Writing
NeuroExistential thought, in practice.
Here are some of the themes I explore through a neuroexistential lens. These pieces bring together neuroscience, emotional life and existential philosophy to consider how our beliefs, relationships, bodies and life transitions shape the way we live. Select a theme to read the full article.
Selected Themes
Mind Your Self
Changing self-limiting beliefs and creating a more authentic life →
Mind Your Body
Stress, the nervous system and the body’s capacity to restore →
Mind Each Other
Belonging, boundaries and the courage to connect →
Mind Your Childhood
How childhood roles can continue to shape adult life →
Mind Your Ageing
Stress, life transitions and finding new ways to live well →
Mind Your Self
Changing self-limiting beliefs and creating a more authentic life
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)
Freedom is a word we use often without pausing to ask what it truly means. What does it take to feel free? And what does it mean to feel authentically like yourself?
Existential philosophy offers a compelling answer. It invites us toward freedom of choice, toward authenticity, and toward finding meaning in the everyday decisions that make up a life. It is an inspiring way of thinking, and it often sits at the heart of existential therapy. Yet there is a catch. Long before we were old enough to choose anything for ourselves, we absorbed habits and beliefs from the people and world around us, from parents, culture, and childhood experience. We absorbed more still through our relationships and through difficult moments along the way. Without examining these, it's much harder to make real change and feel genuinely free.
If, as children, we were told, directly or indirectly, that we were not quite good enough, capable enough, or attractive enough, that belief tends to take root. It settles quietly into the unconscious and can shape how we see ourselves for years, sometimes without us ever tracing it back to its origin. It can make it harder to pursue what we want, and just as hard to fully enjoy it once we have it.
This is one of the central ideas behind NeuroExistential therapy: lasting change often depends on gently identifying and working through the unconscious beliefs that quietly shape our lives, so we have more room to live authentically and well. Freedom, in this sense, isn't only a philosophical idea. It's also something physical: being well in body and mind and being able to choose and shape a life that actually reflects what we want.
Mind Your Body
Stress, the nervous system and the body’s capacity to restore
“There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Health rarely tells only one story. Behind almost every illness we carry, a quieter thread connects the body to the mind, our childhood patterns, and what we've lived through. Understanding that connection is one of the more hopeful shifts in how we think about wellbeing today: not body versus mind, but body and mind as part of the same ongoing conversation.
Many of us sense that our lifestyle and the events we've lived through shape our health in real ways. An interdisciplinary field called psychoneuroimmunology studies how our psychological processes interact with our nervous and immune systems. Its findings suggest that when we experience physical or emotional symptoms, we should address both body and mind together. That means easing symptoms while also asking what might be contributing to them. One core idea in NeuroExistential therapy is that some of the roots of our physical and emotional state may lie in beliefs, associations, and patterns held in the subconscious. Working with these patterns can support the body's own capacity to heal.
Many unhealthy patterns take shape in childhood, when learning happens quickly and through association. A child who is bullied at school, or who struggles academically, may find that becoming ill and staying home feels like a safe response. If this repeats often enough, it can settle into an unconscious "programme" that resurfaces as illness in adulthood, particularly under stress. Sensitivities can form the same way: a certain food linked, without our ever choosing it, to a difficult moment. Gently unlinking the two can, for some people, be part of what helps the body settle again. Our minds have a quiet, remarkable capacity to shape how we experience our own bodies — and sometimes healing starts exactly there.
At the heart of NeuroExistential therapy is the idea that when we can gently separate a difficult life event from the health it may have touched, the body often finds more room to heal. For a long time, marks like these, what researchers call epigenetic changes in gene expression, were assumed to be permanent. Emerging research suggests that isn't always the case, and healing sometimes surprises us in ways we're still working to understand. It's a reminder that our inner world and our physical health may be more connected, and more responsive to change, than we once believed.
Our bodies have remarkable capacities to heal. Many medications ease symptoms and give the body room to recover on its own terms; even the logic behind many vaccines is to gently teach the body a virus's structure so the immune system is ready before it needs to respond for real. NeuroExistential therapy works the same way alongside medicine, supporting the body's immune system and the internal patterns that may have contributed to a health difficulty in the first place.
Mind Each Other
Belonging, boundaries and the courage to connect
"Hell is other people."
— Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
Sartre's play No Exit captures something many of us recognise about living alongside other people. The play is set in a single room that represents hell, with only one door. A man and two women are brought into the room, one after another, each expecting the torment they've been told awaits them there. But no torturer ever arrives. Instead, the three simply talk. As they do, the differences in their values and outlooks surface, and slowly, inevitably, they come to resent and despise one another until being confined together, with no way to leave, becomes unbearable. One character sums it up in the play's final line: hell, it turns out, is other people.
Relationships are complicated, and we rarely can simply set one aside when things get difficult. We find them everywhere: at work, within our close or extended family, among friends and acquaintances, and it's from these bonds that tension, conflict, and simmering frustration so often arise. The question worth asking is how we avoid feeling trapped, as though shut behind closed social doors, and how we build connections with others that feel genuinely good and sustaining rather than confining.
Some of us feel naturally secure in relationships, trusting that the people close to us will be there when we need them. Others carry more worry or more distance into their connections, and tend to find relationships harder going. At times, it can feel as though a friend, a partner, or a family member is suffocating or weighing us down, leaving little room for the freedom we long for. Other times, an acquaintance or colleague provokes a strong reaction, and we find ourselves puzzling over why their behaviour, specifically, stirs up so much frustration. In NeuroExistential therapy, we look inward for the source, whether it's a pattern that traces back to childhood, expectations that simply don't match the other person's, or a quiet fear of closeness itself. The aim is not only to understand where these reactions come from, but to build real resilience: the capacity to stay grounded and centred even in difficult or toxic situations, and to loosen old associations and anxieties so we can build the calm, secure connection we were looking for all along.
Mind Your Childhood
How childhood roles can continue to shape adult life
"Like the sea, very little of the inner workings of a family system is visible from the surface. The deeper you dive, the more you discover."
— Susan Forward, Toxic Parents
Family is one of the most complex systems we ever belong to, precisely because we are born into it without any say in the matter. Even when we distance ourselves physically, the influence tends to remain, since the beliefs formed in childhood, while the brain is still taking shape, settle into unconscious patterns that are not easily released later on. Existential philosophy speaks directly to this tension. It insists that we retain the capacity to choose and shape our own lives freely, even when that means departing from values we were raised to hold. The meaning and direction of a life, in this view, should ultimately be chosen by us, rather than dictated by family, culture, or society.
Susan Forward, whose words open this piece, spent decades working with adults still shaped by what she called toxic parenting, relationships in which a parent's behaviour consistently damages a child's sense of self, and toxic relationships more broadly, wherever that same pattern repeats. Her observations, along with those of many others who work with narcissistic or toxic parenting, point to something strikingly consistent: the child, often well into adulthood, carries guilt and shame for years before recognising that the way they were treated was not their fault and was never okay to begin with. Toxic and narcissistic parents tend to deflect all responsibility away from themselves, placing blame on the child for behaviour that was never actually improper, and dismissing any attempt at self defence, sentences like "you always make a big deal out of everything," "you're so ungrateful," or "after everything we did for you" are painfully familiar to many who grew up this way.
In NeuroExistential therapy, we work to identify and shift the unconscious patterns that shape how we move through the world, the ones that generate misplaced obligation and guilt, and quietly distort how we relate to others. The aim is to build patterns that genuinely reflect who we are, rather than the values or expectations we inherited from our parents, and to find a way out of guilt and shame toward a life that feels more truly our own.
Mind Your Ageing
Stress, life transitions and finding new ways to live well
“The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with those who free you.” Albert Camus, letter to René Char, 17 September 1957
Ageing is often discussed in terms of decline and prevention. Yet it is also a period when many people face profound changes in identity, relationships, and purpose. When children leave home, a career changes, and the body begins to demand a different kind of attention, familiar roles may no longer offer the same structure or meaning. The question becomes not only how to manage change, but how to create a life that still feels alive and creative.
As we grow older, we do not simply accumulate years. We also accumulate experiences: changes in relationships, work, health, family roles, bereavements, disappointments, achievements and transitions that may ask us to adapt in new ways. Some experiences are integrated over time, but others can retain a strong emotional charge. A present situation may then awaken an older sense of fear, pressure, loss, or not being enough, even when the original event is long past.
Therapy can offer a space to revisit these patterns with greater safety and understanding. The purpose is not to erase the past or make difficult experiences seem unimportant. Rather, it is to reduce the intensity with which the nervous system continues to respond to them, so that memories and old beliefs no longer feel as though they are happening in the present. This can make it easier to move from a persistent state of alertness and self-protection towards greater regulation and responsiveness. The body’s stress response is essential when there is genuine danger, but repeated or prolonged activation can create cumulative physiological strain over time.
There is an important connection between emotional wellbeing and physical health. Chronic psychological stress can place a sustained burden on the body’s systems for responding to threat. When stress remains active over long periods, it may affect sleep, immune function, inflammation, metabolism and the body’s capacity for repair. Research also suggests that persistent stress is associated with processes linked to biological ageing, including oxidative stress, changes in cellular energy production, shorter telomeres and alterations in the way genes are expressed. Inflammation also plays a role in many processes associated with ageing and is an active area of research in cognitive decline and dementia. These processes are complex, and stress is only one influence among many. However, finding ways to reduce chronic stress and support greater regulation and emotional safety may play a meaningful role in long-term health and resilience.
In NeuroExistential Therapy, we can explore longstanding beliefs and emotional patterns that may keep the nervous system in a state of vigilance, such as “I must always be needed”, “I have no value without my role” or “It is too late to begin again”. Some of these patterns may be connected to difficult or traumatic experiences that are no longer clearly remembered, yet can still be activated by present-day situations or relationships. Trauma is not always held as a coherent story. It may remain in the form of an intense emotional response, a tendency towards self-protection, or a sense of danger that feels disproportionate to what is happening now.
The work is not about erasing the past or denying the realities of ageing. It is about approaching these patterns carefully, reducing their hold in the present, and creating more room for safety and choice. When old emotional learning becomes less overwhelming, the nervous system may have more opportunity to settle out of persistent alertness and into a state that supports rest and restoration.
Existential philosophy offers a useful language for this stage of life. It asks how we might live meaningfully within the circumstances we have not chosen, without reducing ourselves to them. A parent whose children have become independent may rediscover writing, study, friendship, volunteering or a long-postponed creative practice. Someone emerging from years of caring for another person may need space to grieve, rest and gradually ask what they want their own days to hold. These are not simply practical adjustments. They are opportunities to create a path that is truthful to the life now being lived.
Healthy ageing is not only about extending life or avoiding illness. It also concerns the ability to keep doing what you value, maintain relationships, and contribute in ways that feel meaningful. NeuroExistential Therapy can provide a reflective space to meet this transition, question limiting social expectations about age, and shape a more authentic relationship with your body, your history, and the possibilities still available to you.