I sit down on the sofa first, my husband sits in the seat opposite before standing up to remove his jacket and stare idly around the room looking I know, for somewhere to hang his expensive clothing. I note our therapist clocking this. He takes my husband’s jacket and hangs it on the back of his door.

My husband has shown his hand.

I wonder to myself if our therapist has noticed the first clue of my husband’s character — his unmistakable self-importance. …

There is a common misperception amongst humans, that we must be orderly to be worthy of existence in mainstream society. Orderly as in, one must show courtesy and respect to others, one must exercise judicious judgement of others, (lest thou be judged), one must comply with legal and moral code, one must pay their taxes, one must bake cookies for the new neighbour (even when the new neighbour is a flagrant idiot), one must stand robot-like in orderly queues, and one must most certainly, give two shits about their friends’ first world problems. And so on. …

Little has been said or documented about the fact that depression is ridiculous.

Just when I thought I was emerging from one dark place; clouds parting and vitality starting to make itself known, I unpredictably slip quietly back into the black hole. Like a mole emerging from under his hill, only to find himself tethered at the neck, to some vexatious anchor deep within the muddy earth.

Changing the channel on the TV makes me want to cry. The futility and senselessness of it. Emails pile up, the letter box overflows, the soil in the plant pots dry miserably. I…

I couldn’t really say when it started. Those days are blurry and difficult to remember. Although I do recall at the age of 12, or 13, being at a birthday party and finding myself for the first time, in front of a full-length mirror as I stumbled upon my friend’s parents' bedroom.

Here I was — face to face — top — to — toe with my child body. I surveyed my form up and down and I hated what I was confronted with.

I remember the dress. A floaty flowy flowery number. Little spaghetti straps, the hem stopping short…

Dissociative disorders involve problems with memory, identity, emotion, perception, behavior and sense of self. Dissociative symptoms can potentially disrupt every area of mental functioning.

Examples of dissociative symptoms include the experience of detachment or feeling as if one is outside one’s body, and loss of memory or amnesia. Dissociative disorders are frequently associated with previous experience of trauma. — www.psychiatry.org

Two and a half years ago I was sitting in front of my psychotherapist of one year when he uttered the words “Amelie, what you have experienced is a dissociative fugue”. “A what?” I mumbled with raised eyebrows. I don’t…

When trauma was imprinted in childhood, repetitive and interpersonal, the damage is profound and far reaching.

Sadly it’s often not until we are truly broken, deep into our adult years that we come to recognise or understand the true extent of damage owing to what happened in our infancy.

Victim-hood is an inevitability of trauma but feeling like a victim does not have to be a lifelong label, nor life-sentence. In actual fact, it mustn’t stay this way. As adults we are no longer victims of our childhood trauma, but survivors of it.

The ownership of our past tragedies gives us a springboard to first, resolve what was once intolerable, second and most importantly, to heal…

The need to speak of others negatively; to benefit or get a kick out of somebody else’s misfortune, or character failing is a glaring signal of one’s own weakness and frailty.

I had friends around for dinner the other night and one of them took me to one side to ‘discuss’ our mutual friend and her current woes. These woes according to this friend are ‘petty and trivial’, and in her words she has ‘had it to here’ (with accompanying hand to forehead gesture) with the ‘constant moaning’ from our mutual chum.

She goes on for quite some time, lamenting the character flaws of said chum; and asserts multiple solutions — so very obvious in her mind — for how our friend should just ‘fix’ her problems and no longer be…

I was brought up in what may be aptly termed as reigned chaos. I have a borderline mother, narcissistic father, schizophrenic middle brother and narcissistic elder brother. Don’t laugh.

Thanking my lucky somethings, I have managed to muddle through life sans personality disorder; but not without a few healthy scoops of complex PTSD, depression and anxiety to boot along the road. To add a cherry atop my scoops, I married my university sweetheart, who 2.5 years ago, was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.

You might be noticing a recurrent theme here — yes, I am like a magnet for the…