Dr Alla Demutska

Dr Alla Demutska I am an experienced clinical psychologist who can help you improve your psychological health and general wellbeing.

I am committed to delivering the best quality care. I use evidence-based intervention to achieve the best outcomes. As an experienced clinical psychologist, I bring over 12 years of clinical work to help you enhance your psychological well-being and overall quality of life. I worked with a diverse range of clients in a number of settings, including private practices, public and private psychiatric

hospitals, outpatient programs, and universities. I have been providing individual and group-based therapy using a range of evidence-based interventions. I established a successful private practice nestled in the heart of Fitzroy North, Melbourne, Australia. However, in 2019, I made the bold decision to close my practice and start a new chapter in Singapore. My passion for exploring diverse cultures and lifestyles led me to this exciting crossroads. Over the course of nearly four years, I was a Lecturer at James Cook University, Singapore, where I had the privilege of guiding and supervising students in the prestigious Master of Psychology (Clinical) program. It was a rewarding experience that allowed me to share my expertise and shape the next generation of mental health professionals. Today, I am deeply honored to fulfil the role of the Clinical Director of Counselling and Psychotherapy at the School of Positive Psychology in Singapore. I find great joy and purpose in my role, which enables me to make a meaningful impact on the field of psychotherapy in Singapore. Simply put, I love what I do, and I am dedicated to helping individuals to progress to greater well-being, self-discovery, and self-realisation.

14/08/2026

Something came up for me recently around the inner critic that I did not expect.

I have been working on mine for years. Serious work - the kind that involves personal therapy, training in multiple modalities, clinical practice with clients who carry the same pattern. I know the theory. I know the mechanisms. I have sat with this material from the inside and from the other side of the room.

Recently I was exploring what it would actually feel like to stop being demanding of myself. Not theoretically - to feel into what it would mean to let the internal pressure go. I know, at a cognitive level, that I do not need the critic to function. I have evidence of that. What came up when I actually felt into it was not a thought.

A small girl.

A real felt sense of her. And with it, an understanding I had not had words for before: if I stop being demanding of myself, she has to accept something she has spent her whole life refusing to accept. That her parents are not going to get nicer. That no amount of effort, improvement, or getting it right will change that.

The critic keeps that acceptance at bay. It keeps the door open - the one marked: if you just do better, something might shift.

Letting go of the inner critic does not feel like freedom. It feels like telling that small girl that the thing she has been working toward is not coming.

Inner critic work does not resolve cleanly. It moves through layers. Each layer requires what the previous ones could not reach.

Has this landed for you somewhere? I'm curious what layer you are in.

Full piece here: https://drallademutska.com/blog/inner-critic-adaptive-function-attachment.html

If you want to work with your own critic more directly, I've put together a free guide - a two-day noticing diary, the four types of inner critic, and why silencing it does not work (fillable, or copy the diary into your phone). There's also Witnessing the Critic, a guided audio practice with its own fillable sheet. Get it here: https://drallademutska.com/inner-critic-guide

The feeling on the surface is often not the one that needs attention. Save this if you have ever worked hard on an emoti...
13/08/2026

The feeling on the surface is often not the one that needs attention. Save this if you have ever worked hard on an emotion and nothing shifted.

I put together a free guide - two reflection worksheets and a short audio practice - to help you get underneath what's actually going on. Get it here: https://drallademutska.com/emotion-guide

The voice in the mirror knows exactly where to lookA voice shows up in the mirror. Most women I know have it. It does no...
12/08/2026

The voice in the mirror knows exactly where to look

A voice shows up in the mirror. Most women I know have it. It does not wait to be invited. It arrives the moment you look, and it goes straight to what is wrong.

For me it started young. My mother's commentary about my legs, my shape, what I should and shouldn't wear. That men would not find me attractive. I internalised it so completely that by the time I was an adult, I could no longer tell the difference between what I actually saw and what the voice told me I saw. I thought the criticism was accuracy. It was not. It was a trained attentional pattern that had been running for years without my awareness.

I worked on this properly in my thirties. Thomas Cash's evidence-based body image programme, the exercises, and slowly learning to look without the distortion narrowing everything down to evidence of what was wrong.

Then midlife arrived. The body changed. And the voice came back - softer than before, but recognisable. Now it had new material.

Because I look different now. My skin is not what it was. There are other changes too - the kind the voice knows exactly how to find and point to.

And there is another layer.

My partner has mostly dated women significantly younger than me.

So the comparison is not abstract. It is right there.

Which brings ageing - and the insecurities that come with it - directly into view.

So I am returning to the practices. And I have adapted the ones that helped me most into a free guide specifically for women in the second half of life - for this version of the struggle, with an ageing body and decades of accumulated criticism already in the background.

The guide starts with the Magnifying Glass exercise - mapping exactly where your attention contracts when you look in the mirror, and what it avoids entirely. It comes with a guided audio practice.

https://drallademutska.com/magnifying-glass-practice

This is about learning to appreciate your body - to see it clearly, with gratitude and care. To look with the kind of clear, loving attention that distortion has made difficult.

11/08/2026

I finished a full day of teaching trauma in Singapore last month, walked through the heat, and felt my body come down. The alertness that had carried me through the day loosened. My shoulders dropped. I noticed hunger, tiredness, the plain wish for a bath and silence.

That coming-down is relatively new for me. For most of my life my body did not do it. After anything demanding it would stay switched on for days, scanning, braced, unable to find its way back to rest. I called that being driven. It was closer to being stuck.

We tend to picture mental health as calm. A steady person who does not get rattled. The research points somewhere else. Kashdan and Rottenberg, reviewing decades of work, described psychological flexibility as one of the better-supported markers of health - the capacity to shift, to meet what the moment actually asks for instead of running the same response regardless. Steven Hayes built ACT around a related idea he called workability - less about which state you are in, more about whether you can move.

Porges' polyvagal work says something similar about the body. Activation is meant to pass, and so is shutdown. Health is the return trip - up when you need to act, down when it is safe to rest, and the road between them open in both directions.

I think of the years I could only go up. And the years, after burnout, when I could mostly only go down. Neither of those was peace. Peace, when it came, looked more like range.

I still get stuck. Some days the road closes and I cannot find my way back to rest no matter what I know about it. I am not writing this from the far side.

The change was never about becoming calmer. I can move through more of my own states now than I could, and find my way back down.

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08/08/2026

Research on early maladaptive schemas suggests unrelenting standards are among the most stable across treatment. The tone of the inner critic often softens long before the underlying demand does. Recognising the adapted critic is part of the work, not the end of it.

If you want to learn more, I've shared a free guide - a two-day noticing diary, the four types of inner critic, and why silencing it does not work (fillable, or copy the diary into your phone). There's also Witnessing the Critic, a guided audio practice with its own fillable sheet. Get it here: https://drallademutska.com/inner-critic-guide

You track how your body looks, not what it can do.Not by choice. Decades of appearance attention train the eye to collec...
06/08/2026

You track how your body looks, not what it can do.

Not by choice. Decades of appearance attention train the eye to collect one category of evidence, and by midlife the file is thorough. You could probably list your flaws in order without pausing. Meanwhile the same body carried all the shopping up in one trip, walked the long way home, dug the garden over, held the plank ten seconds past the usual stop. That evidence exists in the same body, every week, and goes unrecorded.

One small weekly practice works on that gap. Once a week, choose one act for what the body can do, and for nothing else. Do it from inside the body, as much as you can, rather than watching yourself do it from outside. Afterwards, two ratings from 0 to 10: how capable the body felt doing it, and how much you enjoyed it. Written down, because written is what accumulates.

The ratings are the practice, not the acts. The numbers are not meant to climb. A 4 does the same work as a 9, because the point is the category of evidence, not the score. If you catch yourself training for the ratings, or the act stretching each week so the number holds, the watching habit has found itself a new job. Drop the ratings for a week and keep the act.

Compliments cannot do it for you. Kind words from someone who loves you are real, and they do not change what your eye collects the next morning. The record that shifts attention gets built one act and two numbers at a time.

The other half of this work is where the eye goes in the first place. My free guide for midlife women maps exactly that - where your attention goes first when you look at your body, and what it never takes in. Comment BODY below and I will send it to you.

The capability was there every week of the past decade. Writing it down is the only new part.

If you'd like to explore that, my free guide for midlife women maps exactly this - where your attention goes first when you look at your body, and what it never takes in.

https://drallademutska.com/magnifying-glass-practice

I thought working with what I felt meant processing it. I was wrong.For years, when something painful happened in a rela...
05/08/2026

I thought working with what I felt meant processing it. I was wrong.

For years, when something painful happened in a relationship, what surfaced was not the pain. It was withdrawal. Or a flat disconnection - a sense of having stepped back behind glass. The hurt was there, somewhere, but something else had covered it, and that was the thing I kept working with. I named it. I explored it. I traced it in the body. Nothing shifted.

I know the frameworks. I know the language. I could name what was happening in my body and track sensations. I assumed that meant I was truly connected to what needed attention. I was not.

What I was working with was a secondary emotion. Real, present in the body, worth knowing about - but pointing away from what actually needed to be reached. Emotion-focused therapy makes a distinction I have come to rely on: primary emotions are direct responses to what is happening now. Secondary emotions are reactions to the feeling underneath - anxiety sitting on top of grief, anger covering fear, withdrawal covering hurt. They are not false. But they are not pointing toward what needs attention.

The difficulty is that secondary emotions are often louder, more familiar, and easier to work with. They show up first. They have a logic to them. Working on them diligently, for a long time, can feel like progress without producing it.

The question that shifted something for me: not what am I feeling - but what kind of feeling is this?

I still do not always know the answer immediately. Sometimes that is where the work has to begin.

If you want to learn to ask that question of yourself, the free guide walks through the four types of emotion and how to tell them apart, here is the link: https://drallademutska.com/emotion-guide

04/08/2026

I grew up in a home where rest had to be earned.

My father would call me during the school holidays - not to ask how I was, but to check what I had learned that day. What new words. What progress. Rest was something you were allowed only after you had produced enough to deserve it.

So my body learned the equation early: do a lot first, then maybe you can stop. For years I could not rest without a finished list and a clear conscience. Even on holiday, I was working.

I am unlearning it. Slowly, and not always well.

Living in Bali helps. The offerings people set out at dawn for no reason other than devotion. The way beauty here is not something anyone earns. It reminds me that rest was never a reward for effort. It is simply yours.

You don’t have to earn yours either.

04/08/2026

Affirmations never touched my inner critic. I used to think I was doing them wrong.

I was not. The critic is holding onto hope - that if I finally get it right, good enough, successful enough, easy enough to love, the love that was missing will arrive. That is why it comes back after every win. It has already found the next floor.

This is why “you are enough” bounces off. It argues with the belief and never reaches the hope underneath.

Letting the critic soften means grieving that hope. That grief is the real work. And it is where something loosens.

A free clinical guide on the inner critic and the kinder voice underneath - link in bio

For years women were told brain fog was stress. This week WHO put it on the menopause agenda by name.Maybe you have had ...
04/08/2026

For years women were told brain fog was stress. This week WHO put it on the menopause agenda by name.

Maybe you have had the appointment. You describe the fog - the lost words, the dropped threads, the feeling of your own mind slipping out of reach - and you leave with the word stress and a vague suggestion to slow down. And some part of you walks out wondering if you made it all up.

You did not make it up. The science was missing, not the symptom.

This week, two things happened at once. WHO held a public session on menopause, brain fog and mood - by name, on the official agenda. And Rutgers launched a research initiative on menopause as a brain transition, not just a reproductive one. The brain finally entered the menopause conversation, at the level of the institutions that decide what gets studied and what gets taken seriously.

Why did it take this long? Because midlife women were barely in the brain research at all. For decades the studies were done on other bodies, and a doctor cannot check your fog against data that was never collected. So the fog got filed under stress, and the woman got filed under anxious.

What changes now is small and enormous at the same time. At your next appointment, the fog is not your word against the clock of a fifteen-minute consult. It is a recognised symptom of a recognised transition, with WHO's name behind it.

The research is still arriving, late and unevenly. But you were never imagining it - the science simply had not looked yet.

If a doctor sent you home with "stress", you can go back with more than your word this time.

If you'd like reflections like this in your inbox, you can subscribe here: https://drallademutska.com/subscribe

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