Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

Send us Fan Mail You can start the day calm, talk to one person, and end up tense, guilty, or strangely hopeless. That shift is not always “just you.” We dig into a phenomenon we call emotional contamination: the way feelings move between people through tone, posture, breath, and unspoken cues, until you’re carrying an emotional state that may not fully belong to you. We walk through everyday exam...

Send us Fan Mail This is just the intro....and  verse 1.

Send us Fan Mail A kid who never raises his voice can look “easy” to the adults around him, but that quiet can be a carefully engineered survival plan. We tell a true story about a boy growing up with abuse and neglect, learning that silence is safer than being heard, and slowly disappearing in plain sight. Then, after protection and removal from the family home, something unexpected begins: not i...

Send us Fan Mail Truth doesn’t usually get shouted in families, it leaks out through consequences. When adults cling to competing stories about who is right, who is to blame, and who has suffered most, kids are left to adapt to a reality no one is willing to name. I’m Kim Lee from the Children’s Consultancy, and this chapter of “Living with Untruth” sits with a hard idea: families rarely collapse...

Send us Fan Mail You’ve probably heard the line: “You can’t handle the truth.” We start there and take it seriously, because in real families and real relationships, the truth often lands like an explosion. When something has been held back for too long, the reveal is loud, raw, and impossible to ignore. And instead of facing what’s true, people often flip the script and villainize the person who...

Send us Fan Mail

Send us Fan Mail Kids don’t always tell the truth with words. Sometimes they tell it with panic, perfectionism, shutdown, rage, or a level of “acting out” that leaves every adult asking the same question: what is wrong with this child? We take that question apart and replace it with a harder one: what truth is this child carrying that nobody else can speak? Through a composite family story drawn f...

Send us Fan Mail

Send us Fan Mail If you have ever watched a child melt down and thought, “I don’t even know what’s happening right now,” this finale will give you a different lens. We talk about mentalization, the invisible skill that helps us look past behavior and ask what is going on in the mind underneath. For us, that shift changes everything: it turns power struggles into information, misunderstandings into...

Send us Fan Mail Curiosity is fragile, and families can lose it without meaning to. Kim Lee from the Children’s Consultancy unpacks the quiet patterns that shut down a child’s inner world: stress that makes everyone reactive, certainty that turns into labels, and shame that teaches kids they are “too much” or “not enough.” When curiosity disappears, mentalization fades too, and children stop askin...

Send us Fan Mail If you have ever caught yourself thinking “They’re doing this on purpose,” this conversation offers a different path: wonder what is happening inside the child, not just what the child is doing. We talk about mentalization, the practical skill of understanding our own mind and someone else’s mind, and why kids do not learn it from advice or books. They learn it from being held in...

Send us Fan Mail Most people think the big question about autism is whether autistic children “understand other people.” I’m not convinced that question gets us anywhere helpful. What actually changes relationships is noticing how mentalization works under real-world pressure and how often misunderstanding runs both ways, even when everyone involved has empathy and good intent. I walk through how...

Send us Fan Mail A child with ADHD can look incredibly empathic and reasonable, and then suddenly say something harsh, slam a door, or melt down over what seems like a small trigger. That swing isn’t proof they don’t care, and it isn’t a simple motivation problem. We walk through how mentalization, our ability to understand ourselves and others through thoughts, feelings, wishes, and intentions, c...

Send us Fan Mail A social media ban for kids under 16 sounds like the kind of clean, decisive fix adults crave when they feel frightened and powerless. I get that fear. Parents are worried, schools are exhausted, and clinicians and safeguarding teams are seeing what algorithm-driven platforms expose children to: comparison, sexualization, cruelty, misinformation, addictive design, and relentless s...

Send us Fan Mail We talk about what happens when a child’s ability to mentalize collapses under stress, and why anxiety and explosive anger can be signs of a nervous system stuck in survival mode. We connect trauma, emotional safety, and polyvagal states to practical ways we can help kids return to regulation so reflection becomes possible again.  • how mentalization depends on felt safety  • the...

Send us Fan Mail We unpack why children cannot learn emotional regulation alone and how they build it by borrowing calm from a caregiver. We explain containment, co-regulation, and repair, and why these early patterns often show up again in adult relationships. • parents functioning as an external brain in early development • the myth that children should manage emotions on their own • co-regulati...

Send us Fan Mail We explore what happens in the brain when we mentalize, and why reflection can disappear the moment emotions surge. We connect child development, neuroscience, and real-life conflict so you can understand reactivity with more clarity and less shame.  • brain development as an evolving process including neural pruning and new pathways  • mentalization as integration of feeling and...

Send us Fan Mail Your child isn’t learning emotional skills from your best lecture. They’re learning from what it feels like when they’re scared, angry, or overwhelmed and you respond. We dig into how mentalization forms: the lifelong ability to understand ourselves and others in terms of thoughts, feelings, wishes, and intentions, and why it grows through experience long before a child has words....

Send us Fan Mail A dog cowers when we approach, even though we mean no harm. That moment forces a human question we ask all the time with kids, partners, and friends: what is happening inside them? We start this series by naming the skill behind that question mentalization, the capacity to understand ourselves and other people in terms of thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes, wishes, and intentions, n...

Send us Fan Mail Recovery gets sold as closure, a perfect apology, or a clean happy ending. I see it differently, and in this finale I name it plainly: recovery is when your life stops revolving around the wound. The scar may still be there, and the memories don’t vanish, but they stop running your days. That one shift can change how you date, how you parent, how you set boundaries, and how you ch...

Send us Fan Mail The most misunderstood moment in an empath and avoidant relationship isn’t the breakup. It’s what happens after the empath finally walks away, quietly, firmly, and often with no contact. I call this “the reckoning” because it’s the day survival beats hope, and the avoidant can no longer rely on the old certainty that the empath will forgive, return, and keep carrying what they won...

Send us Fan Mail The breakup nobody talks about is the quiet one: the day an empath finally leaves after years of trying to make it work. We sit with that uncomfortable truth Kim Lee shares right up front: most people assume the empath leaves because of one event, resentment, or someone new, but the real reason is far harder to face. The shift happens when they realize that loving someone deeply i...

Send us Fan Mail A relationship can look perfectly fine on the outside while quietly collapsing on the inside. We dig into the empath and avoidant dynamic that ends not with betrayal or a blowout fight, but with hundreds of tiny moments that never get repaired: a need dismissed, a vulnerable truth met with silence, a promise that fades, a bid for connection that lands nowhere. We talk through why...

Send us Fan Mail The hardest relationship pain is rarely a single blowup. It’s the slow confusion of reaching for someone you love and watching them step back, again and again. We’re Kim Lee, Child, an adolescent psychotherapist, and we’re continuing our series on what happens when an empath connects with an avoidant partner, especially after the early intensity wears off and the real attachment w...

Send us Fan Mail The most confusing relationships often start with the strongest pull: instant closeness, deep recognition, and that feeling that you finally found someone who gets you. Then the tone shifts. Messages slow down. Plans change. Hard conversations get redirected. If you’re left replaying every detail and asking what happened, this conversation is for you. \n\nWe’re opening a new serie...