Shownotes
“Isn’t the whole point of therapy to be honest?”
In this episode, Caitlin sits down with her clinical supervisor, Kate O'Connor–a psychodynamic therapist and clinical psychologist.
Together, they chat unfiltered on the unspoken tension many healthcare professionals feel: the pressure to follow the rules vs. the pull to show up as a full, complex human. Kate explores the danger of over-sanitising therapy, why true healing can’t be manualised, and how supervision can be a life-affirming space (not a performance review).
If you’ve ever felt like you’re too you to fit the mould of traditional clinical practice, this one’s for you.
Tune in to learn:
- The moment Kate realised supervision could feel more like therapy—and why that’s not a bad thing
- Why Caitlin nearly “tore up her psychology degree”... and how copywriting played an unexpected role
- The surprising reason Kate lets clients draw tarot cards in session
- What a psychoanalytic supervisor taught Kate that traditional training never touched
- Why a CBT lecturer once told Kate: “It’s not technically true, it’s just what we tell people.”
- What happened when Caitlin stopped asking, “What should a psychologist say?” and asked, “What would I say?”
- How the new Code of Conduct in psychology could quietly kill off psychoanalytic therapy
- Kate’s take on why therapists are burning out—and the one word that could change that
- What Carl Jung, the I Ching, and a PR goth have to do with building a meaningful therapy practice
- The taboo topic most therapists avoid—and why ignoring it might be costing clients their life force
Connect with Kate
Connect with Caitlin:
Transcripts
So I am really excited to be chatting with, her today. , But Kate O'Connor is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and clinical psychologist with an interest in weaving clinical practice with mystical thought. Ah, that sounds wonderful. She has a private practice in Brisbane where she sees patients and offers supervision to other therapists.
She also writes a newsletter on Substack called the Psycho Alchemist.
Cool. Well, welcome to the podcast, Kate. I'm so honored that you are joining me today as my clinical supervisor, but today I get to ask you questions,
[: [:Rather than diving in and talking all about me, which, which I'm sure we'll get to about my journey, about how it's been really difficult, branching out into copywriting. But I thought I, I really wanna hear about you and your 'cause. It's something that I don't know exactly about, like your decision to be, become a supervisor and what that looked like for you.
[:But also I was also really helped by supervisors of mine who really treated supervision like therapy and gave me, which is kind of a, that's a bit of like a contentious thing in our profession. Lots of people have the idea that supervision should be something, Very specific and careful in its boundaries of what gets discussed.
but I was, I'm fortunate enough to be in my own supervision with, a psychoanalyst in particular who really, really welcomed me as a whole person into supervision. and I think once I had that experience, I felt ready to, I felt like there was something I wanted to offer as a supervisor that,
[: [: [: [: [:I know I got told multiple times by supervisors that I wasn't communicating right. Because Yeah, I
[: [:And so I think just that helped the whole process of seeing. What it, what that therapy looks like by experiencing it with you, but I guess also my own practice as well. So that's really nice that
[: [: [:Supervision that holds relevance to the case or just holds relevance to our relationship. And, there are also things in your life that are going to be relevant to your work with your clients. And what I had found in supervision in the past is that there was this really kind of like nervousness around getting into that.
because we are in, what's instilled in us in our training is, don't, Violate the privacy of the supervisee by getting into their personal stuff. But what I've found is that people wanna talk about their stuff in supervision because it's relevant to their work.
[:I think it was last year. about my whole thing about living in Tully and not liking it, and I was just like dominated, like the whole about,
[: [: [: [: [: [: [:It was, yeah. Obviously there is, there is a difference between supervision and therapy and I think I would place it out. There's not a working through of your difficulties in the, in supervision in the same way as in therapy, but I think they can be like named and included and honored, not, even if we don't do the therapy on them, you know what I mean?
[: [: [:Sounds like waxing poetic about, about our supervision, which is, really lovely. like, because it's definitely been something that's, had a big impact on, well, I'm still a psychologist, so I think that speaks to.
[: [:Like you can't possibly give that up now. It was more of a, a natural thing where all the issues that Yeah. I had around. Being a psychologist or diversifying into copywriting or something like that, were able to be, yeah, seen for what they were and so that I could have more choice in agency. Mm,
[:My masters who said, if you're a psychologist, you can't participate in other roles in the community. So you can't be like a netball coach was the example that she gave. And that's just so fucked up. Like it's such a, you know, infliction on people who are already so hard on themselves and so perfectionistic and so, conscientious.
[:And that
[: [: [: [: [: [:And they're like, no. They're like, yeah. Very good. Good answer.
[:And I just, I just don't believe, I, I think we haven't even, we've stopped thinking about. Why we even have those ideas in the first place. The idea that every single patient will suffer some kind of irretrievable harm by, by sitting through a dinner with you is just insane. Like, and it, it's not even in the tradition, you know, in analytic schools in the fifties, you would go to your analyst and then you would go to your supervisor and then you would all go to a Christmas party and dance together and like drink together.
That was, that was normal, and everybody just held it.
[: [: [: [: [:but then I've also talked to psychologists who work regionally. I'm thinking of, Anna at the moment, who has a podcast, does my, the, does my psych psychologist like me. And she was even talking about, well, people in the community didn't start seeing her until she was a part of the community, until she was like, integrated.
'cause I didn't trust her. And so that also says something I think, hmm.
[:Some kind of high, high up corporate exec type person who just kept getting passed over for these big roles. And she was like a full goth. And all of her previous PR people were like, you've gotta, you can't be doing that. You've gotta buy all your dresses at Q and Country Road and you can't be doing goth stuff or you're never gonna get hired.
And she did the totally opposite thing. She was like, no, no. We're gonna do goth,
[: [:It's been such a great thing for me in terms of finding work, but also like finding clients who are a really good fit for me, who I
[:I think yeah,
[:It's this really grounding,
connective thing for people who find it really hard to land.
[:So then you learned about it like chicken or the egg kind of.
[:psychotherapy and it really, I think they grow together so beautifully. They really do. In my life, like I've had, I've been in lots of therapy, but I've also seen lots of healers and kind of alternative medicine folk over time. And I think these are all just really, alive ways of making sense of our experiences.
So things like the tarot or, I study something called human design, which is like a birth
chart
[: [:He was like a big purveyor that he used to do it with his patients.
Um. Yeah, I just think it's a fun, it's a nice way to feel connected to the world and connected to those kind of forces of like, synchronicity and, alignment with the destiny.
[: [:We have learned the real truth about what heals people from our randomized control trials,
[: [: [: [: [:Depression index or something like that. It's like, what you gonna base, like the whole thing around one point?
[:They don't do these follow up and they go, look, it worked. But the, there's so much going on in the types of questions that are asked, and the way that they're asked that we just take for granted. And we're taught in school, in the training that, Giving someone a Beck depression scale is an appropriate outcome measure for whether the therapy is working.
And we really have to ask ourselves like, is that really the case? I think,
[: [: [: [:development, frustrated.
Stage in early therapy for lots of people and they're gonna feel miserable. And it, it's, it's an unearthed misery that was long, held and denied. that's, that's being given a voice. Again, it's not a failure, but if we are using those outcome measures, like so many of those studies that were taught are measures of what works, we're not gonna catch that at all.
[: [:It's really bad for your energy. It's a, it's a fast track to being really burnt out. something about doing work that aligns. Makes sense, makes sense. And is like, honest
[: [: [: [: [: [:Certain person was being a bitch and they were telling me to not be so negative. And I was like, but were they a bitch? Like the truth matters. And I, you know, I don't think those models necessarily support that at all.
[:So I'd say something like a worry or something like that, and I was like half expecting, you know, my therapist to like, I don't know, contract it or say something to sooth it. And instead like we'd kind of like go into it, like it, like lean into it. I'm like, oh wow. And that was so much better
[: [: [:I don't know how broad I wanna say. Cast my rant here, but, like it really is expressive of a cultural shift,
[: [:The most gentle thing I can say about it is that I think it really prohibits psychoanalytic treatment because it, frames things like therapist self-disclosure as, risky, dangerous kind of things that should hardly ever be done except in very rare circumstances. And when you're thinking about things like counter counter transference interpretation, where we're saying, when you did this, it made me feel like this.
Which is a really important type of intervention in psychoanalysis. This, this code, really frames that as something problematic. Like it really represents a misalign, a growing misalignment between psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic therapy, and clinical psychology. I
[: [:I, I can, I. There is value in having a particular kind of relationship with our patients that has a particular set of boundaries, that provide a unique container when really big things can be brought forward. And really, I'm really not, I really see the value in that, but you're right, I think there are the idea that it has to be so, quarantined to the point where the therapist is, you know, there are these other things in the code that say, are the kinds of public statements you are and aren't allowed to make. for example, on your personal social media, you're not allowed to, make any, like this is literally what it says. It says you're only allowed to make informed comments that use peer reviewed research findings. Like it's so insane, the sanitization of the, so you can't do a Facebook status update that's not backed by peer reviewed research.
Like it's crazy.
[: [:but I think it's right that we think about where that comes from culturally. 'cause it's a very westernized, philosophy of care.
[: [: [: [: [: [:Like I, I realized yesterday at this conference when they were talking about, you know, this idea that like businesses don't have values, and a company doesn't have values, people have values, but I think, there's some analogous thing happening in the profession that you get. Taught how to, if you, if you've had good training, if you've had good enough training, you're taught how to think, but then we're kind of spa out into the world with this deep sense of obligation to just, kind of parrot what the profession says and thinks and, and wants us to.
Uphold and, and it feels really, I don't know about you, but I feel really scared when I make decisions to not do that. I feel like I put myself at risk in some way by, if I ever am defying those things, even if I have a really good reason to.
[: [: [: [: [: [: [: [:'cause we've talked about that a lot in your supervision.
[: [: [:Okay. So like a lot of my. resistant. Resistant to like me wanting to like. Tear up my psychology degree is like, basically like this resistance to like authority and like my, experiences around that. And I think once I realized that that was relaxed a bit and then just being out of like psychology land, like I, 'cause I practiced, I.
Like part-time. I do my psychology days, but like I'm so much more in the marketing world, like,
[: [:Realization, understanding that I'm like, I wanna be a human first. I wanna be a person. And a big part of, well, sorry. Yeah,
[: [: [: [:And now I just come to my sessions. I'm like, I had this knowledge, I have this training and all of that, and I think like, and just our training makes us so boundaried, like crazy boundaried. And I came to the realization that I don't, I wouldn't ever do anything that was like
[: [:I wanna, I live my life and be fully present and be a full, like a, an individual, right? Like that whole, like individuation, I wanna be. What that looks like for me. And if I get in trouble from psychology and like, let's be real, it's gonna be other psychologists
probably because they're the only ones that are gonna really know about the new code.
it's not gonna be the member of the public.
[: [: [:But there's still the kind of dominant paradigm in medicine is that you go into the doctor, they prescribe you something. They don't ask you about your family or your relationships or, The stress in your life, even though these things are like incredibly predictive of certain kinds of really severe illness and cancer and autoimmune issues.
But he said that the doctors he talks to who are onto that stuff, who are really practicing from like a much more holistic and evidence-based model, They are doing it secretly because they're, if they come out about that stuff to their colleagues, they'll be mocked and framed as like, incompetent or, irresponsible.
And, you know, I think this is, a reason why podcast is so awesome because you're actually trying to have this conversation like out loud in the world about, you know, the challenges of doing this work and then also trying to be a person and have something else. You know,
[: [: [: [: [: [: [: [:I don't, I, this. The outcome of, the failure of our culture to properly initiate people into a spiritual adulthood. So, I wrote this beautiful book by, bill Plotkin, who's a deaf psychologist. He's written a few books about this actually, like a union and He talks about how, and, you know, Freud spoke about this to an extent, about this kind of failure of, the childhood and the adolescence to really properly free the child from, the powers like that kind of parental.
Like that overbearing parental force. And so instead of growing up, what we do is we leave home, but we then allocate the, parental role to the teacher or the supervisor, or the priest or the policeman, and never kind of really connect to our agency and what is unique and, divine about ourselves as an individual and the unique thing that we have to offer the world.
I think if you, if you miss out on that process, if you don't have elders or you don't have structures around you that are really inviting you into that, this is the outcome. You end up with the masses who, aspire to rule following in every area of life. So it's not just in work. You know, you see this in, I go to a Pilates class and I walk in the class and like every girl in the class is wearing the same outfit except me, and it's so unsettling. You know, we're like, oh, this is the correct way to dress for Pilates, so that's what I'm gonna do. and you know, it's so homogenizing of the way that we live and it, and it doesn't cultivate wellbeing.
[: [: [: [: [:Or like maybe like, I don't wanna be bashing psychologists, but maybe that they've tried to bring to psychologists before and they've been shut down on, and that's nothing to do with the psychologist. It's more about like them probably as a person freaking out about like, oh, I
[: [: [:And I think we're just so under-resourced and, and, under supported to be able to hold that for people when really it's like such an incredible, piece of data about what's going on with them and such a, an expression of something in them that I think is like trying to come back to life usually.
[: [: [:know. actually don't know what the whole idea of it is. I really hate it.
I don't know. Like it's, it's like, doesn't make, I, I just don't understand.
Anyway, maybe
[:But I think when it's done without a broader pursuit of meaning and understanding of why the symptoms or the suffering were there in the first place, it's it's gonna be really short lived in terms of the impact.
[: [: [: [:And I'm just like, you be.
[: [:be worked through.
[: [:Hmm.
I think that sponsors a lot of the burnout that we see in our colleagues and in ourselves.
[: [: [: [: [: [: [: [: [: [: [: [:It's really
nice. Helps me with my, with my existential despair. So.
[: [: [: [: [: [: [:It's a Woody Allen movie. I
[: [: [: [: [:It was really, really insane.
[: [: [: [: [:Zoe is, you're so right. Like I, when you were talking, it reminded me of, something that Brene Brown talks about, like maybe joy or something like having that shared like experience of that that's really healing or really important for
[: [: [:I'm really obsessed with lighting. That's my quirky thing. That's in my human design chart too. I need to have the lights be right.
[: [: [: [: [: [:rooms.
[: [: [: [: [: [: [: [: [: [: [:these conversations that have happen behind closed doors or happen in supervision where it's confidential and private, they do need to be happened, in the public
[: [: [: [: [: [:All right. That's the end of another episode. Thank you so much for tuning into Healers with Hustles. If you've enjoyed today's episode, will you do me a tiny favor and subscribe to the show? Just tap the subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform, and you'll be the first to know as soon as the new episode drops.
Thanks so much for listening. Okay, for now.
