What are some common pitfalls of your One Good Thing? How can we avoid them?

It can be easier (or lazier) to blame what happened to us in the past for everything that’s wrong about our lives now. It can be easier (or lazier) to hold onto the assumption that our lives are predestined and what happens next is inevitable – that it’s due to fate or bad luck. Letting go of those assumptions is hard; working through our past experiences is hard. As a psychotherapist, of course I’m going to say that it’s less hard if you have therapeutic support, which is true. But therapy is hard too – and difficult to access and expensive. There is no quick fix, but the effort and the freedom and the future it affords us makes the hard work worthwhile. There are lots of examples of how this can work in my new book, You’re Not My F*cking Mother, which is out in April 2024.

How do you personally do your One Good Thing?

I practice what I preach. I have engaged in personal psychotherapy, I am self-reflective and I continue to access regular support in the form of clinical supervision. None of us is immune to the influence of our past, and we can all get stuck or blindsided at times. Personal development is ongoing work.

And how has doing this changed your life?

It has helped me to write my own story, make my own choices and be my own version of me, who is living the life I choose for myself – which is what everyone deserves.

One Good Thing: remember that your past doesn’t define you