    Sources

    [1] Bottoms, B. L., Shaver, P. R., Goodman, G. S., & Qin, J.-J. (1995). In the name of God: A profile of religion-related child abuse. Journal of Social Issues, 51(2), 85–111. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1995.tb01325.x
    [2] Bottoms, B. L., Goodman, G. S., Tolou-Shams, M., Diviak, K. R., & Shaver, P. R. (2015). Religion-related child maltreatment: A profile of cases encountered by legal and social service agencies. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 33(4), 561–579. https://doi.org/10.1002/bsl.2192
    [3] Simonič, B., Rahne Mandelj, T., & Novsak, R. (2013). Religious-related abuse in the family. Journal of Family Violence, 28(4), 339–349. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-013-9508-y
    [4] Novšak, R., Rahne Mandelj, T., & Simonič, B. (2012). Therapeutic implications of religious-related emotional abuse. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 21(1), 31–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2011.627914
    [5] Koch, D., & Edstrom, L. (2022). Development of the Spiritual Harm and Abuse Scale. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 61(2), 476–506. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12792
    [6] Rodriguez, C. M., & Henderson, R. C. (2010). Who spares the rod? Religious orientation, social conformity, and child abuse potential. Child Abuse & Neglect, 34(2), 84–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2009.07.002
    [7] Hardy, S. A., Nelson, J. M., Moore, J. P., & King, P. E. (2019). Processes of religious and spiritual influence in adolescence: A systematic review of 30 years of research. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 29(2), 254–275. https://doi.org/10.1111/jora.12486
    [8] Downie, A. (2022). Christian shame and religious trauma. Religions, 13(10), 925. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13100925
    [9] Bottoms, B. L., Nielsen, M., Murray, R., & Filipas, H. (2004). Religion-related child physical abuse: Characteristics and psychological outcomes. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 8(1-2), 87–114. https://doi.org/10.1300/J146v08n01_04
    [10] Briggs, S., & Whittaker, A. (2018). Protecting children from faith-based abuse through accusations of witchcraft and spirit possession: Understanding contexts and informing practice. British Journal of Social Work, 48(8), 2157–2175. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcx155
    [11] Roguski, M., & Atwool, N. (2024). Conversion practices in Aotearoa New Zealand: Developing a holistic response to spiritual abuse. PLOS ONE, 19, e0302163. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302163
    [12] Hollier, J., Clifton, S., & Smith-Merry, J. (2022). Mechanisms of religious trauma amongst queer people in Australia’s evangelical churches. Clinical Social Work Journal, 50, 275–285. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-022-00839-x
    [13] Jones, T. W., Power, J., & Jones, T. M. (2022). Religious trauma and moral injury from LGBTQA+ conversion practices. Social Science & Medicine, 305, 115040. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115040
    [14] Dudzai, C., Zvokuomba, K., & Mboko, T. G. (2023). Religion, women, and girls’ rights in Zimbabwe: The case of Zimbabwe’s Johanne Marange Apostolic Church. Journal of Human Rights and Social Work, 8, 376–388. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41134-023-00271-2
    [15] McKinzie, A. E., & Richards, P. (2022). Institutional, ideological, and interactional constraints: The case of sexual abuse in white evangelical settings. Sociological Forum, 37(3), 744–765. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12820
    [16] Hunt, G. R., Mathews, B., Higgins, D. J., Finkelhor, D., Willis, M. L., Haslam, D. M., Lawrence, D., Meinck, F., Thomas, H. J., Malacova, E., Pacella, R. E., & Scott, J. G. (2024). The prevalence of child sexual abuse perpetrated by leaders or other adults in religious organizations in Australia. Child Abuse & Neglect, 155, 106946. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106946
    [17] Chowdhury, R., Winder, B., Blagden, N., & Mulla, F. (2022). “I thought in order to get to God I had to win their approval”: A qualitative analysis of the experiences of Muslim victims abused by religious authority figures. Journal of Sexual Aggression, 28(2), 196–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/13552600.2021.1943023
    [18] Durkin, J., Zordan, R., Bullen, M., Pavich, N., Thomas, P. T. B., Lethborg, C., Holder, W., Jolly, M., Dreise, D., & Fleming, D. (2025). The impact of clergy sexual abuse on spirituality and health: A systematic scoping review of the literature. PLOS ONE, 20(4), e0317821. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317821
    [19] Stone, A. M. (2013). Thou shalt not: Treating religious trauma and spiritual harm with combined therapy. Group, 37(4), 323–337. https://doi.org/10.13186/group.37.4.0323
    [20] Panchuk, M. (2020). Distorting concepts, obscured experiences: Hermeneutical injustice in religious trauma and spiritual violence. Hypatia, 35(4), 607–625. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2020.32

  • Why Emotional Competence Matters

    Why Emotional Competence Matters

    Sometimes you know exactly what you feel and why. At other times, you can tell that something is bothering you, but describing it is another matter. You feel vaguely dissatisfied, unusually irritable, or reluctant to do something you thought you wanted. The feeling may change before you have understood it, or several feelings may be mixed together. Meanwhile, someone asks what is wrong, and “I don’t know” is the most accurate answer you have. Emotions can seem elusive, even arbitrary, when you cannot identify what prompted them or what they have to do with your circumstances.

    They can, however, be understood. The affective science that informs my work examines emotions as biological processes with evolutionary functions. Basic emotional systems help us respond to needs and circumstances relevant to survival and reproduction. They motivate us to seek things we need, protect ourselves, and form relationships. These systems did not evolve to keep you happy or to accommodate your particular plans. You are born with basic emotional capacities, while experience shapes many of their triggers and the ways you respond. A reaction can therefore make sense in terms of your history while being thoroughly inconvenient in your present life.

    Emotions influence what you notice, how you interpret events, and what you feel motivated to do. They also contribute directly to how pleasant or unpleasant it feels to be alive on an ordinary Tuesday. Emotional competence means being able to identify and understand your feelings and respond to them effectively. Developing it can help you change reactions that cause difficulties and make better use of feelings that support what you want. Its usefulness extends well beyond the moments when you are obviously upset.

    Your everyday experience

    Your emotional state affects how you experience a day, even when absolutely nothing significant happens. You might wake up already feeling under pressure, become irritated by small interruptions, and finish the evening unable to enjoy the free time you wanted all afternoon. On another day, the same routine feels manageable, and you have enough interest and energy to enjoy yourself. Circumstances matter, of course, but so does what you feel about them. A life that looks perfectly satisfactory on paper can still be unpleasant to live.

    Understanding your feelings helps you work out what contributes to that experience. What you describe as a bad mood may involve frustration about something you keep postponing, disappointment you have barely acknowledged, or anxiety about tomorrow. Once you can distinguish these feelings, you have a better chance of responding usefully. You may need to change an arrangement, address a concern, or reconsider what you expect of yourself. You cannot prevent every unpleasant mood, but you can become better at understanding what causes it and what might help.

    Well-being and everyday habits

    Knowing what would be good for you does not necessarily make you want to do it. You can sincerely intend to get more sleep and still stay up because late evening is the only time you can do what you want. Going to bed earlier then means giving up something you value, however sensible the decision looks. Treating this as a simple lack of discipline misses the difficulty: you want rest, but you also want some time when nobody can make demands on you.

    Emotional competence helps you recognize these competing motives and look for a workable response. In this example, that might involve examining why your day leaves so little room for yourself and what makes it difficult to protect that time. Understanding the emotional reasons for a habit can make changing it less dependent on repeatedly forcing yourself. Practical circumstances and physical health still matter; emotional understanding contributes by helping you address the part of the reasons you struggle to follow advice about healthy habits.

    Close relationships

    In close relationships, feelings influence how you seek affection, respond to disagreement, and interpret the other person’s behavior. If you can explain what upset you and why, you give them something specific to respond to. “I was disappointed because I was looking forward to spending time with you” makes a different conversation possible from an argument about whether they are always too busy. Understanding your own reaction also helps you work out what you want from that conversation, whether it is reassurance or an actual change in your arrangements.

    Understanding the other person’s feelings helps you consider what matters to them, even when your preferences differ. You can discuss those differences and negotiate what each of you is willing to do. Emotional competence also helps with the enjoyable parts of a relationship: expressing affection, recognizing what makes someone feel appreciated, and allowing yourself to ask for closeness. Being able to understand and communicate feelings makes it easier to know each other and respond to what each of you needs.

    Work and professional life

    Professional knowledge matters, but feelings affect how you use it. Anxiety about making a mistake can make it difficult to finish work you are capable of doing. Discomfort with someone’s disappointment can lead you to accept demands you cannot reasonably meet. Your response to criticism may determine whether you can use helpful feedback or spend the rest of the day defending yourself against it in your head. These emotional difficulties have practical consequences for your work, including how much of your time and energy it requires.

    Understanding them gives you more options. If you know what makes feedback difficult, you can examine the criticism without treating it as a judgment of your entire competence. If you recognize your reluctance to disappoint people, you can take it into account when discussing deadlines. Understanding other people’s feelings also helps you communicate and handle disagreements. Emotional competence supports professional judgment by helping you consider the situation while recognizing your own reactions to it.

    Family relationships

    Family relationships often involve expectations and responses learned long before you could question them. You may still feel obliged to keep a parent happy, avoid certain disagreements, or take responsibility whenever someone becomes upset. An ordinary request can be difficult to refuse because of what refusal has meant in that relationship. You might disagree with the expectation completely and still feel guilty for failing to meet it. Knowing that you are an adult does not automatically change what you feel when a parent is disappointed in you.

    Understanding these reactions helps you decide how you want to relate to your family now. You can examine what you willingly offer and what you do because you fear the consequences of refusing. That may make it easier to state a limit, discuss a recurring disagreement, or remain affectionate without agreeing to everything. Better emotional understanding does not guarantee family harmony; other people have their own preferences and reactions. It can help you participate in those relationships with a clearer understanding of your feelings and more choice about your behavior.

    How psychoanalysis helps

    Psychoanalysis offers time and sustained conversation to explore how your emotions work across these areas of your life. In our sessions, we identify what you feel and examine how it connects with your thoughts, expectations, and behavior. We look at what prompts recurring reactions, including influences you may not yet recognize. Past experience matters where it helps explain what happens now. Relevant ideas from affective science can also help make an experience understandable and suggest ways of responding to it.

    Over time, this work develops a more detailed understanding of your particular emotional patterns: what tends to upset you, what motivates you, and how you respond to your needs and other people. We use that understanding to consider changes and develop ideas you can try in everyday life. The aim is to help you manage your emotional responses in ways that better support your goals and values. This takes more than a useful explanation in a single session. Psychoanalytic work allows us to return to persistent difficulties, examine what happens as you try something different, and work toward changes you can sustain.

  • The Ultimate Prequel: How You Went From Puddle to Person

    The Ultimate Prequel: How You Went From Puddle to Person

    You may be accustomed to seeing me rewind the clock only so far. We usually stop around 300,000 years ago to check in on early Homo sapiens. Occasionally, when we need to examine the ancestral foundations of the mammalian brain, we travel back roughly 200 million years. Today, we are going spectacularly overboard. We are setting the time machine to four billion years ago.

    Our destination is the moment when ordinary, nonliving matter somehow decided to become alive. It remains one of the greatest mysteries science has ever attempted to solve.

    It is also the earliest prequel to the self. Long before consciousness, memory, feeling, or thought could appear, chemistry had to acquire several remarkable capacities: preserving an organised pattern, making another version of it, and maintaining a distinction between itself and the surrounding world. Before there could be a self that knew itself, there had to be something capable of keeping itself going.

    The real estate nightmare of early earth

    To understand how life emerged, we have to look at the young Earth and the raw materials of reality. The universe is, at its most basic, an immense collection of particles. Left entirely to themselves in a closed system, physical processes tend toward equilibrium as energy disperses and the number of possible arrangements increases. In physics, this direction of travel is described through entropy.

    If you have ever cleaned your house only to find it in disarray three days later, you are intimately acquainted with entropy’s general disposition.

    Early Earth, however, was anything but closed or quiet. Sunlight, geothermal heat, electrical storms, volcanic activity, and chemical gradients continuously supplied energy. Under such conditions, local order could arise while the overall movement of entropy continued undisturbed. Modern origin-of-life research therefore studies chemistry operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium, where energy flows can sustain organised structures and reactions.

    Chemistry also has rules. Some particles attract one another, others repel, and particular combinations settle into stable arrangements called molecules. The young Earth was rich in water, minerals, gases, and organic compounds produced on the planet or delivered by meteorites.

    We do not know exactly where the decisive chemistry occurred. Proposed settings include hydrothermal vents, mineral surfaces, volcanic pools, shorelines, and bodies of water exposed to repeated wet–dry or hot–cold cycles. For the purpose of our journey, picture a chemically rich puddle on the young Earth, periodically heated, cooled, concentrated, and diluted. It contained countless molecular structures bumping into one another and doing nothing that a biologist would yet call alive.

    Then some of those structures began to preserve patterns.

    When chemistry acquired a memory

    One leading account of life’s origin proposes that RNA-like molecules, or chemical predecessors with similar properties, formed chains capable of guiding the construction of complementary chains. RNA is especially interesting because it can carry information and participate in chemical reactions, two functions that modern cells distribute between DNA and proteins. This possibility lies at the centre of the RNA-world hypothesis.

    Imagine one of these early chains floating in our puddle. Its exposed chemical edges acted like molecular Velcro, attracting complementary building blocks from the surrounding water. As the blocks lined up along the original chain, they linked to one another and formed a matching sequence.

    A change in the environment—perhaps heating, drying, or another alteration in chemical conditions—separated the two chains. The original template and its new counterpart could then attract further building blocks. One became two. Two became four. Four became eight.

    The molecules had acquired an extraordinary freak property: they could make copies of themselves.

    The precise route remains unresolved, and no one has yet reconstructed the complete passage from simple prebiotic chemistry to the first living system. Yet template-directed replication gives us a plausible glimpse of the decisive transition. Matter could now preserve information beyond the temporary existence of one molecule. Chemistry had acquired a primitive memory.

    The microscopic arms race

    Richard Dawkins calls such self-copying molecules replicators. Once replicators exist, a particular logic takes over. Anything that makes enduring copies of itself will become more numerous than chemistry that produces no descendants.

    The supply of raw materials was finite. As replicators multiplied, the chemical building blocks they required became scarcer. Replication became competition.

    Copies were also imperfect. Some errors produced unstable or ineffective molecules. Others made little difference. Every so often, however, a variation gave its carrier an advantage. One replicator might remain intact for longer. Another might copy itself more rapidly or with greater accuracy. A third might appropriate fragments from rival molecules and use them as raw material.

    Replicators carrying advantageous mutations multiplied more successfully. Their descendants inherited the improved feature, occasional copying errors introduced further variations, and selection continued. Chemistry had entered an arms race over persistence, fidelity, and access to resources.

    Nothing needed to understand what it was doing. The logic followed automatically from replication with variation under finite conditions. Molecules that survived and copied themselves remained in the world; the others disappeared from the sequence.

    The first inside and outside

    Free-floating replicators had a problem. Their useful components dispersed into the environment, favourable reactions occurred only by chance, and anything they produced could drift away or be appropriated by competitors. A replicator required more than a good sequence. It needed somewhere for its chemistry to remain together.

    Certain fatty molecules offered an answer. One end of such a molecule is attracted to water, while the other avoids it. When enough of these molecules encounter one another in water, they spontaneously arrange themselves into sheets and hollow spheres. No architect is required. Their chemical properties produce a membrane.

    Some spheres would have enclosed replicators and other useful molecules by chance. These primitive compartments, commonly called protocells, created a separate chemical interior. Raw materials could enter, reactions could occur at higher concentrations, and their products could remain near one another. Researchers continue to investigate how RNA replication might have operated inside simple fatty-acid vesicles, whose membranes could grow and divide under plausible early-Earth conditions.

    The membrane changed the unit upon which selection could act. Success now depended upon a whole collection of chemical processes remaining viable together. A protocell that acquired resources efficiently, maintained its internal conditions, and reproduced its contents could outnumber less capable compartments.

    This protocell was still unimaginably distant from a psychological self. It nevertheless introduced the first material distinction upon which every later self would depend: an inside that had to be maintained against an outside.

    Once an inside existed, its conditions required regulation. Useful substances had to be admitted, harmful conditions resisted, waste removed, damage repaired, and energy continually obtained. The earliest biological individuality arose from this sustained difference between a living unit and everything around it.

    Every cell in your body still reenacts that ancient distinction across its membrane. Your psychological self appeared billions of years later, supported by an organism that had become extraordinarily accomplished at preserving itself, detecting changes, and responding to whatever crossed its boundaries.

    And that’s why you have to pay taxes

    Once replication, mutation, selection, and bounded individuality had entered the world, evolution had time to become truly excessive.

    Protocells became cells. Some cells learned to exploit sunlight; others consumed chemical compounds or one another. Cells incorporated former rivals and turned them into indispensable internal partners. Separate cells began cooperating in larger bodies. Multicellular organisms developed specialised tissues, nervous systems, memory, emotion, consciousness, language, governments, and eventually tax authorities.

    And there you have it. Life, from the earliest self-copying chemistry to the brain currently reading this sentence, is matter that learned to preserve and reproduce its organisation under conditions of relentless competition.

    This is the ultimate prequel to everything we usually discuss. Long before thoughts, feelings, wishes, and motives appeared, your most distant ancestors faced the ancient requirements of life: remain intact, obtain energy, detect opportunity and danger, and carry their organisation into another generation. Each successful lineage added new ways of accomplishing those tasks. Nervous systems eventually brought the surrounding world into the organism as perception; affect gave biological conditions a felt significance; consciousness made a small part of this immense activity available to experience.

    Your existence rests upon an uninterrupted sequence of successful replication extending across approximately four billion years. Every organism in that sequence preserved the conditions necessary for another generation to follow. The continuity reached your parents, then you, and now supports a mind capable of examining the process that produced it.

    Long before a mind could ask who it was, life had to establish an inside, preserve it, and respond to whatever approached from outside. Four billion years later, one descendant of that first organisation can turn its attention toward itself and examine what the ancient project has become.

  • Your Mind, Your Genes, and the Parts You Don’t See

    Your Mind, Your Genes, and the Parts You Don’t See

    When you think about yourself, your own history offers the most immediate material. Your thoughts, feelings, motives, and peculiarities feel personal and private, shaped by what you have experienced and by the people who have known you. All of that is true. Yet your earliest memories are not the beginning of you.

    Some parts of the self are far older than your biography. Long before your particular life commenced, evolution had furnished the human mind with capacities, sensitivities, appetites, and forms of feeling that would eventually appear in you. To understand yourself more fully, you must therefore look in two directions: toward the life only you have lived and toward the evolutionary inheritance you share with every other human being.

    Mental traits as evolved traits: the gene-centric view

    In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins reframes how we think about evolution. Instead of seeing evolution as something that happens “for the good of the species” or even “for the good of the individual,” Dawkins focuses on genes as the fundamental units of natural selection. From this perspective, you are, biologically speaking, a survival vessel for your genes.

    Genes have no minds or motives in the human sense. They are instructions that have survived across innumerable generations because they built organisms capable of surviving and reproducing. You do not exist for your genes in any moral sense; the metaphor describes the logic of selection. Traits that helped your ancestors live long enough to reproduce became more common, while the genetic variants involved continued into subsequent generations. Over millions of years, this process shaped your body and your mind.

    You already know that physical characteristics such as eye color, bone density, and immune responses arise through genetic instructions meeting the conditions of development. The same is true of mental characteristics. Your capacity for language, sense of humor, inclination to worry, readiness to form attachments, and preferences for particular social arrangements are rooted in evolutionary history. Experience influences how these inherited tendencies are expressed, strengthened, restrained, or redirected. It works upon an architecture already present.

    Mental traits are adaptations shaped by the recurrent problems faced by your ancestors. Memory preserved information about water, food, danger, social debts, and reliable companions. Fear detected threats and prepared the body to escape them. Attachment kept vulnerable offspring close to their caregivers. Jealousy protected relationships, reproductive opportunities, and resources from rivals. Humor displayed intelligence, eased social tension, and made its possessor more interesting company.

    Your mental peculiarities are engineered responses refined through natural selection across immense stretches of time. Evolution supplied the ancient architecture. And then there was your mother.

    Unconscious processes as evolved algorithms

    Freud stated plainly that sex, your libido, drives all your thoughts and behavior, but you are not aware of most of it. He wasn’t thinking about genes, but evolutionary science agrees with his philosophy. Psychoanalysis acknowledges what fits with the evolutionary insight: your mental life is mainly unconscious and driven by reproductive forces.

    You are aware only of the tip of the iceberg. Beneath awareness lies a complex, layered system of mental processes that guides your behavior, shapes your well-being, and influences the trajectory of your life. From an evolutionary perspective, these unconscious processes were structured, in part, by the biological pressures that selected certain patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior.

    Your brain is not a blank slate that experience writes upon freely; it is an evolved organ, preloaded with tendencies. Those tendencies are flexible, though never infinitely so. When you react in ways that puzzle you—avoiding effort despite wanting to achieve something, feeling anxious in an apparently safe situation, or repeating a pattern that works against your declared intentions—you may be witnessing the downstream effects of mental circuits that evolved to solve problems in another time and place, for the mighty end goal of procreation. Your “irrational” reactions can be perfectly rational in their pursuit of nature’s purpose: the continuation of life.

    Think of unconscious processes as evolved biological algorithms, rules of thumb your brain runs without consulting conscious thought. They operate rapidly and efficiently, taking precedence whenever the situation seems to demand it. A shadow moves in the grass, and you startle before identifying its source. A social bond appears threatened, and distress arrives even when the relationship itself has become harmful. You fall in love and suddenly feel prepared to nuke the life you have spent decades constructing.

    These processes remain functional, although their original purpose may diverge from your subjective agenda or from the conditions of contemporary life. In a small interdependent group, exclusion could threaten protection, resources, and survival. Today, the apparent rejection may amount to an awkward exchange in a corridor, while the ancient distress circuitry responds with considerably greater gravity.

    What you want deliberately is therefore not necessarily what your genes make you do. You may want to remain faithful to a relationship yet find yourself obsessively drawn to someone else because your mating circuitry has switched on. You may want a peaceful family gathering yet experience an irresistible surge of rivalry when a sibling receives parental approval. The conscious self states its intentions; older systems continue conducting their own affairs.

    Where the universal becomes particular

    Evolutionary knowledge can explain why human beings possess jealousy, fear, attachment, rivalry, sexual desire, and countless other mental capacities. It cannot tell us why one of them has arisen at this moment, around this person, in precisely this form. That question concerns the individual self.

    Jealousy has an evolutionary function, yet no two people experience it in exactly the same way. In one person it may centre upon sexual exclusivity; in another, attention matters more. It may awaken memories of a favoured sibling, an unreliable parent, a former betrayal, or a childhood spent competing for scarce affection. The universal adaptation enters a private history and acquires a form specific to that person.

    The same distinction applies to fear. The capacity is ancient and species-typical. The object, intensity, associations, and personal meaning develop through an individual life. One person freezes when confronted by anger; another moves immediately toward conflict. Both reactions draw upon inherited systems, although biography has arranged those systems differently.

    Evolution provides the general design. Personal history determines much of its particular expression. Psychoanalytic inquiry works where these two histories meet: the ancient functions shared across the species and the singular constellation of memories, relationships, wishes, and meanings through which they appear in one self.

    Bringing an inheritance into awareness

    The traditional task of psychoanalysis is to make unconscious happenings conscious. This matters because you cannot simply will yourself to bypass millions of years of evolved mental architecture. You can, however, progressively make more of your unconscious mental life available to awareness.

    The purpose need not begin with changing anything. A feeling may deserve attention because it is yours, because it has accompanied you for years without becoming intelligible, or because it reveals an unsuspected connection between parts of the self. Recognition gives the experience a place in your understanding, even when your behavior remains exactly as it was.

    An old tree carries its history in its shape. Some branches follow the characteristic structure of the species; others have been redirected by shade, injury, weather, and the available light. Close attention reveals how inherited form and singular circumstance produced this particular tree. The self also carries its several histories at once, visible in tendencies that seem natural, reactions that arrive without invitation, and associations whose origins have never been followed.

    Once you understand that your mind is the product of both personal and evolutionary history, several aspects of the self come into clearer view:

    • You place individual difficulties within a longer human history. Anxiety is an evolved sensitivity to possible threat; jealousy protects valued bonds; grief reflects the cost of attachment. Their presence has an intelligible biological history.
    • You distinguish the universal capacity from its particular expression. Evolution explains why a mental system exists, while your biography helps explain why it responds to these people, situations, and meanings.
    • You recognise that contradictory motives may arise from different evolved systems, each pursuing an ancient purpose. The conflict itself becomes another feature of the self to know.
    • You encounter the human and the idiosyncratic together. You carry the general architecture of a human mind, configured through experiences no one else has had in quite the same arrangement.

    Awareness may eventually change the parameters of choice. When you can anticipate a reaction and understand something of its origin, more responses may become available. Yet change is only one possible consequence. The primary movement is from an unexplained reaction toward a closer acquaintance with the self that produces it.

    Following the details

    Awareness rarely arrives in one magnificent revelation. It develops through accumulated recognitions: a feeling noticed before it disappears, a thought allowed to finish, a memory that returns beside an apparently unrelated subject, or a reaction whose intensity seems to have more to say.

    In psychoanalytic inquiry, we follow thoughts, feelings, fantasies, memories, and private associations without requiring them to justify their appearance. Repetition attracts attention. A certain tone of voice always makes you defensive. A particular kind of praise produces discomfort instead of pleasure. Someone with an otherwise insignificant resemblance provokes immediate dislike. An old song saddens you before you can remember why.

    Each detail offers a possible passage. One association leads to another; an emotion introduces a memory; a familiar reaction reveals an older expectation. What first appeared incidental begins to show its relations with other elements of the self.

    Conceptual knowledge can suggest where a passage might lead. Evolutionary theory may alert us to rivalry, attachment, status, mating, protection, or care. Psychoanalytic understanding may draw attention to conflict, defence, identification, wish, and repetition. The meaning itself emerges through the person’s experience. Theories give us routes to consider; the self provides the territory.

    Recognition deepens through return. The first appearance of a pattern may seem coincidental. Its recurrence under different circumstances begins to reveal its shape. Eventually, you may recognise the feeling before it has completed its familiar course and understand which ancient system has stirred, which personal history it carries, and why this moment has awakened it.

    Most of the mind continues along well-worn paths outside awareness. Self-knowledge allows you to notice where those paths begin, what repeatedly draws you toward them, and which parts of your history travel beside you. The resulting portrait includes both the life only you have lived and the far older history moving through you.

    What nature intended as a survival and reproductive system can become an object of deliberate reflective awareness. Human beings can recognise the forces that shaped them, think about the purposes those forces continue to pursue, and examine the singular forms they have acquired in one life. In doing so, we accomplish something no other organism has ever done: we make the ancient operations of life a subject of self-knowledge.

  • Sex, Gender, and the Making of a Self

    Sex, Gender, and the Making of a Self

    “Boy or girl?” is most often among the first questions asked about a person. The answer may precede your name. It precedes your earliest memory, and every thought you eventually form about yourself. Other people read your body, choose your pronouns, and begin to imagine who you will be long before they get to meet your personality. This first inherited account of yourself may be given so surely that it forgets to be examined. In reality, it may only partly fit, change its meaning over time, and leave many experiences unnamed. What may appear to be a simple fact paints a much larger portrait: the body you have, the place you occupy among others, and the person you recognize yourself to be.

    Sex and gender gather several different things under one name. Chromosomes, gonads, hormones, anatomy, social expectations, and personal experience. All these contribute to your self in different ways and at different times. To understand how they become part of identity, we will separate these strands and follow each from its beginnings.

    Let’s recall the basics: sex and gender

    Sex refers to a constellation of biological characteristics, including chromosomes, sex-determining genes, gonads, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, and the secondary sex characteristics that emerge at puberty. Assigned sex is the category recorded at birth, usually according to the appearance of the external genitalia.

    Gender emerges from the social and personal world that develops around sex. It includes the meanings a culture gives to being a woman, a man, or another gender; the ways you express yourself; and your own experience of who you are. Gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation describe different aspects of your self, although they may become closely associated in your life.

    Sex is multidimensional, since a person’s chromosomes, gonads, hormones, and anatomy do not invariably convey identical information. Most people develop through one of two common pathways, and the different dimensions of sex correspond closely. However, variations occur at every stage.

    The first strand: chromosomes at conception

    At the beginning, before names, expectations, or nursery colors, you were a cell. The cell carried chromosomes inherited from your two parents. Most commonly, an embryo receives either two X chromosomes, usually written as 46,XX, or one X and one Y, written as 46,XY. These combinations establish fundamental conditions for the development that follows:

    • The Y chromosome usually carries a gene called SRY, which contributes to the activation of the genetic network involved in testicular development. Its presence alone, however, does not determine every subsequent sex characteristic. Other genes must respond, gonads must develop, hormones must be produced, and the body must be capable of responding to them.
    • Variations sometimes occur during the formation of egg or sperm cells or during early cell division. A person may have a single X chromosome, as in 45,X; an additional X, as in 47,XXY; or an additional Y, as in 47,XYY. Mosaic patterns are also possible, which means that different cells within the same body carry different chromosomal combinations.

    These variations usually arise by chance, beyond either parent’s control. Their effects differ considerably. Some become apparent early, some affect puberty or fertility, and some remain undiscovered unless chromosome testing is performed for another reason.

    So, chromosomes begin the sequence. The body that will eventually be seen, named, and interpreted, develops through several further stages.

    Taking the human shape: early sexual development

    Until approximately the sixth week of embryonic development, the gonads remain bipotential: they have the capacity to develop along an ovarian or testicular pathway. A coordinated network of genes gradually carries development in one direction. SRY commonly participates in activating the testicular pathway, while another set of genes supports ovarian development.

    When testes develop, they begin to produce anti-Müllerian hormone and testosterone. Anti-Müllerian hormone influences the internal reproductive tract, while testosterone and its more potent derivative, dihydrotestosterone, contribute to the development of male-typical internal and external anatomy.

    The penis and clitoris emerge from the same embryonic structure, known as the genital tubercle. The scrotum and labia also develop from shared precursors. Hormone production, timing, conversion, and receptor response all influence the forms these structures eventually take.

    If testis-determining signals are absent or ineffective, ovarian development proceeds through its own active genetic pathway. The internal and external anatomy generally develops along the female-typical course. Sexual differentiation is so a sequence of interacting genetic and hormonal events, never a single instruction contained in one chromosome.

    When development takes another route

    Variation can enter this sequence at several points. A person may have a Y chromosome without a functioning SRY gene. The testes may produce an unusual amount of a hormone, or the body may convert that hormone differently. Hormone receptors may also respond partially or scarcely at all.

    In complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, for example, a person has XY chromosomes and develops testes that produce androgens, while the body’s cells cannot respond to those androgens. The external genitalia consequently develop in a female-typical form. Anti-Müllerian hormone is still produced, so the internal reproductive anatomy differs from that of most people with female-typical external genitalia.

    Development may also vary in an XX fetus exposed to unusually high androgen levels, as can occur in some forms of congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Depending on the timing and degree of exposure, the external genitalia may develop characteristics that do not fall neatly within the most common female or male forms.

    Such characteristics may be described as intersex traits or differences or variations of sex development. Some are visible at birth; others become apparent during puberty, through fertility investigation, or by chance. Their medical significance also varies. Certain conditions require prompt care, while others have little effect on health.

    These variations remind us that assigned sex usually reflects one visible part of a much larger developmental history and a much richer reality.

    Another layer: the developing brain

    Sex-related development also involves the nervous system. Sex chromosomes, genes, and gonadal hormones influence the developing brain before birth and continue to exert effects throughout childhood, puberty, and adulthood. Average sex differences are evident in some aspects of brain structure, function, and behavior, although the distributions overlap extensively and individuals cannot be divided into two uniform types of brains.

    The clearest human evidence for the influence of prenatal androgens concerns certain sex-typed interests and behaviors, particularly childhood play. Girls exposed to unusually high androgen levels before birth, most often studied through congenital adrenal hyperplasia, show increased interest on average in activities culturally associated with boys. These findings concern group tendencies and leave substantial variation among individuals. A review of early androgen exposure and gender development shows the evidence for effects on gender identity itself considerably less direct.

    We see that gender identity develops through a complex relationship among biological, cognitive, relational, and cultural influences. The contribution of each remains difficult to isolate, and no single chromosome, hormone level, childhood preference, or brain feature can reveal an individual’s gender identity. People with similar developmental conditions may arrive at different identities; people who share an identity may have very different biology and developmental histories.

    Biology contributes to the conditions from which a self develops, and never defines the person’s first-person account in advance.

    Puberty: the body becomes newly present

    Puberty brings another period of pronounced hormonal activity. Rising androgen levels in a typical male puberty deepen the voice, promote facial and body hair, and alter muscle and fat distribution. In a typical female puberty, rising estrogen levels contribute to breast development, changes in body shape, and menstruation. Every body produces both androgens and estrogens, although their concentrations and patterns of secretion differ.

    These changes make the body’s sex characteristics more visible and may give them a new personal and social significance. For some people, puberty brings an expected sense of continuity. For others, the developing body feels unfamiliar, unwelcome, or increasingly difficult to reconcile with their sense of themselves.

    Puberty can bring an earlier question into sharper focus, introduce a question that had never arisen before, or pass with little reflection on gender. The meaning of the changes depends upon more than the hormones themselves; it also depends upon the person who encounters them and the social world in which they are interpreted.

    How culture interprets the body

    The social interpretation of sex begins remarkably early. Once a fetus has been described as a girl or a boy, other people may choose names, colors, clothes, toys, and imagined futures accordingly. After birth, differences appear in the language adults use, the behavior they encourage, and the qualities they notice or praise.

    Children gradually learn the gendered meanings of the world around them. They observe who is expected to behave in which way, which possibilities appear available to them, and how departures from those expectations are received. They also participate in this process: they imitate, resist, reinterpret, and search for forms of recognition that make sense to them.

    Culture supplies much of the vocabulary through which gender becomes intelligible. It shapes what femininity, masculinity, and gender variance can mean at a particular place and time. The same body, gesture, preference, or form of dress may carry different meanings in another family, community, or historical period.

    Throughout development, biology and culture remain closely involved. Biological characteristics influence how other people respond to a child, while those responses influence how the child understands the characteristics. Neither process allows us to predict exactly what gender will come to mean to the person.

    Development and social interpretation still leave one dimension unfinished: the meaning these descriptions acquire in your own experience.

    When the description becomes personal

    Other people encounter your sex and gender from the outside. They see a body, hear a name, use a pronoun, and place you within familiar social categories. Your acquaintance with these things follows another course. It includes how you experience your body, which forms of recognition feel natural, how you wish to appear among others, and whether the description you inherited seems to contain you adequately. For some people, these elements remain in such quiet agreement that gender rarely becomes an object of thought, and it belongs to the familiar background of the self. Others experience gender as a distinct and intimate certainty. Still others encounter it as a question whose meaning emerges only gradually.

    The question may first appear through discomfort with a role, an unexpected ease in another form of expression, a private image that returns, or the peculiar intimacy of being addressed differently. You may notice that you feel more recognizable to yourselves in certain clothes, among particular people, or under another name. An apparently minor detail can reveal that a given description is missing something. These experiences do not invariably lead to one immediate conclusion. You may need time to distinguish your relationship with your body from your relationship with gendered expectations, expression, sexuality, belonging, or recognition. These parts can correspond closely or move along different routes.

    Gender incongruence can exist without gender dysphoria, and many people examine their gender without seeking medical treatment. It’s a consequence of the complex interplay of biological, environmental, and cultural factors and does not invariably involve distress or treatment.

    Self-acquaintance can precede any label or decision. It may bring a definite label, reveal a more complicated relationship with existing categories, or make the uncertainty itself more intelligible. And only inquiry about the experience uncovers what it really contains. Developmental science can tell us how bodies take shape and which influences are associated with certain patterns. Social history can tell us how categories and expectations arose. But the significance of those facts in one particular life becomes known only through the person’s experience of them.

    TL;DR

    Sex and gender develop over time through several related layers. Chromosomes establish some of the earliest biological conditions. Networks of genes guide gonadal development; hormones and receptors influence internal and external anatomy; the brain continues developing under genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences. Puberty makes many sex characteristics more pronounced. Culture gives these characteristics social meanings and places you within a field of labels, roles, expectations, and possibilities. Gender identity concerns your own experience within that field. Biology, culture, and personal history all contribute, while no single factor determines precisely who you become.

    The question “boy or girl?” asks for a category that describes something only sometimes useful. But the answer remains of little significance besides the person who grows from it. The category can imperfectly record chromosomes, summarize only the visible anatomy, and establish a social position that leaves much of the self ill-defined. It may sometimes begin, but never finish the portrait. What you are, how you are experienced, questioned, revised, and made your own, unfolds through the continuing acquaintance between your environment, time, and your self.

  • Ceremoniousness in Therapy Culture

    Ceremoniousness in Therapy Culture

    Lately, I’ve been seeing more therapy memes and more therapists making funny reels about their work. They share ridiculous moments from our working lives, speak without arranging their faces into expressions of profound concern, and occasionally admit that they, too, can be petty, mistaken, tired, or absurd. More therapists are beginning to sound like people you might actually know. It caught my attention because for a long time, the public image of my profession gave the impression that becoming a therapist required acquiring a new personality, complete with a superbly soft voice, an inexhaustible supply of sympathy, and a face permanently prepared for a difficult disclosure.

    The professional face

    You probably know the performance I mean. The therapist tilts their head, lowers their voice, and receives an ordinary sentence as if it has arrived from a remote and tragic civilization. Every feeling gets a solemn acknowledgment; every account of a disagreement seems to require a grave expression and a lesson about boundaries. Of course, people need to be heard, and some experiences deserve great care. What makes this particular manner questionable is its constancy. A person cannot be equally moved by everything. When concern becomes the default facial setting, it stops telling you what the therapist actually thinks or feels. You begin to wonder who’s behind it and at what point in their working day they switch on the professional mode.

    I encountered this manner as a client and later, during my training, among clinicians. And I tell you, the backstage version could be even worse. In discussions with colleagues, the voice of compassionate authority sometimes to often gets dialed even higher as the competition is tougher. People speak as though their professional knowledge has carried them beyond the ordinary human tendencies to judge, compete, get irritated, or talk nonsense. That implied elevation is hard to bear when you only want to learn how people work and discover that you’re apparently also expected to join a priesthood. It leaves you wondering how much the pose gets between the clinician and what they’re supposed to be examining.

    The client gets a part, too

    The etiquette can recruit the client, too. If the expected therapist is an endlessly sympathetic witness, the expected client may become someone who arrives with an inventory of injuries, armed with the correct vocabulary for naming every slight. Others may feel pressure to display enough distress to justify the attention they receive. Someone can have been badly hurt and still find this script embarrassing; someone can genuinely lose control without performing anything at all. The point is that a room has its customs, and people learn them. When every account of being wronged receives the same reverent response, it becomes harder to ask a less comfortable question: what else was happening there, including in me?

    Where did we get these customs? I suspect part of the answer lies in psychotherapy’s inheritance of medical authority and the expectation that a professional should possess a special composure. The profession also developed a language of attentive concern that can be useful in one conversation and stifling when applied to every conversation. Then there’s the older cultural habit of looking to an expert in human troubles for something like moral guidance. Few therapists, I imagine, set out to imitate priests, but the posture is recognizable: one person speaks as though they occupy higher ground while the other offers a confession. In a culture where psychological difficulties can also become conspicuous parts of an identity, both people have a remarkably elaborate set of roles available to them.

    The people who never book

    Some of the cost remains invisible because the people paying it never enter the consulting room. They take one look at the charades and imagine having to discuss their lives with someone who will call them brave for making a phone call, search their childhood for the meaning of a joke, or nod earnestly through an account of a perfectly ordinary bad day. They may have something serious they want to understand, perhaps a difficulty that keeps returning despite their efforts to change it. But that kind of gaze is simply to cringe to be a part of it. Others do book, spend the hour sitting in uncomfortable pomposity, and never return. They leave having been listened to, perhaps even kindly, while much of what they received had a funny aftertaste.

    I understand that recoil. I’ve felt it as a client and as a clinician. I am one of those who need a conversation in which we can examine something painful without adopting a reverent tone. Concern can be expressed without every movement of the face being recruited to demonstrate exceptional compassion. The conversation itself should be the object of attention. Psychoanalysis gives us ways to listen for what a person doesn’t yet know about themselves and to question what initially appears obvious. That work asks us to acknowledge our participation in the human mess. If you ask me, pretending to float serenely above it makes the conversation rather difficult, as does expecting you to deliver your life in the approved vocabulary of wounds.

    We can dispense with the priestly face

    This is why the silly voices make me hopeful. A meme won’t reform psychotherapy, and a television character tells us little about what happens in actual consulting rooms. Still, when clinicians speak plainly and laugh at their professional habits, people can more easily imagine what talking to them might be like. As more of us work and speak across borders, those who find the old atmosphere intolerable have a better chance of finding someone with whom they can think out loud. I hope this irreverent corner of the profession keeps growing. Serious work requires skill and close attention, including the willingness to notice when you’re wrong. The priestly face contributes remarkably little to any of it.

  • Why I Work With Childfree Freethinkers

    Why I Work With Childfree Freethinkers

    You’ve probably noticed how an ordinary conversation can acquire a surprising number of participants when you mention that you don’t have children. Some want your reasons, others predict your future, and someone who met you eleven minutes ago has already established that you would make a wonderful parent. Mention that you’re also an atheist, with zero interest in astrology or messages from the universe, and you’ll find yourself defending a second ordinary aspect of your life. You’ll end up spending the evening explaining yourself, all because of something you mentioned in passing between ordering dinner and asking for the wine. But over dinner, you can roll your eyes and eventually change the subject. In a consulting room, the same bullshit can become your treatment plan.

    You might reasonably expect never to have that conversation with a psychotherapist at all. But people before you have been advised to trust the universe or Jesus. Worse, your decision to remain childfree may get that solemn nod, complete with a tilted head and widened eyes, and get promoted to your most urgent symptom. Now you’re defending the parts of your life you were perfectly happy with, while the problem you came to discuss is put on hold.

    Being childfree and nonbelieving is a particularly inconvenient combination for anyone convinced that a proper life requires children and a higher power. Parenthood and religion supply comforting answers to questions about life and death. When neither applies to you, people can become remarkably concerned about where you’re supposed to find meaning, how you’ll be dying, and how you’ll live. The problem becomes especially unsettling when someone else’s inability to imagine your life becomes a professional opinion about your mental health. Being childfree and atheist can come with a peculiar requirement to remain relentlessly delighted or these choices become the universal suspects for every one of your difficulties. I’ve chosen to specialize in psychoanalysis for childfree freethinkers because you should be able to get help with what troubles you without being gaslit toward parenthood or a spiritual awakening.

    When childfreedom explains everything

    The underlying problem is the assumption that parenthood is the standard against which an adult life should be judged. Psychoanalysis has some history to answer for here. Some of our traditions treated motherhood as the destination of healthy female development, which meant that a woman who didn’t want children presented an awkward problem for the theory. Conveniently, the theory could be preserved by deciding that the problem was with her. Once you accept that explanation, any difficulty she brings can become further evidence of what she is missing, while the possibility that her childfreedom has nothing to do with it unnoticeably disappears.

    In a 2006 study, Debra Mollen documented experiences of women having their normality questioned, including by therapists. Her recommendations included accepting childfree women as normal; apparently, that needed putting in print. You can see why it matters when wanting children is allowed to stand as a preference while not wanting them requires supporting documentation. An unhappy childhood becomes an explanation, and a reasonably happy one can be searched until a sufficiently unfortunate memory turns up. Your past influences your preferences, just as it influences a parent’s. Having a history doesn’t turn a preference into a disease.

    The same assumption distorts how the rest of your life is understood. Being childfree can matter to a difficulty without being the difficulty itself: it may affect the expectations placed on you or the relationships through which you receive support. If a friendship changes after your friend has children, for example, you may miss the ease of being available to each other. Having a baby yourself would be a remarkably elaborate solution to wanting dinner with someone you love. The useful question concerns the loss you are describing and what it means in your circumstances, rather than whether parenthood would bring you back into line.

    That distinction applies just as much when childfreedom has no apparent bearing on what brings you to therapy. A period of depression doesn’t prove that you need children, any more than a parent’s depression proves they should never have had them. You can have made choices that suit you and still be struggling. Nor do you owe anyone an extraordinary life as compensation: there is no requirement to leave a masterpiece where a family tree might otherwise have been, or to become impressive enough that the relatives finally shut up. Your difficulties deserve attention, and the pleasures of your life deserve to count without first proving that you were right not to become a parent.

    The assumption that you need spirituality

    Secular clients have their own reasons to wonder what assumptions they’ll encounter. A 2025 U.S. study of 120 nonreligious therapy clients found that 45 percent reported at least one instance of what the researchers classified as a microaggression against nonreligious people, including assumptions that they held religious beliefs. I personally share this experience. It weakens the therapeutic relationship at least. It is difficult to speak candidly when you’re busy calculating what your therapist might make of your nonbelief, or whether mentioning it will send the conversation somewhere you’d rather not go. Wanting to know where your therapist stands is a reasonable response to that uncertainty.

    I’m an atheist, and I have no wish to smuggle the supernatural back into the room under a more fashionable name. Replacing god with the universe doesn’t make a supernatural explanation any more convincing. If someone tells you that your suffering was sent to teach you a lesson, you are entitled to wonder who approved the curriculum, and whether you can withdraw. You can want explanations grounded in biological laws of life without having your skepticism interpreted as a failure to be open. An approach can take your feelings seriously while remaining entirely uninterested in what the cosmos or e deity might be trying to tell you.

    When someone dies, the same need for wishful thinking becomes even less amusing. You may find the finality unbearable while remaining quite certain that an afterlife is a fantasy. Telling you that you’ll meet again asks you to accept a claim you don’t believe in order to receive the comfort being offered. You are entitled to someone who can acknowledge the loss on the terms in which you experience it, including the unfinished conversation for which you don’t expect another chance. Having to explain that position becomes an absolutely excessive burden at a time when life already requires considerable effort.

    The point of specializing

    My reason for specializing is to make this understanding part of the starting point. It lets me approach your difficulties in the context of the life you’re actually living, with some familiarity with the pressures you may face and no expectation that becoming a parent or acquiring a faith would put things right. Those difficulties may be closely connected to your childfreedom and nonbelief, or have nothing to do with them. Either way, you should be able to seek help without having to demonstrate that your entire life is justified before we can take its particular problems seriously.

    In regular online psychoanalytic sessions, we work on the concerns that bring you and the patterns that keep them going. We pay attention to what you say and what becomes difficult to say, including reactions you may not yet understand, and consider how your experiences have shaped the way you respond now. Questions and interpretations help us examine what keeps happening, with the aim of making changes possible. Your childfreedom and nonbelief provide some of the context; the work concerns the difficulties you want help with and the life you want to lead.

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