Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

Send us Fan Mail A read receipt, a delayed reply, a slightly different tone, and suddenly your body acts like it already knows how the story ends. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I’m starting a series on emotional resonance and transference, the experience of feeling like something is happening again even when the present moment doesn’t justify the intensity.  We walk thro...

Send us Fan Mail The harm that changes a child most isn’t always loud or dramatic, it can be the quiet absence that nobody knows how to name. We close the Hidden Harm series by looking at emotional neglect as a hidden safeguarding concern: not what is done to a child, but what isn’t there when it needs to be there. When feelings aren’t consistently recognized, acknowledged, and held, a child can l...

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Send us Fan Mail A child who never breaks the rules can look like a parenting success story. But what if that calm, compliant, high-achieving “good behavior” is actually a shield against anxiety, fear, and the feeling that something might go wrong at any moment? We dig into the uncomfortable idea that distress doesn’t always show up as acting out. Sometimes it shows up as control, rigidity, and a...

Send us Fan Mail The child who “never causes trouble” can be the one carrying the most. I’m talking about the kid adults love to praise as thoughtful, sensible, and wise beyond their years and why that praise can hide a deeper story. We unpack what early “maturity” can really mean in child development: not a natural unfolding, but a fast adaptation to an environment that needs the child to stay st...

Send us Fan Mail A teacher says your child is settled, engaged, and doing well. Then you get home and it’s tears, anger, shutdowns, or nonstop conflict. That sharp contrast can feel like you’re living in a different reality than the school is describing, and it can leave you wondering if you’re the problem. We don’t accept that story. We break down why this pattern is often a real and understandab...

Send us Fan Mail The child who never argues can look like a parenting win, but what if that “good behavior” is actually a safety strategy? We dig into hidden harm and the overcompliant child, exploring how a kid can become organized around keeping connection stable by surrendering resistance. The shift is subtle: not loud conflict, but tiny cues like a tense atmosphere, discomfort with challenge,...

Send us Fan Mail The child who never complains can look like a dream: easygoing, mature, no drama, no demands. But that quiet can also be a survival strategy, and it can hide harm that caring adults simply miss. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I’m starting a companion series to safeguarding by looking at risk through a different lens: the hidden cost of adaptation.  I unpa...

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Send us Fan Mail A child can look “fine” right up until the moment everything becomes undeniable, and that gap is where safeguarding lives. I walk through what we mean by safeguarding risk, why risk is not the same as proof, and why most of us should focus on noticing patterns and sharing concerns rather than trying to diagnose harm. Using the NSPCC definition, I anchor the conversation in a pract...

Send us Fan Mail Safeguarding can sound like a threat, but it was built to solve a different problem: adults seeing harm and not acting in time. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I’m starting a series on safeguarding children because the confusion around it causes real hesitation, silence, and delay. When people assume safeguarding is automatically about punishment, blame, o...

Send us Fan Mail A child’s biggest struggle might not start with the child at all. When stress, fear, grief, or anger can’t be carried by the adults in a home, it doesn’t disappear. It often shows up in the child’s body and behavior, quietly and persistently, as if they’re holding something that was never meant to be theirs. We talk through how that happens, why it’s so common, and why it’s not a...

Send us Fan Mail Parenting overwhelm rarely looks like the movie version of a breakdown. Sometimes it’s quiet. You still get everyone fed, you still answer the school emails, you still show up for work but inside you feel flat, flooded, and one small request away from snapping. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I’m unpacking what’s happening beneath the surface when a parent...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever heard yourself shout and then wondered, “Where did that come from?” you’re not alone and you’re not broken. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I want to slow down what we usually rush past: the inner life of the angry parent, and what that anger may be trying to communicate. When we treat anger as evidence of failure, we miss the real story and...

Send us Fan Mail You can feel the pull to confront them, to make them admit what they did, to finally give you the closure you were denied. I’m talking about why that moment almost never arrives with an avoidant partner and how chasing it can keep you tied to the same toxic loop of doubt, self blame, and emotional confusion. We unpack “reality confrontation” as a recovery tool: naming the facts in...

Send us Fan Mail Someone can swear they love you, vanish without warning, come back warm for a moment, then disappear again and still have you blaming yourself. We walk through a real account of that slow unraveling: the late-night calls, the constant emotional labor, the hope that keeps resetting, and the moment it starts to feel like you cannot exist without the relationship. If you’ve ever been...

Send us Fan Mail Loneliness doesn’t always come from being alone. Sometimes it comes from sitting next to someone who speaks to you, lives with you, even says “I love you,” but never quite feels emotionally here. After a short break, I’m back to start a three-part series on one of the most confusing relationship patterns I see: the avoidant partner and avoidant attachment style, where closeness ca...

Send us Fan Mail A parent can be physically present and still feel unreachable even to themselves. That’s the reality we sit with here: parental depression that keeps routines going on the surface while connection, pleasure, and emotional energy feel muted underneath. We name the quiet question many parents carry but rarely say out loud: why does this feel so hard when I love my child so much? We...

Send us Fan Mail Your child goes quiet for a second and your body tightens before anything even happens. That moment can feel like intuition, but it’s often anxiety at work. I’m Kim Lee Child, an adolescent psychotherapist, and I’m naming a pattern many parents live with privately: the shift from watching your child to scanning them for danger, searching faces and tones for proof that something is...

Send us Fan Mail There’s the parent you show the world and then there’s the parent who lives inside you. The one who gets everyone out the door, remembers the appointments, and keeps things moving, while also feeling overwhelmed by small moments, reacting more sharply than intended, or carrying guilt long after the day is done. We start this new series by naming that hidden layer of parenting and...

Send us Fan Mail Something shifts the day you stop wondering if you imagined it and start trusting what you saw, felt, and endured. I’m Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I close the Relational Injury series by laying out a grounded path from recognition to reckoning to recovery, with a focus on what actually helps when you’re trying to come back to yourself after an injurious rela...

Send us Fan Mail Knowing something was wrong is one thing. Living with the truth once you finally see it is another. We dig into “the reckoning,” the phase after recognition where the mind stops being able to defend, minimize, or rationalize what happened and has to face psychological reality with clarity. I talk through why so many people feel driven to confront the person who harmed them, and wh...

Send us Fan Mail Something shifts when you finally admit, quietly, that a relationship has been hurting you. Not a single blow up moment, but a slow accumulation of “That didn’t feel right” experiences you kept tolerating, explaining away, or calling insignificant. We begin a three-part series on recovering from relational injury with stage one: recognition, the point where the truth can no longer...

Send us Fan Mail A teen doesn’t implode in a vacuum and the most frightening part of Adolescence is how ordinary the failure can look from the outside. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I’m unpacking episodes three and four of Netflix’s Adolescence through the lens I use in the therapy room every week: family systems. When one part of a system can’t hold emotion, the pressur...

Send us Fan Mail A teen doesn’t go from calm to catastrophic out of nowhere, and I don’t think a single factor like cyberbullying explains what we’re really seeing. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I’m unpacking Netflix’s Adolescence through a psychodynamic lens to ask a harder question: what happens to a child’s mind when the people they need most are emotionally inconsist...