Tara McKee, Registered Psychotherapist and Sex Educator

12/14/2025

Sometimes, feeling out of step with the world is exactly the sign you’re still sane. Jeanette Winterson’s insight cuts through the noise of our frantic times, reminding us that the trouble often isn’t inside us but in the world we’re trying to navigate. She’s not just offering comfort; she’s flipping the script on what it means to be broken.

Winterson’s work from ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’ to her memoir ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’ has always explored the tension between an individual’s inner truth and a world that often feels fractured and hostile. Her writing refuses to pathologize difference or discomfort; instead, it invites us to consider how the world itself might be askew. This perspective feels urgent today when so many wrestle with anxiety, despair, and a sense that the social order is unravelling.

This idea finds resonance in the work of Rafia Zakaria, particularly in ‘Against White Feminism’, where she challenges the dominant narratives of normality by exposing how racial and colonial histories shape what society deems acceptable or sane. Zakaria’s critique reveals that the pressure to conform isn’t just personal; it’s political. When the world is structured to exclude or marginalize, feeling off might actually be a form of resistance rather than dysfunction.

Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz offers another compelling angle in ‘Chaos, Territory, Art’. She explores how bodies and identities are formed through encounters with disorder, suggesting that chaos isn’t just something to be feared or controlled but a generative force. Grosz’s reflections align with Winterson’s refusal to see discomfort as failure. Instead, both suggest that what we call derangement might be a necessary response to a world that’s itself out of joint.

There’s a quiet rebellion in recognizing that sometimes it’s the world that’s cracked, not you. This shift from self-blame to radical empathy invites us to hold space for the discomfort that comes from living authentically in a world that demands conformity. Jeanette Winterson’s words become a call to reframe mental health and social belonging, not as a quest to fit in but as an effort to stay true to what feels real, even when reality itself feels fractured.

In this light, the personal becomes political, and the struggle to stay whole becomes a shared human endeavour. Maybe that’s the kind of clarity we need most right now.

Image: University of Salford Press Office

12/10/2025

Peter Levine on chronic shame.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRkKfHGFH3C/?igsh=MW5zdDQzZXoyNXNqbQ==

12/06/2025

11/18/2025

Today, the third Tuesday in November, marks the annual National Grief and Bereavement Day in Canada.

Many people find it awkward to talk about death, loss, or grief. Grief is often misunderstood – by those who are experiencing it and by those trying to help.

Everyone will face loss at some point, but few of us are prepared for how long it can last, how deep it can feel, or how it changes our lives and the lives of the people we love.

When personal connection matters most, many who are grieving feel alone, misunderstood, and unsupported. Even well-meaning friends and family often struggle to provide comfort or guidance in the ways that are most helpful.

On National Grief and Bereavement Day, support grief literacy in Canada.

10/23/2025

The message here is so important.

* I am not promoting this link/product/seevice. *

10/15/2025

Authentic mental health care would support people in reconnecting with their integrity and aliveness, rather than coercing them to adapt to a culture that violates it.

10/15/2025

How we feel and the emotions we experience are a central part of our mental health. Conversely how we respond to emotions is critical for our health, mental and physical. While they can perplexing, stubborn, frustrating, annoying, frightening and downright depressing at times, emotions are a fundamental and necessary part of brain functioning. In fact, they are central to being human.

Unfortunately societal beliefs often tells us we shouldn’t have emotions or some emotions are bad. Telling your brain it shouldn’t have emotions is like telling your heart not to beat or your lungs not to breathe, and it doesn’t make your brain very happy.

Emotions don’t always feel nice and can make us want to run away from them. And like any avoidance, short term this seems to work, we feel relieved. But inside your brain is feeling pretty annoyed at trying to hold it all in.

How you respond to your emotions is important. Research shows suppressing, berating and shaming emotions doesn’t help us deal with them at all and just creates more stress and make emotions feel even more difficult.

Naming, validating, expressing and recognising emotions seems to help us process them and help us become friends with them, rather than them having power over us. It seems to soothe those emotions and instead of adding a layer of more stress and difficult feelings, helps us deal with the ones we have.

read more about the science of emotions and how we can help our emotions in my books
📕‘A Toolkit for your Emotions’.
📚 A toolkit for modern life
📖 A toolkit for happiness

10/09/2025

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPjZxNhEc_S/?igsh=cDNhb3ZmdWplMjNh

10/08/2025

Mental Health Villains are systemic cultural assumptions about mental health that sabotage our mental health. I've identified 9 mental health villains that I want to teach about: individualism, capitalism, saviorism, neuronormativity, sanism, behaviorism, mind-body dualism, materialism, and scientism.

This isn't a complete list of all of the cultural assumptions that impact mental health - There are so many more villains of mental health that interact with these!

If you want to explore this topic with me, join me in Nov-Dec for a 6 week group called Shifting Blame: The Real Mental Health Villains. I'll be covering definitions, examples, and ways to resist these 9 cultural assumptions that sabotage our mental health.

Just like the list of logical fallacies is something you can use to filter information, this list of 9 mental health villains is something you can use to spot common cultural myths anywhere they pop up.

This is for cycle-breakers, cult survivors, and neurodivergent seekers who came to the system for help but got retraumatized. This is for professionals, educators, and parents, and anyone who wants to create spaces for unblaming and unshaming.

This is a top-down process of psychoeducation that gently invites you into a bottom-up process of transformation in your own space and time outside of the class.

You can expect a mix of information sharing and facilitated inquiry with writing prompts and reflection questions. To avoid re-traumatization, this is not a space to share trauma stories and we will not have time for unstructured discussion.

Details here: https://traumageek.thinkific.com/courses/healing-self-blame