Live the Change

23/11/2025

WHAT IS "REWILDING YOUR HEART"?

Two years ago I lived in Italy for a year. I explored the possibility of setting up my non-profit/NGO there to work with rewilding, ecotherapy, equine assisted interventions, nature assisted mindfulness etc.

It did not happen. But I explored. And learned, and rewilded myself some more.

In this short film clip I am taking about what rewild your heart means to me, what it is to rewild oneself, on the inside, and the outside.

It was a pretty wild thing to do - to go to Italy to try to find a place and people to set up a rewilding/ecotherapy place. And I loved it there! And maybe I will come back, who knows?

Check the courses I offer online out: https://livethechange-learning.teachable.com/p/home - I am updating them, they have been somewhat in sleeping mode for 2 years, but 4 of them are up and running.

You can also check my webpage out, it is a bit more updated and have some more info about me and who I am, if you are curious: https://livethechange.se/index.php

https://youtu.be/EKnqRgNYkTM

I am being interviewed about what rewilding is to me. And I reflect a bit on it. Sitting on the wall, looking out over the hills at the place in Italy I live...

12/11/2025

Lucy Johnstone: 'The aim is to move, in simple terms, away from the “What is wrong with you?” towards the “What has happened to you?” question. To put it at its briefest, we’re evidencing, we hope, the idea that peoples’ distress is understandable in context, but we wanted to think about context in its broadest form.'

"In 2018, Lucy Johnstone, Mary Boyle, and their colleagues in the UK launched the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF). This framework shifts the notion of 'What is wrong with you?' in the DSM to 'What has happened to you?' and by doing so rejects medical process of diagnosing 'disorders' in favour of a narrative response that tells of contexts, power dynamics, and systems.

At a time when the Global Mental Health Movement is exporting the Western biomedical model around the world, Johnstone, Boyle and the PTMF project team, which includes those who identify as service users/survivors, are seeking to promote a radically different way of understanding distress.

Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist who has experience working in adult mental health settings for many years, believes that the current mental health system has failed, and we are now in the process of witnessing the crumbling of the medical paradigm of emotional distress.

She believes we need an approach based on fundamentally different principles. The PTMF, which draws on a wide range of evidence and examples of existing alternatives, is an attempt to outline what that might look like. The PTMF project team hopes that it can be a contribution to the much needed revolution.

Lucy Johnstone: 'The aim is to move, in simple terms, away from the “What is wrong with you?” towards the “What has happened to you?” question. To put it at its briefest, we’re evidencing, we hope, the idea that peoples’ distress is understandable in context, but we wanted to think about context in its broadest form.

One of the things we wanted to do was to really make very clear the link between personal distress and social context, social inequality, and social injustices. In other words, to put power on the map. Power is not only missing from psychiatric thinking, but it’s also missing from a lot of psychological thinking, and it’s missing from much psychotherapeutic thinking.

In the Power Threat Meaning Framework terms, one of our core arguments is that instead of understanding distress through biological patterns, patterns that are borrowed from the kinds of patterns that we see when things go wrong in our bodies, we need to understand distress through patterns that are organized by meaning. They’re organized by meaning, not by biology, which is a big conceptual leap, one of the fundamental conceptual leaps I think we made. We need to be thinking about how those patterns are based on or organized by social and cultural meanings, not by biology and something that’s gone wrong with our bodies'."

More info on the book here: https://www.pccs-books.co.uk/products/a-straight-talking-introduction-to-the-power-threat-meaning-framework-an-alternative-to-psychiatric-diagnosis

25/10/2025

I work a lot with expressive arts - or just art. I have used it myself, with myself - to find parts of me that had been long gone or missing. In this text I share a bit about how expressive arts can help you reconnect with yourself. I find it so important to thoroughly try out anything on myself that I want to invite others to do, in therapy, in workshops, no matter where. And well, I love the experimentation. Like almost any other time, also this time, I gained some pretty valuable insights!

Working with Dissociation using Expressive Arts