Rumination After Loss and Trauma: Why You Keep Replaying It "Why did it happen?" "What if I'd left earlier?" "Why me?" "Why can't I get over this?" After a loss or a traumatic experience, many people find their mind circling the same questions over and over. It can go on for hours, especially at night. It feels important, as if the answer is just one more thought away. But the answer never quite arrives, and each round leaves you more exhausted than before. This is rumination

If I could point to one pattern that keeps trauma, grief and depression going, it would be avoidance. Not because people who avoid are doing something wrong. Avoidance is one of the most natural, human responses to pain there is. It's what the mind is designed to do: move away from what hurts. The trouble is that what protects us in the short term often keeps us stuck in the long term. The short answer Avoidance means steering away from painful thoughts, feelings, memories, p

Self-compassion isn't weakness or self-pity. A psychologist explains why it helps with grief, trauma and depression, why it can feel hard, and how to start.

You walk into a room and can't remember why. You lose words mid-sentence. You miss appointments you would never have forgotten before. Or, more unsettling, there are whole periods of your life you can barely recall. Memory problems are one of the most frightening and least discussed effects of grief, trauma and depression. For some people, ADHD is part of the picture too, sometimes undiagnosed until adulthood. Each affects memory in its own way, and they often overlap. The sh

Can't sleep since a loss or trauma? A psychologist explains why grief, trauma and depression disrupt sleep, and the evidence-based steps that help you rest.

"I should have seen it coming." "I should have been there." "Why am I still here when they aren't?" "I don't deserve to feel better." Guilt is one of the heaviest things people carry after loss and trauma, and one of the least talked about. It can be quiet and constant, or it can arrive at 3am with a list of everything you did wrong. In depression, it can spread until it feels like proof that you are fundamentally bad. Guilt shows up differently in grief, trauma and depressio

In an earlier post, I explained why combining Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and mindfulness is so effective for trauma, depression and grief. This post is about the how: what it actually looks like to use both approaches together in a difficult moment, on an ordinary day. You don't need to be in therapy to start using these ideas, though therapy can help you tailor them to your own patterns. The short answer Mindfulness helps you notice what's happening in your mind and

After a loss, many people quietly wonder whether what they're feeling is still grief or something more. They're tired all the time. They've stopped seeing friends. They cry without warning, or can't cry at all. Is this normal grief? Or has it become depression? It's a fair question, and not always an easy one to answer. Grief and depression share many symptoms, and they can exist at the same time. But they are different experiences, and knowing the difference can help you und

Some people come to therapy for depression and discover, over time, that trauma sits underneath it. Others come because of a traumatic experience and realise that the heaviness they've been carrying for years has a name. Trauma and depression are separate conditions, but they are close companions. Each can lead to the other, and each can keep the other going. Understanding how they interact is often the first step towards breaking the cycle. The short answer Trauma can lead t

"I should be feeling something." People say this to me after a funeral where they didn't cry. After an assault they describe as if it happened to someone else. After months of depression where nothing, not even the things they used to love, seems to reach them. Emotional numbness can be frightening. It can make you feel cold, broken or disconnected from your own life. But numbness is rarely the absence of feeling. More often, it's a sign that your mind is protecting you from

Choosing a psychologist is a personal decision. Before you book, it helps to know how someone works, who they work with, and what sessions will actually feel like. This page explains my approach, so you can decide whether it feels like the right fit for you. Who I work with I work with adults who are living with the effects of trauma, depression and complicated grief. Often, people come to me with more than one of these at once: a loss that was also a shock, a depression that

When people are struggling, they tend to ask two questions. The first is, "What do I do with these thoughts?" The second, usually later and more quietly, is, "How do I stop them running my life?" Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is very good at answering the first question. Mindfulness is very good at answering the second. For most people living with trauma, depression or grief, both questions matter, which is why bringing the two approaches together can be so effective. T

Most of us expect grief to hurt. What we don't expect is for it to frighten us. Yet many people describe the weeks after a death not as sadness but as shock. The heart pounds every time the phone rings. The same moment replays over and over. Sleep comes in broken pieces. Then, months later, the fear quietens and something heavier moves in: a flatness, a sense that nothing will ever feel right again. This isn't a random collection of reactions. It's a recognisable path, from l

Some people come to therapy saying, "I think I'm depressed." Others say, "I think I'm still grieving," or "I think something that happened to me is still happening to me." Very often, it's all three. Grief, trauma and depression are separate experiences with separate definitions. In real lives, they rarely arrive one at a time. A sudden death can be a loss and a trauma at once. Months of grief can slowly harden into depression. Trauma can leave you so numb that you can't grie

People experience a special kind of magic during nighttime sleep which brings them deep relaxation. Your body enters a sleep state when your breathing becomes more controlled and your body temperature drops. Your mental focus becomes impaired and your emotional response becomes unpredictable when you experience sleep interruptions throughout the night. The body requires sleep as physical restoration while the mind requires sleep as mental food. Research demonstrates that poor

Some mornings feel like running on a treadmill that won’t stop. Your body reacts with rapid heartbeat and your thoughts become uncontrollable while everything around you including the ringing phone becomes overwhelming. Stress enters your life uninvited because it happens without advance notice. The tool offers you a straightforward method to practice mindfulness which enables you to take breaks and obtain control of your breathing and find your center again. Mindfulness is a

Most of us spend a large part of our lives at work at a desk, in meetings, leading teams, or helping others. You’ve probably felt your chest tighten before a big deadline, or found your thoughts tangled after a long week. That heaviness, that restless buzz in your head it isn’t just “part of the job.” It’s your mind signaling that it needs attention. Workplaces can be beautiful places of creativity and connection, but they can also be pressure cookers where stress settles int

Have you ever laughed something off that secretly hurt? Or blamed stress when the truth felt too heavy to hold? That’s not a weakness. That’s your mind protecting you. In clinical psychiatry, these unconscious protective strategies are called defence mechanisms. First conceptualised in psychodynamic theory and now widely studied in empirical psychology, defence mechanisms help us manage internal conflict, anxiety, and emotional pain (Cramer, 2015; Vaillant, 2011). They are no

Do you experience overwhelming fear when someone might abandon you, even when they are still present?Do you create distance when someone becomes too emotionally close? These patterns are not random. Often, they are rooted in attachment. Attachment theory, first developed by John Bowlby and expanded through decades of research, proposes that our earliest caregiving relationships shape how we relate to others and to ourselves throughout life (Bowlby, 1988; Mikulincer & Shaver,

Why do some people develop depression, anxiety, or PTSD after traumatic experiences, while others exposed to similar events do not? The answer may lie in something quietly powerful: epigenetics . Epigenetics refers to biological processes that regulate gene expression without altering the underlying DNA sequence (Cecil et al., 2018). Think of your genes as piano keys. Epigenetics determines which keys are played, how loudly, and for how long. This growing field has transforme