Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode 106: Coping with trauma – personally and professionally – with ex-Paralympian Dr Yvonne Waft

Thank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast.

In today’s episode of the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast, we have an inspiring, resilient guest who is an ex-Paralympian, author and a successful clinical psychologist. Join Dr Yvonne Waft as we unravel trauma, and explore the bumps in the journey from an able-bodied 19-year-old, to an Paralympian, author and clinical psychologist. We explore the need for diversity, post-traumatic growth and the challenges of disability.

We hope you find it so useful.

I’d love any feedback you might have, and I’d love to know what your offers are and to be connected with you on socials so I can help you to celebrate your wins!

The Highlights:

• (00:00): Summary
• (00:57): Introduction and resources
• (01:54): Exploring grief and trauma – a process
• (03:05): Introducing ex-Paralympian De Yvonne Waft
• (05:06): Losing limbs – processing grief and trauma
• (07:18): Yvonne’s route to psychology
• (08:37): The isolation of exclusion and ableism
• (10:47): Reflecting on multiple identities – parent, disabled, incoming psychologist
• (14:41): The freedom of post-qualification
• (17:23): Finding your people
• (20:17): Battling the barriers as a trainee
• (21:22): The change in the way disability is viewed from the 1990s to post-covid
• (24:39): Being disabled and parenting a child with disability
• (26:42): The daily struggles of a disabled person
• (31:43): Connect with Yvonne!
• (32:44): The need for diversity in professions
• (36:55): Publishing Yvonne’s story
• (40:36): Finding my people – through academia and sports
• (42:19): In loving memory of a dear friend
• (44:25): Unravelling traumas
• (49:09): You can't go over it, you can't go under it, oh no, you've got to go through it
• (51:59): Windows of tolerance
• (53:18): Reflecting on post-traumatic growth
• (55:46): Summary & close

Links:

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Episode 106 Coping with trauma personally and professionally

Coming up in today's episode, we are looking at trauma. We are looking at how you can experience personal trauma and then begin to make it your clinical specialty. It is a fascinating episode. It's not every day we can say the podcast is featured a Paralympian, so it's a very special episode and I hope you'll find it useful.

If you're looking to become a psychologist, then let this podcast, podcast. Dr.

Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent, and I am a qualified clinical psychologist. Hope that you are well wherever you are listening to this in the country, in the UK or indeed the world, please do come and let me know a little bit about yourself by coming along to the free Facebook group, the Aspiring Psychologist Community with Dr. Marianne Trent, and do come and follow me on socials. If you're watching on YouTube, you can do that by scanning the QR code on screen. Now, if you're not watching on YouTube, please do just search for Dr. Marianne Trent on whichever social platform you're on, and I should appear as if by magic. One of the things that I have done in my professional career over the last few years is to get a little bit more confident in talking about myself publicly.

That is something that I started to do in the Grief Collective book. It's something I continued in the Clinical Psychologist collective book and also something that I've continued in the membership and for that matter in these podcast episodes too. But it does take confidence and it takes time, and we need to make sure that we are not just talking about ourselves all the time because that's not that useful for our clients. What we need to do is strike a balance and to know why we're sharing our personal story to really make sure that it's of benefit to what we're talking about with the client. Now, I sort of stumbled into working with trauma as my clinical specialty because that's what was being delivered in the service I was working in, and it just really resonated with me. But we all start in our journey for clinical specialties with different reasons, different motivations, and today's guest has a very interesting reason for why was right for her clinically and how it all unfolded.

It is a fascinating episode. It does feature an ex Paralympian athlete, and it was just such a pleasure to speak with Dr. Yvonne. I hope you'll find it really, really interesting for a variety of reasons, and I would love to know what you think of the episode. Please do come and let me know, and I'll look forward to catching up with you on the other side once you've been introduced to Yvonne. Hope you find it useful. Just want to welcome along. Our guest today, Dr. Yvonne Waft is a clinical psychologist. She's also an author of a really lovely new book, which is out now, and it's called Coping with Trauma. But more than that, she's also a retired Paralympian. It's not every day that we can say that we've got an Olympian on the podcast. Welcome along, Yvonne.

Thank you very much, Marianne. It's lovely to be here. Thank you for having me on.

Oh, thank you for coming. And this is a case of us having known each other and known about each other for a while. We are Facebook friends. We've been in the same Facebook groups probably quite a few years now, but we've never actually met in person, so it's really nice to have you here. And you had approached me because of your passion for working with trauma and because of your new book, and we will come on to talk a little bit about your book in good time. But yeah, I really want to get a flavour, introduce our audience to who you are, what your journey with psychology has been, and I know some of that might tread on some territory of your book as well. But something else I didn't say about you in your intro is that you are a wheelchair user.

Yeah, absolute. And that kind

Of weaves in some of your trauma story and also your psychology story as well. Can I let you guide us through a little bit about that, if that's okay, Yvonne?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's all in the book. There's no big secrets here. So I became a wheelchair user at the age of 19. I had a very nasty run-in with meningitis and septicemia, so I lost both legs actually, which was pretty traumatic for a 19-year-old girl back in the mid 1980s. I thought I knew which way my life was going at that point, and then all of a sudden I had to do a complete rethink about life and everything. I think, as you say, I got into sport. I played wheelchair basketball for many years to international level, and it was really through doing that that I started to see role models, other people who were further along that journey of being disabled adults. Really, that enabled me to see a future for myself really through coming out of trauma and into life as a disabled adult.

And yeah, gradually through that process I got myself back to university, studied psychology. I think there was an unconscious process in that happening in that having not probably had as much psychological support as I needed adjusting to my new circumstances at 19, I really felt the lack of that and I wanted to understand myself better. I had also had quite a tricky childhood prior to that with not the most compassionate empathic parenting. And so emotionally things have been quite difficult for me. I think growing up and then adjusting to disability, I didn't really have the tools, so sport was the first way that I started to adjust to things and started to see the possibilities, as you say. I then eventually went to the Atlanta Paralympics in 1996 as a wheelchair basketball player for the GB women's team, and that was an amazing experience, and I suppose that that sort of journey started me to have real confidence in myself and my abilities.

And alongside that, I then got back into education. So I was doing my psychology degree. I was becoming more and more fascinated. The more I learned about psychology, the more I suppose learned about myself, applying what I was learning to myself, and I really wanted to go into clinical psychology at that point. And then of course, that journey sort of unfolded. So I was a mature student at undergrad. I was think 27 or 28 when I started my undergrad because obviously I'd had this interruption previously. So I came out of my undergrad at just about 30 or so and was getting married around that time and then went on to have my daughter. So sport kind of got put on hold and I had my daughter and then started focusing on the clinical psychology career and came up against quite a few hurdles with that. I think accessibility to roles being turned down at interview because well, home visits are needed in this role, so you won't be able to do that. So sorry. But no, there were a lot of things that came up along that journey.

I had an assistant psychologist post in a department where the weekly psychology meeting was in a room upstairs, and I had no access to that, so I was just excluded from the psychology meeting. So yeah, there were lots of things along that journey that were difficult and kind of sucked it up. I think I sucked up a lot of ableism on that journey because I really wanted to be a clinical psychologist, but it really shouldn't have been as hard as it was at times. So then I did eventually get onto the clinical doctorate and again, faced quite a lot of ableism there as well. So I experienced a lot of ableism along the journey, and I don't really know what the answer to that is other than that needs thinking about it a systemic level at the sort of level of the trainers in clinical psychology, because I mean, for example, the course I attended, the clinical doctorate that I attended at Leeds when I attended it, the course office was in a building that I couldn't access easily, if at all, and parking at the teaching venue was very, very difficult.

But I couldn't physically get a training to Leeds at that time to attend training. So there was a lot that I had to deal with. And then moving from placement to placement every six months when you've had to argue for some reasonable adjustments in your workplace, and then you move to another workplace six months later and you've got to start again trying to get just basic access requirements in place and finding out where the accessible lus are, and sometimes that's not in the department that you're based in. And yeah, just so many challenges along the way. And also, as I said, not only was the disability stuff, which I kind of took on myself to deal with a lot, I really did have a lot of internalised ableism going on and kind of took it as my responsibility to sort that sort of stuff out.

I also had a 2-year-old toddler when I started training, and that was really hard too, being a parent, being the only parent in my cohort, being older than most of my cohort and trying to juggle childcare needs, getting back from placements that could be all over the place in time for nursery shutting. I had a big argument at one point with the course placements officer because they wanted to place me. So I was living near to Wakefield at the time in West Yorkshire, and they wanted to give me a placement in Huddersfield, which would be over an hour's drive away. It was the other side of Huddersfield from where I was. And so the travel would take me over an hour. Now my nursery time, my child was in nursery in Wakefield at the time, near to the main mental health hospital in Wakefield. So what I would have to do is drive from my village near Wakefield to Wakefield, drop my daughter off, and then drive over an hour to other side of Huddersfield.

And I said, I literally can't do it because the hours don't allow. I can drop her off at 8:00 AM I can pick her up no later than 6:00 PM if you want me to work nine to five in this placement. It doesn't add up. And what they wanted to do was to get someone who lived in Huddersfield to travel to field head Hospital in Wakefield placement at that same time. And I had a conversation with that person who said, you live like five minutes from St. Luke's Hospital in Huddersfield. I'm dropping my child off less than five minutes away from field head hospital in Wakefield. Can we not just swap placements? And we spoke to the placement supervisor and they said, no, you can't. And I said, well, I can't do that placement end of, I said, I have to pick my child up by 6:00 PM I started quoting all sorts of like, have you heard of attachment theory?

These are very senior psychologists. Psychologists. Have you not heard of atachment theory? I have to pick my child up. I can't leave her at nursery. So yeah, there were all sorts of wrangles like that about, well, both childcare and disability. So I really had a double whammy of challenges going on through my training journey, both before training and through training and then post-training really as a clinical psychologist working in the NHS where there wasn't that much flexibility in terms of working hours. Yeah, you could go, but you were still expected to be in the department nine till five on the days you were working. And as a parent, you'll know yourself, you've got kids, it's hard to do that nine to five because it forces you into doing all the child wrangling early in the morning, get them to school, get yourself to work. It's really tough, isn't it?

And then the same at the other end of the day, it was really hard to get that flexibility and add into that that not only am I disabled, but my daughter actually has disabilities as well. She has a perinatal brain injury. Sadly, that's caused her a lot of difficulties. She's 22 now and she's doing great. But there were times at those early stages in her life where it was really challenging. It was a lot to deal with, and I was dealing with that as a disabled person myself. So the levels of stress on top of stress that I was dealing with and then doing a really stressful job. Clinical training, as you know, is incredibly stressful. And working as a psychologist in the NHS post-training is really stressful. It's a hard job. And really the answer to all of that came much later on roundabouts.

I trained 2003 to six, I started doing a little bit of private work around six, eight years after finishing training, I went into a bit of private practise and very rapidly thought this is where I belong. And there was a bit of a transition period of a couple of years, but by 2016, I was fully in private practise and can pick and choose my hours. Now pretty much, I have so much more freedom now, so much more freedom to choose what work I do as well and to develop in the directions I want to develop, which is just amazing. It's an amazing luxury. I went through a lot of hardship early on in the career, but I've got to a place where I have so much freedom and ability to earn. And yeah, it's just so, so freeing now being in private practise and being a supervisor and being an EMDR facilitator on training, I've just got so much freedom now compared to what I had back then. So I would say the struggle was worth it, but it was very hard at times. It was way harder than it needed to be at times.

Wow, Yvonne, what a lot to go from being able-bodied 19 living, living your life independently to then almost waking up and having to experience that you are now going to be a wheelchair user, not have the chance to even say goodbye to your legs. You didn't know that was happening. That's a lot. That's a lot. And then it sounds like there's so many experiences of being othered and almost you were othering yourself as well. You

Probably had your own preconceptions about what wheelchair users were like, and because you experience what you experience and that's been our norm, that's been your norm. And then suddenly you're having to enter this whole realm of other stuff. I had myself imagining and thinking actually when you were joining and spending time with all of the other women in the basketball team, that must've been incredibly liberating. You must have learned so much about them, about how to be confident as a wheelchair user. And some of those might have well been wheelchair users from birth and others might have been from accident or illness as well. I feel like that's a really great learning zone to really learn.

Absolutely. I mean, one of the things I talk about a little bit in my book coping with Trauma is the importance of finding your people, finding the people who you can connect with, who can be supportive of you, who can show you the way even I think there's so much more available now in terms of social media, which be a blessing under curse I think. But back in the mid eighties, there was very little access to information. And actually for me going into wheelchair basketball and finding people who were working, I didn't know that was an option at first. People who had careers, people who had married and had families, I mean, I was 19. I didn't know. I thought I might want to get married and have children at some point, but I didn't know when something dramatic like that happens. You dunno if that's still an option for you. Will anyone ever love me? That was probably a question on my mind at some points back at that stage. And then to get into wheelchair basketball and see people that were married and parenting or just living their lives in whatever way they wanted to, that was just so liberating to see that I didn't have to have my options limited just because I was now a wheelchair user.

It was finding my people and making those connections and then the friendships that grew out of that, some of those people that I was connected with, then I may have gone big chunks of time in my life without speaking to them. But then we'll meet up because I coach wheelchair basketball now. I don't still play, but I do still coach and I'll bump into people that I've not seen for 20 or 30 years who I used to play with or against back then. And it's like we spoke yesterday. We just pick up conversations and just catch up. And it's just lovely to have those sort of connections, but that's been such a powerful healing part of my journey to have those connections. Absolutely.

So pleased that you had a go at wheelchair basketball and then that ended up happening for you. That sounds like you've got just what you needed when you didn't even maybe really know that you needed it. And it's been transformational for you and it just sounds wonderful. I'm so pleased that you had that and had that experience. And also when you were talking about your experiences of being an assistant psychologist and then your experiences of being a trainee

Just sounds

Horrendous and being a parent. So I trained shortly after you finished. I started in 2008 and there were parents on the cohort. I would say that largely there was a more sensitive shift to making sure their placements were going to be doable, especially because one of the parents was a single parent and so it really is them or nobody that's going to be picking those children up. But you've really described having to battle many, many things, but having now been a few decades into being a wheelchair user and the changes that have happened really probably since the pandemic about neurodiversity, about inclusivity, about disability, about inclusion for all of our individual quirks and differences. Do you think there's differences for being a wheelchair user currently 2023 than there was when you were coming up through the system and when you were learning to be disabled yourself?

It's really interesting you ask that. And I think when I became a wheelchair user, it was pre the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, but there was already kind of a movement towards that. And I think the Americans with Disabilities Act came out in I think 1990 and that set a template really for the DDA in this country. And so there was a real sort of positive movement towards rights for disabled people and anti-discrimination legislation. And there was a battle to get that in place. And I think there was a period of huge hope after that for disability inclusion and real positivity and growth. And I think public buildings changed, shopping centres changed. The built environment generally changed. People's access to work changed. You could go to an employer and say, this isn't actually good enough, you can't discriminate against me in this way. And so things had moved on massively.

So by the time I was entering clinical training in 2003, things were feeling very, very hopeful and positive. And I felt like I could go in there and say, actually this isn't good enough. Can you do this? And can you make this reasonable adjustment and can you do that? And I saw things changing over a period of time and improving. And then I dunno what happened around 13, 14 years ago, but I would say that things have gone massively downhill. I do know what happened 13 or 14 years ago. There was a change of government and I would say that politically the will has changed massively. And where you are noticing that maybe there's more understanding of neurodiversity I and inclusion since the pandemic, I would say the opposite actually. I would say that the pandemic highlighted the disposability of disabled people actually in certain quarters.

It's coming out in the little bit in the Covid inquiry. Now, this government we're very happy to throw disabled people, older people, sick people under the Covid bus. And I was really alarmed at the beginning. Right at the beginning of the first lockdown, I was just preparing to do my teaching session to the second year leads, trainees on disability, and literally we'd locked down a week and a half before I was due to deliver this training. And I was having to quickly jiggle my slides and everything into a format that I could deliver somehow. And I didn't even know how online, whether that was going to be me doing it live online or sending a presentation. It was all so up in the air at that point. And while I was prepping my presentation to do that, there was literally a debate going on in parliament about the COVID Act, and they were discussing things like if two people turned up in a and e needing a ventilator and one was disabled and one wasn't, then obviously the able-bodied one would have to have the ventilator and the disabled one would've to die.

And that was literally being discussed in parliament. Here I am a disabled person, very healthy, doing very valuable work in the community as a psychologist and as a wheelchair basketball coach. And also parenting a young person who at that point would've been 18, 19 I think, who has a learning disability, cerebral palsy and autism. And hearing that she also would be thrown under the bus. Now that was so complicated to get my head round as a carer of a young person like that. If I get thrown under the bus and I don't get the ventilator, then who's going to look after her? Well, obviously my husband would, but he was also clinically vulnerable. He was on immunosuppressants at the time for asthma and eczema, so he was going to be vulnerable. He wasn't going to get the ventilator either, and who was going to advocate for my daughter and support her through all of that.

So we had this whole sort of anxiety around that. And I think more and more just reading Twitter, I shouldn't read it, but at the moment I keep seeing psychologists on their other people, on their disability news service and so on, talking about the new moves that the government are making on DWP and benefits and how people who are too sick to work are going to be forced to do work placements to earn their benefits. You've either got to do a work placement or die in the process of trying to get that, and they're just trying to get everyone back to work, even though many, many people are not able to work. My daughter, unfortunately, she tried doing a work placement as part of a college course, and it was so stressful to her with her learning disability and autism that she stopped sleeping and almost became psychotic with the pressure and we had to pull her out of it.

And that's the of level of, to look at her, she looks like someone who could possibly try a bit of work, but actually the reality is if the government, if the DWP forced her into doing some sort of a work placement, the stress would be too much. And I don't think people have enough understanding at those kind of policymaking levels of the impact of health conditions, neurodiversity learning impairments, just the extra stuff that disabled people have to deal with. I mean, just to give you another example as a family, well, I went to a conference in London a week ago on Friday, and we decided in advance of that that we would make it a family trip to London and have the weekend there. So we did that. I went to my conference on the Friday, we did a couple of days doing London stuff, and then we got the train back and we'd been told as we set off from Wakefield Station that on the way to London that the lift was out of order and they were hoping it would be back in order by the time we returned because we'd be returning on the opposite platform and we'd need the lift to get over the footbridge.

Anyway, Sunday evening came and we were at King's Cross Station and we said, we're here for the assistance people. Can you get us on the train please? And by the way, they mentioned about the lift, can you check that that's sorted, please? And they phoned ahead and they said, no, the lift's still out at Wakefield. What you'll probably have to do is either get off at Doncaster and get a taxi. Well, my daughter's a wheelchair user as well as I am, so there wasn't going to be a taxi that could take both of us from Doncaster to somewhere in between Wakefield and Huddersfield. So we said that would probably be a challenge. And they said, the other option is you take the train past Wakefield, you go to Leeds, you get another train, you come back from Leeds to Wakefield, and you come in on the correct platform then well, that's what we ended up having to do. That added an hour to our journey home. I can see you shaking your head there. It's ridiculous, isn't it?

It's just madness, isn't it? It's not all right.

It's not. I mean, we plum the time we were coming home with the thought that I had a full day's supervision clinics on the Monday. So arriving home at a time where we could relax and chill and watch a bit of telly and all of that, that was all factored in to me being able to be up and ready for work the next day. And as it was, we ended up not getting after 10 o'clock at night because we to do this extra hour on the train to get in on the right platform. And some people talk about how services and government and people just don't recognise the extra time and energy that sort of thing takes from disabled people. When the government is saying, we're going to force disabled people into work through these benefit sanctions, what they don't realise is that those are the things we're dealing with an extra hour on your journey. Imagine if I was commuting from Wakefield to somewhere south of here every day and having to do that as part of my commute every day. Does that time not matter? Does it not matter that for example, then I might not be able to pick my kids up from nursery and get them fed to sensible time? The extra energy and effort involved in that is just crazy.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm sorry that my questioning about improvements perhaps now seems quite naive, but that's been enlightening for me. How would you

Know if I

Didn't tell you as a non wheelchair user, what I see is the rise of the ramps? There's been many, many more ramps created. And so I guess that just made me think that it was better and that because people are better at advocating and kind of knowing about disability discrimination, I hoped I was a home carer for a number of years, so I did used to hang around with lots of people with wheelchairs. And what I used to find is I was pushing them. People would talk to me rather than the client themselves, and it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, this is the person you want to be speaking to. But since that time, I haven't really spent much time with people in wheelchairs other than grandparents here and there, fleeting moments. So thank you for illuminating my knowledge, updating my knowledge, and I hope that changes. And I hope that anybody listening to this who might well be a wheelchair user themselves, who've written off this career for themselves, begins to believe that actually with the right tenacity, the right determination, the right ability and confidence to assert yourself, this can happen, this is a viable career for

You. Absolutely. And if anyone was in that position and wanted to reach out to me personally, I'm on all the main socials. I'm on Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Facebook. So if anyone was in that position of thinking, is this career even viable and how on earth do I do it, then they could absolutely reach out to me and I'd happily mentor them through the process if needed. Because we need more visibility, we need more people with all the diversities in the career, because otherwise what we end up with is, well, what we have at the moment is lots and lots of able-bodied, white middle-class women, a few men, people from more working class backgrounds,

Able-bodied white middle-class woman is trying to do her bit to make the cook.

Absolutely, absolutely. And we all try to make it more inclusive. However, it is very sort of, I can't think of the word. Is it homogenic or I can't remember the word now, but there's not much variety in the profession. There is some, we have people of different races, different colours, different religions. We have people of different backgrounds and origins and class, and we have people with disability amongst our number, but probably not enough. And I think we need to be sort of giving those people a metaphorical legger helping to increase the diversity. Really we just need to increase that diversity in the profession because we we're here to help the whole range of people out there. If we don't represent the populations that we're trying to help, then we can't fully understand what they're dealing with. And I'm not saying every psychologist has to understand every aspect of diversity, but we do need to be curious about it.

I don't think there's any problem with a white psychologist helping someone from a Muslim community or a black community. I think as long as we stay open and curious and ask, am I getting this? Am I understanding it right? You put one idea to me and I said, well, actually that's not my experience. My experience is different to that. You didn't put it in an offensive way. You were just curious. And that's what we can model, isn't it? We can model that curiosity, but I think as a profession, we don't really represent the communities that we're trying to help fully enough yet. And I think there are people from different races, classes, cultures, disabilities, all of those areas of diversity. Even the L-G-B-T-Q communities, I don't think they're fully represented within our numbers in the profession yet. And I think for people who want specific support around certain issues of difference in diversity, then it can be really, really helpful if they can find someone with those experiences who can then help them to see a way forward.

Yeah, absolutely. And as a very recent on the ground update, someone that I worked with when I was in Birmingham had recently shared on Facebook that when she was training in Birmingham, she'd been the only person of colour on the cohort. And then when she was teaching this week, looking out a sea of faces of people from different diversities, different backgrounds, she said, just was so lovely to see how that change has been happening. And I've definitely seen and been experienced to more people from certainly neurodiversity coming through training. And I know there are people from the L-G-B-T-Q community who are qualified psychologists, but I think it's potentially more difficult to be out there in your role and in your job. I've been trying to get someone to come on the podcast who is comfortable talking about some of that and their experiences, but haven't yet managed that. So if you know of anyone or if anyone listening knows of any qualified psychologists from the L-G-T-P-T-Q, I might have added an extra word. I

Have a suggestion for you there. Yeah, I have a suggestion for you there. Great.

Perfect. But yeah, it's being able to see what we want to be, isn't it? Yes. That can be so inspiring and transformational.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

So when did you first see what you wanted to be, which was an author as well?

Yeah, I think even as early as when I was recovering in hospital from my illness, people kept saying to me, oh, you should write a book about this. And I was kind of thinking, well, haven't really got much to write yet. And I didn't think anyone would be very interested in that aspect of it. So I suppose there was always the seed of an idea there that maybe there was something in my story. And I suppose as my story then unfolded over the decade since the sort of sports story, that kind of fleshes it out a bit. Maybe there's stuff in that to add in. But really my psychology journey and then probably over the last sort of, I dunno, half a dozen years or so, we've had some very lively Facebook communities where psychologists have really got together. And over the last several years really, we've had some very vibrant Facebook groups where psychologists have got together and shared ideas.

And there's been many of us doing all different sorts of things, different sorts of work, particularly in the private practise field. The psychologist group for private practise is very lively and has many, many very capable, competent, inspiring people in it. And you start to see, I saw that you'd written a book about grief and then about aspiring psychologists, and then there was McKayla Thomas had written her couples therapy book and I'm trying to think who else. Various people had written books. And it started to feel like, actually I've got quite a lot of knowledge now. I've been a psychologist for nearly 20 years. I've been working in the mental health field for well over 20 years now, going on for 30 years. So I started to think that maybe I have some stuff to share here. And it happened almost by accident that I received an email from the Association for Clinical Psychologists from Sarah Swan who had just written a book on coping with breast cancer from the perspective of someone who'd lived the journey, but was also bringing her psychology expertise to that.

And she'd proposed to the A CP that this could be a series of books. Psychologists are human too live experiences, they, we've all got stuff to bring. We all experience the things that everyone experiences in life. And so they sent out an email saying, has anyone else got a story in them about this? And I responded to that email, despite my imposter syndrome popping up its naughty head and saying, no, no, no, no, no, you couldn't possibly. I actually thought, no, actually yes I could. And I quietened my imposter and pinged an email straight back and said, I could do coping with trauma. I've lived it. It's my area of expertise, and I have that book in me. I just need to put it down on paper. And I ended up doing a book proposal being accepted and spending three years writing coping with trauma, which has a fair amount of self-disclosure about my own trauma journey journey, probably to be fair, heavily filtered in places just to protect the innocent or the not so innocent.

But yeah, then applying how I got through that journey and the lessons that I've learned through being a psychologist and applying those lessons, lessons retrospectively, I suppose, to my journey and thinking about how did I cope actually in many ways I coped using a sort of act model, but act hadn't really been invented then. That's acceptance and commitment therapy, which was kind of written in, I suppose the nineties and early two thousands. It became very popular. Steve Hayes, Russ Harris, various other names, Robin Wal is very big in the act community. So yeah, I think I was kind of applying some of those lessons. Not always properly, but some of those things of, okay, so I'm disabled now. Can't do much about that. So that's the acceptance part. But then what matters? What do I want to do? How am I going to live my life now? I'm only 19. What am I going to do with my time? I could just give up and live on benefits or I could live my life. How am I going to do that? And I found my way into various sporting endeavours and then back into education, and I found my people through academia and sport and yeah, the rest is history. It's all in the book.

So the first thing that struck me was your really wonderfully heartfelt dedication at the start of the book to your colleague who and friend who died. She was so young, she died from leukaemia. And I think it's really lovely that you've dedicated it to her.

Yeah, I mean, she didn't work in psychology. She was a friend who I'd met through wheelchair basketball, in fact. And yeah, it wasn't actually in the end, the leukaemia that killed her. It was the treatment she'd actually gone into remission from the leukaemia after two bone marrow transplants, but it was the second bone marrow transplant and what that took out of her that ultimately killed her. So she died of graft versus host disease, or in fact, she actually died of chest infection, sepsis kind of situation as a result. But yeah, she was such a close friend, she was so inspiring and supportive, and she so wanted me to get this book written and finished, and she was so supportive with that, but she just didn't make it. She died earlier this summer and she just didn't make it to see the book published. So yeah, huge loss. I'm so

Sorry for your loss and for the loss of those who loved her as well. But I was starting to read the book when I was on a trailer. I was like, oh, that's really touching, really touching. I loved that. So I use a fair amount of self-disclosure in what I do either in my books or in the podcast because I know from my own experience, when you've got a case study in mind, it helps you so much. And I love that this is actually, your book is part of a series of psychologists who have those personal case studies, but that you also use case studies in your book as well to illuminate and allow people to really get that tangible feel. So that was something I really liked. And it feels like for me, trauma felt proper big scary. I needed to be a proper human, a very established psychologist to even consider getting to grips with it.

And I wish I'd picked up books on trauma before I did. I really believe that as a society we should be trauma informed. And I think your book would be an excellent place to start for anybody who maybe like me is thinking, oh, that's much further down my career. Because what we know and what you illuminate us with the book as well is that so much of what we might see as physical health is actually complications from trauma. And so much about what we see about so many mental health presentations might well have started with trauma. And it might be, as you talk about in your book, it might be type one trauma, it might be type true trauma. So it might be something that's been around all someone's life, or it might be a very big crater, a very big bump in the road that's caused that. But we've got to know and help people desham themselves. It's not their fault. And I think that's what your book really does really well. So well done to you.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's really good to get feedback. Obviously it's very early days because it's not, well, as we are speaking now, it's not actually quite out by the time this goes out, it will be out in the public domain. Obviously it's publication data is early December, so we're recording this slightly before that. So I haven't had huge numbers of people read it and feedback yet. So that's obviously every little bit of feedback that I get that suggests I hit the mark. It's really reassuring. Yeah, so thank you for that. Yeah, so one of the things I think is that one of my audiences is people who are experiencing the after effects of trauma themselves and the sort of self-help helping them to maybe start that journey towards healing themselves. But the other major audience I see is, as you said, people who are at the beginning of maybe their mental health professional journey who maybe think, oh, trauma sounds big and scary, but having it broken down into a way that there's all that psychoeducation, as we call it at the beginning part of the book.

What is trauma? How does it impact us? What do we typically see clinically? And then all the self-help, the strategies that I've used and that I've learned over the course of my career to help people start that healing journey. Exercises that you can do, things that you can do to really help manage. And for someone, when I was an assistant psychologist at the beginning of my journey, and I was thrown into a room with a person who had problems and I didn't really know what I was supposed to do with them. And so you'd have a conversation with them and you'd maybe validate what they were saying, but having some actual things to do in the room and some actual things to say to them that were like, well, this is kind of normal for trauma. It sounds like you've been through some stuff and this is what we expect to see.

What you're telling me is what we expect to see, and this is something you can do about it. I would've so valued a book that did that for me way back when I was at that early part of my career. So I think your audience of aspiring psychologists and many, many other, I dunno, trainee counsellors, trainee mental health nurses, even educators, people in all sorts of different domains of life could really benefit from understanding what trauma is and having some ideas of things you can help people with just at that sort of almost self-help sort of level. And that's where this book's targeted really.

Yeah, and I echo some of that. I think earlier in my career, it was like, gosh, you've been through so much. Can't really change that. I can't really alter that. And I really liked something I've not actually thought about, but makes a lot of sense was one of my children's favourite books was We're going on a bear hunt. And you mentioned that in your book, and people can want to avoid their distress, avoid their trauma, because understandably, but you really beautifully talk about not going around it, not going past it. And then they realise, oh no, we're going to have to go through it. But what we do in trauma treatment is we do that stabilisation, we help them know that it's going to be okay, that it's safe to do that, and that it's only ever going to be done in a manageable, humane way.

And I think what I've experienced, and I'm sure what you have is sometimes repairing some of the damage that's been done by less sensitive hands from previous therapists is that you have to begin to get them to trust you, to know that you know what they can cope with, and you're not going to plunge them into despair so that people say, I know it often gets better before it gets worse. And they might come along thinking that the first session, I'm just going to totally take them to bits. And that's just not ethical. That doesn't happen. It should always feel like, so I do personal training as well, if my personal trainer had stacked out my weights to begin with it, it would've damaged me and I wouldn't have come back. And so I think we need to make sure, I know you do this anyway, we need to allow the patient, allow the client, the human to grow in their confidence of us and in their ability to tolerate and manage their own thoughts, feelings, and their distress. Of course.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that idea of you can't go over it, you can't go under it, oh no, you've got to go through it. That is true of trauma therapy. You do need to go back and have a proper look at what happened, but you don't just do it from the off. You put things in place. And I think one of the things that my book will do is it will give people some of that what in, for example, the MDR for trauma therapy, we would talk about the preparation phase and the stabilisation phase, wouldn't we? And I think my book kind of addresses a lot of the stuff that goes on in that before we get into the trauma, how are we going to manage ourselves and contain ourselves, and how are we going to stay in the moment, stay conscious, stay in the room when the overwhelming trauma might cause us to dissociate, to cut off from reality, to destabilise to decompensate.

So yeah, I think that's all really, really important, isn't it? And I think for people coming into working with trauma, having some skills to be able to do that and to recognise what's happening, even if the patient is becoming or the client is becoming overwhelmed and out of, I talk about the window of tolerance, which comes from Dan Siegel's work that zone where you can actually do some useful therapy and processing and thinking where you're not hyper aroused and in total fight flight panic mode, but not so hyper aroused that you're almost asleep and catatonic as well. So it's keeping you in that window where you can actually do the work. So yeah,

My main intervention, where I start with everybody is a window of tolerance. And it's so illuminating. You can see people going, oh, oh yeah, I spend all my time up there, all my time down there. But I think what we forget about trauma and what clients forget is that there can be post-traumatic growth, and I've worn this necklace purposefully today, you can't really see on here, but perhaps I'll put a closeup photo of it. It was actually a whole nother issue, but it was a gift from a client that I'd been seeing for some trauma work. And what it is, is it's a piece of claris cliff pottery that got broken, that has been made into a beautiful piece of jewellery. So the client wanted to kind of help me know intangible ways. Actually something beautiful can come from trauma, and you can absolutely get post-traumatic growth and you can kind of polish up the jagged edges so that they're smooth so that they don't feel so spiky and so that they're easier to look at. And so I love that analogy. It's just the best work in the world, isn't it? Working with people with trauma, isn't it? Because you get to meet them the most vulnerable states, and then you get to see where they get to. And it's just wonderful. I just love it.

Yeah, likewise. And I think my thesis was about post-traumatic growth, my doctorate, and it was something that resonated with me. I heard something in one of the teaching sessions on the doctorate about post-traumatic growth, and it struck a chord with me, and I thought, I need to go and find out what that is. I think I've got it. And going back and then sort of looking at my life and thinking, yeah, I can definitely relate to the idea of post-traumatic growth, both through my sport and my education and my career. I definitely have taken something really, really dramatic and traumatic, and I have used it as a platform for growth, and I'm still growing from it now. And this book is another example of how I'm growing from that. And your little analogy there with your necklace, that made me think of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which is where they take a broken vessel of some sort and they repair it with gold. And so you have this pot that may have just been an earthenware pot, for example, and it's been dropped, and you take all the pieces and you glue it back together, and then you mark all the seams with gold, with liquid gold, and you create something of beauty from something that's been broken. And I think that is my hopeful message for everybody. However broken you've been, there is hope that you can repair and you could even make something better from the pieces when you put them back together.

What an absolutely wonderful note to end on. That's so powerful. Could you tell us more about your social media links where people can find and connect to you if they'd like to?

Yes, absolutely. So my business name is Catalyst Clinical Psychology, and so on. I think Facebook and Twitter. I think if you do at Catalyst Clin, you will find me. But I think you can also find me by my name. So if you put Dr. Yvonne Waft in, I think you'll find my business Facebook page, my business, Twitter, my LinkedIn. And I'm also just dabbling with Instagram. I've never been a big fan of Instagram, but I've just kind of got back in there and started trying to use that. And I think I'm WF Devon on there at wf Devon.

Lovely.

Yeah,

I will make sure that I get all those links from you. There'll be on screen for anyone watching on YouTube, and I'll make sure that in the show notes for anyone listening on MP three and on any of my emails that your details are there, they will also be in the show notes, a link for how you can get your hands on a copy of Dr. Yvonne's new book, brand New book, baby. And when I first published my first book, a friend of mine likened it to a bird and said, may it really so high for you. May it reach the people it needs to and may be really proud of it as you watch it. And I really, really love that. So I wanted to just share that, extend that to you as well. Thank you. But coping with trauma, it's available now and I absolutely recommend it. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for pitching this idea of a podcast to me. And yeah, please do let me know if there's anything I can help with in future or if you've got any future ideas or podcast episodes as well.

That's fabulous. Thank you so much for having me on. This has been so much fun. It's just so great to have an opportunity to just talk about me and what I do. It's not something I do very often. I'm often talking about other people and what they're struggling with. It's lovely to talk about me for a change. Thank you.

Well, thank you very much. How incredibly lovely to speak with Dr. Yvonne and to hear more about her story. I hope you found it interesting. If you would like to check out her new book, which is available now, please do check out the description with this post or the show notes or any of the links on my socials, and you'll be able to grab a copy of it yourself there. If you're watching on YouTube, you might well have caught some photos of Dr. Vonne in her Paralympian days. And also more recently as she's been playing basketball, you may even have caught the little video where she received a package of books from her publisher and she held a copy of that book in her hands for the very first time, which is an utterly magical moment. And if you ever go on to publish your book, I hope it's one that you absolutely revel in.

So let me know what content you would like producing for podcast episodes that are coming up. Pitch me your idea. Absolutely. Please do come and get in contact with me, Dr. Marianne Trent, pretty much everywhere on socials. And if the membership would be right for you in advancing your goals for progressing your career in psychology, please do check that out. I will look forward to coming along with the next episode of the podcast, which will be with you from 6:00 AM on Monday. Thank you so much. Take care of yourselves, and I'll see you very soon. Bye.

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