Stimmung Therapy Services

25/09/2026

Therapy is effective if the therapist is prepared to enter their client’s worldview. This is the only way for the client to trust you with their vulnerability when they inevitably hear themselves talk about how things don’t actually work for them anymore.

Don’t you think?

24/09/2026

Ask whether your choices for your children may actually be choices for you.

It’s a hard gauge to get in parenting, says a woman who’s never had her own children😄.

Seriously, though, I see how difficult being a parent for my teenage clients’ caregivers can be when two or more care-givers’ values on parenting don’t align.

I see how my adolescent clients articulate to me their grievances, their wishes and how they are unable to pe*****te a parent’s fixed mind on what’s best for their child. I witness parents trying their best to prevent their children “making the same mistakes” they did and sticking to an autonomous dynamic. I see parents allowing their neurodivergent teenage child to rule the roost at the expense of the rest of the family.

Opening up a parent’s mind to another way of relating to their teenage child/ren without completely giving up their values is a challenge for all involved, including me.

And it’s not prescriptive because it needs to incorporate the core personalities of both child and caregiver.

It warrants collaboration, repetition and the parent and their child learning to bear the anxiety and pushback that comes with change.

14/09/2026

I’m very excited to have been invited to be a panellist at next month’s Existential Courage conference, and speaking with all these people, some of whom I’ve never yet met😃 I’m especially delighted to see Dida here too🤗

11/09/2026

10/09/2026

Marking World Su***de Prevention Day.

***dePreventionMonth

10/09/2026

Practical advice on how to have some difficult conversations.

09/09/2026

Intersex Awareness Week is next month. Some people’s meanings of normal or normative will be challenged, but intersex is another, occasional, natural biological occurrence.

03/09/2026

When I was little, we always went to visit Gran in Sunderland for our summer holiday. So I learned to paddle, bob and swim in the cold water of the North Sea from a very young age.

At some point I learned about seahorses.

I assumed they were the same size as land horses.

I was already wary of horses because of their great, bony heads and the way they can suddenly throw them back.

So I became increasingly nervous about getting out of my depth at Roker or Seaburn beaches, in case seahorses were swim-galloping beneath me and one might suddenly come up underneath my bobbing body and toss me out of the water.

I was about six.

I wondered why nobody else seemed concerned.

I never asked.

Years later I saw seahorses on the telly.

How disappointed I was.

They were tiny. Pretty, but tiny. Nothing like the enormous, mythical sea creatures I had imagined.

I didn’t realise until I was about fourteen that seahorses were always tiny.

Nobody knew I’d believed this, because I’d never told anyone.

So these days I can laugh about it.

Although I still get the frighteners when I think about the seahorses in the famous Guinness “Good Things Come to Those Who Wait” advert.

At least I can now swim in deep water without fear of being ambushed by an enormous seahorse.

I just have to hope they don’t release the Kraken.

And perhaps this explains something.

These days, when my expectations aren’t met, I can feel foolish — a bit of a mug. I feel I should have known how it really was going to be.

With people, places, experiences, whatever.

Maybe my reaction isn’t always about what’s happening now.

Maybe, sometimes, it’s still about the seahorses.

What happens for you when your expectations aren’t met?

30/08/2026

Choice is a by-product of freedom. With freedom come responsibility: this is a certainty, and out of your control. Thus you are responsible for the consequences of your choice. It tells us something about who you are.

You are also free not to choose.

Which is also a choice (the consequences of which you are responsible too).

Maybe you choose both - or all, or everything. Eschewing responsibility doesn’t disperse it: in that there is no choice.

22/08/2026

“There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone,” said paediatrician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.

One day father must stop fathering. For now he must be the best father he can be, or at least a “good enough” father. The excitement, the uncertainty, the surprise, the knowing, the worry, the not knowing, the joy, the loss, the volatility, the sleepless nights, the hope, the unsolicited advice, the intuition, the expertise, the wonder, the watching, the missing the moments, of who she is becoming with him.