JD Psychotherapy - LGBTQ Affirmative Therapy

JD Psychotherapy - LGBTQ Affirmative Therapy Providing compassionate and inclusive psychotherapy for LGBTQ+ individuals aged 21+. Safe, affirming, and confidential care.

Selfobject dynamics are present in every therapeutic relationship, whether explicitly recognised or not. From a self psy...
08/04/2026

Selfobject dynamics are present in every therapeutic relationship, whether explicitly recognised or not. From a self psychological perspective, clients do not merely relate to the therapist; they experience the therapist as performing essential psychological functions. Recognising these dynamics allows clinicians to work with transference and relational need in a nuanced and ethically grounded way.
This article offers a practice-focused overview of how selfobject needs appear in the consulting room and how therapists can respond effectively.
How Selfobject Needs Present in Therapy
Selfobject needs often emerge indirectly. Clients may seek reassurance, admiration, calmness, or sameness without explicitly naming these desires. Requests for validation, reactions to perceived misattunement, or idealisation of the therapist can all be understood as expressions of selfobject longing rather than resistance or dependency.
Mirroring needs may appear as a hunger to be deeply understood.

Offering face-to-face psychotherapy in Carmarthen and Swansea, specialising in LGBTQ+ and ADHD: trauma, anxiety, and depression. Your path to healing and self-acceptance starts here.

IntroductionThe phrase “ghost in the machine,” coined by Gilbert Ryle (1949), was intended as a critique of the idea tha...
26/03/2026

Introduction
The phrase “ghost in the machine,” coined by Gilbert Ryle (1949), was intended as a critique of the idea that the mind is a separate, non-physical entity inhabiting the body. While this philosophical position might initially seem abstract, it has profound implications for psychotherapy.

In this article, I explore these implications through a conversational format with an AI assistant, examining how different therapeutic modalities implicitly accept or reject the idea of an “inner self” as something separate and hidden.

A Conversation on the Ghost in the Machine
John
When people talk about the “ghost in the machine,” what are they really pointing to?
ChatGPT
They are usually referring—implicitly or explicitly—to a dualistic model of the person. The idea is that there is a mind or self inside the body, directing behaviour, observing experience, and perhaps even existing independently of the physical organism.

Gilbert Ryle criticised this view as a category mistake.

Offering face-to-face psychotherapy in Carmarthen and Swansea, specialising in LGBTQ+ and ADHD: trauma, anxiety, and depression. Your path to healing and self-acceptance starts here.

As awareness of climate change deepens, I am increasingly encountering clients whose distress is explicitly linked to en...
26/03/2026

As awareness of climate change deepens, I am increasingly encountering clients whose distress is explicitly linked to environmental collapse, political inaction, and fears about the future. Eco-anxiety and climate grief pose particular challenges for clinical practice, not least because they arise from real, ongoing threats rather than intrapsychic fantasy alone. We have even had whole residential courses exploring this issue, as it is becoming more prevalent. In this, I found myself encountering very dark emotions. This article explores key ethical and therapeutic considerations for clinicians working in this emerging area.
Avoiding Pathologisation
A central ethical task is resisting the pathologisation of what may be proportionate and reality-based emotional responses. Framing eco-anxiety as a disorder risks colluding with wider cultural defences that deny or minimise environmental threat.

Offering face-to-face psychotherapy in Carmarthen and Swansea, specialising in LGBTQ+ and ADHD: trauma, anxiety, and depression. Your path to healing and self-acceptance starts here.

Developmental trauma is increasingly understood not only as the result of overwhelming events, but also as the consequen...
08/03/2026

Developmental trauma is increasingly understood not only as the result of overwhelming events, but also as the consequence of chronic relational failures during early life. From a self psychological perspective, trauma arises when essential selfobject needs are repeatedly unmet or responded to without sufficient attunement. Rather than damaging the psyche through conflict alone, these experiences disrupt the development of a cohesive and resilient self.
This article explores how Heinz Kohut’s concept of selfobjects provides a clinically useful framework for understanding developmental trauma and its enduring psychological effects.
Developmental Trauma as Selfobject Failure
In self psychology, early caregivers are experienced not simply as external others, but as selfobjects who perform vital psychological functions. When mirroring, idealising, or twinship needs are persistently unmet, the developing self lacks the necessary scaffolding to organise affect, self-esteem, and identity.

Offering face-to-face psychotherapy in Carmarthen and Swansea, specialising in LGBTQ+ and ADHD: trauma, anxiety, and depression. Your path to healing and self-acceptance starts here.

I enjoy the use of analogies. For me they work not because of an exact correspondence, but the similarities and differen...
17/02/2026

I enjoy the use of analogies. For me they work not because of an exact correspondence, but the similarities and differences often help with an understanding of one or both sides of the analogy. In this, the result of a recent conversation with AI, I was able to learn more about the difficulties of keeping AI ‘true’, AND more about the use of psychotherapy terms. In psychotherapy we often talk about the importance of ‘autonomy’ and of ‘relationship’. In the early stages of therapy, I find that the part where the two bump into each other is not often discussed. This is often for sound therapeutic reasons - the client may have under-developed their autonomy in the face of overwhelming relationships. I hope you find this article as helpful as I did:

As artificial intelligence systems edge closer to forms of autonomy, we encounter a problem that is familiar to psychotherapists: how to enable agency without permitting harm.

Offering face-to-face psychotherapy in Carmarthen and Swansea, specialising in LGBTQ+ and ADHD: trauma, anxiety, and depression. Your path to healing and self-acceptance starts here.

Heinz Kohut’s self psychology represents a significant shift within psychoanalytic thought, moving the focus from instin...
08/02/2026

Heinz Kohut’s self psychology represents a significant shift within psychoanalytic thought, moving the focus from instinctual drives and conflict towards the development, cohesion, and maintenance of the self. This contrasts strongly with writers such as Jung and Freud. Central to this model is the concept of selfobjects: people, relationships, and experiences that perform essential psychological functions for the developing and adult self. Although self psychology emerged in the 1970s, its emphasis on attunement, responsiveness, and relational regulation has proven enduringly relevant. In many respects, it anticipates contemporary relational, attachment-based, and trauma-informed approaches.
This article outlines the core principles of Kohut’s self psychology, explains the role of selfobjects, and considers how these ideas are understood and applied in present-day psychotherapy.

Offering face-to-face psychotherapy in Carmarthen and Swansea, specialising in LGBTQ+ and ADHD: trauma, anxiety, and depression. Your path to healing and self-acceptance starts here.

As the realities of climate change become increasingly difficult to ignore–increasing average global temperatures, incre...
31/01/2026

As the realities of climate change become increasingly difficult to ignore–increasing average global temperatures, increasing sea-level, more extreme weather–many people are experiencing profound emotional responses to environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and an uncertain future. These responses are often described using terms such as eco-anxiety and climate grief. While not psychiatric diagnoses, they reflect understandable psychological reactions to chronic, global threats. Psychotherapy has a growing role in helping individuals make sense of these experiences, reduce distress, and develop sustainable ways of living with uncertainty.
What Is Eco-Anxiety?
Eco-anxiety refers to persistent worries, fears, and feelings of helplessness related to climate change and environmental collapse.

Offering face-to-face psychotherapy in Carmarthen and Swansea, specialising in LGBTQ+ and ADHD: trauma, anxiety, and depression. Your path to healing and self-acceptance starts here.

A Relational, Humanistic Critique of the “Dopamine Hole”SEO meta descriptionA concise relational, humanistic critique of...
24/01/2026

A Relational, Humanistic Critique of the “Dopamine Hole”
SEO meta description
A concise relational, humanistic critique of the popular “dopamine hole” self-help video from Newel of Knowledge, exploring what it gets right, what it oversimplifies, and how people in distress might use it safely.
Keyword phrase
dopamine hole relational humanistic critique
The video in brief
The video “How to quickly escape a dopamine hole” (YouTube) can be viewed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXQ3VVRuy1I

The presenter speaks to viewers who feel “flat, foggy, and fried” and names this a “dopamine hole”, caused by “cheap pleasures” such as scrolling, po*******hy, junk food, and gaming. He reassures viewers that:

- “You are not broken”, only overstimulated.
- A dopamine hole is not laziness, weakness, or a fixed flaw.
- You can escape within one to three days by unplugging and using a structured method.

Offering face-to-face psychotherapy in Carmarthen and Swansea, specialising in LGBTQ+ and ADHD: trauma, anxiety, and depression. Your path to healing and self-acceptance starts here.

The emergence of artificial intelligence that can update itself, modify internal models, and act with partial autonomy r...
17/01/2026

The emergence of artificial intelligence that can update itself, modify internal models, and act with partial autonomy raises a set of questions that sound surprisingly familiar to psychotherapists. Concerns about misalignment, harmful optimisation, or systems losing contact with reality mirror well-known clinical struggles. When a person becomes disconnected from feedback, distrusts others, or develops a self-reinforcing internal narrative, the therapeutic task becomes one of reconnection, grounding, and restoring reflective capacity.

This article summarises key ideas from recent discussion about data integrity, autonomy, and the potential for harm in advanced AI systems. It reframes the issues through a psychotherapeutic lens, treating them as questions of relationality, conscience, and boundary-setting rather than as purely technical challenges.
Data Contamination as Epistemic Drift
The problem often called “AI slop” refers to synthetic output contaminating future training data.

Offering face-to-face psychotherapy in Carmarthen and Swansea, specialising in LGBTQ+ and ADHD: trauma, anxiety, and depression. Your path to healing and self-acceptance starts here.

This article offers a reflective review of Therapy for Perverts, Weirdos and Crazy Cat People: A Lived Experience Introd...
12/01/2026

This article offers a reflective review of Therapy for Perverts, Weirdos and Crazy Cat People: A Lived Experience Introduction to Gestalt Therapy by John Gillespie, an independently published introduction to Gestalt therapy rooted firmly in lived experience. I was tempted into reading this book, as the author is likely to feature in my training and I wanted to find out what sort of person was coming along.
Rather than presenting Gestalt therapy as a technical model or professional framework, the book invites the reader into the author’s personal journey. In doing so, it challenges many of the unspoken norms around who therapy is “for”, and gently but clearly resists the shame that so often accompanies difference, vulnerability, and non-conformity.
The Nature of the Book
This is not a textbook, nor does it claim to be. Gillespie describes the work as an “educated layperson’s introduction”, and that framing is important.

Offering face-to-face psychotherapy in Carmarthen and Swansea, specialising in LGBTQ+ and ADHD: trauma, anxiety, and depression. Your path to healing and self-acceptance starts here.

IntroductionWorking with clients who carry a persistent sense of shame often reveals how deeply these experiences are ro...
04/01/2026

Introduction
Working with clients who carry a persistent sense of shame often reveals how deeply these experiences are rooted in early relational patterns. Patricia DeYoung’s Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame (2015) offers a thoughtful and clinically grounded account of how this form of shame takes shape and how it can be approached in therapy. Her writing brings together relational theory and neurobiological insight in a way that illuminates what many clients describe only as a quiet, longstanding feeling of being “wrong” or fundamentally unacceptable. The book has been a useful companion in reflecting on how I identify and work with chronic shame in the therapy room.
What Chronic Shame Means in a Relational Context
DeYoung describes chronic shame as a relationally formed experience of the self as unworthy, fragmented, or fundamentally “wrong”—usually originating in repeated misattunements rather than overt acts of shaming. This resonates strongly with my clinical work.

Offering face-to-face psychotherapy in Carmarthen and Swansea, specialising in LGBTQ+ and ADHD: trauma, anxiety, and depression. Your path to healing and self-acceptance starts here.

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