Substack · LinkedIn · Medium
Reference Document
Platform setup, copy assets, and the four-week LinkedIn content plan. A working reference — not a prescription.
Substack — Publication Setup
Publication Identity
Setup Checklist
When creating the Substack account, work through these in order:
1. Choose publication name Staying With — check availability at substack.com/new first. · 2. Upload a clean portrait photo (same as website). · 3. Upload a header image — the website's cream/gold palette translates well; keep it typographic rather than photographic. · 4. Paste the About page text (Section 2 below). · 5. Set the welcome email (Section 3 below) — this sends automatically to every new subscriber. · 6. Write and schedule the introductory post (Section 4 below) — publish this within the first week. · 7. Connect to nikosmarinos.com footer: add a "Subscribe on Substack" link in the footer of every page.
Substack — About Page
Paste this directly into the Substack "About" section. Keep the line breaks as they appear.
Staying With is a space for essays on love, loss, relational life, and what it costs to remain present — in therapy, in relationships, and in the slow work of knowing oneself.
I am a psychodynamic psychotherapist and psychologist practising in Paris, working with individuals and couples in English, French, and Greek. For the past twenty years I have been interested in what holds people together and what pulls them apart — not as an abstract question, but as something that plays out, session by session, in the room.
The essays here draw on clinical experience, literary reference, and the framework I have developed over years of practice — Relational Integrity — which attends to the symbolic, emotional, and relational dimensions of how we live with one another and with ourselves.
This is not therapy delivered by newsletter. It is thinking done in public, carefully, about things that are genuinely difficult.
If you are a therapist or trainee, someone in the middle of a relationship that confuses you, someone trying to understand what happened in a relationship that ended, or simply someone who reads seriously — you are exactly who I am writing for.
Essays are published monthly. All issues are free.
Substack — Welcome Email
This sends automatically to every new subscriber. Set it in Settings → Email → Welcome email. It should feel personal, not automated — which means keeping it short and specific.
Thank you for subscribing to Staying With.
This is a space for essays on the relational life — on love and loss, on what holds people together and what doesn't, on what it takes to remain present when remaining present is the last thing that comes easily. Essays come monthly. They are free.
I'm a psychodynamic psychotherapist working in Paris. I've been practising for twenty years, writing for almost as long, and I'm increasingly convinced that good thinking about relational life doesn't belong only in the consulting room or the academic journal. Some of it belongs here — in public, in prose, available to anyone who wants to think carefully about how we live with one another.
I'm glad you're here. If a particular essay stays with you, I'd welcome hearing why.
— Nikos
nikosmarinos.com · Paris
Substack — Introductory Post
This is the first post subscribers will see in their feeds. Its purpose is to establish the publication's voice, clarify its territory, and give the reader a reason to stay. It is not a throat-clearing announcement — it is a proper piece of writing. Publish it within the first week.
On Staying With
The phrase came from a patient. Not what he said, exactly, but the situation he described. He had come to therapy because he could not stay in anything — relationships, cities, commitments, conversations that were going somewhere difficult. He did not leave, not formally. He simply withdrew so gradually, so elegantly, that by the time there was a formal ending he had already been gone for months. He had learned, early and thoroughly, that the safest way to survive something painful was not to survive it but to preempt it — to exit before the exit was required of him.
What he was discovering, slowly, was that this manoeuvre came at a cost he hadn't calculated. Not the cost of the things he'd left — those losses he could account for. The cost was harder to name: a kind of psychic restlessness, a suspicion that he had never actually been anywhere, that his life, experienced from inside, had the quality of a series of departures with no corresponding arrivals.
What would it mean, I found myself wondering, to stay?
Not to stay in the sense of resignation, or endurance for its own sake. Not the rigid staying of someone who mistakes loyalty for the refusal to feel. But something more specific: the capacity to remain present with what is genuinely difficult — with ambivalence, with the unresolved, with feelings that don't quickly become anything useful — without either fleeing into premature resolution or defending against the difficulty by converting it into narrative.
That question has been at the centre of my clinical work for two decades. It has also been at the centre of the essays I have been writing, across a series of publications, about love, loss, relational life, and the strange labour of knowing oneself. This Substack is where those essays will continue to live.
The writing here draws on psychoanalytic thought — Winnicott, Mitchell, Benjamin, and others — but it is not addressed to analysts. It is addressed to anyone who finds themselves interested in what actually happens between people, and in the gap between what we intend in our relationships and what we produce. Therapists read it. So do people who have never been inside a consulting room but who recognise the particular exhaustion of living relationally without much help thinking about what that means.
Essays come monthly. They are free. They will sometimes be difficult. They will not, if I can help it, offer comfort that hasn't been earned.
— Nikos Marinos, Paris
LinkedIn — Strategy
Core principle: LinkedIn is not a therapy directory. It is a professional network where your thinking can reach other practitioners, people in professional transitions, bilingual and multicultural professionals, and potential referral sources. Write for that readership — not for patients directly.
The audience that finds you on LinkedIn is different from the audience that finds you through Google or Substack. They respond to clinical intelligence in accessible form, brief reflections on relational dynamics in professional contexts, and thinking about identity, care, and the cost of holding difficult roles.
LinkedIn — 4-Week Content Plan
Full post copy for all 12 posts across 4 weeks. Each post is ready to paste into LinkedIn. Edit the line breaks after the opening lines — LinkedIn performs better when the first 2–3 lines create a reason to click "see more."
After two decades of practice, I've built something I should have built a long time ago.
A new website — nikosmarinos.com — where my clinical work, the Relational Integrity framework, and the essay series I've been developing are now in one place.
The site includes six new essays, a full introduction to Relational Integrity, a presentation of the Designing a Self series, and pages about how I work with individuals and couples.
The essays are free to read. They are written for anyone who thinks carefully about relational life — therapists, people in the middle of things, and people trying to understand what happened after.
I'm glad it's finally here.
→ nikosmarinos.com
Relational Integrity is not a therapeutic protocol. It is a way of thinking about what we owe one another in intimate life.
It rests on six ideas: Symbolic Honesty. Emotional Responsibility. Narrative Integrity. Secure Ambivalence. Presence Without Rescue. Symbolic Pacing.
The name that surprises people most is Secure Ambivalence — the capacity to hold contradictory feelings about someone without that contradiction becoming an emergency. Much of what brings people to therapy is the belief that ambivalence is a problem to be resolved rather than a condition to be tolerated.
It usually isn't. The work is learning to live inside it without collapsing the contradiction prematurely — in either direction.
The full framework is on the site, with an essay that moves through each of the six pillars.
→ nikosmarinos.com/relational-integrity
Most people come to therapy having already tried to fix the problem themselves.
They have reorganised their thinking, updated their explanations, found better words for what went wrong. The problem, often, is not that they haven't understood enough. It is that understanding has become the way of not feeling it.
The first essay in the Staying With series — Staying With What Hurts — is about this. About a particular kind of intelligence that becomes its own defence. About the difference between articulating an experience and actually having it.
It follows a patient I call Ivan — an architect whose precision in the room was extraordinary and whose capacity to be moved by anything remained completely intact, behind glass.
→ nikosmarinos.com/staying-with
There are people who show love primarily through alertness.
They notice, before you've said anything, that you're tired. They track small shifts in your tone. They remember things you mentioned once, months ago. Their care takes the form of surveillance — benevolent, precise, and exhausting to receive if you don't know what it is.
In couples work, I often find one partner whose primary love language is a kind of watchfulness — developed, usually, in a childhood where love and danger arrived from the same direction. Being attuned became protective. Staying alert became a form of closeness.
The other partner, who communicates differently, often experiences this as pressure rather than care. They are not wrong. The person offering it is not wrong either.
This is one of the most common and least-named dynamics in long-term relationships. I write about it in "When Love Doesn't Sound Like Love."
→ nikosmarinos.com/staying-with
When couples arrive for therapy, the most important thing is usually not the thing they name first.
"We don't communicate" often means: we communicate constantly, but in a register that neither of us can bear to look at directly.
"We want different things" sometimes means: we are afraid of the same things, and the conflict is a way of not knowing that.
The first task in couples work is not to solve the problem they've arrived with. It is to understand what the problem is actually about — which is almost never what either person said in the first session.
I work with couples in English and French, in Paris and online. My approach is relational and psychodynamic. I don't offer communication exercises or reconciliation protocols. I offer a space in which what is actually happening — between the two people and within each of them in the other's presence — can be looked at more honestly.
→ nikosmarinos.com/couples-counselling
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't come from working too hard.
It comes from caring too completely, for too long, in a context where the caring is not adequately recognised or returned. It comes from giving, not from depletion. More precisely, from giving in a way that has gradually stopped being a choice.
Winnicott wrote about the "ordinary devoted mother." What he didn't fully attend to was the cost of ordinary devotion — what happens to the person who holds the environment for others, session after session, year after year, without sufficient recognition that holding is itself a labour.
This is the territory of "The Cost of Care" — the newest essay in the Articles section. It is addressed as much to therapists as to anyone else.
→ nikosmarinos.com/essays
We say someone "reinvented themselves" as if the self were a product — designed once, redesigned later, updated in response to market conditions.
The clinical reality is considerably stranger. The self is not a project completed in youth and then maintained. It is something we are always in the middle of making, partly from material we chose and partly from material we didn't, and the relationship between those two kinds of material is what most of the difficulty in therapy is actually about.
Designing a Self is a ten-essay series exploring what it means to have a self you recognise, to lose it, to find that it has changed in ways you didn't sanction. It draws on relational psychoanalysis, philosophy of identity, and two decades of clinical work with people in the middle of precisely this question.
The introduction is now on the site.
→ nikosmarinos.com/designing-a-self
Endings in therapy are their own form of clinical work.
They are not administrative. They are not just the last few sessions before the agreed finish date. They carry everything that has been in the room — attachment, ambivalence, the particular form of gratitude that is also loss, the relief that is also abandonment.
A patient once said to me, a few weeks before we finished: "I thought I'd be readier than this." She was ready. She was also not ready. Both were true, and I made the mistake, early in my career, of thinking one of them had to give way to the other.
The capacity to hold that — to remain present with the contradictory feeling rather than offering the comfort of resolution — is one of the things I think hardest about as a clinician.
"Letters After the End" is an essay about just this. About what continues, internally, after a therapeutic relationship closes.
→ nikosmarinos.com/staying-with
I conduct therapy in English, French, and Greek.
This is not primarily a logistical point. It has clinical consequences I find genuinely interesting.
Language is not transparent. The same experience does not feel identical when described in different languages — or rather, the same person does not have quite the same access to themselves in all their languages. There is, often, a language of early experience and a language of adult life. A language that holds the body and a language that holds the idea.
Sometimes the most important clinical moment is when a patient switches, mid-sentence, from one language to another. Something needed a different container.
I work in Paris with an international clientele — expats, bilingual families, people whose professional and personal lives are conducted in languages that are not their first. For some of them, finding a therapist who works in their own language is not a convenience. It is a condition of the work being possible at all.
→ nikosmarinos.com/expat
The essays have moved to Substack.
The publication is called Staying With — named for the series that began it, and for what I think the work of relational life actually requires: not resolution, not optimism, but a kind of sustained presence with what is genuinely difficult.
Essays come monthly. They are free. The first proper post went up this week.
If you have been following the work here, or on the website, and would like it to arrive directly: subscribe at stayingwith.substack.com.
I'm glad to be writing there.
After twenty years of practice, the question I return to most often is not about what changes in therapy.
It is about what stays.
Something stays. Not the interpretation — most interpretations are forgotten within a week. Not the insight, exactly, though insight has its place. What stays, when the work has gone well, seems to be something more like a changed relationship to one's own experience. A slightly greater capacity to tolerate what had previously been intolerable. A small shift in what can be thought about, rather than merely acted out.
This is a modest description of a very long process. It is also, I think, an honest one.
The things that stay in good therapy are rarely the things that were planned. They are almost always the things that were felt — in both directions, between two people who were genuinely present with one another, for an agreed period of time, in a room.
A month ago I launched a rebuilt website, six new essays, and a Substack publication.
What I didn't expect was how many people would write to say that something they'd read had named something they'd been carrying without a name for it. That is, I think, the best thing writing can do.
If you are in Paris — or working online — and are considering individual therapy or couples counselling, I have availability. I work in English, French, and Greek. My practice is psychodynamic and relational. The first step is just an email.
If you are a therapist or trainee and would like to think about any of this further — the Relational Integrity framework, the essay series, the question of what it means to practise with integrity across languages and cultures — I'm glad to hear from you too.
→ nikosmarinos.com/contact
After Week 4: Reduce to 1–2 posts per week. Rotate between: new essay announcements (when they appear), brief clinical reflections (the most shareable format), responses to what is happening culturally, and occasional behind-the-scenes glimpses of the work (the Designing a Self series development, the Theory Companion, etc.).
Do not attempt to maintain 3 posts per week indefinitely. Quality over consistency. One good post per week is far better than three thin ones.
Medium Dormant
The Medium profile at medium.com/@nikosmarinos has no published articles. It was created but never used.
Recommendation
Leave it dormant for now. Do not attempt to build Medium as a primary platform alongside Substack — the audiences overlap substantially and the content would be identical. Splitting effort between two essay platforms at launch serves neither well.
When to use Medium (later)
Once Substack is established and the essay archive is substantial — typically 6–12 months in — cross-post selected essays to Medium. Medium's Partner Programme and distribution algorithm can introduce new readers who would not have found Substack directly. Cross-posting is permitted under standard Substack terms provided the original Substack post is the canonical version.
Posting Cadence — Summary
Voice Principles for All Platforms
These apply equally to Substack essays, LinkedIn posts, and any future Medium pieces. They are not rules so much as reminders.
What the writing is
Literary-clinical prose at the intersection of relational psychoanalysis and essay writing. Grounded in clinical experience. Addressed to intelligent, serious readers. Capable of being difficult without being obscure.
What the writing is not
Self-help. Mental health content marketing. Thought leadership in the LinkedIn-generic sense. Anything that could appear on a wellness platform without significant loss of meaning. Any post that could be subtitled "5 Ways To..."
The test
Before publishing anything, ask: would someone who has read Winnicott, or Woolf, or anyone who takes both clinical and literary thinking seriously — would they find this embarrassing? If yes, revise or delete.
On brevity in LinkedIn posts
The format rewards compression. Aim for posts that feel complete — not truncated, not padded. The best LinkedIn post says one thing, says it with precision and some weight, and stops. The worst LinkedIn post says three things, none of them fully, and ends with a question designed to generate engagement rather than thought.
On the question of audience
Write for the reader you want, not the reader you have. The reader you want is someone who is interested in thinking carefully — about themselves, about relationships, about clinical work if they are a therapist, about what it costs to live relationally if they are not. Write for that person. Others will find it or they won't.