Self Compassion as an Aspiring Psychologist

Marianne: Hi, welcome along to The [00:00:30] Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. And today we are going to be thinking about compassion. Now, compassion is something that I think would've made my journey to being a clinical psychologist a whole heck, more enjoyable had I discovered the practice of compassion before I actually did.

So first off, I will tell you [00:01:00] when I first connected with compassion, and also the close call I had. So let's start with the close call to begin with. So one of the seminal texts on compassion is by Professor Paul Gilbert, who I have had the absolute joy of meeting for a two-day course. And I got [00:01:30] there first. There was just him and I think just him and me in the room. And he came up to me and greeted me so warmly, including a handshake. This is pre-COVID times. And I had just walked from a train station in winter and I was absolutely freezing and I felt so self-conscious of how cold my hands were and also just completely [00:02:00] like a rabbit in the headlights for the fact that Paul Gilbert was in front of me, greeting me, welcoming me along to his course.

And I also was thinking this course was going to be pretty massive. There was going to be loads of people in the room. And I was just hoping to blend in really and to just sit in the background and soak up Professor Paul Gilbert brilliance. But it didn't turn [00:02:30] out that way. There was probably only about 10 of us on there. And so it was a really intense day. It was a real privilege, a real privilege. I loved it and I learned so much.

But my first brush with Professor Paul Gilbert was when I was training. It might even been shortly after I was training, but I was at a house party for someone on my cohort. And [00:03:00] these house parties, I don't know how old you are listening to this podcast episode, but this is not like a house party like it was when I was an undergrad uni where you don't really know the person who's hosting it. You stay up all night. You have the time of your life. You drink some drink that's orange that's come out of a punch bowl, but you don't really know what's in it. And you know [00:03:30] right now that might trigger you as well because I know there's all sorts of drink spiking things around.

But growing up, this is the late to 90s and early two 2000s is when I was doing my undergrad. I have very fond memories and thankfully I came through it unscathed apart from drinking too much vodka and Coke and things like that. Sometimes I don't even know why I did that because I don't like Coke really. So anyway, so [00:04:00] yes, I was at this house party, which definitely didn't involve bowls of punch, but probably did involve stuffed vine leaves. It was that kind of party, but lovely.

And on the sideboard, in my friend's house, there was a copy of the very weighty tome, a compassionate mind by the said Professor Paul Gilbert, and it had been returned [00:04:30] by someone who had read it and they said, "Marianne, would you like to read it?" And I took one look at it, saw how thick it was. And I was like, "No, thanks." I wasn't really into reading like workbooks for pleasure. I thought it would be really, really worky.

And actually when I came to read it, this would've been probably 2010, 2011, but I didn't [00:05:00] come on to get to grips with compassionate theory until 2017, 2018, I'm going to say, had I had it in my life for that many years in the middle bit and for the bit before I actually got onto the clinical training course, I think it would've been super useful [00:05:30] for me. And I'd have had a much gentler ride because something I know that will resonate with many aspiring psychologists is that we can be our own harshest critic. And I think this fits in with some of the pop psychology around us being wounded healers. You know we're partly healing ourselves by entering into this [00:06:00] profession. And I certainly think that it's really the best job in the world. I feel so grateful, so lucky to do this that I really love.

So it doesn't feel like work a lot of the time, which is just I'm very lucky in that regard I think. And I know that many of you might feel the same as well, but it [00:06:30] can definitely ebb and flow. Sometimes it feels a lot more worky than others and know we get those real golden nuggets of just incredible connection and knowing where you've made such a difference to the lives of people you've worked with, which is just incredibly wonderful.

So yeah, part of our wounded healer mentality can be that actually we're quite [00:07:00] mean to ourselves at times. So discovering self-compassion for me earlier in the process, if I had picked up that weighty book off that sideboard along with some posh dip and yeah, stuffed divine leave, then it might have been really useful for me. And I think it would've been really useful for me as a new parent as well to have [00:07:30] already welcomed self-compassion into my life.

So if you don't know you're not familiar with books on self-compassionate, I'd absolutely recommend the one by Professor Paul Gilbert, but also Dr. Chris Irons, The Compassionate Mind Approach to Difficult Emotions. That's the one that I really think is really accessible and really useful. So do check out those as a first port [00:08:00] of call if this peaks your interest, I would say. So yeah, they're really useful books. And had I discovered those when I was a parent, I would've absolutely cut myself more slack. It's hard to do any job. Well, let alone be a new parent who, yeah, at one point I was waking up like 37 times a night with a screaming baby. It's tricky. It's tricky if you've got high expectations upon [00:08:30] yourself.

So the reality is, certainly if you have clinical psychology in your sites, that there aren't limitless places available. So I'm just taking a quick look at the book, The Clinical Psychologist Collective here. And the success rates in the number of places, it's pretty sobering reading. So across the UK-funded [00:09:00] places in 2021 were 979, with the applicants being 4,544. So the success rate that year was 22%. And of course, it is a little skewed because people will be applying who maybe have only just graduated. And so it would be less likely that they would be successful. So actually if you do have a number of years experience and you might perhaps have a master's and done some published research, [00:09:30] then actually your chance at success might be higher than 22%. Does that make sense?

But yeah, the number of places was 979 and it was always on my radar, how many places there were on the course that I wanted to apply for? And because I was doing my assistant psychologist roles in the Midlands. So the course that I ended up getting on [00:10:00] happily loving had 15 places. One, five the year that I was successful. And so it was always in my mind if I help someone too much, or if I'm too graceful and useful here, I could be talking myself out of a place and giving it to them, which, oh, it's a really [00:10:30] difficult position because I adore my friends. I'm still in contact with many of them now, and yet, yeah, it's difficult. Isn't it being a human, but also we've got this survival instinct. At that point, if I'd had to choose who I prefer to get on a course, then I would've had to have put in my secret ballot box while I'm raising my hand, "Me." I'd rather I got [00:11:00] onto training. And that's difficult because we want to have a really collaborative ethos.

And I think this is more commonly spoken about now about how to remain compassionate to your self and to others. And actually there is room for everybody to do well and to try and be their optimal best and [00:11:30] that see something that my children struggle with as well. So my children are eight and five. If I say to one of them, "Oh gosh, you've done that beautifully. What a wonderful picture. What a love little artist you are." Or I might say, "Oh God, you are so funny. Oh, that's really made me laugh." The other one will say, "I suppose, I'm not funny. Or I suppose I'm a terrible artist." And it's like, " [00:12:00] No, that's not true." I try to introduce them to the concept of mutual exclusivity, which is a hard sell. We're just going to pause for this quick ad break here. And hopefully by the time we get back, we will find that you are less of a hard sell than the eight-year-old and five-year-old are in terms of mutual exclusivity.

[00:12:30] I [00:13:00] found that the Our Tricky Brain Kit really helps me as a clinician to bring the compassion-focused therapy to life in a way that my clients can really engage with and remember. So yeah, I'd recommend it.

[00:13:30] So as you might know, mutual exclusivity is the concept [00:14:00] that things can only operate a bit like a train track, so they can only operate as a parallel. So if I was a good artist, then it would mean someone else couldn't be a good artist, but of course, we know that those are not mutually exclusive concepts. We know that actually it's quite possible for people to lots of people to be very good at art and for our artistic style to [00:14:30] apply and appeal to different people as well. So some may say that I was the better artist. They'd be wrong on because I'm dreadful. And others, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all of that. Others might think that someone else is better artist and they would likely be right because my art is abysmal. But so yes, I pick a bad example, but my kids like drawing. So that's a really nice thing.

So again, the mutual exclusivity in clinical psychology is that I can have really useful skills and [00:15:00] experiences to offer, and useful techniques and things about me that makes me a good psychologist. But you can also have the same technique skills and experiences or different techniques, skills and experiences. And you can also be good psychologists too because we have to be able to [00:15:30] hold space for others also doing good things and know that that doesn't detract from our own experience and our own validity and our own worth. Gosh, these are all terms that we learn about in psychology undergrad, the validity and ecological validity and normality and on all of that. And actually here I am using them to talk to you.

So the stuff [00:16:00] we learn at undergrad and the stuff we learn at A level if you did, it is super useful. And actually I still use many of the techniques in the theory that I learned at A level now. And also bystander effect and cognitive dissonance and things like that, they're really integral concepts. So anyway, that's a bit of an aside, isn't it? But in terms of compassion, we can allow ourselves to [00:16:30] be good enough and know that we can't expect ourselves to be a genius at psychology if we are indeed starting out if we've not done it before, we have to be able to give ourselves the breathing space and the capacity and the permission, but also the kindness really [00:17:00] to not get things right first time, every time.

And that cropped up recently for me on my second ever salsa lesson because I was just not very good, but realistically, I was comparing myself to people who'd been doing it for years and were asking me to dance and spinning me around like I was on strictly. And so I was never going to come up very well. And it actually [00:17:30] did take me an hour or so until I was home to think, hold on, Marianne, come on. It's all right. You can't expect yourself to be an expert on your second lesson and it's okay if your feet were a bit of a mess. It's okay if you were feeling a bit overwhelmed at times. That's all right because actually the people teaching you stuff were teaching you quite complicated moves. And when even the basic steps are taking some head space and some thinking, it's okay to find the complicated [00:18:00] ones a little bit perplexing as well.

So I am going back for lesson three next week and I may still be rubbish. I likely will be. And my dancing is about as good as my artistry. But I'm all right with that because I'm never going to be a professional dancer. Believe me, I am never going to be that. So I can both be a good psychologist and a terrible [00:18:30] dancer because the two are not mutually exclusive. I wouldn't have to be one or the other.

So yeah, I would just allow yourself to appreciate where you are right now and to not be able to, for example, be expecting yourself to be a complete neuropsych wizard if you've never done neuropsych before. I remember when I was an assistant psychologist, I'd done [00:19:00] some neuropsych with a client and we were concerned about some of his functioning and it involved drawing a clock face. And my supervisor just really briefly came into the office afterwards and said, "Oh, look, you can see that actually he might have some visual impairment because he's only done it on one side or he is got some planning problems or ran out of space." And I just thought, "Oh yeah, why didn't really see that? I didn't really [00:19:30] get that one when I saw that." And I felt like, "Oh, she's so good." And she is. But I've never done it before. And so actually I wasn't used to making interpretations and trying to formulate about this particular piece of neuropsych or particular of theory.

And so just allowing yourself some breathing space to allow yourself to grow, [00:20:00] water yourself, and allow yourself to just do what you need to do, and to know that you are supposed to be learning. Even when we are fortunate enough to get places on decency courses or whatever courses that you are aspiring to, we are not expected to know at all because we are not supposed to be the finished article.

I feel like this is a massive topic and we might well need to [00:20:30] do another episode on this. And if you think that'd be useful, give me a shout. Please do subscribe and review. And yeah, keep listening and let me know any feedback you've got. And I will look forward to catching up with you on our next episode. Take care.

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