Dr. Libby Nugent: Clinical Psychologist

07/12/2025

07/12/2025

07/12/2025

Thought provoking read “how Zack Polanski's attitude to carers is in keeping with the body and dependency denialism of identitarian individualism”

In her excellent 2021 book Care and Capitalism, the sociologist Kathleen Lynch describes the way in which the devaluing of care work is tied to negative attitudes towards dependency and the body.

07/12/2025

04/12/2025

INTO THE OFFICE WOODS: A fairy tale guide to the Christmas Do

Office parties may look like glitter and karaoke, but they carry a deeper
psychological weight. In private practice they rarely happen, yet they still
arrive in supervision and reflective conversations: half dreaded, half
cherished. During my NHS years I felt the paradox keenly: reluctant to attend,
but often glad once there.

This essay explores what these gatherings reveal about workplace life, through the unlikely lens of Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Parties become temporary forests: spaces of play, risk, archetype and consequence. What they offer, and what they threaten, depends on how we frame and hold the threshold.

Working in private practice, office parties are mostly a non-event. Yet they still wander into my consulting room: in reflective practice, in supervision, in the stories colleagues tell with both fondness and dread. During my years in the NHS and social care, I always felt conflicted about them. I r...

03/12/2025

Reflective Practice Group for Newly Qualified Clinical & Counselling Psychologists

Beginning February 2026, I will be facilitating a six‑session online reflective practice group (first Friday afternoon of each month, 2–3:30pm).
Transitioning from training into early career practice can feel disorienting.

This group offers a contained professional forum — not supervision or therapy — but a space for collective reflection, resonance, and symbolic repair.
Designed for newly qualified psychologists (NHS Band 7 or equivalent), those completing final viva/coursework, and final‑year trainees preparing for qualification in 2026.

If you’d like to join, you can find details and booking via Eventbrite:

Monthly reflective group for newly qualified clinical & counselling psychologists. A space for resonance, inquiry, and symbolic nourishment.

30/11/2025

28/11/2025

✨ Introducing Symbolic Currents - My New LinkedIn Weekly Newsletter ✨

So many of the conversations I’ve had this year in supervision rooms, reflective practice groups, and late-night writing sessions return to the same idea: we live inside stories long before we can name them.
Teams, organisations, professions… they’re all shaped by symbolic currents that run just beneath the surface.

I’ve created a weekly newsletter, Symbolic Currents, as a place to explore these deeper layers more openly.

Each week I share short reflections on:

• group dynamics and leadership strain
• containment, symbolic literacy, and organisational life
• the myths and metaphors that quietly organise our thinking
• the psychology of collapse, recovery, and meaning-making
• snippets from my ongoing writing and workshops

If you’re someone who senses that there’s always more going on in the room - more feeling, more symbolism, more story - this is for you.

Thank you to everyone who has been reading my work so far. I’m excited to build this space with you.

Sign up here:

Unpacking the ethical and relational dynamics of work and group life through metaphor and reflective practice.

28/11/2025

Feeling caught between duty and disillusionment in NHS or social-care work?

Following the resonant Hansel and Gretel: Death Mother workshop, join me for a new online seminar exploring the self-sacrificing archetype at the heart of healthcare burnout.

This session deepens the exploration of the Death Mother Archetype through psychoanalytic and group-analytic lenses, using the fairytale Rumpelstiltskin to reflect on the emotional toll of modern care work — and how we might reclaim resilience and agency.

In this seminar, we’ll reflect on the emotional labour of care:
how we are so often asked to spin straw into gold - conjuring abundance from scarcity, holding ever more risk with ever fewer resources. We’ll think about the cost of this, the difficulty of naming what is happening, and why naming remains essential if we are to hold onto what matters.

What We’ll Explore
The Death Mother Archetype: How institutions can nurture and deplete in equal measure.
Ambivalent Attachment: The tension between loyalty to your profession and the instinct to pull away.
Fairytale as Reflective Tool: Using Rumpelstiltskin to unpack personal and collective experiences of pressure, sacrifice, and invisibilised labour.

Workshop Structure
Welcome & Recap – Revisiting themes from the Hansel & Gretel workshop and setting group intentions
Deep Dive: The Death Mother Archetype – A group-analytic exploration of its impact on burnout
Break (10 mins)
Fairytale Reflection: Rumpelstiltskin – Naming the unnameable; reclaiming agency and voice
Closing Space – Integration, Q&A, and reflective next steps

After the Workshop
All attendees will receive a resource pack including reading suggestions, reflection prompts, and information about reflective-practice groups for ongoing support.

Who Is This For?
Anyone working in health, mental health, or social care who is navigating exhaustion, ethical strain, or the emotional complexities of care work.

This seminar offers a reflective, psychologically grounded space to process burnout, connect with peers, and begin reclaiming your own resilience.

Moving beyond the self-sacrificing archetype, embracing rest, support, and community to reclaim a balanced life.

27/11/2025

27/11/2025

Professional loneliness is one of the quiet epidemics of our time. Rarely dramatic, often hidden beneath competence and care. Like Andersen’s Little Matchstick Girl, many practitioners find themselves striking brief sparks of warmth in overstretched systems, moments that sustain but never build a fire.

In this post, I explore how loneliness emerges not from the absence of people, but from the absence of containment: those steady structures and relational membranes that hold us in our work. Drawing on group analytic thought, I reflect on why some clinicians feel the frost first, and how shared fires of supervision, professional boundaries, and collective holding can thaw the cold.

Professional loneliness has become one of the quiet epidemics of our time. It shows sometimes through dramatic burnout, but more often, you find it in the small, private moments when practitioners realise they are holding far more than their frames were built to contain. It is the loneliness of shou...

26/11/2025

I'm pleased to inform you that our group will continue next term.

I have changed the pricing a bit (reducing it to keep the group accessible).

We’ll meet at the same time each Tuesday, from 4:00–5:30 pm (GMT), via Zoom. You can book using this link:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reflective-practice-group-for-aspiring-clinical-psychologists-tickets-1933068633319?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=ebdsshcopyurl.