About
I’m interested in how legal, therapeutic, and lived-experience knowledge can inform each other to improve practice and systems. This site includes selected research, writing, and projects. For my counselling work, visit www.steadyground.au
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What Victoria’s Cult Inquiry Needs to Deliver
This week, the Victorian Parliament’s Legal and Social Issues Committee is expected to table the final report of its inquiry into cults and organised fringe groups. The report follows an avalanche of survivor testimony, alongside evidence from advocates, researchers, faith representatives and government bodies, which has made it impossible to ignore that Victoria has a serious problem with group-based coercive… *
368 words2–3 minutes
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Beyond Talk Therapy: Breathwork in Trauma Recovery
For many people, healing begins with talking. We name what happened, we explore how it felt, and we build understanding of why certain patterns persist. Talk therapy is profoundly effective, particularly for insight, meaning identification, and relational repair, and yet for many people, there comes a point where understanding alone stops creating change. We know the story but the body… *
919 words4–6 minutes
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It’s Not Laziness. It’s January.
If you feel lower in January and find yourself trying to “get going” without much success, it’s easy to assume something has gone wrong. You might notice a familiar line of questioning: Often, those explanations don’t quite fit the experience. January low mood is common, predictable, and shows up even in people who enjoyed their break, care about their work,… *
798 words3–5 minutes
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It’s Hard to Explain
In Victoria, a parliamentary inquiry is finally listening to what survivors of cults and high-control groups have been saying for decades. The testimony emerging is devastating in scale and strikingly consistent: across registered charities, religious organisations, health practices, and community initiatives, people have been targeted with patterned coercion that reshapes *
875 words4–6 minutes
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Patrick McIvor 