Well it’s hard to believe we are half way through 2026. How is your year been for you? What’s shifted for the better, what needs more work and in what area of your life?

I’ve always had a passion for restoring old things.

There’s something deeply satisfying about bringing something back to its former glory rather than replacing it. When I bought my ninety-year-old cottage, I knew it had stories to tell. Over the years, people had painted over almost everything. 

Last Sunday, I decided to tackle the original brass door locks and handles.

They were buried beneath layer after layer of paint. White. Cream. Green. More white. Decades of people covering what was already there.

I spent hours with paint stripper, steel wool and a scraper. It wasn’t glamorous. It was slow, messy work. There were times I wondered why I was bothering.

Then, little by little, the original brass began to appear.

The detail returned.

The craftsmanship returned.

The beauty had never disappeared. It had simply been hidden beneath everything that had been added over the years.

As I sat there scraping away, I couldn’t help thinking that’s exactly what happens to us.

We aren’t born believing we’re not enough.

We aren’t born people-pleasing, over-functioning, avoiding conflict or carrying everyone else’s emotions.

Those are the layers.

They come from our families, our experiences, our relationships, our disappointments and the roles we learned to play just to belong.

Eventually, we forget they’re layers.

We mistake them for who we are.

So much of psychotherapy isn’t about adding another strategy, another technique or another way of thinking.

It’s about stripping away everything that was never really yours to carry.

The fear.

The shame.

The expectations.

The survival patterns that once protected you but now keep you disconnected from yourself.

When those layers begin to fall away, people often say the same thing.

“I feel like myself again.”

Not a new version of themselves.

Just themselves.

Maybe that’s why I love restoring old things.

The beauty isn’t in changing them.

It’s in revealing what was there all along.

Have a wonderful last weekend of June and enjoy what brings you back to yourself. xx