Books
Pilgrims - Second Edition
A psychotherapist I was supervising had a dream, in which I had written two books -Pilgrims and The Story of My Life. I took this dream as a requirement that I should write these books, and the first, Pilgrims, was published by Random House in May 2005. I have now revised and added to the original manuscript, and the book is now available in a Second Edition as an eBook, Paperback, and Hardback.
“A tender and intensely moving account of an extraordinary journey, a beautiful and uplifting story of transformation in the final chapter of life. .. This book charts what is possible, with love and wisdom, when death brings us face to face with the ultimate meaning of our lives.”
— Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
“A moving, profound exploration of life, death and regeneration.”
— Oliver James, author of They F** You Up: How To Survive Family Life*
For an article on me and Pilgrims that appeared in The Observer Magazine click here
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Series: The biography of a system
A Boyhood - The Biography of a System Book 1
The first book in this three book series, The Biography of a System, can reasonably be expected to be available on Amazon in 2025 ... or 2026. Each book is one part psychological memoir and one part popular psychology, and all are written for the men who were fleeced of their souls in childhood, and for the women and others who are trying to understand and love them.
The format allows for an unflinching account of the monstrousness of normalisation and its collateral damage. After my having first cultivated an emotional bond with readers through my own story, a story that is both personal and universal, I aim to both break the heart and lift the spirit. I do so, in the case of A Boyhood, by piecing together the torn-out pages of my own early years - pages my family and the institutions that surrounded them would have had me torch. I show, through memoir and psychology, how our system separates a boy from his own nature, innate morality, and inner life, robbing him of essential ways of relating to the world, to others, and to himself.
The innate emotional literacy of childhood is perhaps the most valuable gift we can nurture in any child, boys and girls equally, but instead we all pay a heavy price for the dysfunctional standard of masculinity society holds boys to. The world teams with immature, emotionally impaired, destructive men stumbling their way through relationships and the world like children lost in the dark. But there is a door, a way through.
The door is still open ...
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Articles
I wrote this article for the magazine The Psychotherapist in 2008. It seems to me it has stood up well over time. I wrote it after fifteen years of training people to become psychotherapists in London. They were either undertaking diplomas or M.A.s in psychotherapy and counselling.
I came to the conclusion, pretty early on in this work, that you can't train a person into being a psychotherapist. Rather, a person needs to undertake an apprenticeship over a period of something between ten and twenty years - more like twenty - in which they are working as a psychotherapist, learning from their patients, from undergoing their own therapy, and from the kind and honest guidance of a master of the craft. This is because psychotherapy is a craft, not a science and not an art - although it requires both. Click on the link above.
Conversations with No Subject
Thoughts on the therapeutic dance.
I wrote this article for The Psychotherapist in 2009. It seems to me psychotherapists are trained to intervene, when 99% of the time it would be better for them to accompany. I try to make that point in this article.
I was interviewed by Ed Marriott ofThe Observer newspaper, and the article was published in the newspaper's Society suppliment on Sunday May 1st 2005. The topic of the interview was my book Pilgrims.