The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Death Anxiety: What It Is, Why It Happens & How Therapy Can Help - Thanatophia

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

Are you struggling with a fear of death or constantly thinking about your own mortality? In this episode of The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast, Clinical Psychologist Dr Marianne Trent explores death anxiety also known as thanatophobia and why some people experience an intense fear of dying or non-existence.We discuss how childhood experiences, trauma, attachment, and even parenting styles can contribute to anxiety around death. You'll also learn about how therapy can help, including evidence-based approaches like Terror Management Theory, Existential Therapy, and Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT).Whether you’re a mental health professional, a student, or someone experiencing these fears yourself, this episode offers practical insight, psychological understanding, and compassionate support for navigating fear of death. #deathanxiety #thanatophobia Highlights00:00 – Introduction: Why talk about death anxiety?02:03 – What is death anxiety, and how does it present?04:21 – Childhood experiences and early realisations of mortality07:30 – The connection between trauma and fear of death09:52 – Avoidance behaviours and obsessive checking11:40 – Personal reflections: losing loved ones at a young age13:55 – Parenting styles and how they shape our relationship with death16:50 – Death anxiety in OCD, health anxiety, and phobias19:18 – Cultural influences and how we learn to fear death21:00 – When death anxiety spikes: ageing, parenthood, and illness23:43 – The idea of legacy: wanting to leave something behind26:04 – What helps? An overview of therapeutic approaches28:30 – How Compassion-Focused Therapy can soothe existential fear30:14 – What not to say to someone experiencing death anxiety32:10 – Supporting yourself and others through gentle curiosity34:00 – Wrapping up: You’re not alone in feeling this way📚 Book Titles Mentioned and Associated AuthorsThe Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins https://amzn.to/3GCq2aU (Referenced while discussing the newest prequel focusing on Haymitch. https://amzn.to/44rcDvG) The Grief Collective – by Dr Marianne Trent https://amzn.to/40dLqtHLove’s Executioner – Irvin D. Yalom https://amzn.to/3GwE5io (Described as formative reading during clinical training.)Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death – Irvin D. Yalom https://amzn.to/3Ik7igW (Explicitly named as relevant to death anxiety.)A Matter of Death and Life – Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom https://amzn.to/4kviGnqThe Gift Of Therapy - Irvin Yalom https://amzn.to/4lRbenX Mentioned in relation to Yalom’s reflections after his wife’s passing.)Links:Dr Marianne Trent (00:00):What if I told you that your fear of death might be quietly shaping your choices, your relationships, even your worldview? In today's episode, we are diving into the psychology of death, anxiety, what it is, how often it crops up, and what happens when it starts to interfere with daily life. Whether you've ever had a passing fear of dying or you...

I'm Jo and I work as an assistant practitioner in a CAMS service in Lancashire. I bought and read Marianne's book The Clinical Psychologist Collective to accompany me while completing the clinical psychology training application. It proved to be really good company. I found it sparked ideas of how to build experience and skills, but more than that, it offered the chance to get lost in people's stories. It provided a timely reminder not to get so caught up in an end goal and to value and enjoy each job we fulfill along the way because the work we do now is important and matters to those we sit

alongside as well as ourselves. It also gave the reassurance that there are eclectic roots into clinical psychology, which is important for me as someone who's had a meandering journey and not a typical route to the profession. I wholeheartedly recommend the book for both personal and professional reasons. Be prepared to put evening tasks on hold for a while though, because once you've started reading it's tough to put it down. What if I told you that your fear of death might be quietly shaping your choices, your relationships, even your worldview? In today's episode we are diving into the psychology of death anxiety. What it is, how often it crops up and what happens when it starts to interfere

with daily life. Whether you've ever had a passing fear of dying or you find yourself avoiding the topic completely, you're not alone. And the good news, there are always ways to find more peace and to work through this. And stick around right to the end because we are sharing a top tip for thinking about your own mortality and helping you to have more control. Hope you find it super useful. If you do, please like and subscribe for more. Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. I am Dr. Marianne, a qualified clinical psychologist. Thank you for being here and if you are watching on YouTube, please do bear in mind that currently only 11.2% of you are subscribed to the channel.

Please do come along and subscribe to my channel Dr. Marianne Trent and watch the content, like, engage, comment, get involved, because it really does help me to create bigger and better content and secure bigger and better guests so that you get more from this podcast too. Following a show or subscribing to a YouTube channel really is the kindest thing you can do for any creator that you rate. So if you're not already following the show on your favourite podcast platform, please do. Okay, with no further ado, let's dive in, meet our guest for today, Tia, and I will

see you on the other side. Hi Tia, welcome along to the podcast. It's lovely to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Hello Marianne and everyone. Thank you for being here. So we are thinking today about kind of where you are right now, which is that you are an end stage trainee clinical psychologist who yesterday completed her VIVA and PASS. Congratulations. And we are thinking about specifically your research today,

which is on death anxiety. Is that right? Yes, that's right. Amazing. So what is death anxiety? I mean, death anxiety really is the fear or the unease about our own death or the dying process and this can show up as worry of losing control or you know the unknown because we don't, most of us don't know what's going to happen after we pass and kind of what happens after life. And it, you know, can be a quite common thing as well. Of course some people experience it at some point, but we don't really talk about it very much. So that's kind of where the research stemmed from. OK, so we're not necessarily thinking specifically

about people who might have a palliative diagnosis or who think that they might not live as long as people around them. We're thinking about the general kind of Dawson's Creek style existential ponderings of our own mortality. Is that right? That's exactly right, yes. I mean it's the one thing in life that is inevitable to all of us and that's exactly what the thesis focused on. Okay, absolutely. Can you tell us a bit more about your thesis then and the the terror management theory? What is that? Yeah, of course. So terror management theory is a psychological theory that

really tries to explain how we cope with the knowing that we will one day die and terror management theory states that because we're the only animal that's aware of their mortality, it's quite unique and hence the term terror. Because if we went through our life day to day just thinking about the fact that you know we will want Haces to exist, that is quite terrifying to think about. But the terror management theory states that basically we'll build up systems to buffer this terror, this fear, this death anxiety that we have. And we do this through systems like our culture, our personal values and relationships that act as buffers in a way. And these buffers give us a

sense of meaning, they help us feel secure so that the death anxiety doesn't overwhelm us. It's a bit like having an emotional toolkit for that death awareness. Okay, so terror management theory, TMT, is that something that's your own baby or is that already in the literature? Oh no, that's been in the literature since I want to say like the 80s. It was three social psychologists who came up with this theory and it really started this idea of why do we need self-esteem. And that's kind of what I've really touched upon in terms of these buffers. So self-esteem help us buffer certain difficulties. One of those difficulties is

the awareness that we may one day die if we are living up to our worldviews or our values. It gives us a sense of meaning that life is worthwhile, that we are worthwhile people. That then buffers that anxiety through self-esteem. Okay. If things are going wrong and we have high kind of feelings about our own mortality, what might we be seeing in ourselves or perhaps in someone we care about or someone that we we work with clinically? Well, I mean, I think a lot of us fear death anyway, because it's a big unknown. Our brains try to keep us safe. It's a big don't get eaten machine, right? So it's normal to have these thoughts pop into our mind or to have reminders day to

day, you know, you may see a scene on TV or hear about someone's passing. And that does trigger these thoughts of mortality or reflection on life in ourselves. But normally we are pretty good at buffering those thoughts, like I said, through those mechanisms. But for some people, they may have not had the opportunity to develop the buffers as well as others. For example, this could be from things like early loss, trauma, insecure attachment styles, kind of a lot of the things that we see in people who also develop mental health difficulties, you know, those early childhood adverse experiences.

And when we don't have those buffers or perhaps we manage our mortality in a way that's not productive or not helping us, it can, or the literature at least, says that it can definitely lead to an increase in mental health difficulties. The research also states that death anxiety can be a transdiagnostic factor across different mental health disorders. Okay, yeah, and it is, it does crop up more than you might imagine so I don't know if you've ever read any of the Hunger Games books but I'm reading the new one at the moment the one that was published in 2025 and it's focusing in on Haymitch who in the first Hunger Games is Katniss's kind of mentor but it's focusing in on his story when he was in the Hunger Games and it's interesting one of the participants is kind of saying, actually, my hope is that I will die quickly

and that my family won't have to watch this protracted, horrific death. And that's almost hoping for that good death that we sometimes speak about. But obviously, in a game show, a good death is perhaps different than the millionaire's death, which I think is spoken about, which is lying in a bed when you're 100 surrounded by people that you love. That's kind of sometimes thought of as a millionaire's death. And then of course, Squid Games as well. Squid Games is around in our culture currently. I've just literally finished season three yesterday. Bit disappointed actually. But yeah, like thinking about people's death

and kind of whether that's quite a violent death or whether it's something actually that we hope we will live till our older years. We hope that we will, I guess, hit some of those milestones that are different for each of us, but certainly, you know, for many people might include finding a life partner or, you know, maybe having children or not having children or starting a business or, you know, making a success of your career, making yourself proud, making others proud. Like, you know, there's certain things that

we might want to do. Some people might want to go on and become a grandparent or just like those self-imposed life goals. Is it measuring ourselves up to how well we feel we have or haven't measured up to those goals that leads to us having this terror response. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right there. So what the research also states, and I think what you started to describe here, we have different ways of dealing with our mortality. And of course, we have different worldviews. So for example, if we take religion into account, of course, that kind of gives us a quite nice framework to work from and sets out you know if you do certain things you will have a good life or perhaps you will go to heaven or be

reincarnated after life. And then outside of religion we can also think about these other ways of buffering our death anxiety through what we call symbolic or literal immortality and what you've described of having a life partner, having children, in a way that kind of buffers the death anxiety because our legacy lives on so we can live on through our children, through our family. So in a way that is a really nice buffer to have. But I think what you're also describing is right in terms of, you know, if you value family and closeness, relationships in your life and you are finding that you are having, you are meeting those values or those goals in your life then that

does increase your self-esteem or at least that's the reset of the literature states. Yeah and it's strange isn't it because I don't think my grandfather would have been ready to die. Is that an okay thing to say ready to die? 80. He spent his 90th birthday on his shed roof fixing it so he was like very much not what you'd expect for your average 90 year old. He died when he was 95 but he was so done by then, like he was ready, like he would say like well my wife died, my girlfriend died, all of my friends have died. And in my book, The Grief Collective, Dave, one of the contributors, thinks about kind of the tree of life, the family tree, and actually as we

grow, rather than looking up for our family connections, we begin to have to look across. But then ultimately that might not be enough either and we have to start looking down and even if we don't have our own children it might be that we're looking down to our nephews or our nieces or kind of our cousins children and if being part of a family is important to you then you almost need to readjust your gaze because you know I speak to you as the daughter of one living parent and it does just alter things and yet I definitely have experienced more of the sideways you know connections and it's a very is a very strange existential like Dawson's Creek is for me, my first grounding

in kind of existential angst. And it's what I come back to time and time again, which probably isn't a very popular cultural reference these days. But like it's just, it's a whole process, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. And I think when we are going through such a big change, perhaps if we lose a close family member, we may need to adjust and think about, you know, where I am in life now, how can I meet those sort of, if, you know, family and relationships

are important to do, which for so many of us they are, you know, think about how can I adjust. And actually, if you feel like you're not able to adjust or perhaps as a society we don't really speak about these things, perhaps with family sometimes we do or when there's an event like that that happens we do speak about it but not so much day to day and I think it's it can be a bit of a shame because where do people that need to support for that go and of course therapy is a fantastic opportunity to think about it, but even as clinical psychologists, we're not often trained in how to have these conversations outside of people going through palliative care. And I think that's when the difficulties can come up. You know, if you're trying to adjust but not having the right support around the adjustment to death

and reflecting even on your own mortality, then you can start to mismanage those fears. Yeah, and actually clinically, it might crop up more than we think it does, but if we haven't kept digging, and then what, and then what, and then what, and then what, especially with OCD, if you keep digging, keep digging, keep digging, keep then and what, and then what and then what, you often will get to, well, I worry that I'm going to die and it's going to be horrendous and it will be painful and it will be preventable and everyone will say, well, you could have done this or should have done that. And so actually, yeah, like you said, I think it does crop up, but we haven't always got,

like you said, exactly, we haven't got the training or the skills to be able to grapple with that or that it doesn't feel clinical enough, you know, absolutely in the services with the access thresholds we have currently, you know, if it's not significantly impacting on someone's well-being, if it isn't giving them lots of problems, if it isn't you know making them risky to themselves or if it isn't, you know, making them risky to themselves or others, you know, then likely they ain't gonna meet the threshold and of course it's something they can explore privately but actually, you know, you still matter, it's still valid, you

shouldn't be suffering and I guess it's when it tips from still being able to be functional to then not being able to get on with your day and do the things that actually you need to do. Is that when it becomes more problematic? Yeah, I mean, exactly. Right. So of course, if like, again, if you go and if you think back to the buffers, if you are able to sort of buffer that anxiety through, you know, having those close relationships or living up to your worldviews, whatever those worldviews may be, of course, they're going to be different based on a person's identity. If we just don't have those sort of foundational strengths or those things that we can reach into, that's when it's going to become a problem. And exactly like you were speaking about, that transdiagnostic factor of death anxiety within so many mental health difficulties, and I talked about this

in part of my conceptual review within the thesis, and essentially most, if not all mental health difficulties have this underlying, you know, something, well, I will die, something will happen to me, or somebody in my life will die, or the process of death itself, or how is this going to impact the people around me, is it going to be painful, or what's even going to happen to me after death. So even if you are religious and you feel like perhaps you're not living up to those values, that can bring on some really strong fears about what's going to happen to you post-death. Yeah, and just as you speak then, it's making me think about my own father's death and I'm very fortunate I was able to be with him but watching someone die is a privilege if that's

something that you want but it's also can be triggering and traumatizing in itself you know. So yes his death wasn't violent but it still can traumatic. And actually I've had to access EMDR to get the kind of traumatic bits of his illness and death to lay flatter because otherwise that moke well have, have made me fearful of my own death or other people's. And so it's thinking about actually how much of what you're experiencing is trauma and how much of this is just death anxiety that's not linked to a specific thing, you know? And so it's trying to separate the two

because you deserve to thrive, you deserve to flourish. Yeah, of course. And thank you so much for sharing that. I think, yeah, like you said, I think with the experience that you've had in an off-course, so many people would have had a similar experience, you know, one that's quite distressing, I think that's the difference of where it could be a trauma. But I think where it doesn't necessarily lead to, so sometimes we can think of this post-traumatic

growth, but that doesn't of course happen to everybody. It can lead to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder instead. And that of course depends on the previous coping that the person had, and this could be attachments, coping styles, etc. previously, but the thoughts that you have in during the memory or when that event is happening. I think if we are able to talk through, and similar to trauma I think, if we are able to talk through and process this event then I think it makes it easier for our brains to make sense of it, kind of find meaning and within therapy we also talk about this thing reclaiming your life right and I think it's a little bit of that as well if we were to think existential therapy. I had, during this process process read a lot of books by Yalom

and one of the wonderful things he talked about was when he works with people and their existential worries and fears. He says you know if you think back to your life over the past year, how do you feel if you had to relive that past year every single year for the rest of your life. And I think that's a really nice kind of opening into what is it that you value about your life and what would you change? I'm so glad you've mentioned Irvin Yolom. I love his work actually and I first experienced it when I was on training. I think in my first year I I read Love's Executioner, which really helped me to develop as a clinician, I think. But then of course, Staring at the Sun, his book on death anxiety, I really found interesting as well. And I had the

pleasure of actually going to one of his talks, it was remotely, it was during the pandemic, I think it was 2020. And he was talking about his new book at the time about his wife's death, a matter of death and life, I think it's called. And he was doing it from home and obviously he's a kind of world-renowned psychiatrist and it was interesting to see how his he has aged and actually midway through he got up and went for a wee and kind of needed to be supported and kind of shuffled back and it was it's just really hard it's hard to see people age it's hard to see people that you care about faltering and even if they aren't old

but they have declining health it can be really hard to see that in someone you love or you care about and that was a bit of a shock for me to see this man who, you know, I've grown up reading, aging and of course being so open and honest about his grief and the loss of his wife. And it's a privilege to age, it is, but it's not always without its difficulties. I love that, and yeah, exactly you're right. And it's making me think about the book that I'm reading by Elam at the moment, and it's called The Gift of Therapy. And it really is him thinking about the fact that he's come into the end of his life and what can he sort of leave on as a legacy. And I think in a way that was, of course course his kind of symbolic or maybe even to an external literal mortality because you know, continue to talk about someone

when they've passed or about the work they've done that makes them live on and think in the book that you discussed, I think the staring at the sun, he talks about this ripple effect as well, how whilst we may be gone, what's the ripple effect that you've had on people and those around you. Well, there's another book there for me to check out because I wasn't familiar with that one but what I will do is I'll pop all the links to the books that we're mentioning, I'll pop them in the show notes for people or in the description if people are watching on YouTube. Is mindfulness a good way of kind of

keeping our terror management in check? That's a really lovely question, again something that I had discussed throughout the thesis and I think the of keeping our terror management in check? That's a really lovely question, again, something that I had discussed throughout the thesis. And I think the thesis kind of focused on how terror management describes death or how normally we can deal with death awareness in a avoidant or quite defensive way. But there are of course other ways of dealing with our mortality and that is in a more engaging and more reflective, accepting way. And mindfulness is a really nice way of doing that and of course mindfulness helps us stay present and accept uncomfortable feelings and uncomfortable thoughts without trying

to run away from them, without trying to push them away and that in turn of course reduces anxiety. There's a specific meditation on death, on our own mortality, it's called Mara Nasati, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, which helps people to just sit and reflect on the thoughts that they have coming up for them about their own mortality, about other people's mortality around them. And in a way that can of course help reduce that anxiety that people feel, and it's not going to be as easy at the start right because it's a bit like any kind of anxiety. It won't be easy to start off with but the more we become comfortable and the more we sit through with those feelings, the more reflective and accepting we can become of those thoughts and that reality. Yeah and I think the more comfortable we become with our own

And I think the more comfortable we become with our own stillness and the quietness and being able to tune into our thoughts and to maybe not think about them as as threatening, harmful, dangerous. Even yesterday I was talking to someone at the gym and she's experienced an injury and I was like, she's like, I still just really love coming to the gym. And I said, well, maybe you could do something a bit slower. You know, you could go swimming. Just look so boring. So boring. You know, or maybe, you know, yoga or my, you know, mindfulness stuff or palates. Oh no, oh no, too slow.

Cause I'm not just be, oh, my mind would be racing. And it's like, okay, it's almost like evidence that actually this is kind of what you need because it's okay to be by yourself. That doesn't need to feel threatening. And actually I did used to, I have to confess, I confess in training I quit my mindfulness course because it was just like it was too much. I was asking this to do too much in my own time, lying down for like half an hour by myself in the dark. Like I had things I wanted to do differently at that stage of my career.

Cause I was literally at the stage that you are at now and having to go into university on days that people who were not opting into this free course were not doing. And so it felt like this is not what I signed up for. I thought this would just be an extra thing, like, you know, that we could just do. But no, this now feels like a punishment. And so I then started to resent that practice. And it was just, it's just not what I needed at that time. But actually, it was maybe just I wasn't ready for that at that time. And actually, yeah, like tuning into our stillness and our awareness can come when you're ready for it, I think. But sometimes when, especially when life feels so noisy, you know, these fans are always in our hand. Even during this podcast, I've had a LinkedIn notification

come up, come and follow me, connect me. I've had someone try and call me. I've had to know that. I've had a text message. I've had, I've heard on my computer, I've heard a couple of WhatsApp pings, like it's a lot, you know, we absolutely need to be able to just have some boundaries, some time, some space for ourselves. We weren't designed to be this on all the time. Yeah you're exactly right we are constantly in a state of doing rather than being right and then I wonder how that links to these cultural worldviews that many of us hold especially here in the West that sort of hustle culture and are we living up to this hustle culture? Are we doing enough? Are we being productive? perhaps comparing ourselves to other people? And of course, we know that

social media is a highlight reel. But then what is that doing to us? And if we feel like we're not meeting that, then what's that doing to our self-esteem and mental health? And I think it's a nice way of thinking about actually how then that death sort of awareness and our ability to think about that, you've understood these wider issues that we're experiencing anyway and you're exactly right having time to just be or focus on what is important to me. And one of the things that we talked about or what I talked about in the thesis was this difference between that deeper death engagement and compared to that defensive sort of brief mortality awareness where we're trying to push away our thoughts of

death or mortality. And what the research is showing actually is that there's, whilst it's not a wake-up call for everybody, there are some people who benefit more from having this deeper engagement of mortality and that it seems to be people with higher mindfulness, higher psychological flexibility, higher curiosity. And when in one specific experiment when they ask people about their goals and extrinsic versus extrinsic goals, those people who got to engage more deeply with their death actually ended up rating intrinsic goals. So things like health, relationships and just wellbeing as more important than previously. But if we had those brief reminders of mortality or

the people that in that group that had the brief reminders of mortality, they're more likely to rate those extrinsic goals like fame, money, wealth, all of those things as more important. Absolutely. And just listening to you talk actually, it makes me think about my own mortality. And it makes me think about some of the planning that I have already done for that. And one of those things is, is to have written a will. And we did that during something called the UK Will Aid Month, which I know is coming up in October this year. And that's where you get trained legal professionals to draw up a will for free in exchange for a charitable donation. And so if whoever is listening to this or watching this doesn't yet have a will, its cost doesn't necessarily need to be prohibitive in that. And it is really important, especially

if you are not married, or especially if you are not married or especially if you are married but you are no longer together and you don't want that you know your estate to pass to your spouse or if you have very specific requests about where you want portions of your estate to go and actually knowing that that is all set up is is another thing that might help or certainly help people when you've gone. But also as therapists, we might wanna think about having therapeutic wills. So what happens when we die,

if we have open cases to us, who should handle that? And so I think there's all these extra layers of mortality considerations for people working in helping professions. Have you got a will, Tia? Can I ask you that? I don't actually have a will myself, but I think this is such an important topic to think about. And I wasn't aware of the will aid month, so I might have a think about that. And I really liked your, yeah, I hadn't considered actually how would we deal with ending therapy if

something did happen to us and that would have such a huge impact on the clients that we work with and that must be really unsettling. And I think this is why it's so important and again a huge part of my thesis focused on we don't have these conversations enough and I'm just really grateful to be able to discuss this review and thank you so much again for having me on here to just to raise this awareness and get hopefully people to think about that this isn't a normal conversation to have and just to make it more accessible. Yeah it should be normalized shouldn't it and thank you so much for being here thank you so much for introducing this topic. There is another there's going to be a little death a death mini I have to say. So this is episode one.

Episode two is actually looking at the palliative decisions that are happening in court and what the implications are for people, but also what the implications are for us working in mental health services. So if anyone is enjoying this conversation, please do look out for the next episode, which if you're watching this live is coming out next week, or if you are watching just as a general series, look out for it and watch or listen to that one. So thank you so much for your time, Tia.

Congratulations on getting to the end of your training and wishing you the very best with what comes next. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me here and wishing you the best too. Thank you so much. Bye, Tia. Bye bye.

Oh what a lovely, lovely guest episode that was. I hope you found it helpful. If you have, please drop a comment, drop a like, rate and review the episode or the show. It would be so gratefully received. Thanks to Tia for her time and congratulations on getting to the stage of her career that she's at. If grief is not your special area of knowledge or expertise, or if you would like to up your levels of insight and awareness into it, please do check out my book, The Grief Collective – Stories of Life, Loss and Learning to Heal. There will be links in the show notes and in the description but it gets lovely reviews and it's such a nourishing, wholesome, inspiring read and if you love people and their stories it gives you an

excellent chance to have a peek behind the curtains of real people's lives and experiences so it's definitely one not to miss. All of the books that we mentioned including The Grief Collective there'll be links for in the description and the show notes. What has this episode brought up for you? Let's get involved in the YouTube comments, let's support one another, let's inspire conversations. To quote Jack from Titanic, let's make this count. is the aspiring psychologist Pascals without a Marian Dread Hello, my name is Veronica Kasova.

I live in Edinburgh and I just graduated with a Masters in Psychology of Mental Health. Marion recommended me the Clinical Psychologist Collective when I was networking on LinkedIn and I must say I love it. It is one of a kind. It's like a window into the lives of people on the path of becoming a psychologist. The stories are unique, honest and filled with a kind of intangible wisdom only personal storytelling can uncover. A common thread in the stories I valued most was to be compassionate not only with others but

with myself too. Also not fixating on becoming a psychologist, but enjoying life, growth and the final results will come as a by-product. Marianne, thank you for taking the time to collate all the stories. The book is a true gem and I think every aspiring psychologist should have a copy on their shelf. Thank you.