Understanding the pattern and being unable to stop it are two different problems.
Most people who find this page already understand their patterns. The Sunday Letter is written for what insight has not, on its own, been able to shift: clinical thinking on high performance, every Sunday morning.
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Three patterns that tend to appear together, and that insight alone tends not to resolve.
These are clinical observations about a specific profile: high-achieving professionals who understand their patterns, often with real precision. What tends to be harder is getting the pattern to stop.
The Moving Bar
You hit the target. For a moment, maybe. Then the target moves. It rarely stops moving. The satisfaction you expected doesn't arrive, or it does briefly before it becomes the new floor. You are not ungrateful. You are running a race that was never designed to finish.
The Repair Loop
You feel off. Not dramatically, just below baseline. So you do what you usually do: you try to fix it. Push harder, sleep better, analyse what's wrong. Sometimes it works. More often, the effort to fix the dip is what makes it last.
Second Wave Shame
The dip passes. Then the audit begins. Why did you struggle with something so manageable? What does it say about you that you needed time to recover? The original difficulty is gone. What lingers is the meaning you loaded onto it.
Understanding why these patterns run tends not to tell them to stop. The work that tends to reach them operates at a different level than insight.
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA Registered
“Most of the people I work with already know what’s running. What tends to be harder is why knowing it doesn’t stop it. That’s the gap I work in.”
I trained in schema therapy, CBT, and ACT. The clinical work I do builds on those foundations.
Clinical thinking on high performance. Every Sunday morning.
Not a newsletter. A letter. Written to one person, in plain language, about what tends to happen underneath high performance and what tends to help. No self-help language. No wellness platitudes. Clinical thinking, weekly.
“Written to one person. Read, I hope, in five minutes on a Sunday morning before the week begins its demands.”
Each letter takes one clinical observation, something that tends to run underneath high performance, and follows it somewhere useful. Not advice. Not a framework. A way of thinking about something you probably already recognise. It tends to land differently from most things written on this topic. That tends to be the point.
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
I'm a clinical psychologist with a particular interest in what tends to happen to high-achieving people when the systems that made them effective start working against them.
Most of the people I work with aren't short on insight. They understand their patterns, often with real precision. What tends to be harder is getting the pattern to stop, and that gap, in my experience, is where the most interesting clinical work lives.
I trained in schema therapy, CBT, and ACT, and I've spent the last five years working out what actually reaches these presentations.
I write about this weekly in my Sunday Letter.
Clinical training
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