The Best Is Yet To Be
As most of you who know me will be aware, I will be eighty this year. And in line with what I wrote in Regenospan, I have decided to make the most of it while I still have breath and energy – connecting with people and travelling, mostly with my beloved Alan.
Making decisions about what this next chapter might hold and believing with all my heart: “The best is yet to be, whatever shape it takes.”
I have spent over forty years helping others understand their inner worlds – the parts, patterns, and inherited wounds that shape a life without us ever fully agreeing to them. I have sat with thousands of people in that tender, difficult space between who they’ve had to be and who they truly are. And I have loved that work with all my heart.
But this month, something shifted. This month, the work came home more deeply.
I turned back towards myself – not for the first time, not dramatically, not in crisis – but in the particular way that happens when a number of factors came together, writing a memoir about your grandmother’s death and your mother’s abandonment, and preparing a presentation on Janina Fisher’s work on trauma and the fragmented self. Wrapping up my book “Women Who LovED Too Much.
All at the same time. All in the same month. All pointing at the same wound.
I want to share some of what’s been moving in me, because I think it might be moving in you too.
Being an AuDHD person, I have at least six things buzzing in my head at any given time. Here are the ones that have been alive in me this month.
Women Who LovED Too Much – Nearly There
After years of living inside this material – both professionally and personally – my book Women Who LovED Too Much is nearing completion, and I have very mixed feelings about letting it go. Not because it isn’t ready. But because writing it has asked me to revisit territory I thought I’d long since made peace with.
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The original Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood touched millions of women when it was published in 1985. It named something real. But it was also, in many ways, a product of its time – focused on what women do, without fully asking why. My version goes further. It asks: what is the wound underneath the pattern? What did love addiction protect us from? What did we learn, very early, about what love required of us – and what it cost?
I wrote this book because I lived some of it. And because in four decades of clinical work, I have sat with woman after woman who loved at enormous cost to herself and didn’t know why she couldn’t stop. This book is for her. For all of us who confused intensity with intimacy, and longing with love.
It will be out soon. Watch this space.
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The Memoir – Teaching Me Things Therapy Never Quite Reached
The book I’m writing is called What Breaks Us All. It’s built around a Jung quote that has been a compass for me for years: “You were not sent to mend the broken. You were sent to reveal what breaks us all.” The book traces the line of women I come from – my grandmother Margaret, who died in 1925 at thirty-one in an obstructed labour that should never have been fatal; my mother Nancy, barely two years old when Margaret died, who spent her early years in an industrial school and left me at four weeks old without ever returning. And then me. The women who came before me, carrying what they carried, passing it forward without ever meaning to.
Writing a memoir isn’t like reading someone else’s story. You can’t stay detached from it. Every chapter requires that I enter the rooms I’ve kept sealed, into the feelings I’ve analysed intellectually for decades but perhaps never truly lived.
I found little frozen pockets of Grace, still standing in the hallway of a house in Belfast, still four weeks old and waiting to be picked up, still angry and ashamed and not quite sure she was the kind of person who deserved to take up space.
I know these parts. I’ve worked with them. But writing this memoir has introduced me to them differently – not as clinical material, but as mine. Still mine, after all these years. Still here. It has been very therapeutic.
Preparing the Wise Self Presentation – Cracking Something Open
I’ve been preparing a talk for my women’s group on Janina Fisher’s work – specifically her Living Legacy of Trauma workbook and her masterwork Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. Fisher’s central insight is one I’ve taught many times: trauma doesn’t just happen to us. It reorganises us. It splits off the unbearable experience into separate parts — parts that stay frozen in the original threat while the rest of us tries to get on with living.
I know this. I teach this. I have helped hundreds of people find their way through it.
But sitting with Fisher’s work this month, preparing it for women I care about, I kept reading a line and putting the book down. Not because it was difficult. Because it was true in a way I hadn’t quite let myself feel. Lots of journalling.
The line that stopped me most: there are no bad parts. Only parts trying to help, in the only ways they know.
This month, I found myself sitting with my parts differently. Not trying to change them. Not even thanking them in that slightly performative way we do when we’ve read enough self-help to know the right words. Just being with her. Letting her know she wasn’t alone anymore. That I had her now.
It sounds small. It wasn’t small.
Collective Trauma – The World Is Having a Parts Crisis
I have also become increasingly aware that for every personal trauma, there’s a collective trauma. We are only one of many. It’s a frequency.
Looking out at the divisions, the rage, the tribalism, and the way entire communities are losing their sense of safety enough to think is a collective reflection of what Fisher describes in the individual. A world of activated parts, with very little Wise Self present. Groups frozen in old threat responses. Leaders in fight or flight. The capacity for genuine connection, for curiosity about others, for tolerance of complexity, diminishes daily.
The Estrangement from My Son – Living What I Teach
I don’t talk about this often in public. But it feels dishonest not to.
My son and I are estranged. It is one of the most painful things I carry. And it is – in the particular way that life has of insisting on its own curriculum – also one of the things that has taught me the most.
I have spent the last few years working with the patterns of transgenerational estrangement. I know, intellectually and clinically, how these ruptures form, how unresolved wounds in one generation become the fault lines in the next, how the very people we love most can become the ones we hurt most deeply, and how estrangement is almost never simply about the present moment. It almost always reaches back, through time and lineage, to something that was broken long before either party was born.
Knowing all of this does not make it hurt less. But it does change how I handle the hurt.
This is why I’m writing What Breaks Us All – not just as a family history, but as an act of witness. If I can trace the line of fracture back far enough, if I can name what broke the women in my lineage, then perhaps the pattern stops here. Perhaps what gets passed forward now is not the wound, but the understanding of the wound.
That is the hope I hold. On the good days, it feels like enough.
What I Keep Learning About Being Nearly Eighty
Every decade of this life has required me to give something up and pick something up. To let one version of Grace retire with dignity and welcome the next one in. And the approaching of eighty is asking me to do that again – but more profoundly than before. Because what I’m being asked to give up now isn’t a role, or a skill, or a way of relating. It’s the need to have it all figured out.
The Wise Self – as Fisher describes her, and as I have come to understand her through my own life and work – is not something to be attained. She is remembered. She was always present, beneath the survival strategies, beneath the different parts, beneath decades of working very hard. She is the part of us that can hold all the other parts with warmth and without judgment. She is the part that knows, without needing to prove it, that we have
What This Might Mean for You
I share all of this not because my journey is more important – but because I know, after forty years of this work, that healing often echoes. When something shifts within one woman, it often resonates with another. That is the essence of community, of the group, of the therapeutic bond. We recognise ourselves in each other’s truths.
So if any of this has landed – if you recognised yourself in the parts I described, if something in you said yes, that’s me too – I want you to know: that recognition is not an accident. It’s your own Wise Self, putting her hand up.
She’s been there all along. She’s patient. And she would very much like to be introduced properly.