Moya Sarner
Writer at Freelance
"Sarner is beset by a gnawing doubt" -- The Sunday Times NHS psychodynamic psychotherapist Guardian columnist Author of When I Grow Up
Articles
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5 days 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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2 weeks 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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1 month 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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Do we understand this? That psychotherapy works? Of course it doesn’t always[...]But for many, it works. It saves lives. It keeps people out of hospital[...]It can allow people to stand tall when they have previously had to drag themselves along the ground https://t.co/rd4AYKoEIz
Enlightening letter by @sebkraemer on the dynamics of mental health diagnosis
nicely timed excellent piece by @MoyaSarner following two @guardian letters on diagnosis https://t.co/vvl18rXPPh
This week's column is about how we have a tendency to use diagnoses, incl but not ltd to ADHD, to close a door to our own minds - but it doesn't have to be that way. One way to open that door & develop self-understanding is psychodynamic psychotherapy https://t.co/PWrKRWddFZ
