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There are some symbols that seem to speak to us before we have had time to think about them. The door is one of them. A door is such an ordinary thing. We pass through doors every day without much thought. We open them, close them, lock them, knock on them, wait behind them, stand outside them. And yet, in dreams, myths, stories and the inner life, a door is rarely just a door. It is a threshold. It marks the place between one world and another. Inside and outside. Known and unknown. Safety and risk. The life we have been living, and the life that may be waiting. A door may appear when something in us is on the edge of change. We may not yet know what is changing. We may simply feel restless, uncertain, called, or afraid. There may be a sense that something has ended, but the new thing has not yet taken shape. In that in-between place, the image of a door can carry great power. It may ask: are you ready to enter? But it may also ask: are you ready to leave? Not every door is open. Some doors are locked. Some are hidden. Some are forbidden. Some are only slightly ajar, allowing a strip of light to fall across the floor. A closed door may frustrate us, but it may also protect us. It may represent a boundary that needs to be respected, a part of the self that is not yet ready to be known, or a mystery that cannot be forced. In therapy, I am always interested in the feeling around the symbol. Is the door inviting or threatening? Is it old or new? Heavy or fragile? Is it familiar, like the front door of a childhood home, or strange and unknown? Are you inside looking out, or outside wanting to come in? Do you have the key? Are you knocking? Is someone, or something, on the other side? These details matter because symbols are never fixed. A door does not mean the same thing for everyone. For one person, it may suggest freedom. For another, exclusion. For another, danger. For another, hope. A locked door in a dream might speak of something withheld, perhaps an emotion, memory or possibility that remains out of reach. But it might also say: not yet. The psyche has its own timing. It often protects us until we have enough strength, support or understanding to open what has been closed. An open door can feel full of promise. It may suggest welcome, invitation, or permission. But even an open door can be frightening. There is still the question of whether we dare to cross the threshold. Many of us know what it is to stand at the edge of change. To remain where we are may feel too small, but to move forward may feel frightening. A part of us longs for the new room. Another part wants to stay with what is familiar, even if the familiar no longer nourishes us. This is often how change happens. Not in one grand gesture, but at the threshold. We hover. We hesitate. We imagine. We retreat. We approach again. The door may also symbolise choice. Once we go through, something may be different. We may not be able to unknow what we discover. We may not be able to return to exactly the same version of ourselves. This is why doors appear so often in fairy tales and myths. The hero or heroine opens the forbidden door, enters the hidden chamber, passes through the gate, crosses into the forest, the underworld, the castle, the unknown. A door invites movement, but it also asks for consciousness. What am I entering? What am I leaving behind? What part of me is ready? What part of me is afraid? There is also something deeply intimate about a door. It suggests privacy. What happens behind closed doors belongs to the inner world. Our homes have doors. Our bedrooms have doors. Therapy rooms have doors. The door protects the sacredness of the space within. So perhaps a door can also ask: what needs a boundary? What needs to be kept safe? What needs to be opened, and what needs to remain private? In the inner life, the door may stand at the entrance to a forgotten room of the psyche. A place where old grief, buried anger, unlived creativity or childhood longing has been waiting. Sometimes we spend years walking past such doors, sensing something behind them but not quite daring to turn the handle. And then, one day, something changes. A dream comes. A symptom speaks. A relationship breaks open. A book, a conversation, a piece of music, a moment of silence, touches something in us. The door appears again. This time, perhaps, we pause. We listen. We place our hand on the handle. The deeper question is not simply, “What does a door mean?” The more useful question is, “What does this door mean to me, now?” Where in my life am I standing at a threshold? What door have I been afraid to open? What door may need to close? What am I waiting for permission to enter? And if I crossed the threshold, what part of me might finally begin to live?

As the year draws to a close, I offer you my first blog. What’s on my mind today? Love - and dogs. On Boxing Day my neighbour, his little Staffordshire terrier in its harness, ready for a walk, waved goodbye to a couple of Christmas guests in their car. As he strode off the dog turned around and stared, aghast, at the visitors’ car about to leave. His daddy gently tugged on the lead to encourage him to keep walking and the dog pushed his paws into the road in a Disney stop. “No!” (I voice-overed) “I thought we were all going together! I don’t want to go with just you daddy!”. No stiff upper lip. No promises of not leaving it so long in future. No “Phew, thank God that’s over for another year…”. Just genuine doggy remorse that his expectations were not met. Thirty seconds later, he was feeling better as he sniffed the local lamppost for new and interesting smells. The resilience! Today I’ve been watching dogs in the park. Not one without its tail wagging. Each and every one seemingly thrilled to meet new friends, old friends, two-legged and four-legged, it seems to matter not. Everything is a source of amazement, but not for long. Then they’re onto the next amazing thing with barely a backward glance. How much easier life would be if we could be more dog. Relishing the moment, throwing ourselves into relationships with complete abandon. Grieving endings briefly and then moving on to the next lamppost. I know we can’t. I know the human brain is more complex and it needs to reconfigure itself after a loss. I get it. But as I prepare to say goodbye to 2022, I’ll be looking for my own metaphorical new lampposts. Grateful to have had 2022 when so many didn’t make it through. Intent upon relishing 2023 with every ounce of my being. Wishing everyone who reads this a Happy New Year and leaving you with the words of Meher Baba (February 25, 1894 to January 31, 1969) Love is essentially self-communicative: Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. True love is unconquerable and irresistible; and it goes on gathering power and spreading itself, until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches. Lynn

I wrote this in the Spring of 2012 and I can still feel the impact of the experience now. I thought I’d share it as I continue researching death, dying and grieving for my Matter of Life and Death workshops. The nest was eye-catching. Balanced on the rudder of a moored canal boat, twigs were woven together with rubbish - strips of blue, green and red plastic. A waterbird recycling project. Mummy and Daddy Coot - taking turns to sit on their five eggs - quickly became a canal-side sensation, with the birds growing accustomed to amateur photographers and commentators discussing the nest, its construction and the commitment of mother and father Coot to their eggs. Onlookers eagerly awaited the sight of the baby coots. In London, where etiquette discourages eye contact, the coots drew us together for a while. We gathered on the towpath to photograph the birds, their colourful nest and their eggs, to allow ourselves to be captured for a while by nature in the midst of a busy city. The prosaic became poetic, as we waited excitedly for an anticipated new life - beauty emerging from a pile of rubbish. How those little Coots and their five little chicks brightened the last few weeks of a dull, rain-sodden Spring. But today the nest is gone. I cover my mouth in horror. My breath becomes shallow and rapid. The adult coots are stamping on freshly-gathered twigs with their oversized webbed feet, determinedly re-building their vandalised nest. Of their five little babies, there is no sign, and as I frantically cast around hoping for a sighting, I hear someone say “Shame they nested through weeks of rain and then their chicks get eaten.” As if punched in the stomach, I exhale sharply, then feel a horrible soreness where my heart is. I wipe my tear-filled eyes with my hand and flee the scene as if distance will help. And as I trudge heavily back to work I feel the familiar sensation of shock as I wonder how I didn’t see this coming. How I never see it coming. "I learned that every mortal will taste death. But only some will taste life" (Rumi)

In the wake of the publicity around Prince Harry’s book ‘Spare’, and the allegation that Prince William accused his brother of being ‘brainwashed by therapy’, I’m tempted to say ‘if only!’ . On the other hand, I have some sympathy with Prince William’s alleged viewpoint. Let’s unpack this subject. Firstly, why do I say ‘if only’ ? I’m being facetious by saying if it were so easy brainwash our clients perhaps we’d save them a lot of time and money. It isn’t easy sitting for weeks, months or years at a time whilst a client purports to desire a change in behaviour whilst doing the opposite. But having attended therapy for years, I know my own changes were not easy. And I’m so grateful that my therapist never exhibited frustration at my resistance. Just as you wouldn’t push a little child into the deep end of a swimming pool without arm bands and lots of encouragement, nor would any therapist worth their salt try to crash through a client’s defences - developed for good reasons, usually in childhood - and attempt to force a change before they were ready. When change happens, it often happens incrementally. This is due to the nature of the brain and the ego (who we believe ourselves to be) and the ego’s astonishing will to survive intact. Making change is difficult. Period. Good psychotherapists put aside their own agenda and take the view that they don’t know what’s best for the client. The client knows what’s best for themselves. At some level they know. And although it might sometimes appear that wrong choices are being made, therapists must hold a position of humility and curiosity. We may wonder with the client what might happen downstream if they were to make this or that decision, and so on. But we need to remember that the client has a soul and that soul has its journey and what may look like a mistake to us might be the perfect healing journey that client needs to undertake in order to develop a particular quality or set of qualities to help them become more whole. To individuate. Gestalt therapy refers to the process of individuation (or becoming whole) as ‘selfing’. Selfing is a dynamic process. So, when we respond in the same old way to challenging situations (choosing to avoid confrontation, for example, or choosing full-scale confrontation as opposed to calm dialogue), we are in a very real sense avoiding our wholeness. When we take a leap of faith and choose a different way of responding to challenges, we are ‘selfing’ - taking a step towards becoming whole. So, back to Prince William’s alleged viewpoint - can therapists brainwash clients? Can they influence their clients? Of course! People can be influenced by many things - nature, nurture, our experiences, our friendship groups, what we choose to read and so on. So when we are in crisis and reach out and find a therapist in whom we place our trust - yes, of course there is the potential for undue influence. Psychotherapy training is about not influencing our clients. It’s about providing the right environment, holding space and allowing clients to find their own, best way forward. Ideally, we therapists are like Sherpa guides - we know the terrain, we have plenty of experience of the territory in all kinds of weather, we can to some extent suggest the best paths to take. But we don’t direct or decide. The route, the speed, the stops en-route, changes of direction - all these are the client’s decisions. We assist the explorer as best we can. In the therapy process, we do this by asking open questions (questions not requiring a yes/no answer) and allowing the client to explore their inner and outer worlds without interference from outside influences. However, some people are very receptive, searching for somebody authoritative to make decisions on their behalf. This can be alluring for some therapists and there’s a need to avoid being unconsciously recruited by clients wishing for this.

Each year, like many psychotherapists, I find myself carving out time not just to deepen my understanding or nourish my practice - but to prove that I’ve done so. Logging CPD hours, gathering certificates, listing webinars, copying receipts for books I have purchased, providing reasons for buying the books, and summarising the books. The process is supposed to ensure ongoing professional development. But more and more, it feels like I’m spending less time genuinely educating myself and more time just documenting that I’ve tried. Recently, I found myself summarising several books I’d read for reaccreditation - books I chose out of genuine professional interest and deep personal curiosity. Yet instead of reflecting on how they’d changed my perspective, challenged my assumptions, or informed my practice, I was caught up in turning rich insights into neat, countable units. Not for my clients. Not for myself. But for an external system that seems to prioritise evidence of learning over the learning itself. As therapists, we understand that the most meaningful growth doesn’t always fit into neat categories. It develops gradually through reflection, embodiment, and dialogue. Sometimes it occurs when we revisit a familiar text with fresh eyes, or when a passing comment in supervision sparks something profound. However, under the current reaccreditation model, these subtle, transformative experiences often don’t “count.” What does count? A ticked box. A dated signature. A record of attendance. All useful in their place, but not reflective of the depth and nuance of therapeutic learning. I wonder how many of us spend hours trying to articulate in a few lines what we’ve “learned” from a book - not for the sake of integration, but to have something to upload. And how often the time spent proving we’ve read something might have been better used to pause, reflect, discuss with peers, or even rest - because rest, too, is part of how we learn. This is not a call to abandon accountability or standards. It’s a call to reimagine professional development as a living, breathing process rather than an administrative hurdle. Could we trust therapists more to shape their learning paths? Could reaccreditation invite dialogue instead of documentation? I don’t want to become a better form-filler. I want to become a better therapist. And I suspect I’m not alone. I will be formulating an alternative re-accreditation proposal to put forward to the UKCP, and meanwhile, I would be happy to hear my colleagues' feedback on this article.