Author Archive for mark.tyrrell

Is Your Label Limiting You?

Words matter, because they can shape expectation. When we are labelled we can sometimes be confined by that label. We can start to live up or down to that label, especially if it's been stuck onto us by some source of authority.

Stop Being a Hypochondriac

The paradox of hypochondria is that the sufferer often knows they are a hypochondriac even whilst maintaining they are justified in believing they are ill.

How to Stop Pulling Out Your Eyelashes

I could understand Marilyn pulling out her own eyelashes, but even she sounded shocked with what she went on to tell me: "I've taken to obsessively tearing out my three-year-old daughter's eyelashes and nibbling them! It's sick, I know; but it's become such a compulsion."

In an Abusive Relationship? Help Yourself Today

There it was again: a fresh but already yellowing circle around her eye. I swear the month before she'd carried, for a while, the puffed signs of a swollen jaw; not long before that she'd been wearing dark glasses on an overcast morning. She worked in our local post office. She always looked diffident, unsure, depressed. I never felt able to ask her about herself; the context was all wrong somehow. But I guessed that whoever she was going back to, again and again, was the centre of her Universe - and not in a good way.