The Point at Which You No Longer Need Them to Do It

There is a stage in prolonged coercive control that receives almost no attention in the clinical literature and virtually none in public conversation. It is the stage at which the external source of gaslighting becomes unnecessary. By that point, you are doing it yourself. This is not a metaphor. It is a specific, observable psychological […]

The Safest Place to Run an Abuse Detection Tool Might Not Be the Obvious One

The logic is straightforward. Digital abuse happens on phones. Messages arrive on phones. Screenshots are taken on phones. So the tool that analyses those messages should live on the phone too. Several AI tools for detecting manipulation and documenting coercive behaviour have now launched as mobile apps, and that logic is sound as far as […]

When the Tool Finds Nothing

There is a result from an AI abuse detection tool that nobody talks about. Not the false positive, where the tool flags something that turns out to be nothing. The false negative: where the tool finds nothing, and the person using it concludes that nothing is wrong. For most applications, a false negative is a […]

What the EU AI Act Actually Bans, and Why Practitioners Keep Getting it Wrong

A client asks whether the app her employer has introduced is something she should worry about. A consultant wants to know which conversation-analysis tool you would recommend to an organisation trying to get ahead of a harassment problem. A colleague asks whether the thing advertising itself to her clients as manipulation detection is legitimate. These […]

Every Time You Think in a New Way, You Expand Your Nervous System

There is a particular quality to the difficulty of abstract thinking that is worth naming, because most people experience it as a failing rather than as a feature. When asked to move from the specific to the abstract — to keep asking “what is this an example of?” until they arrive somewhere genuinely unfamiliar — […]

What Gossip Actually Is — and Why It Feels So Hard to Stop

Most people, when asked why gossip is problematic, will give answers that focus on the consequences: it damages relationships, it spreads misinformation, it creates a culture of distrust. These are all true. And they are almost entirely ineffective as reasons to stop. The people I have encountered who successfully changed their relationship to gossip did […]

The Boundary That Doesn’t Ask to Be Loved

There is a pattern I have seen enough times to recognise its shape immediately. Someone has a conflict with a person they care about. The conflict is real: something happened that was genuinely not okay. The other person shouted, criticised, dismissed, or hurt them in some way that left a mark. There is a period […]

How to Find Yourself in Behaviour You Find Abhorrent

There is a version of the projection model that I find actively harmful, and I want to address it before going any further. That version says: because everything in your experience is a projection, you are responsible for what other people do to you. If someone treats you badly, you created that reality. Their bad […]

I’m Promising You Nothing — and That’s the Point

There is a question I get asked, in various forms, whenever I talk about the deeper levels of transformation work. What do you actually get? It is a fair question. And the honest answer is: nothing I can point to in advance. I can tell you what I have seen happen. I can point to […]

The Physical World Is So Compelling It Makes Us Forget There’s More. That’s the Trap!

I want to talk about something that does not often get described clearly, because the people who have experienced it tend to reach for language that is too large, and the people who haven’t tend to dismiss it before the sentence is finished. The thing I want to describe is this: there is a particular […]