Eucalyptus Psychology

19/06/2026

Worry and rumination are often grouped together, but they concern different things. Worry is about the future. It rehearses what hasn't happened yet and often never will. Rumination is about the past. It goes over a conversation or a mistake that is already finished. The two feel different, but both are repetitive, and in both the mind keeps returning to the same thing without getting anywhere.

Neither responds well to being told to stop. Tell yourself to stop worrying and you get much the same result as telling yourself not to think of a white bear. What actually helps is having something better to think about.

Worry eases when it is met with curiosity. It treats an uncertain future as a problem you can solve by thinking hard enough, which you can't. Curiosity asks a simpler question of the same uncertainty: what is actually true now, and what would actually help. Kierkegaard called anxiety the dizziness of freedom, the vertigo of standing before everything we might do or become. Curiosity doesn't remove that. But it is difficult to be curious and afraid at the same time, and with practice the curiosity tends to win.

Rumination eases with absorption. It is self-focused by nature, the mind watching itself go over the same thing. Iris Murdoch described the opposite of this and called it unselfing. She is standing at a window, anxious and resentful about something, when a kestrel appears, hovering. For a moment there is nothing in her mind but the bird. When she returns to what was bothering her, it has become smaller. Being genuinely interested in something other than yourself, a piece of work or the weather over the hills, is not a way of avoiding the problem. It simply stops the problem being the only thing there is.

In our experience, most of the work is not in stopping the thought. It is in finding something else worth your attention.

03/06/2026

We're really pleased to welcome Dr Florence Morley, consultant psychiatrist, now consulting at our Olinda clinic and taking new referrals.

Florence works with adults (18+) and takes a collaborative, formulation-based approach to complex trauma, ADHD and ASD, and mood and anxiety disorders.

She's in clinic on Thursdays and available by telehealth on Tuesdays, with current wait times of around two to four weeks.

It means psychology and psychiatry are now available together at Olinda, including shared neurodevelopmental assessment, so clients can stay for ongoing care rather than being sent elsewhere.

Enquiries and referrals: www.eucalyptuspsychology.com.au

21/05/2026

A lyrebird visited the Olinda clinic garden this morning. They are amazing mimics - capable of reproducing the songs of other birds, the click of a camera shutter, the whine of a chainsaw, with such fidelity that the copy and the original become hard to tell apart.

It is difficult to watch one without thinking about the question of voice. Lacan, with characteristic provocation, claimed that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other - that what speaks most intimately in us is not, in fact, ours. The phrases we reach for, the desires we believe ourselves to hold, the very grammar in which we frame our wanting: most of it has been handed to us by language, by family, by the structures we were born into and could not have chosen. We speak, and something else is speaking through us.

The therapeutic work, in this picture, is not the recovery of a true voice hidden beneath the borrowings. It is closer to a slow act of listening - to what we are in fact saying, to whose words we are using, to the small places where something more our own might begin to surface. Lacan distinguished between empty speech, in which the ego repeats its familiar formulas, and full speech, in which something of the subject breaks through. Most of us live, most of the time, in the former. The latter is rare, and tends to arrive unbidden.

The lyrebird has no such trouble. Its mimicry is its song. For us, the question of when we are speaking and when we are only being spoken is harder, and never finally settled.

If you’re looking for somewhere to think about questions like these, we’d be glad to hear from you.

Eucalyptus Psychology - Mooroolbark and Olinda eucalyptuspsychology.com.au [email protected] (03) 8740 3754

24/04/2026

The Sublime and the Beautiful.

In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant drew an important distinction.

The beautiful is harmonious, proportionate, soothing. A garden, a song, a kind conversation.

The sublime is different: vast, overwhelming, sometimes threatening.

A storm. A mountain that makes you feel small. Grief.

The sublime exceeds us.

And yet encounters with the sublime, precisely because they exceed us, also enlarge us.

To stand before something overwhelming and not be destroyed is a form of dignity.

In our work we meet many people who are living, whether they chose to or not, in something closer to the sublime than the beautiful.

Conventional reassurance tends to offer the beautiful back: soothing, manageable, proportionate.

Sometimes the more honest answer is simply to name the scale.

What you are carrying may be as large as it feels. That is worth acknowledging.

If any of this resonates, we'd be glad to hear from you.

Eucalyptus Psychology — Mooroolbark & Olinda

www.eucalyptuspsychology.com.au

17/04/2026

Solidarity and Isolation

Albert Camus thought most philosophy was asking the wrong question. The question was not whether suffering could be explained. It was whether it could be shared.

Shame thrives in private. The conviction that your particular difficulty is evidence of your particular inadequacy - rather than a response to conditions that are genuinely hard - is very difficult to challenge from inside the isolation it produces.
We sit with many clients who carry a quiet, often unspoken story: other people manage. I am the one for whom things have not gone as they should.

This story is usually not accurate.

The conditions producing housing unaffordability, career instability, and the particular pressures of contemporary life are affecting a very large number of people. Your experience of them is yours and specific. But you are not navigating them alone.
The structural is not an excuse. It is context. And in the therapy room, context changes what the experience means.

https://eucalyptuspsychology.com.au/

Olinda & Mooroolbark

09/04/2026

Defence mechanisms don't emerge from weakness. They emerge from intelligence.

At some point, something was too much - too painful, too threatening, too overwhelming to process directly. And the mind, being the adaptive system it is, found a way around it. Intellectualisation. Denial. Projection. Dissociation. Humour. Withdrawal. These aren't failures of character. They're solutions to problems that once felt unsolvable.

The difficulty is that solutions don't come with expiry dates.
A defence that was genuinely protective at eight - learning not to feel too much, not to need too openly, not to show what was really happening inside - can still be running at thirty-eight, largely unexamined, quietly shaping every significant relationship and decision. Not because the person is stuck, but because the mind doesn't automatically distinguish between the original threat and the present moment.

This is part of what makes psychological change both difficult and worth pursuing. It isn't about dismantling defences - it's about developing enough safety, and enough self-awareness, that they become a choice rather than an automatic response.

The person who intellectualises can still think carefully. The person who withdraws can still value solitude. But neither has to do so compulsively, in every moment that feels remotely unsafe.

What shifts in good therapy is often less about behaviour and more about the relationship a person has with their own interior life. The defences soften - not because they're attacked, but because they're no longer needed in the same way.
That's slow work. But it tends to be the kind that lasts.

https://eucalyptuspsychology.com.au/

📍 Olinda & Mooroolbark

03/04/2026

🌿 The psychologist Irvin Yalom spent decades arguing that beneath most human suffering are four unavoidable truths: that our time is finite, that each of us must ultimately face our inner world on our own terms, that meaning isn't handed to us, and that we are more free - and therefore more responsible for our lives - than we usually feel comfortable admitting.
Most of the time, we manage these truths at arm's length. Routine, plans, certainty about the future - they keep the deeper questions quiet.
But there are moments in life - and in history - when that distance collapses. When the future stops feeling predictable. When the structures we relied on feel less solid than they did. When ordinary decisions suddenly carry an unfamiliar weight.
Those moments tend to surface something that isn't quite anxiety in the clinical sense. It's older than that. More fundamental.
Yalom called this existential anxiety - not a disorder, not a sign something has gone wrong with you, but an honest encounter with what it means to be alive.
It's uncomfortable. It's also, in the right conditions, an invitation to ask what actually matters to you - and how you want to live given that nothing is guaranteed.
That's work worth doing. And it's exactly what therapy, at its best, is for.
- Eucalyptus Psychology

26/03/2026