Josephine Aligwekwe

There is a particular kind of professional who is objectively brilliant and genuinely struggling. They have the qualifications. The track record. The technical knowledge that makes them indispensable on paper. They can hold a room when the content is complex, the numbers are intricate, or the strategy demands intellectual rigour. And yet, something keeps catching. Relationships at work feel more difficult than they should. Feedback lands badly, or doesn't land at all. Leadership feels more...

There's a particular kind of frustration that brings people to therapy, not the acute, something-terrible-has-happened kind, but the slower, quieter kind. The frustration of watching yourself repeat the same patterns in relationship after relationship, with different people, in different years of your life, and not being able to understand why. You get close to someone and something in you tightens. You pull away. Or the opposite: you feel someone pulling back slightly and something in you...

You've worked hard to get here. The career, the title, the salary, the life that, from the outside, looks like exactly what you were aiming for. And yet somewhere along the way, something quietly broke. You're not sad, exactly. You're not falling apart. But you're running on something that no longer feels like energy. It feels like fumes. You push through because pushing through is what you do. Because stopping is not part of your vocabulary. Because rest, somewhere along the line, started to...