BrightonPsych (@BrightonPsych) / X

BrightonPsych

6,076 posts

BrightonPsych

@BrightonPsych

Tweets by Mark Vahrmeyer | UKCP Psychoanalytical Psychotherapist | Views my own | Co-owner of Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy in #Brighton and #Lewes, UK

East Sussex

Joined July 2011

Pinned
BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
Jul 2, 2025
Why AI “therapy” between sessions may feel helpful - but is quietly undermining real psychotherapy and change. 🧵 I am seeing more and more articles about how AI can be used to support patients between sessions. This is why this is a bad idea:
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BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
Jun 9, 2025
Empathy is a relational skill, not a personality type and not a gift. There is no such thing as “an empath.” To call oneself “an empath” is often to avoid looking at the underlying structures that shape one’s compulsive over-attunement and sensitivity to others’ emotions.
52K
BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
Jun 12, 2025
Psychologically maturing means tolerating disappointment in adult relationships. Adult relationships will always, at some level, disappoint. Not because something has gone wrong—but because no other person can ever fully meet the needs we bring from childhood.
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BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
Mar 5, 2023
So ‘celebrity’ therapist ‘diagnoses’ celebrity Royal on live TV with a basket full of psychiatric labels. I can’t begin to cover with what’s wrong with this ethically…. Not least what do these diagnoses even mean??? This is NOT psychotherapy!
Gabor Mate diagnoses Prince Harry with attention deficit disorder
From dailymail.com
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BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
Jul 21, 2025
Why so much research into addiction is plain wrong. 🧵 Addiction is not simply a compulsion or a moral failing. It is a maligned form of attachment. When early caregivers are absent, frightening, or unpredictable, the child turns to internal strategies.
63K
BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
Oct 14, 2025
Everyone starting therapy says they want change. But unconsciously, most want everything else to change - their past, their parents, their partner. Anything but themselves. The work of therapy is recognising that change begins only where grief for what cannot change is allowed.
14K
BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
May 19, 2023
Replying to @JonathanShedler and @JoyceCarolOates
Human experience has always been talked and written about and whilst the terms may have changed, the existential challenges of being a human have not. As it it with depression, so it is with narcissism. It became a clinical term around 125 years ago but was written about by Ovid
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BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
Aug 15, 2025
What's the quickest way to tell if a relationship is healthy? Both people give each other the benefit of the doubt. Ambiguity is met with curiosity, not accusation. The default belief: the other is for us, not against us.
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BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
Apr 3, 2023
‘Mental health support is based on talking therapy, and talking is what chatbots do’ - No! Mental health support is based on a human-to-human relationships. This systematic drive to eliminate the value and function of human relationships is perverse.
Would you open up to a chatbot therapist?
From bbc.co.uk
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BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
May 27, 2025
Real psychotherapy isn’t about giving answers. It’s about surviving the not-knowing — together. This is another realm where AI fails. Therapy is the alchemy of two nervous systems in dialogue. No algorithm, however advanced, can replace the patient–therapist field.
32K
BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
Jan 4, 2024
I don't know how often this needs to be reiterated: When, as a psychotherapist, you give advice, you are doing so because of what you find unbearable, rather than serving the patient. Same goes for all the 'therapists' dispensing life advice on TikTok etc.
46K
BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
Jun 18, 2025
Splitting is a primitive defence. We all use it, but some adults rely on it. However, in early life, it is essential for us all. Why? Because the infant cannot yet bear ambivalence—that something can be both good and bad. 🧵
54K
BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
Mar 2, 2023
Patients do not automatically feel better after psychotherapy sessions - at least not if the psychotherapy is being done right. Our role is to be a constant, a solid presence, for the patient so that they may confront their inner world. 🧵
36K
BrightonPsych
@BrightonPsych
May 29, 2025
Psychoanalysis, and thus psychotherapy, can only begin once the patient’s crisis has passed. It is always a crisis that brings a patient to therapy. But the crisis is not the work. The work is in the relationship. Patients need to want to come to therapy rather than need to.
17K