The Psychology of Becoming
The Paradox of Modern Life
We live in a time where emotional distress is better recognised than ever before - and yet more people than ever feel stuck, fragile, and unsure how to move forward.
Psychological suffering has increasingly been framed as something that happens to people, rather than something that makes sense within the context of their lives.
Emotions are described as symptoms - Struggle is interpreted as dysfunction.
And the individual is often positioned as a passive recipient of treatment, rather than an active participant in change.
In this landscape, people are encouraged to manage, regulate, and cope - but rarely to understand what their experience is asking of them, or how it relates to the direction of their lives.
This is not a failure of individuals - It is a failure of context.
Much modern psychological work has become de-contextualised: removed from biography, values, responsibility and meaning.
As a result, insight is often gained without traction, awareness without movement, and validation without direction.
The Psychology of Becoming Exists to Address this Gap
Rather than asking “What is wrong with you?”, this work asks:
- Why does this make sense now?
- What has been lost, avoided, or outsourced?
- What is this experience signalling about how you are living?
- What kind of person are you being asked to become?
This is not a model focused on symptom elimination.
It is a process of psychological orientation:
Here, emotions are not pathologies to be suppressed, but signals to be understood.
Patterns are not flaws, but adaptive responses that may no longer serve. And change does not come from control alone, but from restoring agency, authorship, and direction.
This work assumes something quietly radical:
That most people are not broken, deficient, or ill - but disconnected from their own authority, their values, and their capacity to act meaningfully.
'Becoming' is not about self-improvement:
It is about re-establishing a relationship with yourself that allows movement, responsibility, and growth.
This process is for people who are no longer satisfied with managing their lives - and are ready to participate in shaping them.
From Philosophical insight to Psychological Practice
In the work of Iain McGilchrist, the term attendance refers to the quality of our openness to experience - the manner in which we encounter reality, relationship, and meaning before attempting to analyse or control it.
Attendance is not effortful concentration, but a receptive and contextual way of engaging with the world, through which meaning is allowed to emerge rather than be imposed.
Attentive Orientation (developed by Paul over the last 15 years) can be understood as the practical application of this idea within psychological work, in particular our depth psychology approach.
Where attendance describes a foundational stance toward experience, attentive orientation translates that stance into a structured way of working - helping people develop how they attend to their own thoughts, emotions, relationships, and life situations over time.
In doing so, it restores context, agency, and direction, allowing change to emerge naturally from understanding rather than being driven by techniques or symptom control alone.
This new and emerging framework is called Contextual Attentional Psychology, or CAP.
ABOUT PAUL
Meet Paul Lee MSc
Hello, I'm Paul and I've been working with people as a psychologist, psychotherapist and coach since 2009. I have expert knowledge of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and adopt a non-medicalised philosophy when helping people overcome mental health challenges. This means that I will frame your current difficulties as being the result of what has happened to you rather than what is wrong with you.
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