Dr Alla Demutska

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Dr Alla Demutska

I am an experienced clinical psychologist who can help you improve your psychological health and general wellbeing.

I am committed to delivering the best quality care. I use evidence-based intervention to achieve the best outcomes. As an experienced clinical psychologist, I bring over 12 years of clinical work to help you enhance your psychological well-being and overall quality of life. I worked with a diverse range of clients in a number of settings, including private practices, public and private psychiatric hospitals, outpatient programs, and universities. I have been providing individual and group-based therapy using a range of evidence-based interventions. I established a successful private practice nestled in the heart of Fitzroy North, Melbourne, Australia. However, in 2019, I made the bold decision to close my practice and start a new chapter in Singapore. My passion for exploring diverse cultures and lifestyles led me to this exciting crossroads. Over the course of nearly four years, I was a Lecturer at James Cook University, Singapore, where I had the privilege of guiding and supervising students in the prestigious Master of Psychology (Clinical) program. It was a rewarding experience that allowed me to share my expertise and shape the next generation of mental health professionals. Today, I am deeply honored to fulfil the role of the Clinical Director of Counselling and Psychotherapy at the School of Positive Psychology in Singapore. I find great joy and purpose in my role, which enables me to make a meaningful impact on the field of psychotherapy in Singapore. Simply put, I love what I do, and I am dedicated to helping individuals to progress to greater well-being, self-discovery, and self-realisation.

09/04/2026

Authenticity is often described as something simple.
Say what you feel. Be natural. Stop adjusting yourself for others.

But when you look closely, it becomes far less straightforward.

Many of the reactions we experience as most “authentic” are simply the ones our nervous system has rehearsed for years. They feel true because they are familiar. They are predictable. They have protected us before.

I remember a friend who was trying to change the way she argued with her partner. They were learning to slow conversations down, to pause instead of escalating. She told me it felt unnatural. Artificial. As if she was pretending to be someone else.

What she was actually encountering was unfamiliarity.

If you grew up around emotional intensity, chaos can feel honest. Calm can feel staged. Dysregulation can feel like self-expression. Regulation can feel like performance. Over time, however, new ways of relating can settle into the body. What once felt forced begins to feel like a deeper alignment.

This is why authenticity cannot simply mean expressing whatever arises in the moment. Our impulses are shaped by fear, shame, attachment history, and survival strategies. They are real. But they are not always the most truthful reflection of who we are underneath.

Authenticity often requires a pause.
A willingness to ask: which part of me is speaking right now?

Strangely, the most authentic movement is not always comfortable. It can feel exposing rather than natural. It can bring anxiety rather than relief.

Sometimes what feels most like “yourself” is simply what you had to become in order to survive.

And sometimes becoming more yourself begins by accepting what initially feels foreign.

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08/04/2026

There is a widely circulating idea that estrogen creates a broader attentional field, making women more “interruptible,” while men sustain a narrower, more continuous focus.

It resonates because it maps onto everyday experience.

But the neatness of the explanation invites a closer look.

Estrogen does influence brain function.

Research in neuroendocrinology shows that it modulates activity in the prefrontal cortex (involved in executive function), the hippocampus (memory), and networks related to emotional processing. Across the menstrual cycle and menopause, fluctuations in estradiol are associated with changes in cognitive flexibility, verbal memory, and sensitivity to social and emotional cues.

In practical terms, this can look like a wider attentional field - tracking multiple inputs at once, registering shifts in tone, context, and relational signals alongside a primary task.

But the research does not resolve this into a simple difference between men and women.

Findings are variable. Effects depend on factors such as sleep, stress, age, and baseline cognitive style. Large-scale psychological research also shows that differences in attention are shaped not only by biology, but by learning, environment, and socialisation.

There is no strong evidence that men sustain focus more effectively simply because of testosterone.

What seems to emerge instead are tendencies, not rules.

One style of attention is broader, more open to multiple streams of information, more responsive to emotional and contextual cues.

Another is narrower, more contained, and easier to sustain within a single channel without being pulled outward.

Most people move between both, depending on context.

Continue reading in the comments below. ↓

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👉 If you’re curious about how attention, emotion, and relationships shape your inner world, join my email list. (link in the bio)

07/04/2026

Traumatic memory is frequently encoded in implicit networks rather than explicit narrative form. Van der Kolk's research demonstrates that trauma is stored differently than ordinary memories-in sensory-based, fragmented forms rather than integrated verbal narratives.

This is why individuals may understand their history cognitively, yet experience intense physiological reactions to cues that resemble earlier threat.
The body responds first. Interpretation follows.

When someone with trauma history encounters a trigger-a tone of voice, a physical sensation, a smell-the amygdala activates before the prefrontal cortex can contextualize the information.

The reaction feels present-tense because the implicit memory system doesn't timestamp.

It encodes: this happened. Not: this happened then.

Effective trauma processing therefore requires approaches that engage sensory and somatic systems, not exclusively verbal analysis.

Language can organize experience, but integration depends on reconsolidation within affective memory circuits.

This is why approaches like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy focus on body-based processing alongside cognitive work.

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02/04/2026

There is a message circulating everywhere now: listen to your body.
Trust the feeling. If it feels wrong, don’t go there.

For many people this was a necessary correction.
There are histories where internal signals were ignored for too long.

Relearning how to notice tension, fear, exhaustion or resentment can be profoundly regulating.

But there is another reality.

Sometimes the body is not warning you about danger.
Sometimes it is warning you about expansion.

A nervous system organised around earlier threat does not distinguish easily between risk and growth. Visibility can feel like exposure. Responsibility can feel like pressure. Opportunity can feel like threat. Not because the situation is unsafe - but because becoming more present in your own life was never neutral in the past.

The texture of the discomfort matters.
Growth often carries fear and aliveness at the same time.
Misalignment carries a contraction - the sense that something essential in you is being asked to disappear.

There is no formula that resolves this instantly.
What helps is asking.
Where exactly is the fear coming from?
What is this situation asking of you - more honesty, or more self-silencing?

Sustainable growth rarely happens through force.
It happens through graduated contact with what feels difficult.
Approach. Stay long enough to gather new evidence. Then rest.

The nervous system updates through experience, not through reassurance.

The real question is rarely whether discomfort exists.
It is whether what you are moving toward is worth the stretch of becoming more fully you.

Full article here: https://drallademutska.com/resources/general/growth-vs-misalignment-nervous-system/

01/04/2026

When Old Trauma Resurfaces in Perimenopause

For many women, the changes don't arrive as a clear event. They arrive as something that simply stops working the way it used to.

Emotions that felt containable begin to feel closer to the surface. Reactions feel unfamiliar, sometimes frightening. Old material surfaces that you thought you had dealt with, or at least filed away. Many women read this as regression. As proof that something has gone wrong with them.

But here is what I keep coming back to: for years, possibly decades, the nervous system has been doing something remarkable. Holding things together through control, productivity, cognitive strength, emotional management. These were not character flaws. They were intelligent adaptations. They worked because the biological conditions that supported them were stable.

Perimenopause changes those conditions. New research from Emory University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides the first direct human evidence that estradiol plays a central role in regulating how the brain responds to threat - and that when estradiol fluctuates or declines, that regulation is disrupted. Specifically, lower estradiol was associated with heightened activity in the central amygdala, the region most involved in fear and threat detection. The hormonal scaffolding that helped the nervous system manage distress begins to shift. And what it was holding begins to move.

There is something else in the research worth naming. Traumatic stress appears to interfere with estradiol's regulatory effects on threat circuitry. For women carrying unresolved trauma - and many are, beneath years of high functioning - this is not simply a hormonal transition. It is a moment when the distance that once felt manageable becomes harder to maintain. Not because they are falling apart. Because the body is withdrawing its cooperation from strategies that were never meant to be permanent.

Large longitudinal studies show that nearly 40 to 45 percent of women experience clinically significant depressive symptoms during the menopause transition. I don't think that number reflects fragility. I think it reflects how much women have been carrying, for how long, without accurate information or real support.

What I find myself returning to is this: the nervous system is not failing. It is refusing to continue doing something it was never designed to do indefinitely.

The real question is not why this is happening now. It is whether we are willing to meet it - rather than manage it back into silence.

Why Old Pain Surfaces in Perimenopause

There is a pattern I see clinically, and increasingly in research, that I think deserves more direct conversation.

Women in their forties and early fifties - particularly those with histories of childhood adversity - experience significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety during perimenopause than women without those histories. The 40 percent increased risk of depression during this transition is not evenly distributed. It concentrates in women who carry unresolved early experiences.

The question worth sitting with is why perimenopause specifically.

For many high-functioning women, the nervous system has spent years managing historical pain through control, productivity, emotional compartmentalisation, and staying in motion. These were not flaws. They were intelligent adaptations that allowed achievement and functioning despite significant early adversity. They worked because the neurobiological conditions supported them.

Perimenopause changes those conditions.

Declining estradiol affects the prefrontal cortex, reducing its capacity for emotional suppression and executive regulation. The amygdala becomes more reactive. Research suggests estrogen fluctuation affects the hippocampus's capacity to contextualise memory - including, potentially, its ability to distinguish past threat from present safety. Serotonin and GABA systems destabilise. New Emory University research published in PNAS provides the first direct human evidence that estradiol shapes the brain's threat-detection circuitry, and that traumatic stress disrupts this regulatory effect specifically.

The result is that the neurobiological capacity to override or suppress emotion reduces - sometimes significantly.

Clinically, this looks like intrusive memories returning without clear trigger. Emotional reactions that feel disproportionate to present circumstances but make complete sense as responses to historical patterns. Previous coping strategies - staying busy, cognitive reframing, willpower - stopping working. Somatic anxiety that mirrors earlier trauma responses. Many women interpret this as going backwards. As proof that they have failed, or that their earlier work meant nothing.

The reframe I return to is this: perimenopause does not create trauma. It removes the neurobiological capacity to suppress it.

The body is not betraying these women. It is withdrawing consent from strategies that were never meant to be permanent.

This has real treatment implications. When the underlying driver is unprocessed historical material surfacing under reduced hormonal capacity, symptom-focused intervention alone often provides limited relief. Trauma-informed approaches -somatic therapies, nervous system regulation work, methods that reach implicit memory rather than cognition alone - become central, not supplementary. Evidence suggests estrogen may help alleviate PTSD symptoms, so HRT may also restore enough neurobiological stability to make that processing possible - though this remains an emerging area. Psychoeducation reduces the shame that makes everything harder.

The opportunity inside this window is real. For women who have functioned for decades through suppression, this may be the first time their system has the conditions to actually metabolise what it carried.

That is not regression. That is the body finally trusting that it is safe enough to feel.

Read the full blog post here: https://drallademutska.com/resources/general/trauma-resurfacing-perimenopause-childhood-experiences/

Dr Yvonne Sum CSP

30/03/2026

Many high-functioning adults organize their lives around staying capable and in motion. This is often interpreted as ambition or discipline. At times, it is. At other times, it is structured avoidance.

Stephen Porges's Polyvagal Theory describes neuroception-the nervous system's unconscious safety detection. This process happens below conscious awareness, continuously scanning for threat or safety cues. It prioritizes protection over exploration.

If certain emotional states were once associated with collapse or abandonment, the system will learn to bypass them. Chronic exposure to overwhelming emotional states-particularly in childhood when we lack the neural development or relational support to process them-teaches the nervous system that these states are existentially dangerous.

Understanding avoidance as protective shifts the work from self-criticism to recalibration. The aim is not to dismantle defenses prematurely, but to update them. To show the nervous system through experience that what was once unbearable can now be felt and survived.

27/03/2026

I thought I learnt to feel my emotions. Years of therapy, practices, workshops, and ceremonies gave me language, awareness, and familiarity with fear, sadness, and grief. I could name what was happening in my body. I could track sensations. I assumed that meant I was truly connected.

At a recent workshop in India, I encountered something different. I met hopelessness, helplessness, and despair not in a contained or controlled way, but fully, directly, and viscerally. My body felt nauseous. I cried. I stayed present, even as every instinct in me wanted to escape. I was supported, yet internally it felt like stepping into an abyss - a place without edges, without reassurance, without any sense of when or how it might end.

What came was not a single memory, but a flood. Childhood powerlessness. Being unseen and unprotected. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the fear of having nothing to eat, winter without heating while it was minus twenty outside. All of it arrived together, as if the nervous system no longer needed to keep these experiences separate. I kept bringing myself back to the body, repeating: stay with sensation, stay here, don’t disappear into the story. There was no distance this time. I wasn’t watching it happen. I was inside it, and it was frightening.

It became clear how much of my life has been organised around never entering that territory. Around pushing forward, staying capable, staying productive, staying in motion. I could see how consistently I had moved away from these states through anger, achievement, planning, and constant doing - anything but letting myself feel that kind of collapse.

And at the same time, something else was happening. I was not alone. I was guided. I was held. Allowing myself to soften into these feelings - rather than bracing against them - changed their quality. What had felt overwhelming began to feel workable. The feelings did not disappear, but they lost their terror. They became part of my internal landscape rather than something I had to outrun.
There was curiosity. A sense of openness. A willingness to let these states exist without immediately trying to fix them.

And after staying with them, I began to feel exhilaration and joy. There was a strong sense of love, and an ability to receive love without bracing against it. It surprised me. I could feel it clearly in my body.

It was striking to experience how entering such deep despair made space for joy to be felt - not as an opposite or a reward, but as something that had been unavailable before.

I want to say this clearly. Healing is not linear. There are experiences that cannot be moved through alone, no matter how reflective, resourced, or capable we are. At times, support and hand-holding are necessary. Asking for help, and allowing it, is part of staying in contact with life rather than hardening against it.

Everything in me needs presence and welcome - including terrifying feelings, intrusive thoughts, and overwhelming sensations. These states are not mistakes to correct or symptoms to eliminate. They deserve to be seen and held with gentleness because they belong to me. They persist not because they are pathological, but because they were once ignored.

Much like a child who needed protection and care and did not receive it, these parts continue to signal until they are met.

26/03/2026

Many women in a midlife transition report increased irritability.

They describe shorter tolerance, sharper reactions, less willingness to accommodate.

It is often framed as hormonal instability.

Sometimes it is.

But often the anger is not new. It is cumulative.

For decades, many women over-functioned. They anticipated needs, absorbed emotional labour, stabilised systems, avoided conflict, and stayed reasonable. They negotiated around other people’s comfort.

Midlife transition reduces the ability to keep doing that without consequence.

The body no longer supports chronic suppression. The nervous system signals sooner. The resentment that was manageable at thirty becomes intolerable at forty-five.

I would look at anger at this stage as information rather than regression or something to be afraid of. It can reveal where boundaries were unclear, where the load has been excessive, where accommodation replaced authenticity, and where personal needs were repeatedly overridden.

The question is not how to eliminate the anger.

It is how to decode it.

If the anger is chronic, it may be pointing to structural imbalance - in relationships, in work, in internal standards.

Many women try to soften themselves again. To regulate harder. To return to being agreeable.

But midlife does not reward suppression. It rewards alignment.

Anger that is metabolised becomes clarity.

Anger that is dismissed becomes bitterness and long term resentment.

This stage asks a direct question:
Where have you been saying yes when you meant no?

Read the full article here: https://drallademutska.com/resources/general/midlife-anger-boundary-renegotiation/

25/03/2026

Research on emotion regulation consistently shows that suppression reduces expression but not physiological arousal. In many cases, it increases sympathetic activation.

Gross and Levenson (1997) conducted experiments where participants watched emotionally evocative films while suppressing their emotional expression. Physiological measures showed increased heart rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance-despite appearing calm externally.

More importantly, habitual suppression correlates with reduced access to positive affect. Emotional systems are not designed to be partially engaged. When we blunt distress, we often blunt joy. Longitudinal research by Gross and John (2003) found that habitual emotion suppression predicts decreased well-being, lower life satisfaction, fewer positive emotions, and increased symptoms of depression over time.

Suppression is an intelligent short-term strategy, especially in unsafe environments. The difficulty arises when it becomes a chronic mode of functioning. Over time, what was protective becomes constrictive.

19/03/2026

As psychologists, we are trained in cultural humility. We are taught to monitor bias, bracket ethnocentric assumptions, and avoid imposing our worldview onto clients. In theory.

But is it truly possible to sit with full openness when a client’s values directly violate our own?

Can I work with someone who supports the war in my country? Can a therapist deeply committed to monogamy support someone who is cheating and has no intention of stopping? Where does competence end and self-betrayal begin?

This question stops being theoretical in the therapy room.

I can analyse my countertransference. I can identify which parts of me are activated. I can tell myself, “This is my pain point, not the client.” I can understand it intellectually.

But that is not the real issue.

The real question is whether I can remain non-defensive, non-moralising, and emotionally available in the room. Whether my body stays open. Whether I stay within my window of tolerance. Whether my warmth is genuine or forced.

Professional ethics do not require us to erase our humanity. They require us to practice within competence and avoid harm. Competence includes emotional capacity.

Research on therapeutic alliance consistently shows that warmth, empathy, and congruence are among the strongest predictors of outcome - regardless of modality. If I am contracted, morally charged, or guarded, clients will sense it. Even if nothing is spoken. That contraction can sometimes become material to work through. But it can also undermine the safety of the space.

Fortunately, I do like my clients. The warmth I feel toward them is real. I also have the privilege of choosing who I work with. I do not work with perpetrators or in forensic settings. In my current context, it is relatively easy for me to feel positive regard.

There is a difference between understanding where a client is coming from and regularly sitting with someone you fundamentally do not like or whose values are really challenging for you. I can understand the origins of a behaviour. I can contextualise it developmentally, relationally, historically. That does not automatically mean I can offer steady warmth toward it.

And that raises a difficult question.

If a therapist repeatedly works with clients they tolerate without genuine positive regard, if the internal contraction is chronic rather than occasional, is that still ethical?

Understanding is one thing. Sustained relational presence is another.

The deeper question may not be whether we can see clients whose values differ from ours.

It may be:
Where is the edge between growth and not being helpful?

17/03/2026

Affect tolerance is often misunderstood as emotional strength. It is not about enduring pain through willpower. It is about the nervous system's ability to stay engaged without fragmenting.

This capacity forms in early attachment contexts where distress is met with steady regulation. Infants cannot regulate their own arousal. When distressed, they rely on caregivers to provide soothing, which gradually teaches the developing nervous system how to self-regulate.

When that scaffolding is inconsistent or absent, adults may experience strong emotion as destabilizing rather than informative. Dan Siegel describes this as the "window of tolerance"-the optimal arousal zone where we can effectively process emotions. When emotional intensity pushes us outside this window into hyperarousal (panic, rage) or hypoarousal (shutdown, dissociation), our capacity for integration collapses.

Therapeutic work involves building tolerance incrementally, allowing intensity to be metabolized instead of avoided. The emphasis is not on becoming less emotional, but on increasing range without losing coherence.

12/03/2026

For a long time, feeling my body did not feel safe.
I knew my father’s mood from the sound of the key in the door. I could tell, before he entered the room, whether yelling and throwing objects would follow. My body was not a place of pleasure. It was a radar system. Hypervigilance became normal.

As a child, I learned to disappear into books. I could leave my body and enter another world. That dissociation was not dysfunction. It was adaptation.
In my twenties, I avoided the gym. An elevated heartbeat felt threatening. Exercise made my body loud. I thought something was wrong with my heart. I did not yet understand that activation in a traumatised nervous system can be misread as danger.

Later, as I studied trauma, I began to question that assumption. Perhaps nothing was medically wrong. Perhaps sensation itself had been paired with threat.
There was another layer. My father represented volatility. My mother represented emotional absence. My clearest memory of her is dissociation in front of a television. If I was too alive, too expressive, too activated, it may have overwhelmed her. Dampening myself preserved connection.

So now, when I move toward aliveness - through dance, breath, exertion - resistance still appears. Not because I do not want vitality. But because aliveness once had relational consequences and because there was a time when being fully in my body meant being fully in fear.

This is not about forcing myself to feel more. It is about slowly allowing my body to learn that sensation is not the same as danger, and vitality is not betrayal. I am still in that work.

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Thought Partner Studio, The Riverside Piazza
Fitzroy North, VIC
059608

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https://drallademutska.com/

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