Tee Landman, Counselling Psychologist

16/07/2026

Turning Toward What Hurts: Trauma and Psychotherapy Beyond the Promise of Cure. This post explores what trauma informed psychotherapy can offer when it works outside of a 'quick-fix' model.

Trauma therapy that avoids pain often keeps it alive. A psychoanalytic and existential view of facing trauma, and what psychotherapy can honestly offer.

27/06/2026

27/06/2026

In Self Psychology, we understand that our sense of self grows through relationships and the emotional experiences that help us feel seen, supported, and connected.

If Self Psychology interests you, visit the IAPSP website — it’s full of resources, ideas, and opportunities to explore further: http://www.iapsp.org?utm_campaign=meetedgar&utm_medium=social&utm_source=meetedgar.com

12/06/2026

“How do I practice more self-compassion?”
The wellness industry often tells us to regulate our emotions: breathe, ground yourself, challenge your thoughts, stay calm.
While these can be valuable tools, emotional regulation is not necessarily the same as self-compassion. Many of us become very good at managing our feelings while remaining deeply critical of ourselves. We learn how to calm the anxiety, but not how to understand why we speak to ourselves with such harshness in the first place. From a psychoanalytic perspective, self-compassion, requires us to become curious about the internal relationships we have developed over a lifetime.
Why do we hold ourselves this way?
What makes kindness toward ourselves difficult to believe?
Sometimes the challenge is not learning how to be compassionate. Sometimes it is understanding why compassion feels so foreign, undeserved, or even dangerous.
Self-compassion begins not with fixing ourselves, but with becoming curious about the history of how we learned to treat ourselves.

29/05/2026

We often think “bad communication” is the problem, but more often, it’s a doorway into deeper emotional patterns. In our relationships, we replay old relational blueprints - projecting unmet needs, fears, and hopes. If we listen closely, we might just hear the longing beneath the words.

28/05/2026

26/05/2026

A small but meaningful professional moment.

I’m excited, and honestly quite proud, to have been invited as a panelist for the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

It feels deeply affirming to be in conversation with international colleagues in the psychoanalytic field, especially from a South African clinical and theoretical context. Psychoanalysis can sometimes feel like a private, quiet, patient and often solitary kind of work, so moments like this matter.

Grateful for the invitation, and looking forward to the discussion.

https://iarpp.net/colloquium/on-dreaming-parasomnia-dream-enactment-and-murder/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

21/04/2026

Not every painful pattern in your life will change because you “change your mindset.”

If you keep finding yourself in the same kinds of relationships, the same emotional dead ends, or the same familiar hurt, it means something unconscious is being repeated.

In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, repetition is understood as the mind’s attempt to return to what is familiar, even when it is painful. You may be trying, unconsciously, to finally get from others what you did not receive earlier in life. That is why insight matters. Real change does not come from surface-level advice. It comes from understanding how these deeper patterns are shaping your emotional world.

26/03/2026

New on the blog: The Architecture of "Us": Reflections on Couples Therapy. This post provides a clinician’s intimate take on the repetitive loops, exhaustion, and court-room style dynamics many partners bring into therapy. Read more: https://wix.to/LyD6SYp

These blogs are a way for me to grapple "out loud" with my clinical work and what it actually means to sit with human suffering. Lately, my focus has turned to couples and intimate partners.Often, when intimate partners come into the consulting room, the air is thick with a very specific kind of anx...