Terry Burridge Counselling

03/08/2026

Some thoughts about depression, based on my own clinical and personal experience.

. “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”― John Keats, Letters of John Keats I hesitate to try and write about depres…

25/07/2026

A tale of the unexpected - how we came to live in Aylesbury.

I like words. Always have done. As a child I used to fill a notebook with my stories. When I was about 9 or 10, I was told I could enter an essay writing competition. My imagination was rich enough…

30/06/2026

Why I write

I was thinking about my reasons for writing. It's a narcissitic activity. Adding yet more words to the already huge word mountains we try and tackle each day. Let alone the forests and lakes of conversation we try to navigate. From the beginnng of my writng this blog I've had in mind the image of joining up the dots of my life in the hope that others will see familiar patterns....

I was thinking about my reasons for writing. It’s a narcissitic activity. Adding yet more words to the already huge word mountains we try and tackle each day. Let alone the forests and lakes …

23/06/2026

Apparently around 600 million blogs were written last year. Sensibly, I decided the world needed one more.

So I've started a blog.

Expect reflections on life, books, teaching, fantasy novels, growing older, and whatever else happens to wander through my mind. There may even be elephants and the colour yellow at some point.

My first post is called Words Are All I Have. If you'd like to have a read, the link is below.

08/06/2026

I've started to blog again. Hope you enjoy it.

31/03/2026

This piece is based on the work of the based of the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich. He wrote a sermon about sin and its meaning. Rather than listing “Sins” Tillich argues that sin is:

“… separation. To be in the state of sin is to be in the state of separation. Separation is threefold: there is separation among individual lives, separation of a man from himself, and separation of all men from the Ground of Being.”

So Tillich argues that Man is permanently estranged from himself and The Ground of his Being (aka “God”. Or more loosely the numinous. Or that which we classify as “the wholly other”.) In my clinical work over the years - as a mental health nurse and a counsellor - I have created a new category of “Existential separation”. My experience is that so many of our emotional crises are based in a deep sense of alienation. Alienation from all those people, places and things that root and nourish us. I’m reminded of those folk whom one used to see pushing a shopping trolley carrying all their important possessions. Literally a mobile home. In my clinical work I’ve seen the psychological equivalent. They might have a street address but they are camping out in it. Emotional squatters.

The clinical work is to ground these people. To help them become “persons of substance”. Rooted and grounded in the knowledge that they count. As Tillich wrote “Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous YES to one's own true being.” If I’m besieged by psychotic, persecutory voices all day or feel so valueless that killing myself is my only response then something is missing. A sense of being connected. To the Ground of our Being, which is where we grow and thrive. And that sense of disconnectedness is so often at the root of our distress.

If this were a piece about our physical health, I could write about the need for daily vitamins. But here I want to include our emotional health. A daily walk in the park just to look at the natural world. Literally the birds and the bees. A minute or two to appreciate a sunset. Activities that ground us and remind us of our place in the wider world. A small exercise but one that is as important to our spiritual and emotional health as are vitamins are to our physical health.

Photo By raschau - https://www.flickr.com/photos/raschau/43099112594/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75457129

09/03/2026

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning”. Viktor Frankl

The past few months have been difficult for me. About two years ago I had severe cycling accident in which I broke both my ankles. This meant being an inpatient for about three weeks and “disabled” hobbling around my house in a wheelchair or on crutches for several more months. I am not “good” patient”. Thirty years as a psychiatric nurse has left me highly critical of what I see as poor care. But that’s another story. Again, recently, I was hospitalised with colon cancer which was found early and successfully treated. But it was another blow to my body and my sense of self. The most recent challenge was crashing off my mobility scooter and breaking a hip and shoulder in the process. These three events have left me with a severely compromised sense of self. Until two years ago I saw myself as fit, able to do a 50 mile bike ride and go the gym twice a week. Plus gardening. That seems a long time ago. Currently I can’t go anywhere without my trusty zimmer frame to keep me balanced. I do not enjoy it. In my head I’m still that fit seventy year old cyclist turning up for a club run. Not an invalid who hobbles about the place, needing to be toileted every few hours.

So what has this to do with my Viktor Frankl quote? I think it’s about meaning or meaning making. Trying to create a new jigsaw out of the remnants of two or three other ones which are only partially complete. (So I have the Eiffel Tower sitting in the middle of the Sahara desert with the Thames running underneath it. It’s a work in progress!) You see my point. I’m having to salvage things that were never meant to be together in order to create something new - and workable.

My work background is in psychiatry. Looking back I’d call myself a mental illness nurse since very little of my time was spent in practicing good mental health. Nor in helping my patients learn good survival techniques. We were primarily a crisis service taking people off the battlefield of their lives and giving them the care they needed to go out and fall again. And again. And again. I often look back at my time in the front line and wish I’d spent more time listening and less time doing. (One of my most valued compliments came from a patient whom I’d nursed, often when he was unwell and floridly psychotic. One day I was walking in the garden with another patient and bumped into James, also an inpatient - “Look after your nurse’” he said “He’s one of the good ones.” I glowed for the rest of my shift. I’d made a difference to at least one person.)

My broader point is about the translation of psyche as mind or brain. It can equally well be translated as soul which take us into a different realm, I think. For me, soul speaks of the essence of a person. My “who am I-ness?” It is this distinction that is so often missing in current medicine, particularly psychiatry. We prescribe antidepressants galore when the underlying problem is with their soul. We prescribe antipsychotics when what is needed is to bring together the cut off parts of their soul as represented by their voices etc. For me, this is soul making.

The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich once preached a fascinating sermon about Sin. In it Tillich probes the meaning of sin and grace. He suggests that sin is best understood as something deeper than moral violations. It is an estrangement or separation from others, from ourselves, and from the Ground of our being.

That echoes my own view of clinical medicine which misses the mark when I choose to accept the definition of psyche as “mind” not “soul”. I am cut off from the ground of my Being. From the Other. From my soul self.

I’ll end this blog with a quote from the poet Keats who wrote “Some say the world is a vale of tears, I say it is a place of soul-making."

05/01/2026

The Real Meaning of Christmas?

One of the questions I most often ask my patients is “What does that mean to you?”when they are describing an event or experience. The answer is revealing. It is an important question because It allows us to think about their value system. So, two people can describe a similar experience but respond to it in quite different ways. (Think of the story of three blind men in a room with an elephant. Each man describes the elephant differently because they cannot see the whole creature. So in therapy. Each person describes their experience from their current viewpoint. It is part of the task of the therapist to bring to light other aspects of the patient’s story. To create a more 3D picture.)

This blog was prompted as we celebrated, or not, Christmas. Today is the twelfth day of Christmas, when decorations are traditionally taken down and we can reflect on the event as a whole. Christmas is always a demanding time. An almost impossible event to try and ignore. It divides us into factions. Those who love Christmas and those who loathe it. Each year we hear the cry that we are missing the “real* meaning of Christmas. Which begs the obvious question, “Is there a” Real “meaning to Christmas?

So with the “Real” meaning of Christmas. There can be no “true” meaning. For some it’s a religious festival, celebrating the birth of Jesus. For others it’s a family time. Where we all try and get on with each other for a protracted period of time. (In the UK the divorce rate goes up post New Year with January known as Divorce month). For some it’s a time for Good works, helping with a soup kitchen or similar. For others, the fortunate ones, it can be a time to relax and enjoy some well earned downtime. In any event Christmas is unavoidable. (Ironically, even the act of avoiding Christmas can serve as a reminder of what we are trying to avoid!).

The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan describes The Real as “the dimension of experience that lies beyond language, symbolization, and imagination”. It seems to me that we might describe a “real” Christmas in similar terms. All too often Christmas is overlaid not with Gold , Frankincense and Myrrh but with impossible dreams of a kind of emotional Never-Never land where reality does not prevail and growing up doesn’t happen. (Not too surprising that the su***de rates also go up in January. )

So, what am I saying about the “real” meaning of Christmas? That as Lacan puts it, the whole event is laden with unconscious values and expectations such that “Reality” finds itself homeless - along with the infant Jesus. As my work with individual patients is to help them build a full and complete picture of themselves and their lives, so this blog is an attempt to allow people to build a “Real” Christmas - whatever that might look like.

And your “Real Christmas” will be entirely different to mine. Your Christmas might be Midnight Mass followed by a celebratory glass of something. Your neighbour might be in their local enjoying a few beers and a darts match. There is no “True” Christmas to find. There is only the Christmas you create each year. And there is the “secret”. You own Christmas, not vice versa.

(Photo by Morgane Le Breton on Unsplash)

19/12/2025

A week ago I came out of hospital following surgery for cancer of the colon. It was successful from a medical perspective. They found and removed the cancer with no secondaries discovered. As one nurse put it “You’re lucky. Nobody wants cancer but bowel cancer is the best kind to have.” ( A league table of cancers. A new thought although I take the point! I was “lucky” in that my symptoms were not severe and the cancer was caught in its early stages.)
I was duly admitted to hospital arriving for a 7:30 a.m. appointment for surgery that day. It was a little worrying to find the doors locked, nobody on duty and diversion signs barely obvious.
(Long live our NHS? Maybe.).

This was disconcerting, having got up at 5:30 to avoid the traffic and get a parking space. When we were finally on the ward, the de-personalisation process began. Away with my day clothes and on with the theatre gown as I left behind my civilian identity and became hospital number 123456 (or its equivalent.) The rest of the day is lost to my memory as I underwent a six hour operation. The next thing I remember is being woken up to have my blood pressure taken. (An important part of hospital life. Every morning at six is B.P. time. It’s almost a sacred ritual.)

My point is not to complain about having my B.P. monitored. Nurses have their tasks to do and making sure I’m still alive is an important one. But it’s the lack of any useful information about one’s stay in hospital. And some of the important information was wrong which delayed my surgery by a week until the error was corrected. It meant missing an important family occasion because I wasn’t well enough to travel.The free flow of information it wasn’t!

In 1988 a psychoanalyst, Elizabeth Menzies Leith produced a book on nursing and its defences. In it she suggested that nursing is structured and organised in such a way as to minimise nurses becoming over emotionally attached to their patients and suffering the repeated pain of saying “Goodbye” many times over. She suggested that the whole structure of nursing was a defence against these anxieties. The task oriented nature of Adult nursing. The shift patterns and the whole ethos of a ward or clinical area are designed to keep a “safe” distance between nurse and patient and to avoid any painful attachments.

Certainly this was my experience over a week . No nurse ever introduced themselves as my Named nurse for the shift. Or indeed ever introduced themselves. There was no attempt made to get to know me as a fellow human being. (Despite being corrected by me a half a dozen times a shift, I was consistently called “Terence” instead of my usual “Terry”. Why waste my breath? Simply that I was “Terry” and have been most of my conscious life. If you’re going to nurse me, at least call me by my proper name. It’s not difficult.)

What added insult to injury was that my ward overlooked the university campus where I had worked for a number of years. I taught in the nursing department of the Faculty of Health. Fortunately I taught Mental Health nursing. Otherwise I might have despaired and gone to Tesco stacking shelves!

So, my score card for the staff who nursed me recently. A rather feeble 5/10 “Must try harder. Much room for improvement.”

20/11/2025

There’s a reason Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam is considered one of the most important images in the history of art. God reaching out to Adam — that nearly–touching moment — has come to represent the giving of life, consciousness, and perhaps even something deeper: a meeting between two beings that irreversibly transforms them both.

It’s this idea of meeting that I want to explore, particularly through the lens of the philosopher and theologian Martin Buber, whose writings on “I and …” relationships have shaped the way many of us think about human connection.

Buber described three fundamental kinds of relationships: I–It, I–You, and I–Thou. It’s the last of these that interests me here. He describes an “I–Thou” encounter as a direct, mutual, sacred way of relating — one in which individuals meet each other as whole beings. I often think of it simply as Personhood. Others might call it God, the Divine, the Transcendent, the Wholly Other. Whatever the word, the sense is the same: being connected to something bigger than myself.

And yet describing this kind of connection is notoriously difficult. Words buckle under the strain, as T.S. Eliot reminds us: “Words strain, crack and sometimes break…” So, with due humility, I’ll do my best — and trust you’ll follow what I mean.

What did Buber mean by I–Thou?

You may have heard the phrase “a moment of meeting” in psychotherapy. It refers to those rare instances of deep connection and shift — when therapist and client meet each other not as roles, but as real beings. They don’t happen often, and when they do, they feel like a gift.

A moment of meeting is a little like the creation of a child. No one can claim sole authorship; it’s always a joint effort. In therapy, the therapist creates the conditions for change, but nothing happens without the client’s readiness to receive, respond, and co-create the transformation.

But these moments aren’t limited to the therapy room. Like grace, which I wrote about in a previous blog, they can appear anywhere, often when we least expect them. And this is where Buber becomes especially helpful.

A concise definition of I–Thou might be:
A mutual, direct, authentic encounter where each person meets the other as a whole, unique being — without judgement, agenda, or objectification.

These encounters can happen in prayer, worship, s*x, nature, play, or any moment of genuine intimacy. Sometimes they show up in the most ordinary places: in supermarkets, queues, bus stops, or gyms.

Just the other day in my gym, a woman I’ve been chatting with recently told me she hadn’t spoken to anyone all day and felt lonely. I listened. I nodded. I made a mental note to invite her over for dinner. It was small, unplanned, and unmistakably an I–Thou moment.

I’m due for surgery later this week and expect to be in hospital for about a week. I wonder how many I–Thou encounters I’ll have there. Last time I ended up nearly having a fist fight with a nurse who decided I was “difficult and demanding.” One hopes not to meet him again.

Two encounters stand out from my years as a counsellor and nurse.

The first happened in a park with a patient. We were watching pigeons doing very pigeon-like things. I began humming Tom Lehrer’s “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” My patient joined in, and soon we were strolling through De Crespigny Park singing Lehrer at the tops of our voices. Fortunately, no one heard us, or we might both have been sectioned.�It was absurd, joyful, and unexpectedly sacred.

The second happened on a ward. I had arranged four times to spend an hour with a patient, and four times I’d had to cancel because of ward pressures. On the fifth attempt, I went to cancel again.

“I’m sorry, Tim, but I’ve got to cancel our meeting again,” I said.

“That’s alright…” he began. Then he stopped. “No. It’s not alright. I want to talk with you.”

There it was. Realness. Personhood.

I said, “Give me two minutes.”�I went back to the office, handed the keys to another nurse and said, “I haven’t managed to see Tim all week and he’s cross. See you in an hour.”

For me, that was a profound I–Thou moment. My patient had become real, and so had I.

So wherever you are, in hospital, in the park, in the gym, in a queue, in prayer, or in conversation, may your days be filled with I–Thou encounters.�Or perhaps more accurately: may they find you.