Elizabeth Li Ph.D.

About

Elizabeth Li, Ph.D., is an academic affiliated with University College London and Anna Freud, where she works across research and teaching. Her work explores how early relational experiences shape later mental health conditions, and how psychotherapy can help. She has published widely on childhood adversity, psychological mechanisms, and psychotherapy process and outcomes. She's especially interested in applying theoretical perspectives to mental health practice and in translating complex therapeutic insights into accessible, meaningful narratives.

Recent Posts

What Once Saved You May Be What’s Holding You Back

One’s drive for control once protected them from chaos and grief. Only when life feels safe can they mourn the childhood they never got to have.

When Sadness Finds Its Exit Through Rage

Emotional neglect can turn grief into rage, anger can mask unprocessed sadness, and efficiency and control, once protective, can become prisons of fear.

Why Some People Always Feel Angry and Unfairly Treated

A high-achieving person's irritation at inefficiency reveals not arrogance but exhaustion—the quiet resentment of someone who’s always had to hold everything together.

Choosing to Be Loved Without Working for It

How anxious agreeableness becomes self-perpetuating, where it comes from, and how to unlearn the habit of earning love.

When You Work Too Hard to Be Loved

Taught to be agreeable, women can work too hard to be loved. What begins as warmth can slowly become a pattern of self-forgetting.

What the Right Therapy Feels Like When You Find It

Space, depth, presence, and emotional honesty in therapy can help you reconnect with yourself—beyond symptom relief or insight alone.

How Two Types of Therapy Helped One Patient

Sometimes, therapy helps us manage day-to-day spirals. Other times, it offers a deeper lens into our emotional world.

When Adulthood Feels Too Dangerous: Inside an Avoidant Mind

Shame doesn’t soften with time—it just finds new ways to hide. This post explores what happens when avoidance grows older but never grows up.

Why Some People Never Seem to Grow Up

Avoidant personality disorder and the painful work of growing up.

When the Mask Slips: Envy, Coldness, and the Limits of Help

When a young woman’s emotional vulnerability drew me into a confusing and exhausting dynamic, I began to question whether my empathy was helping — or enabling.