AUTHOR. TEACHER. PSYCHOLOGIST.
Chris Cleave.
Award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of books published in 36 languages. Existential psychotherapist and chartered psychologist.
What if the work of being human again turns out to be the main work of our lives now?
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Across all my work – in the consulting room, in the classroom and on the page – I explore how people live with intelligence and grace amid the world's accelerating trauma. It is an act of resistance to be human in this dehumanising age.
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My forthcoming non-fiction book, Human Again: The Journey Back To Ourselves (2027), brings together psychotherapy and storytelling to offer a hopeful reframing of trauma – not as a private failing, but as a shared human inheritance, and a path back into relationship with the world.
Books.
“I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”
"What good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something?”
“Just beyond your sight, life might be moving in ways that are moments away from being revealed to you.”
“I'm going to write to you about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away. I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges.”