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&nbsp; &nbsp;I have been watching House of David these past weeks, two full seasons, and I cannot stop thinking about Jonathan.&nbsp; &nbsp;Not David, the anointed one, the future king whose story everyone knows. Jonathan. The one standing beside him. The king's son who looked at the man who would take everything that was meant to be his, and chose him anyway.&nbsp; &nbsp;I found myself asking, in the quiet after each episode, the kind of question that stays with you longer than you expect. Does this still exist? In this world, in this era, in the lives of ordinary people who are not kings or prophets or biblical figures, does this kind of loyalty still happen?&nbsp; &nbsp;I am not someone who trusts easily. I will be honest about that. Something I witnessed decades ago, a betrayal that was not directed at me but close enough to feel, changed something in my capacity to believe that loyalty is guaranteed by blood, by proximity, or by the words people say. I learned early that loyalty is not a given. It is rare. And its absence, when you discover it, does not just hurt. It shifts the ground you were standing on.&nbsp; &nbsp;So when I watch Jonathan, I watch him with the particular attention of someone who knows what the other thing looks like.&nbsp; &nbsp;What strikes me most about Jonathan is not the grand gesture. It is the clarity. He knew. He knew that David was anointed, that the throne that was meant to pass to him would pass instead to this shepherd boy. He understood the full cost of what he was choosing. And he chose it anyway, not because he was weak, not because he did not value what he was giving up, but because his values mattered more to him than his crown. He was faithful to what was right. Even when right was the most expensive thing on offer.&nbsp; &nbsp;That is the rarest form of loyalty. Not the loyalty that costs nothing. Not the loyalty that lasts only as long as it is convenient or reciprocal or safe. The loyalty that looks at the full price and pays it anyway because the alternative would require becoming someone you cannot respect.&nbsp; &nbsp;But I want to be precise about something, because I think it matters enormously. Jonathan was not a Jonathan to everyone. His loyalty was not a general warmth distributed equally across all his relationships. It was specific. It was a covenant between two particular souls whose connection the scripture describes as a knitting together. He chose David. Consciously. Completely. And that specificity is what made it sacred rather than sentimental.&nbsp; &nbsp;True loyalty in this form is not a personality trait. It is not something a person simply has and shares with the world. It is something that happens between two specific people when something in each of them recognises something in the other. Which means the question is not only where do I find my Jonathan. It is also whether I am capable of recognising my David when he or she arrives. The person whose soul calls out something in me that makes me willing to show up at full cost.&nbsp; &nbsp;So how does one find a Jonathan in a world that so often offers something lesser?&nbsp; &nbsp;I have come to believe it is less about finding and more about becoming. Karma, or whatever equivalent your spiritual tradition offers, is not simply reward and punishment. It is resonance. The loyalty you live, the values you refuse to compromise even when compromise would be easier, the faithfulness you bring to the people and the commitments that matter to you, these things create conditions. They do not guarantee outcomes. But they make certain encounters possible that would not otherwise be.&nbsp; &nbsp;You do not find your Jonathan by searching. You become someone whose life, whose values, whose way of being in the world, makes that kind of covenant recognisable when it arrives.&nbsp; &nbsp;I think about my twin boys when I sit with this. They are eight years old and they have each other in the way that only twins do, two people who arrived in the world together, who have never known a version of life without the other. I plant seeds in them as often as I can, quietly and repeatedly, about what it means to be there for one another. Not just when it is easy. When it costs something. I do not know what their lives will ask of them or of their bond. But I pray, with the particular faith of a mother who does not trust easily and has learned why, that they will be for each other what Jonathan was for David.&nbsp; &nbsp;Not because blood guarantees it. Blood guarantees nothing. But because they are being raised to understand that loyalty is not a feeling. It is a choice. Made again and again, in small moments and large ones, to do what is right for the person you have chosen even when everything else pulls in a different direction.&nbsp; &nbsp;Jonathan did not become David's Jonathan because he was born a certain way. He became it because when the moment arrived, he chose his values over his throne. That choice, made once and then again and then again, is what made him who he was.&nbsp; &nbsp;We live in a world that makes that kind of loyalty feel almost naive. And yet I cannot stop believing it is possible. Not for everyone. Not in every relationship. But somewhere, in the right covenant between the right two souls, it still exists.&nbsp; &nbsp;I have seen the other thing. I know what its absence costs. And I still believe in Jonathan.&nbsp; &nbsp;And in a world that gives us every reason to stop hoping, choosing to hope anyway might be the most courageous thing we can do...<figure id="figure-59xc21j9c1ms0h8d77" class=""><img id="59xc21j9c1ms0h8d77" src="https://cdn.durable.co/covers/14FHZw63iGzr6DDkBYl7qx6711vfRnEGvHprjKenOPSAlKfa7v0OrWzfixPoxp85.png" alt="" title="" class="object-cover bg-gray-100 rounded-lg md:rounded-xl lg:rounded-2xl" style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionx="undefined" data-positiony="undefined" data-fullwidth="false" data-mce-src="https://cdn.durable.co/covers/14FHZw63iGzr6DDkBYl7qx6711vfRnEGvHprjKenOPSAlKfa7v0OrWzfixPoxp85.png" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;"></figure>This piece reflects personal reflections and does not constitute clinical advice.© Dr. Saoussen Chebaiki (Sue), July 2026. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced without the author's written permission.

The Cost of Loyalty

&nbsp; &nbsp;I watched Encanto, the Disney movie, again last week with my children. I have lost count of how many times I have seen it now. And yet something landed differently this time, something I had felt before but never quite found the words for.&nbsp; &nbsp;Everyone in that family has their own battle. And nobody is allowed to say so.&nbsp; &nbsp;That is what Encanto is really about, underneath the magic and the music and the colour. It is about a family so busy performing its miracle that it has forgotten to ask whether anyone inside it is actually alright. And it is one of the most quietly precise portraits of family systems I have ever seen, not in a textbook, not in a clinical paper, but in an animated film that my children watch with joy while I sit beside them and feel something much more complicated.&nbsp; &nbsp;I want to walk through that family one person at a time. Not to analyse a film, but because I recognise these people. I meet versions of them in my consulting room. I have been a version of some of them myself.&nbsp; &nbsp;Luisa carries everything. Literally and otherwise. Her gift is physical strength, and the family has arranged itself around her capacity to bear weight without complaint. She moves mountains, redirects rivers, relocates entire buildings, and she does it all with a smile that is fixed just a little too firmly in place. Nobody asks how she is. Why would they? She is strong. She can handle it.&nbsp; &nbsp;What nobody sees is what is happening underneath that smile. The anxiety that visits her at night. The terror of what would happen if, just once, she put something down and did not pick it back up. Her worth has been so completely tied to her usefulness that she has lost access to the part of herself that exists when nobody needs anything from her.&nbsp; &nbsp;I feel Luisa every time I watch this film. Not physically, but in the particular exhaustion of being the one who carries, the one others lean on, the one for whom the expectations never seem to find a natural limit. There is a version of Luisa in every family, and a particular version in families where there is only one child, where the whole weight of hope and pride and need lands on a single pair of shoulders with nowhere else to go.&nbsp; &nbsp;Isabella is the other side of the same coin, though her prison looks very different from the outside. She is beautiful, graceful, effortless. Everything she touches blooms. The family adores her, holds her up as its jewel, and in doing so has locked her inside a version of herself that was never fully real. She grows roses because roses are what the family needs from her. What she actually wants to grow is wilder, stranger, more honest. Thorns and cacti and colours that do not match anyone's idea of perfection.&nbsp; &nbsp;The moment Isabella discovers she can grow something other than roses is one of the most moving moments in the film. Not because she becomes free immediately, but because she realises for the first time that there was a self underneath the performance. A self she had never been permitted to meet.&nbsp; &nbsp;Between Luisa's impossible strength and Isabella's impossible perfection stands Mirabel, the one who received no gift at all. Or so the family believes. Mirabel does not move mountains or grow flowers or control the weather. She has no door, no power, no place in the family's framework for what value looks like. And so she is quietly, persistently, painfully excluded. Not cruelly. Just inevitably, the way systems exclude what they cannot categorise.&nbsp; &nbsp;But Mirabel is the only one who can see the cracks. The only one willing to follow the truth even when everyone around her is looking away. Her gift is perception, courage, and love that does not require anyone to be more than they are. She does not need a cape to be a hero. She never did. The family simply did not have the eyes to see it.&nbsp; &nbsp;Then there is Bruno. The one they do not talk about. His gift is seeing the future, which sounds extraordinary until you understand what it actually means. It means he sees painful things before anyone is ready to hear them. It means the truth he carries is unwelcome. And so the family does what families do when something is too uncomfortable to hold. They externalise it. They give it a name and a face and a door, and they shut that door and agree, collectively and silently, never to open it again.&nbsp; &nbsp;Bruno's exclusion is not just a family drama. It is a clinical portrait of denial. Not the denial of one person, but the denial of an entire system, sustained by everyone's participation, disguised as protection, and passed off as simply the way things are. He lives in the walls of his own home for decades, still warm, still loving, feeding rats and telling himself stories because the need for connection is so deeply human that even the most rejected person finds a way to keep it alive in secret.&nbsp; &nbsp;And at the centre of all of it, Abuela. The one from whom everything flows, including the wound.&nbsp; &nbsp;Her story is devastating. She lost her husband on the night everything fell apart. She fled with nothing, carrying three infants and an unimaginable grief. She built the miracle, the house, the family's gifts, from the rubble of that loss. Her strength is not a performance. It is survival made permanent.&nbsp; &nbsp;But what she never did was grieve. What she never allowed herself was the full weight of what she lost. Instead she converted that pain into purpose, into control, into a family system so rigid and so oriented around performance that it began cracking from the inside. The crack in their Casita is not a structural problem. It is the physical expression of everything the family has been refusing to feel.&nbsp; &nbsp;Her suffering was real. Her loss was genuine. And yet, and this is perhaps the hardest thing to say with compassion and mean it, her pain did not give her the right to bleed on others. Understanding why someone became who they are does not erase what that cost everyone around them. We can hold both truths at the same time. We can honour the wound and still name what it produced.&nbsp; &nbsp;This is what intergenerational trauma looks like when it is not processed. It does not disappear. It becomes the architecture. It becomes the expectations Luisa cannot put down and the roses Isabella cannot stop growing and the silence nobody breaks about Bruno and the door Mirabel was never given.&nbsp; &nbsp;Every family has its Abuela. Every family system has an original wound that gets passed down in the language of expectation, control, and silence. And every family has its Mirabel, the one who feels the cracks, who cannot pretend they are not there, who loves everyone enough to walk toward the truth even when it costs her everything.&nbsp; &nbsp;Sometimes, and this is perhaps the hardest truth of all, healing requires letting the house fall. Not because destruction is the goal, but because some foundations are built on denial and performance and unprocessed pain rather than on truth. And a house built on those things will keep cracking no matter how many mountains Luisa moves or how many roses Isabella grows. The miracle returns in Encanto only after Casita falls completely, after there is nothing left to protect or perform. It is in the rubble, with every illusion gone, that the family finally sees each other clearly for the first time. That is terrifying. It is also, sometimes, the only way through. In my work as a clinician I have sat with people at exactly that moment, when everything they built their life around has collapsed, and I have learned to recognise it not only as devastation but as the first honest ground they have ever stood on. You cannot build something healthy on a foundation that was never true. Sometimes you have to let it fall before you can finally build something that lasts.&nbsp; &nbsp;I watched this film last week with my children and I felt, as I always do, that it was made for anyone who has ever carried more than their share. Anyone who has performed strength or perfection so long they forgot what it felt like to simply be. Anyone who was excluded not because they lacked something but because the people around them lacked the eyes to see what they were offering.&nbsp; &nbsp; If you are reading this and you recognise yourself in any of these characters, I want to say something simple.&nbsp; &nbsp;You do not have to keep carrying what was never yours to carry alone. The expectations others place on your life are loud, but they are not the ones who will live it. You are. And only you will bear the weight of the choices you make or fail to make on your own behalf.&nbsp; &nbsp;People can judge your life all they want. But it is you who will live it. You alone who will bear its consequences.&nbsp; &nbsp;That is true for any of us. Even the ones who were given a magical gift. Even the ones who were not.<figure id="figure-a4jg4e8hbtms0gjili"><img id="a4jg4e8hbtms0gjili" src="https://cdn.durable.co/covers/25GygKj67Jzes2cvBKkayvCW8kOiBzHHq2jdzo3uPFjJduRYKYLjXPgl4yEfPDuJ.png" alt="" title="" class="object-cover bg-gray-100 rounded-lg md:rounded-xl lg:rounded-2xl" style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionx="undefined" data-positiony="undefined" data-fullwidth="false" data-mce-src="https://cdn.durable.co/covers/25GygKj67Jzes2cvBKkayvCW8kOiBzHHq2jdzo3uPFjJduRYKYLjXPgl4yEfPDuJ.png" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;"></figure>This piece reflects personal observations and clinical reflections. It is not intended as a clinical assessment of any individual or creative work.© Dr. Saoussen Chebaiki (Sue), July 2026. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced without the author's written permission.

Behind the Glow

&nbsp; &nbsp;When the news broke that King Charles had met with Prince Harry, Meghan, and their children, the reaction across Britain was swift and sharp. Disappointment. A sense of betrayal. The feeling that something important had been given away, that loyalty had not been honoured in the way loyalty deserves to be, that a monarch had stepped back when he should have held firm. It was not an unreasonable response from people who have watched Prince William and Princess Catherine give everything quietly and consistently, and who expected the institution to reflect that back. When you believe in something, when you have invested your sense of pride and identity in it, watching it appear to waver is genuinely painful. That pain deserves to be acknowledged before anything else.&nbsp; &nbsp;But I want to ask a question underneath that pain. Not to dismiss it, but to sit alongside it with something that might, perhaps, add another layer of understanding.&nbsp; &nbsp;Does it matter whether a defining role finds you before or after you know who you are?&nbsp; &nbsp;Queen Elizabeth became queen at twenty five. The crown did not interrupt a life already fully formed. It arrived early enough to grow into the architecture of her identity, woven in before she had fully become anyone else. This did not spare her pain. She was torn, privately and profoundly, between wife and queen, between mother and monarch, between the people she loved and the duty she carried. She made decisions that hurt those close to her and she bore that quietly for decades. She was not without feeling. She was a woman who always knew, without having to deliberate, which way she would turn when the conflict arose. Not because she chose it consciously each time, but because that hierarchy had been part of her since before she had language for it. The role and the self had grown together so long they were almost inseparable.&nbsp; &nbsp;King Charles arrived at the crown after a full, complicated, deeply personal life had already taken shape. A man with convictions, with a romantic history that cost him and others enormously, with a proven willingness to place the man before the king when something mattered enough to him personally. That is not weakness. It is biography. And biography does not dissolve when a crown is placed on a head.&nbsp; &nbsp;I know something about this from a very different place. Not as a monarch, but as someone who spent twenty years in a role that was chosen for her before she had the chance to choose for herself. Medicine found me early, through good marks and family expectation and a culture that places enormous weight on certain paths. I gave it everything, including the frontline of a pandemic that asked the last of what I had. But it was never mine in the way that matters most. Psychology I found late, and I fought for it the way you fight for something that truly belongs to you, attending university during the day while working night shifts, pregnant, married, walking against every expectation that told me I was choosing something lesser. When I finally resigned from medicine completely, everyone who loved me was afraid. I had chosen passion over stability, vocation over status.&nbsp; &nbsp;In therapy I do not feel I am working. I am simply being myself.&nbsp; &nbsp;I share this not to place my story alongside those of kings and queens, but because I think this experience, of living inside a role that was assigned versus finally inhabiting one that was chosen, is something many people recognise. The career reconsidered at forty. The path abandoned after decades. The quiet grief of realising that what you built your life around was never quite yours. And the strange, hard won peace of arriving, finally, at something true.&nbsp; &nbsp;King Charles has spent his life knowing the difference between those two feelings. He is a man who already knew, long before the crown arrived, what it felt like to choose something personal over something institutional. That history does not disappear. Which is perhaps why, when his son appeared at the furthest distance, something in him moved before the king could hold it back.&nbsp; &nbsp;I also find myself wondering, and this is offered gently, whether a man who carries some weight about what his earlier choices cost his children when they were young might find it very hard to risk repeating that distance. Guilt, when it is honest, can be a powerful motor. Not always toward the right decision. But always toward the most human one.&nbsp; &nbsp;And this is where I want to pause, and ask the British public, with genuine respect for everything they feel, to allow one more image into the picture. Before the king, there is a grandfather. A man for whom, despite everything that has passed, that child is still his child, and those grandchildren are still his grandchildren. In my culture we say that grandchildren are loved even more fiercely than children themselves. That does not make his decision right. It does not make the disappointment less valid. But it makes it human. And perhaps understanding what made it human is not the same as excusing it.&nbsp; &nbsp;There is something else I want to name carefully. Prince William's position in all of this moves me perhaps most of all. He has given consistently and quietly, devoted himself alongside Princess Catherine to something that asks everything of them both. Quiet devotion is so often taken for granted, by institutions and by families alike. A parent caught between two children in conflict is one of the most painful human positions there is. Not right or wrong. Simply human. And the child who stays sometimes bears a cost that nobody thinks to acknowledge.&nbsp; &nbsp;There are people in this story I want to honour, not as public figures but as human beings carrying things the rest of us rarely stop to imagine.&nbsp; &nbsp;I want to honour every woman like Queen Elizabeth, women who have spent their lives torn between who they are and what life asked of them, seeking a balance that was probably never fully reachable, giving everything to roles that claimed them before they could choose, and carrying that quietly, with a dignity that the world often mistook for coldness, or for weakness.&nbsp; &nbsp;I want to honour every man like King Charles, men whose inner battles remain hidden, who are judged for their decisions without anyone taking the time to ask what those decisions cost them, or what old guilt quietly shaped them.&nbsp; &nbsp;I want to honour Prince William for a devotion that continues away from the noise. And I want to honour Prince Harry, because no story has only one side, and no person is only what we see from the outside.&nbsp; &nbsp;None of us can know what any of them truly carry. Only they know that. Only God knows what sits beneath the decisions that the rest of us are so quick to judge.&nbsp; &nbsp;What we can choose is whether we meet people with that judgment, or with the kind of understanding that asks, before anything else, what it cost you to become who you are.&nbsp; &nbsp;That question belongs to all of us...<figure id="figure-gpphcrq0hjms0g9np3"><img id="gpphcrq0hjms0g9np3" src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/1c9yVGKZAqeoWDxoqGrKZRW52TEGrmNPwY6clqCPlX9lAZJg9s1ZTX2fGuqrSOiF.png" alt="" title="" class="object-cover bg-gray-100 rounded-lg md:rounded-xl lg:rounded-2xl" style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionX="undefined" data-positionY="undefined" data-fullWidth="false"/></figure>This piece reflects personal and clinical observations based entirely on public information. It is not intended as a clinical assessment of any individual.© Dr. Saoussen Chebaiki (Sue), July 2026. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced without the author's written permission.

Invisibly Torn

&nbsp; &nbsp;I was in a London supermarket last month, when I stopped in front of the tabloid rack. Prince Harry and Meghan again. Speculation about the Invictus Games, a possible return to the UK, what it would mean. I stood there longer than I intended, and something that had been forming quietly in my mind for years finally found its shape.&nbsp; &nbsp;I should introduce myself honestly, because this piece comes from more than one place in me. I spent twenty years in medicine, first training and then practicing as a medical doctor, before retraining as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist specialising in EMDR. That long road through the human body before arriving at the human mind has shaped the way I see people in ways I am still discovering. I am also an Algerian woman who has followed the British Royal Family since I was fourteen or fifteen years old, sitting in front of a television screen the night Princess Diana died. I was not yet a clinician. I was just a young girl watching something she did not have the language for yet. I visit London regularly, and every time I arrive something in me settles. This country, its people, its history have become genuinely dear to me. The royal family is part of that.&nbsp; &nbsp;I also carry another hat, one I cannot take off even when I try. I come from a culture that places enormous weight on the role of women in preserving the bonds between brothers. It is something I feel as a personal responsibility in my own life, something I think about when I look at my two young sons. I am aware of this lens. I do my best to set it aside and reach for something more objective. But I would not be honest if I pretended it was not there.&nbsp; &nbsp;I want to write about Prince William and Prince Harry. Not about who is right and who is wrong, because that question does not interest me clinically or humanly. What interests me is what happened between two brothers, and how unfinished grief has a way of waiting silently until the right moment to resurface.&nbsp; &nbsp;The first thing I feel when I think about them is compassion. I grew up without siblings. Brotherhood has always been something I reached toward, found in friends and cousins, chosen deliberately because I never had it by blood. So when I watch a bond like theirs under strain, I feel it as a genuine loss. At their core, beneath every title and every public narrative, they are two people who lost their mother at a formative age in the most public and incomprehensible of circumstances, two orphans who had to keep walking forward inside a world that was watching. That they found their footing at all says something real about their resilience.&nbsp; &nbsp;For a time, they walked forward together. When Catherine entered William's life, something in the dynamic shifted in a way that looked, from the outside, genuinely stabilising. Harry was building something meaningful, finding his place. The grief from losing their mother was not gone, but it seemed integrated enough to live alongside. In clinical work I see this often. A person who has not fully processed a trauma can nonetheless reach a functioning equilibrium, particularly when the relational environment around them feels safe and steady.&nbsp; &nbsp;Then things changed. And I want to be precise here, because this is not about blame and it is not about character. What I observed through a clinical lens is that something in the new dynamic reactivated what had never been fully resolved in Harry. Meghan's own story, whether consciously shaped or not, carries a structural echo of a story he had already lived from the inside as a child. A woman who struggled to find her place. A woman whose suffering became visible and public. When a present situation rhymes closely enough with an original wound, the nervous system does not always distinguish between memory and now. What had appeared healed revealed itself as dormant.&nbsp; &nbsp;Princess Catherine did not do this to Prince William. She did not carry a narrative that mirrored his past. She brought something genuinely new. Prince Harry was not so fortunate in that particular sense, and I say this without placing responsibility on any one person.&nbsp; &nbsp;What concerns me most as a clinician is something we call secondary gain. When pain becomes the organising centre of an identity, when it is what gives a person their narrative and their sense of purpose, the prospect of real healing can quietly become threatening. The wound needs to stay present because without it something essential feels lost. This is not a conscious choice. It is not performance. It can be completely sincere. But it is one of the most difficult places to reach someone from a therapeutic perspective, because the very thing that would free them is the thing they are most afraid to release.&nbsp; &nbsp;Trauma that is witnessed, named, and properly processed loses its grip. It becomes part of a person's history without remaining the engine of their present. That possibility is always open. It does not require an audience, a memoir, or a public reckoning. It requires only the courage to stop organising one's life around the wound, and to discover what remains when the pain is no longer needed to explain everything.That is true for any of us...<figure id="figure-3qenn6a1rrms09oexx" class=""><img id="3qenn6a1rrms09oexx" src="https://cdn.durable.co/covers/16TJ2H84ElOXyIIQoKT9Xl0VkPMYOVSCv5JDKL80JLjupRZJ3kslbnVfNu7HQogr.png" alt="" title="" class="object-cover bg-gray-100 rounded-lg md:rounded-xl lg:rounded-2xl" style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionx="undefined" data-positiony="undefined" data-fullwidth="false" data-mce-src="https://cdn.durable.co/covers/16TJ2H84ElOXyIIQoKT9Xl0VkPMYOVSCv5JDKL80JLjupRZJ3kslbnVfNu7HQogr.png" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;"></figure>&nbsp;This piece reflects personal and clinical observations based entirely on public information. It is not intended as a clinical assessment of any individual.© Dr. Saoussen Chebaiki (Sue), July 2026. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced without the author's written permission.

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The Cost of Loyalty

Behind the Glow

Invisibly Torn

When Two Orphans Lose Each Other