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🎓Registered Psych
🤝 Helping bridge the gap between knowing & doing
⚒️No-BS psychology tools + hot takes
💬Coaching compulsive helpers & fixers ↓

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I’m Ilia.

Psychologist & Executive Coach. I specialise in the Organisational space meaning I have dedicated my life to improving people’s experience of work & life around it!

I’ve spent 15 years helping leaders, teams, healthcare workers, first responders, and everyday humans navigate pressure, uncertainty, and change & I’ve decided to share some of what I’ve learned back with the internet.

This page is for you if yiu want to understand how to apply psychology to life, less of you want to dive down the Clinical rabbit hole.

#leadershipcoach #psychologist #iopsychology #selfdevelopment #professionaldevelopment by @ilia.the.psych

Sometimes, you just don’t gotta be speaking on things you have no background in 🤷‍♂️

So, I’m going to do my part & spread some no BS info to stop the rising tide of pseudo-psych 😭

#influencer #innerchild #nervoussystemregulation #trauma #attachmentstyle by @ilia.the.psych

AI is going to change how we work, think and make decisions. But I think some of the most important skills we’ll need aren’t technical at all.

As a psychologist, these are my top five human skills for the age of AI:

1. Metacognition
2. Curiosity
3. Critical thinking
4. Self-efficacy
5. Cognitive persistence

Companies are being extremely gung-ho with a technology that could change not just how we work, but how we think.

Perhaps for the worse (think Wall-E).

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AI and psychology • essential skills for the age of AI • human skills in the AI era • cognitive offloading • metacognition and artificial intelligence • critical thinking skills • AI and self-efficacy • cognitive persistence • future of work skills • human AI collaboration

My content is here to educate, entertain, and support, but it’s not a substitute for therapy. For personalized care, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

#psychology #leadership #futureofwork #psychologist #artificialintelligence by @ilia.the.psych

One of the occupational hazards of working in a helping profession is that you can become very good at solving problems and surprisingly bad at just letting people have them.

When your job involves assessing, supporting, advising or intervening, it’s easy to bring that same mindset home.

But your partner, friends and family aren’t your clients. And sometimes the very skills that make you effective at work can get in the way of being emotionally available at home.

Because there’s a subtle difference between helping someone because they need help and helping someone because you can’t tolerate their distress.

I’ve had to learn that distinction in my own marriage.

These days, I try to ask what kind of support someone wants before offering it. Maybe they want advice. Maybe they want me to listen, acknowledge what they’re feeling, or simply keep them company while things are difficult.

Being a good helper doesn’t always mean doing more. Sometimes it means getting comfortable doing less.

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Helper and fixer personality • healthcare worker relationships • helping professions and burnout • emotional support versus problem solving • overfunctioning in relationships • listening versus fixing • emotional validation psychology • relationship communication skills

My content is here to educate, entertain, and support, but it’s not a substitute for therapy. For personalized care, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

#healthcare #therapistsofinstagram #relationships #relationshiptips #quotestoliveby by @ilia.the.psych

I think one of the most common misconceptions in pop psychology is just how much of our adult attachment style comes from our parents.

It’s become pretty fashionabl in psychoanalytic thinking, to explain a lot of our adult struggles through our childhood relationships.

And while our parents certainly get the ball rolling, longitudinal research suggests their influence on adult attachment anxiety and avoidance is considerably less predictive than many people assume.

I think the branching-path graphic in this reel is a better way to understand it.

Life is a series of branching paths. Our early experiences influence where we start, but friendships, relationships, culture and subsequent experiences can reinforce, challenge or change our trajectory.

And importantly, our attachment patterns aren’t fixed. They can continue to change throughout our lives.

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Selected references:

Dugan et al. (2026). A prospective longitudinal study of the associations between childhood and adolescent interpersonal experiences and adult attachment orientations.

Pinquart, Feußner & Ahnert (2013). Meta-analytic evidence for stability in attachments from infancy to early adulthood.

Adult attachment styles • anxious attachment • avoidant attachment • attachment theory psychology • childhood attachment and parenting • causes of insecure attachment • can attachment styles change • adult relationships and attachment • psychology of relationships

My content is here to educate, entertain, and support, but it’s not a substitute for therapy. For personalized care, please reach out to a licensed menta professional.

#attachment #avoidantattachment #anxiousattachment #relationships #therapy by @ilia.the.psych

$Listen, getting eyes on a cause can be educational, and I appreciate the value of speaking up. But contextually, we’re also living in a period where politics feels increasingly tribal, emotions are high, and people are becoming tightly aligned with ideological identities. So I think the question this reel is asking isn’t whether therapists should advocate, period. Rather: Do mental health professionals need to publicly involve themselves in every form of political advocacy? And are some forms of advocacy actually more useful than others? Helping a refugee navigate a complicated new system is advocacy. That’s probably more useful than putting a Palestinian flag by itself in an Instagram or professional bio. I understand the urge to do something when the world feels chaotic and you feel powerless watching it unfold. But useful advocacy, in my opinion, should move beyond expressing outrage towards action that actually helps people — ideally in ways that bring people together rather than further contributing to the fracture. And let’s also remember that mental-health professions tend to skew left politically, while the clients we work with represent a much broader spectrum of beliefs. They deserve access to care and support too. I worry that if we signal that therapy belongs to one particular worldview, we risk pushing people towards further echo chambers that may only entrench the very beliefs we find objectionable. ———————————- Therapy and politics, political advocacy, therapist advocacy, political signalling, therapeutic alliance, psychologist ethics, mental health professionals, inclusion in therapy, therapist self-disclosure, psychology and politics My content is here to educate, entertain, and support, but it’s not a substitute for therapy. For personalized care, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional. #therapistsofinstagram #therapy #psychologistsofinstagram #politics #socialjustice by @ilia.the.psych$

I talk to people about values a lot, and one of the biggest challenges is that people often give me a goal disguised as a value. For example … “I value getting promoted.” “I value buying a house.”

Those are goals.

Values are more about how you want to behave while you pursue them.

I find values useful because they give people direction when outcomes are uncertain, help clarify what matters when there are multiple choices, and give you something you can act on right now.

They also help separate “Did I get the outcome I wanted?” from “Did I behave like the person I want to be?”

Goals matter. Values help you decide which goals are worth pursuing, and how you want to pursue them.

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Values vs goals, ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, behaviour change, psychological flexibility, coaching psychology, values-based living, goal setting

My content is here to educate, entertain, and support, but it’s not a substitute for therapy. For personalized care, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

#values #valuesmatter #selfimprovement #psychologist #therapistsofinstagram by @ilia.the.psych

A lot of these terms have picked up serious momentum online, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time going down the rabbit hole — reading the research, talking with other clinicians, and comparing it with what I’ve seen working with people over the years.

A quick clarification: I’m not a clinical psychologist, and these ratings aren’t me deciding whether someone’s experience is “real” or not.

They’re a common format take on concepts judged against how clearly defined is the construct, how well established is the evidence behind it, is it recognised within major diagnostic systems and how confidently should we actually be talking about it as a distinct diagnosis based on the above.

Some of these describe very real experiences without necessarily being established diagnoses.

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Internet diagnoses, mental health diagnosis, psychology terminology, CPTSD, rejection sensitive dysphoria, pathological demand avoidance, high functioning anxiety, mental health misinformation, DSM, ICD-11

My content is here to educate, entertain, and support, but it’s not a substitute for therapy. For personalized care, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

#mentalhealthawareness #psychology #rsd #pda #empath by @ilia.the.psych

If you’re studying psychology and sometimes feel like you’re reading a completely different language… you kind of are.

The theories, terminology and names can feel insanely inscrutable at first. But keep going.

Eventually the language starts to click, the concepts connect, and the people who once made absolutely no sense start becoming strangely familiar.

So, if you’re struggling at the moment… Don’t despair it gets easier.

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Psychology students, studying psychology, psychology degree, famous psychologists, psychology theories, psychology study tips, psychology education

My content is here to educate, entertain, and support, but it’s not a substitute for therapy. For personalized care, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

#psychologist #psychology #psychologystudent #therapymeme #therapistsofinstagram by @ilia.the.psych

Sometimes you’re not angry because your partner is resting.

You’re angry because they’re breaking a rule you’ve spent your whole life obeying.

If you learned that rest comes after productivity, then watching someone sit down without first proving they’ve “earned it” can feel lazy, unfair or even irresponsible.

Meanwhile, you may feel guilty doing the exact same thing.

That’s why one of the alternative rules I’ve had to practise myself is:

Rest supports functioning. It isn’t a reward for exhaustion.

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Rest guilt, overfunctioning, productivity guilt, relationship resentment, burnout, perfectionism, people pleasing, emotional regulation, psychology of rest

My content is here to educate, entertain, and support, but it’s not a substitute for therapy. For personalized care, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

#burnoutrecovery #psychologytips #relationshiptips #psychology #guilt by @ilia.the.psych

In Australia, psychologist is a protected title. It means you’ve met the registration requirements to practise as a psychologist. It does not mean you necessarily spend your career doing therapy.

Psychology is an incredibly broad profession.

My formal training is in organisational psychology, but I’ve also completed ongoing training in CBT, ACT and other psychological approaches, and spent years working with individuals, leaders and teams in high-pressure and trauma-exposed environments.

That doesn’t make me an expert in everything, and I’m careful about the topics I speak on.

But psychology does not begin and end with clinical psychology.

So yes, occasionally I’m going to have opinions on fairly vanilla psychological topics like evidence-based practice, or offer a psychologically informed perspective on something happening in the world.

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Registered psychologist • organisational psychology • psychology coaching • evidence-based practice • psychological wellbeing • performance psychology

My content is here to educate, entertain, and support, but it’s not a substitute for therapy. For personalized care, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

#psychologistsofinstagram #psychologist #leadershipcoach #mentalhealthawareness #psychology by @ilia.the.psych

I did a recent stitch with Jimmy Carr, and some people commented on how unfunny they found him.

Which got me thinking: why can the exact same joke be hilarious to one person and completely miss for someone else?

One explanation I find really persuasive is Benign Violation Theory.

The basic idea is that humour often works when something feels like a violation — inappropriate, uncomfortable, taboo, unexpected — while still feeling benign enough to laugh at.

And that “benign enough” part is subjective.

Your values, experiences, psychological distance from the topic, and the context you hear the joke in can all shift where that line sits.

So sometimes “that’s not funny” might be more accurately phrased as:

“I didn’t find that funny.”

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Psychology of humour, dark humour, benign violation theory, comedy psychology, offensive humour, why jokes are funny, humour and personality, psychological distance

My content is here to educate, entertain, and support, but it’s not a substitute for therapy. For personalized care, please reach out to a licensed health.

#psychology #darkhumor #psychologyfacts #standupcomedy #notfunny by @ilia.the.psych

Ilia | Psychologist & Coach

@ilia.the.psych