Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode: 34: When you’re hurting and feel like quitting psychology

Thank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast.

In my endeavours to support aspiring psychologists, I have been approached by a few who have told me about difficult experiences in their roles that have left them feeling that this field is not for them. Today I speak to you about how we can manage the knocks and bumps that we experience along the way in psychology and how we can get support when we need it. I hope this helps you, and thank you for being a part of my world.

The Highlights:

• 00:28: A busy week
• 02:23: Deciding psychology isn’t for you
• 03:30: When things just go really wrong
• 05:50: Different relationships we find ourselves in
• 08:50: Feeling you’re being treated unfairly
• 10:08: Accessing support
• 11:41: Jingles and testimonial
• 13:08: Managing a difficult supervisory relationship
• 15:10: Maybe it is time for a change?
• 16:05: A useful way to think about your role
• 16:59: A lesson from CAMHS
• 18:54: Ouchy feedback from clients!
• 19:52: Reaching out for support
• 21:46: An announcement for new free content!

Links:

To join my free Facebook group and discuss your thoughts on this episode and more: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aspiringpsychologistcommunity

Get your Supervision Shaping Tool now: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/supervision

Connect socially with Marianne and check out ways to work with her, including the upcoming Aspiring Psychologist Book and The Aspiring Psychologist Membership on her Link tree: https://linktr.ee/drmariannetrent

To check out The Clinical Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3jOplx0

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Hi, welcome along to the aspiring psychologist podcast. Thank you for being part of my world. If you are listening to this live, I hope you are having a good summer so far this morning. I was planning on recording a podcast episode before I had to do a guest podcast episode that I was doing for somebody else on grief. It was on my to-do list along with cleaning up my email inbox, which had been a little bit unchecked for about three or four days cuz things had just got a bit busy. But unfortunately, the email inbox took longer than expected, as is often the case. And so yeah, the podcast episode didn't get done and I just looked at it on my to-do list just as I was getting ready to finish for the day and I thought, oh, it's too late now.

Cause the children are already here. I've already picked them up from school. And then I thought, you know what? They're both not in the room that I'm in, they're happily playing together. This is kind of how it's gonna be over the summer. Cuz I speak to you before the schools have broken up at the moment. And I thought, well, I'm just gonna go for it. You know, it would be a shame not to tick this off my to-do list and I can stand in my own way with excuses about why I can't do things or I can just get on and do it. So that is what I'm doing. And it might be that this is timely for you. So today's episode is something that will likely happen to all of us. At some point in our career. It may even happen at various times, various points in our career, because it's a really normal part of life.

But I think when we work in the profession that we do, it can be easy to get knocked and bopped along the way by people. And what we are talking about today is when things go wrong, when you might feel like quitting and running away and joining the circus and doing something that is so very different to working in the psychology field. That does happen when I was an assistant psychologist, somebody jacked it all in and became a personal trainer. They just decided enough of this shenanigans. When I was at St. Andrews, somebody quit there, forensic qualification route. They decided it was no longer for them and went off surfing instead, and the last I heard was having a very lovely life indeed. So you know, it doesn't say anything about you, if you decide it's not for you.

That's okay. But what I'm talking to and who I'm talking to and the eventualities that I'm talking to in this episode are when things happen that make you feel really ouchie. We're not talking necessarily about, you know, just an underlying sense that this isn't the career for you, actually I've changed my mind. We're talking about something that's happened. That's led a different part of yourself to feel really hurt, really confused and like running away. So let me give you some examples of where this type of scenario might crop up for you. So it might be that you are in sort of a relevant experience role and maybe something has happened, perhaps on one of the wards or one of the units that you work in, maybe there's been an incident and it's making you feel like this isn't going to work out for you or maybe, you know, there's an investigation into the role.

All staff members played in whatever the incident might be, and that can lead to lots of brains really mulling things over and really trying to make sense of what has happened. And, you know, we might have all sorts of complicated emotions coming up as well. We might have shame and guilt, embarrassment, remorse, regret, and yeah, it can feel really, you know. There's one school of thought that shame was always supposed to feel ow, but that it was supposed to be so uncomfortable that it kept us from doing things that might lead us to experience that shame, so I'm not saying that you should feel ashamed for whatever it is that's going on. I'm just making sense of any shame that you do feel. And please know you can only experience that because of your human brain as well.

And you definitely didn't ask to be human. I certainly didn't. We just making a best way through this world with this incredibly tricky brain that we've got. So another example where this might crop up for you is perhaps within a supervisory relationship, within your role, perhaps there's just a bit of a mismatch. , there might be that you are getting feedback about your performance with clients or your academic writing style, or the way that you speak to the supervisor or your juniors or your seniors, and please know that it might not necessarily be you, that the problem is with, you know, we are like really intricate jigs or puzzles aren't we, and we can't expect all of the pieces to align all of the time. You know, sometimes there's gonna be bits that don't want to fit bits that don't want to fly flat.

And sometimes we're going to find it more difficult to get things, to lie flat with some people compared to, you know, to other people where things just feel more effortless. And as you reflect upon your life, you will be able to, to think about people that you could happily spend hours in the company of, but not talking to you will be able to think about people that you could happily spend hours talking to in a really engaged, switched on way that feels really academically and, you know, just professionally exciting. There will maybe, maybe not even academically, you know, maybe this is just someone in your personal life that you could talk to for hours, but in a way that feels really good. You feel really enliven to be around them. Maybe there's other people that you feel like you want to talk more to kind of our anxiety, you know, you feel like these silences are uncomfortable.

and maybe there's just people who fit in between these parts. You know, maybe there's people that you just also don't wanna spend any time at all with, you know, perhaps you can imagine really uncomfortable meetings that you've had in the past where staff members just aren't getting on. They're not liking each other. You know, I was watching the last dance yesterday, which is not at all about dancing. It's on Netflix and it is about Michael Jordan in the Chicago bulls. And they were talking about one of the team who had just, episode two if you wanna know specifically watch one I'm talking about, there was a member of the team who just after a while was so kind of cross with his position that he started kind of being quite disparaging about one of the managers and it made it quite uncomfortable for everybody really, you know, he'd be shouting things on tour buses and, you know, just, it just all got really complicated and we can probably, you know, picture relationships like that, that might have happened in staff teams that you are working with as well.

Hopefully you're not the one shouting things at your staff teams, but you know, we can't expect everybody to get along all of the time. And this reminds me of some of the stuff, you know, with Kul in episode 31, we're talking about leadership and change and cultural kind of temperatures of organisations. And if you like this way of thinking, you might find it helpful to listen to that episode as well. So that's Kul episode 31, but you know, if you find yourself being the one who feels like you're being singled out or criticised, for some reason that can feel really, really conflicting, that can feel really, really complicated. And another example might be that if you are perhaps in a university environment and you are getting feedback about yourself and perhaps your essays, aren't, you know, they're not seeming to garner the results that you feel they ought to be, or when you compare the feedback you are getting to that, of your fellow cohort, it just doesn't feel like you are being treated that fairly, or it's be you're being, you know, given different feedback to other people.

and it might be the because you've got different skills and talents. It might be that, you know, when we spoke to Dr. Deborah Kingston for episode 30, she recognised that she was dyslexic. Well, she didn't recognise it. One of her tutors did. So it might be that maybe writing is something that you find more challenging and that you could do with some extra support in that. So I guess that's one of our first pieces of advice here. It would be to think about whether you've got any formal sources support available to you to help you get a different opinion on where you are at right now. So it might be that you've got a center for academic writing, perhaps, linked to the university that you are doing, you are studying with. It might be that you have got a personal tutor, perhaps as part of whatever course you are studying that you can access to have some advice and discussion with about how you are feeling. At this point, let's take a short break, and I will be back along with some more pieces of advice that might be useful if this is happening to you or indeed to someone that you care about.

*Jingles*

Testimonial: The clinical psychologist collective book is really informative and helpful in preparation for clinical training. It gives some good food for thought and lots to reflect on to become a psychologist.

Hi, welcome back. So we've been thinking in the first half about the different types of situations that you might encounter that might make you feel a little bit wobbly and like quitting a role or quitting, you know, an entire career. But yeah, so we've covered a couple of examples about what you might do in an academic setting within occupational settings. It might be that there's another member of your team that you could talk through how you are feeling sort of more informally or more on the record as well. You know, perhaps as a team manager who you have a good relationship with that you could talk about these things with. Of course you could speak to your supervisor yourself, and have that on the table and have a discussion about what might be going on. At this point you might find it helpful if you haven't done so already to go and grab your free supervision shaping tool which you can do by checking out the link in the show notes.

but I do believe good thinking psychology dot code UK slash supervision. I'm fairly sure that's right. But yeah, that way you can get the supervision shaping tool straight into your inbox and that will then help set up any future supervisory relationships in a way that helps, you know, how you're gonna problem solve if there are problems in future. But if you haven't done that already, you could still think about bringing that to supervision to just help you examine the temperature of the water and how to have things be different. If you feel like it's not really, that's not really the time for that then of course, if you are employed, you could think about discussing your concerns with HR and if you can't get a good fit with the current supervisor, you could in fact consider whether you might have a different supervisor within that role.

And it might be that that's perhaps not in your immediate service and that you access supervision somewhere else, but it's really difficult if you do have such a breakdown of relationship. And it's understandable, but if you feel like you want to look around for jobs, that might feel like they're a better fit for you, not because you are not good for that job, sometimes things just don't align. And so yeah, sometimes people contact me and they're really demoralised by the experience that they're having at any particular job. And I have to say that on balance, it sounds like it's not them, that's the problem. And actually in a different environment, somebody might be really celebrating their success and really pleased with, you know, their performance. And then they go on to get a different job and they contacted me and they're like, oh my God, this is so different.

You were right. You know, it wasn't me. It was just that there was a, a bad fit, you know, a bad culture fit as Kul would say it, it was just, you know, it wasn't working out for whatever reason, but they've been able to move past that perhaps with a bit of therapy to work out what the lasting legacy has been from that. And if there's been one, but to be able to take themselves and their development and their advancing skills forward, and it can be useful to think about job roles as, you know, what can I gain from this role? What can I give to this role? How can I try on these shoes whilst I'm in this role? And then when I leave, what might I like to keep? What might I like to take with me? And there might be some things that you are really pretty pleased to leave behind.

And I found that in training, you know, during my placements was that for some stuff I really liked it and I thought, yeah, I'm definitely gonna keep that. I love that. And for other stuff, I'm like, no, not keen to ever do that again and you know, that's okay. And I think sometimes we can do the same with our roles as we're heading towards becoming a trainee as well. So it can feel, you know, I think I'm sort of reflecting on what it's like when you are a young person in a school or when you've got children or when you work with children perhaps in CAMHS services is that it can feel like this time period in our lives and their lives are going to last forever. But what we know is things quickly change, you know, in CAMHS services, you know, young people would come in and see me and it would all feel like everything was the end of the world.

And then a week later, you know, a teacher's gone on long term sick or, you know, a new person's joined the school or someone hasn't been at school. And so the bullying hasn't been around and things are very different even a week later. And I think we can absolutely keep changing and keep rolling with the changes that our life brings us. But to think about perhaps some of the difficult areas as being states rather than traits, but if you recognise that whatever you are going through right now is impacting on you in a longer term way, it's making you feel depressed or anxious, fearful, perhaps even traumatised, you know, then that's starting to become a trait, you know, and that's not okay. And so we need to think about whether you might reach out for occupational health at that point to help think about how to protect you, and to help you to feel better and differently in future.

So that is also an option. But you know, I think it's just really tricky, you know, we can get so many knocks and bumps and scrapes along the way, and these can come in the form of feedback from clients as well. You know, some clients aren't gonna like you no matter how good you are, there will be some clients who just don't get you, or don't like you, or you've just got a bit of a mismatch, no matter what you do, they don't seem to get it. There was one client, who complained about me when I was working in an adult service, and you know, when we looked into it, it didn't seem like the complaint wasn’t that justified. I think it was just a mismatch, you know? but even then it feels horrid when you get a complaint coming about you, it can make you feel like, oh, what's the point, oh, I'm gonna quit.

You know, I'm just gonna comfort. I'm gonna just look after myself and eat ice cream for the rest of my life. I'm rubbish and ridiculous. Even if we didn't particularly rate the opinion of the person giving the feedback, it can still feel like it knocks you when you do get that feedback. Because you know, when we are setting out to help people in this profession, you know, we're certainly… you're not getting paid that much. And so, you know, sometimes the feeling we get from the work we do is the stuff that makes the difference. And so if we're just getting not that good money and like negative feedback all the time, you can really be bogged down by it, you know, and that can really affect the way you feel about yourself and the career. But to you, I say, if you're having a hard time, reach out to somebody you care about or someone who is supportive, this might be a friend in psychology, it might be a friend out of psychology.

It might be a partner. It might be a parent, might be even be me. You know, someone that you trust, let me know what's going on for you. Please know, you're not alone. Please know that whatever you are feeling and experiencing is only possible because of this unique, tricky human brain of ours. And yeah, you are lovely. You are really striving for this career, you know, and you're not doing this cuz you think it's gonna get you, you know, golden shoes and things. You're doing this, because you genuinely care about easing distress in other people's lives and helping people understand themselves and the world better and have a different experience, you know, this isn't like a narcissistic career. You're doing this because you genuinely care about other people and that makes you very special, but it also means that you might get bumped and scraped along the way.

We don't want hardened professionals. We want human ones, and so please know that it's okay to be human, but make sure you are being well supported. And with that in mind, if you would like to register for your interest for the aspiring psychologist membership, there are spaces becoming available. Again, I believe it's Friday, the 2nd of September at 8:00 AM, but you need to be on the list. You'll only be able to come on board if you are on the list. So, go to the link on my show notes, or to the link tree on any of my socials or if you connect with me on social media, a great place to do that is on Instagram and LinkedIn, where I'm Dr. Marianne Trent, for both of those. You will absolutely be able to find information about how you can do that.

You might also find it useful to look and read the words of the clinical psychologist collective, but I would love your thoughts on this episode. Please let me know if you are hurting or if you've hurt in the past. And what advice was helpful for you? This is probably a good place to tell you about the free Facebook group, which I'm gonna let it out there. You know, I haven't created it yet, but I am paving the way for a free Facebook group. So I will make sure that that is up and running by the time this podcast episode lands. So yeah, come along, join the free Facebook group, which as yet doesn't have a name, but I'm fairly sure is going to be called the aspiring psychologist community with Dr. Marianne Trent. So look out for that, come and join and come and discuss your thoughts about today's episode.

Thank you so much for being part of my world as ever come and subscribe to YouTube, come and like, and follow the show on apple or Spotify wherever you are listening to, yeah. Do lots of good things such as tagging me in socials. If you really enjoy an episode tell other people about it. And I will look forward to catching up with you very soon for our next episode, which will be dropping into your ears from 6:00 AM on Monday. Thank you. And if you found this helpful, I'm really glad. I will speak to you very soon. Take care.

*Jingles*