Blog

I look up and the mountain crest imposes itself in its grandeur, stealing the entire landscape. The altitude takes my breath away. A single thought overwhelms me: I am so close to God.Everything I see around me - the trees, the rocks, the car park at the base of the mountain - loses its importance, becomes dots of colour in an image so vast it seems like an entire universe. And I am here, up high, so close to something vast and untouchable, that nothing else matters.Then a second thought hits me: How did I get here?I look down. The car park looks like a toy. The cars are just tiny dots of metal. Impossible that I climbed this high. Impossible that my feet travelled all this distance.And suddenly I understand why I don’t remember: the mind refuses to see the path in its totality. At the base of the mountain, looking up at the peak, you feel crushed. The distance paralyses you. The brain calculates all the kilometres, all the suffering, all the uncertainty and whispers to you: You can’t. It’s too much.Fear doesn’t come from the mountain. It comes from our devastating capacity to imagine everything at once.But the climb doesn’t work in totality. You never climb an entire mountain. You climb three metres. Then three more. Step by step - not because it sounds poetic, but because it’s the only reality our psyche can digest without collapsing.You fragment the infinite. You transform it from nightmare into a series of banal gestures. One step. Another. You don’t look up. You don’t calculate. You live only in the next three metres.And yes, you will stop. You will feel like you can’t go on. Your chest will burn, your legs will tremble. You will need to stop and you must. But one thing to remember: don’t stop for too long.Because what happens in pauses that are too long? The body cools down. The muscles stiffen. But worse, the mind starts calculating again. You exit the rhythm, the hypnotic flow of steps, and you find yourself back in overwhelming reality: there are still so many kilometres, so much pain, so much uncertainty.Momentum isn’t about speed. It’s about continuity. It’s about remaining in the simple, repetitive, almost meditative gesture of steps, before the mind has a chance to tell you the story about impossibility.How many times do we give up exactly when we are so close? We confuse exhaustion with failure. We interpret the need for a pause as a final verdict. The body says “I need two minutes,” and the mind translates “I will never succeed.”A glass of water. Deep breaths. Looking around, not up, not down: just here, where your feet are now. Then one small step. Just one. And you will discover - you will always discover - that you can take one more.The transcendence we feel at the peak, that feeling of being so close to God, it’s not the prize for reaching the destination. It’s the retroactive amazement that we were capable of something that seemed inconceivable. It’s the shock of looking back and realising: I did this. Me. Step by step. Without understanding how.The mind doesn’t carry us up the mountain. The mind keeps us at the base. The body carries us up, as long as we don’t give the mind too much time to talk.Step by step. It’s not a cliché. It’s the only chance.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

How to Climb a Mountain (Without Thinking About the Mountain)

When anger infects the mind and contaminates the heart, you risk losing yourself.You are no longer whole. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">You fragment.<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Anger arises when your truth has been denied, trampled on, crushed by another. Not as a misunderstanding, but as a violation. It arrives as a raw, incandescent force, determined to annihilate whatever feels unjust to you. Yet while it strikes outward, it tightens inward. It closes the heart. It severs you from love. Anger is potency. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">It is destructive.And its force shows no mercy, neither to the other, nor to yourself.Beneath anger lies suffering. A suffering that cuts into flesh and blood, that reaches the most vulnerable place within you. You want to cry. But anger will not allow it. It demands destruction before feeling. To strike before collapsing. Only after the object of pain has been annihilated is pain permitted to surface.Here, the risk is at its peak: the loss of the self.<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">This inner tension is, not infrequently, at the root of killing, destruction, abandonment. Anger is not merely a reaction; it is a defence. It validates the ego when it feels threatened, rejected, excluded. In an attempt to preserve its sense of righteousness and belonging, the ego may unconsciously destroy bonds, love, community. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">And it does so without realising that it is, in fact, destroying itself. Simina

Anger and the Loss of Self

The first day of 2026. I look out at the ocean and, for a moment, I feel blessed to be here. After an entire night of torrential rain and wind, the clouds begin to break apart, and the sun’s light emerges — soft, tentative, uncertain. Yet the waves remain immense, crashing violently against the shore, as if the storm has not truly passed. Facing the ocean, I feel small. Not poetically small, but genuinely so. Insignificant. Replaceable. And then this thought comes to mind: choose your battles. At the beginning of a new year, we like to believe we can choose. That if we are conscious enough, aware enough, we can steer our lives in a better direction. And yet reality keeps reminding us that much of what happens to us lies beyond our control. Perhaps humility in the face of life does not mean giving up responsibility, but accepting its limits. Acknowledging that not all battles are ours&nbsp;and that sometimes even our reactions are not fully free, but shaped by old fears, early attachments, and histories we did not choose. The year ahead will inevitably place us in situations that escape our control. What we do then will not always be a clear or correct choice. Sometimes it will simply be what we are able to do in that moment. Maybe true responsibility is not about mastering life, but about remaining attentive. Attentive to our thoughts. To the emotions that quietly guide us. To the small gestures that, without us noticing, slowly shape our future. The ocean does not ask us to conquer it. Nor to fully understand it. Only to know when to step into the water, and when it is wiser to remain on the shore. Happy New Year!Simina

Choosing Our Battles at the Start of a New Year

The end of the year is an important moment. Not only because “a year comes to an end”, but because more time passes in our lives. For some, it is a period of calm and gratitude. For others, it is an intense time: one of evaluation, comparison, sadness, or loneliness.<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Christmas is not only about gifts and festive meals. In the collective imagination, it is the moment when we are with “our tribe”, with those we call family, and with the comforting idea that we do not have to go through the end of the year alone. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Only reality is not that simple. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">For many, Christmas can be hard. Sometimes we sit at the table beside people next to whom we feel lonelier than we would among strangers. We put on a mask and try to “be fine”, out of pressure, out of the need to belong, out of fear of exclusion, or out of guilt. For others, it is exactly the opposite: an inner emptiness, because “everyone is with family”, and they have nowhere to be, or no one to be with.This is one truth: there are so many people who are lonely, whether within a family, or entirely on their own.<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Loneliness is personal, and it has roots in our history: in attachment, in relationships, in life experiences. We do not always choose what we feel. But often, we can choose how we respond. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">There will always be people with a sadder story than ours, and people who seem luckier or more fulfilled than we are. That is not what saves us. What belongs to us is how we settle within ourselves in relation to what we are living through, and how we choose to respond to the situation we are in, even when everything seems hopeless, with no way out. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">The true feeling of being in control is born out of our actions in the face of what we are up against. Not from trying to change the people in our lives or forcing life to be different, but from changing the way we relate to the situation and to the feelings we struggle with. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">If you feel isolation, frustration, or an emptiness that drains your life force, sometimes the most powerful antidote is not forcing yourself to “be okay”, but creating a thread of connection, however small. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">We can always choose to visit a children’s centre or a care home for the elderly, to offer a helping hand at a centre for people experiencing homelessness, to serve a warm meal or share clothes. We can choose to buy food and spend ten minutes talking with someone on the street, to send a card with a few kind words to a neighbour, to share a smile on the street, or to look for a group or a community that organises events during this time. We can write a blog and share our experience with others. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">The feeling of love, whether we are speaking of self-love or love for others, grows through the practice of loving and, implicitly, through being there for others: through a smile, through a few minutes of our time, through a kind word. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Merry Christmas, and a better New Year! <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Simina ﻿

On Loneliness, Choice, and the End of the Year

Thoughtful man sitting on grass looking out to the beautiful sunrise with happy feelings, peace of mind, happiness, serenity

Loneliness is a universal experience, often exacerbated by our individual attachment styles. Understanding how our early relationships shape our patterns of attachment can provide profound insights into why some of us feel lonelier than others. This article delves into the connection between attachment styles and loneliness, offering a psychoanalytic perspective on how our early life experiences influence our capacity for connection and intimacy.Attachment Theory: An Overview Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and further expanded by Mary Ainsworth, posits that our early interactions with primary caregivers form the blueprint for our future relationships. These early experiences shape our attachment styles, which can be broadly categorised into four types: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganised. In this short article I am going to focus only on the first three types.* Secure Attachment: Individuals with secure attachment feel comfortable with intimacy and autonomy. They tend to have positive views of themselves and others, making them less likely to experience chronic loneliness.* Anxious Attachment: Those with anxious attachment often crave closeness but fear rejection and abandonment. This can lead to intense feelings of loneliness, even when in relationships.* Avoidant Attachment: Individuals with avoidant attachment value independence to the extent that they avoid closeness. Their fear of dependency can result in isolation and loneliness.Psychoanalytic Insights on Loneliness and Attachment From a psychoanalytic perspective, our attachment styles are deeply intertwined with our unconscious mind. Early experiences of caregiving are internalised, forming the internal working models that guide our expectations and interactions in relationships.Anxious Attachment and Loneliness * Fear of Rejection: Anxiously attached individuals often perceive themselves as unworthy of love, leading to heightened sensitivity to social rejection. This fear can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the intense need for reassurance pushes others away, exacerbating loneliness. * Dependency and Clinginess: The tendency to cling to partners for reassurance can strain relationships, leading to frequent conflicts and breakups, further deepening feelings of loneliness.Avoidant Attachment and Loneliness * Emotional Self-Sufficiency: Avoidantly attached individuals pride themselves on self-reliance, often dismissing the need for close relationships. While this independence may protect them from the pain of rejection, it also isolates them, preventing deep, meaningful connections. * Fear of Vulnerability: Avoidant individuals struggle with vulnerability, viewing it as a weakness. This fear creates barriers to intimacy, resulting in superficial relationships that fail to satisfy their emotional needs. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

The Role of Attachment Styles in Loneliness

“If you truly want something with all your heart, you will find the energy and means to make it happen.” Those were my analyst’s words at a moment when I was close to giving up. I can still hear his calm, steady voice. I was lying on the same old couch, absent-mindedly tracing the embroidery on the throw with my fingers, staring at the ceiling.&nbsp; I had run out of patience. Powerlessness, fear, and frustration were rolling around inside me. My clinical training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy felt endless. After five years of seminars and assignments, years of intense analytic work with patients, almost two years spent in the corridors of a psychiatric hospital caring for those too unwell to be in the community, and hundreds of hours in personal analysis and supervision, I felt I’d reached the end of the tunnel - only there was no light. And the journey was not yet over.&nbsp;How was I going to see this through? How would I carry the cost, financially and emotionally, of such an arduous training?&nbsp;<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Part of me wanted to rage - at the universe, at my training organisation, at my analyst, and most of all at myself for choosing such a complex and lengthy path. And yet I knew I could not quit or turn back.&nbsp;I was especially cross with my analyst: how could “wanting it” possibly summon the energy and the means? If I didn’t want to complete it after all those years, who did?&nbsp;What I couldn’t see back then - despite already being five years into both my analysis and my training - was that no one else could carry this for me, and I was not yet ready to step out of the safety of being a trainee and take on the full responsibility of standing alone in the world as a psychotherapist. Becoming a therapist is not just an academic pursuit; it is about being prepared to hold the emotional and mental lives of others, which demands maturity, self-awareness, and inner readiness.I already had a BSc in Forensic Psychology, and still so many questions felt unanswered. A fierce curiosity drove me: to inch closer to what felt true in me and to understand the human condition more deeply. That is why I chose to commit to the long, demanding road of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.So, what does psychotherapy training actually involve in the UK? While pathways differ depending on modality and training body, the core elements are always rigorous: theoretical depth, clinical experience, and one’s own therapy. I can speak most honestly about the path I took - psychoanalytic psychotherapy and analytical psychology with the Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy (AGIP) in London.My clinical training took nine years in total, including a foundation year. Throughout those years I was in my own analysis – most often three times a week, and for several years four times a week. To this day, I see personal analysis as the master teacher in my profession. I do not believe we can become good, ethically responsible psychotherapists, entrusted with another person’s inner life, without undergoing our own sustained process of self-knowledge. Truly knowing oneself happens in relationship: sharing one’s thinking and inner world with another and allowing oneself to be vulnerable and seen.<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Alongside personal analysis, the training combined several strands:· &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Four years of theoretical seminars in psychoanalytic theories and thinking.<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">· &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; A minimum of one year in a psychiatric setting, to encounter severe mental distress within the system that holds it.· &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; A year of infant (baby) observation and seminars, to witness development and early relationships with reflective attention.· &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Intensive, long-term clinical work with patients under close supervision, week in, week out, over years.· &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; And woven through it all, hundreds of hours of supervision and reflective writing to deepen and test one’s clinical mind.<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;"> It is demanding - of time, of money, of one’s capacity to think when it would be easier to react. It asks you to tolerate uncertainty, to stay with not-knowing long enough for something true to emerge. It requires humility: you learn quickly that techniques are useful, but it is the quality of attention, the steadiness of the therapeutic frame, and the depth of your own self-knowledge that become decisive.Why do it? Because when someone sits in front of you, you are asked to think with them when they cannot; to help them make sense of what feels unbearable; to hold hope when hope is temporarily out of their reach. And it demands that we, as therapists, keep doing our own work too.So, if you are considering this path, know that the journey will test you and shape you. The light at the end does exist, but it is not a spotlight of triumph. It is quieter and more human: the moment a patient says something they have never been able to say before. In that moment, all the years of study, observation, placements, supervision, and analysis make a different kind of sense. The training does not end but it becomes part of how you live, and how you listen.<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-size: calc(16px * var(--body-fontSize, 1)); font-style: var(--body-fontStyle, normal); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;"> by Simina Simion, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist

What it really takes to train as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the UK

Simina Simion Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist

I’m a UKCP-accredited psychoanalytic psychotherapist with a background in forensic psychology. 

I offer long-term, weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy for adults navigating emotional challenges, relationship patterns, and the deeper questions that shape their inner lives.

My work is for those who are high-functioning on the outside, but internally tired, overwhelmed by anxiety, emptiness, people-pleasing, or repeating the same painful patterns in relationships. Perhaps you’ve been in therapy before, but felt it only scratched the surface. In my practice, we go to the root.

I will help you understand the unconscious patterns that formed early in life, often around difficult attachment or copying strategies you no longer need. Together, we make sense of your internal world and create space for a more authentic, grounded self to emerge.

Specialisations:

Relationship issues
Specialised in ADHD
Loneliness and co-dependency
PTSD, depression and anxiety
Stress management
Childhood trauma (developmental trauma)
Attachment and separation difficulties
Identity exploration, relationship dynamics, and interpersonal issues
Employment and financial difficulties
Pre- and Post-natal depression, challenges of new parenthood
Fertility problems, coping with miscarriages
Gender and sexuality concerns
Grief and loss
Anger management and emotional difficulties
Migration, acculturation, and deportation issues
Marital problems and relationship struggles
Personal growth and improving relationships