Erm… I’ve Written a Book!?

It still feels a bit strange to say out loud, to be honest.

Having said that, it has been in me for years and I have always had the idea in the back of my mind. And then when I sat down to start writing it, it just kind of flowed out of me!

It’s called ‘A Therapist’s Reflections on Authenticity: Congruence and the Modern World’, and it pulls together a lot of what I’ve been thinking, teaching, and talking about for years. Probably decades, to be honest!

At the heart of it is something that has always been of the utmost importance to me, but has felt increasingly relevant in the modern world – authenticity.

Not authenticity as a buzzword, a personality trait, or something polished and packaged up for social media (see neo-authenticity), but authenticity in the deeper sense.

What it means to actually be in touch with ourselves, what gets in the way of that, and why so many of us feel such a tension between who we are and who we feel we’re supposed to be.

The book is rooted in person-centred theory, especially Rogers’ ideas around congruence, self-concept, psychological tension, and the ways we learn to deny or distort our experience from a young age. But it also goes beyond theory and looks at the modern world we’re trying to live in – social media, performance, pressure, work, image, people-pleasing, burnout, and all the subtle ways we can drift away from ourselves.

In fact, the lead up to writing this book was the most important aspect of all. I got burnout and my life kind of unravelled. I talk about this in the book too, but it made this issue even more central than it had been before.

So in many ways, this book is about authenticity. But it’s also about anxiety, disconnection, performance and the cost of being too far removed from our actual experience for too long.

I haven’t written it as a quick-fix self-help book, because I have a difficult relationship with those types of books (I talk about that in the book too). It’s much more of a reflection on what it means to live more congruently, to understand ourselves better, and to gently reclaim parts of ourselves that are getting hijacked by all the systems and distractions we increasingly live amongst.

If you recognise these kinds of struggles in yourself, in other people, or just in the world more broadly. Whether you’re struggling with anxiety or ways that incongruence often shows up in our lives (insert most struggles here!). Or maybe you are a counselling student, therapist, or just someone interested in these themes, psychology or sociology, I hope there’ll be something in this book for you.

I can (congruently!) say that this was at the core of writing the book. It felt increasingly relevant and present in almost everything we live amongst and are seeing happening in our struggling society.

So I didn’t write this just to say I had written a book or for my ego (okay, maybe a little bit). I wrote it because I wanted to offer my viewpoint to others in the hope that it would be helpful, start conversations and maybe be part of some people starting to turn away from many of the things that pull us away from ourselves (most of which are driven by people who really don’t have our best intentions at heart)…

…And to begin the very precious journey of turning back towards, and reclaiming, our authentic selves again (I offer plenty of ways this might be done, and thoughts around the process too).