Entangled Minds: Walking the Inner Terrain
I chose the name Entangled Minds to reflect a double meaning—one that speaks to the inner complexity of the individual psyche, and another that gestures toward the shared space of group therapy.
The first meaning refers to the tangled, often messy nature of inhabiting a human body and mind. At times, my mind feels less like a clean map and more like a dense, living forest—teeming with thoughts, sensations, emotions, and elusive, uncategorisable phenomena that slip away from all attempts to order them.
Despite tremendous progress in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and related fields, we are still far from a comprehensive map of human consciousness. Even the most elegant academic models—those that distil aspects of thought, perception, and emotion into coherent frameworks—often feel overly reductionistic when compared to the richness and fluidity of lived experience.
In light of this, I offer the image of the mind as a messy entanglement—a squiggle, if you will—of body and psyche. Rather than relying on sterile labels or neat categories, I imagine the mind as an ecosystem: an interconnected web where thoughts, feelings, and sensations move like animals, plants, and fungi—coexisting, interdependent, and in flux.
Just as a natural ecosystem resists being reduced to simple models—its relationships shifting moment to moment—so too does the psyche defy tidy explanation. When we attempt to simplify or overly manage this complexity, we risk ignoring the unintended consequences that follow.
As a therapist, this invites questions:
How can we nurture a diverse inner ecosystem without needing to control or suppress it?
How can we tend gently to the many parts of ourselves, without replicating the kinds of aggressive management often seen in psychiatric models?
This first meaning of Entangled Minds is an invitation to explore complexity, diversity, and interconnection—with reverence, not fear.
The second meaning—of minds entangled with other minds—will take us into the territory of group therapy, where the relational field becomes both mirror and medicine. That’s a thread I’ll follow in my next post.