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1 week ago | 
msn.com | Moya Sarner
Continue reading More for You
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1 week ago | 
msn.com | Moya Sarner
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Moya Sarner
We can try as hard as we like to build a better life for ourselves and our loved ones, but the truth is that sometimes things happen that are very difficult to recover from. Terrible, traumatising, crushingly painful things.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Moya Sarner
When people seek therapy – and I know this, because I too was once a person seeking therapy – we often want strategies, techniques and tools for our toolboxes. We want to be asked questions and to know the answers; we want to ask questions and to be given answers. We believe that these are the things we need to build a better life.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Moya Sarner
I was moved to read of the grief expressed by so many at the brutal felling of the Sycamore Gap tree. I found it surprising. Not the crime itself: I know well the unconscious drive we all have within us to destroy good things – the most valuable, the most beautiful, the most life-affirming things. What took me by surprise was the capacity that so many people found within themselves to express their devastation and anger at this painful loss, not only to us as individuals, but as a nation.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Moya Sarner
Many of us tend to diminish ourselves and others with some snappy, reductive phrase rather than dig more deeply in search of understanding. Enter the idea of the “people pleaser”. The term has a ring to it; it rolls off the tongue and its meaning seems self-evident. It feels comfortable and anodyne. We know where we are with a people pleaser. But do we really? I hadn’t taken the time to think about it until recently.
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2 months ago | 
theguardian.com | Moya Sarner
There is a national conversation – or perhaps more a national talking at each other – taking place at the moment, about an “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, is concerned too many people are being “written off” in this way. I spend quite a lot of time thinking about this subject, alone, with colleagues, with patients as a therapist, and as a patient in therapy myself.
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2 months ago | 
theguardian.com | Moya Sarner
I don’t remember the context in which my psychoanalyst first brought to my attention how much I hate to feel disappointed. I do remember that I laughed. Who doesn’t hate it? That’s why it’s called disappointment, as Seinfeld would say. But then I reflected on what she had said, and it really made me think. I began to wonder why it is that disappointment is so particularly loathsome for me – even more than grief, or pain, or envy.
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Mar 24, 2025 | 
theguardian.com | Moya Sarner
During lockdown, I was sitting on my balcony in the sunshine one morning when I witnessed a brutal killing. I heard a loud, mechanical-sounding buzz behind me and went to investigate. I found a fly caught in a web, buzzing and shaking, fighting to escape. I watched as a spider darted from one side of its prey to the other and back again, using its legs to wrap its silk round and round the fly. At first, the fly seemed to buzz more and more loudly and shake more and more vigorously.
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Mar 10, 2025 | 
theguardian.com | Moya Sarner
The other night, I got home from work feeling very tired. It was really cold and what I really wanted for dinner was a jacket potato. In fact, I wanted two. So I heated the oven, slathered my potatoes in oil and sea salt and cooked them for an hour and 20 minutes. I was so tired that I neglected to complete the final step, an error that risked turning this very ordinary dinner into an explosive disaster: I forgot to prick my potatoes. Guess what happened.
