Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode 119: Navigating psychology from a wheelchair

Thank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast.

In this episode of the Aspiring Psychologist podcast, we speak with Gavin Clarke, a previous guest on this podcast, where we discuss the complexity and spectrum of disability and types of disability. Gavin talks us through embracing and accepting his disability and being a wheelchair user, as well as the support that is out there for people with disabilities. Join us as we explore Gavin’s podcast, life experiences and the importance of acceptance with Gavin.

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): Introduction
• (01:31): Some freebies for my loyal listeners!
• (03:02): Introducing Gavin
• (04:19): Congenital talipes equinovarus and it’s lifelong impact
• (06:10): The different types of wheelchair users
• (07:22): The development of congenital talipes equinovarus
• (09:29): Driving with a wheelchair?
• (11:32): The wheelchair gave me opportunity
• (14:09): Acceptance is freedom
• (17:08): The difficulty in trying to remove politics from disability in society
• (19:35): Experiences do not necessarily make you a better or worse person – it is just you
• (21:48): There is no specific list of people with disabilities
• (22:56): Some support is out there!
• (26:36): Sometimes there is no “enhanced” experience as a person with a disability
• (29:15): Disabling me & a Safe Place
• (31:33): Connect with Gavin!
• (32:25): Summary & close

Links:

📱To connect with Gavin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavin-clarke-8a28892b/?originalSubdomain=uk and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamgavinclarke/

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

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Coming up in today's episode, we are looking at what it is like to live with complex pain, what it is like to be a wheelchair user and some of the struggles that they might navigate as they navigate the profession of psychology with those additional challenges. I hope you find it so useful.

Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent, and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. Now I have started learning a little bit more about podcasting really as I've gone along, and it was as I was recording an episode with Gavin, which you might well have listened to recently, which was all about masters level study that I started thinking, oh, I think this other topic we've gone on to might well best operate as a separate episode. I was thinking about something called search engine optimization, which you might have heard called SEO. So we decided we were going to have two episodes, so two for the price of one. So if you might find it useful to listen to Gavin's previous episode, please do. You can watch that either on YouTube or listen to it as an mp. Three across loads of platforms including Spotify, including Apple, and also directly from my website, www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/podcast.

Whilst you're there, you might like to also some of my lovely free lead magnets, one of which is the ultimate DClinPsy guide. You can get to that by going to my website and then looking at the free resources tab, which will be either on the right of the screen as you look on desktop or if you are on mobile. If you click the little, what they call burger icon, it should pop down and you can scroll until you find the sweet spot. So let's think today about welcoming Gavin back and we are going to be thinking with him about pain, about being a wheelchair user. You might find it useful to listen if you are affected by some of the things that Gavin is experiencing or similar or just to kind of thicken your narrative and your understanding of some of these very important issues if you are working in the sphere of mental health, I'll look forward to catching up with you on the other side. If you're watching on YouTube, why not just like the video right away? We know it's going to be a good one. See you very soon. So Gavin, I want to welcome you back to the podcast. It was when we were recording the previous version and we were like, I think this might almost be two separate episodes. So thank you so much for agreeing to come back again.

Well, not at all. It was really enjoyable the first time round, so why not come back and talk some more.

Tell us a little bit about yourself for those who might not have caught the first episode.

So my name's Gavin Clarke. I'm an MSC psychology student. I'm a podcast host and I also work in my day job as a compliance manager, which sounds very grandiose, but it's basically about making sure that people are doing the right thing by customers and acting in the right sort of way. I live with disability and I have done since birth and that's been a kind of story throughout my life of different experiences and different joyous moments along with some more frustrating ones too.

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. So the earlier episode we did was about doing conversion masters and doing that in a distance learning capacity, and I think that's going to be so useful, but we wanted to get together today to think about your experiences of being a wheelchair user, of trying to navigate through your career with that and also of some of the more unusual but incredibly difficult physical health conditions that you've struggled with

And there's a lot to go through and hopefully people listening find it interesting and insightful. I like to share some of the experiences that I have so that others can learn from them and maybe even realise something about ourselves in the process. So I was born with called congenital talipes equinovarus, (CTEV ). You might also see it named as Club Feet, but please do not use that terminology because it's really offensive. So CCTEV is the go-to in my opinion. And basically what that means is that I had lots of surgeries when I was younger, lots of experiences of pain that leads to a kind of dimension of trauma and just to experiences as you grow up. Surgery's not fun, it's not a nice experience, particularly when you are a baby and then two, three years old, 10 years old, 15 years old. All those kind of experiences add up and it kind of brings you to a point where you just understand things slightly more, not necessarily at that age, but actually as you grow older and see how other people deal with different things and you have that broadened experience, you can pull more from your own past experience and you can even use that or you don't.

And that's personal opinion, personal standpoint, whether you feel capable of using that or not because for some they just can't. It's just not something can do. I'm again very fortunate that I am able to use some of that to at least try and try and help others to work through their experiences too.

Thank you very much. Thanks for illuminating us a little bit. Have you always been a wheelchair user?

So no, I started using a wheelchair about two years ago. This will probably show you some of my stubbornness in life. So I've had periods where I could do a lot more and even now I have some periods where I can do more that I can get up and walk around and I'm called an ambulatory wheelchair user. And what that means is that I'm someone that can actually get themselves up out of the chair and move around to a certain extent, whereas a permanent wheelchair user would be somebody perhaps that at a spinal injury that had had some spinal cord damage and just cannot physically walk or move themselves around in any kind of meaningful way without the use of a wheelchair. So there are different types of people within that wheelchair use a population including people with chronic fatigue syndromes and just energy limiting conditions.

So there's lots of reasons that people would use wheelchairs. I started using it after one of my latest operations, which was a couple of years ago, and that didn't go that well. It was always a bit of a risk. I was willing to take that risk. There was a good chance it was going to work, but it just left me in a worse position that then developed the complex regional pain syndrome, or at least it is probably the bit that tipped it over the edge from normal, well say normal, complex pain, complex pain that wasn't the defined condition to this complex regional pain syndrome or CRPS. And from that point really, I've been using a mixture of wheelchair crutches. I did try using a walking stick that didn't work that well.

This might show my age slightly, but for those of you that are old enough to remember 'House', I basically had an image in my head that I would be like House going around being slightly ratty but getting away with it. The reality was I just kept on falling over, which was not so good. So yeah, I've been using a mixture of things and more and more the wheelchair. So I use the wheelchair when I'm out and abouts if I'm going into the office at work. So predominantly work from home at the moment, but if I'm going to the office, I'll use the wheelchair just because I just can't physically get around that much. And if I try, I will probably end up falling, which it's just not that much fun and you're always at risk of causing yourself some other injuries or I might just be so wiped out that I can't physically get back home because I have to drive back.

And people might be wondering how is a wheelchair user driving at that point? So I will just say that wheelchair users can drive, not all wheelchair users can. It depends on what their broad mobility is, but I use hand controls to drive, so that kind of gives me my freedom. I was without a car for about a year whilst a mixture of the DVLA we're trying to sort themselves out, not a fun experience, trying to get that one sorted and then just trying to get things fitted and everything to the car. So I use that to get around and having that freedom as I would describe it, is incredibly important for me and for my own mental health. So I have had periods of depression, I have had periods of being really very down, really not wanting to be around anymore, and part of that was a lack of being able to do things.

It was feeling like I was less than because I was having to rely on everybody else despite having been born with an underlying gentle condition that meant lots of pain over the years and use of crutches at some points and just not being able to keep up with other kids, not being able to do everything that I wanted to. So yeah, there's a progression with the type of condition that I've had that links in with developing arthritis, which is very common when you've had the type of surgeries that I had as a youngster. And for those of you that have ever lived with arthritis or know somebody does, you'll see that quite often it just gets worse. So I was always likely to end up needing to use a wheelchair, but bizarrely, I actually feel like the wheelchair gives me opportunity.

It can be very frustrating when you have people talking to you in the kind of, oh, this is terrible. You've got to use a wheelchair or even saying that your wheelchair bone. So I had an experience recently where I was going for an MRI and they couldn't do it because I was a wheelchair user and they were describing me as wheelchair bound. Now that sort of thing is an ableist reaction to somebody that's just trying to live their life, but the wheelchair for me gives me more experience, gives me more freedom, allows me to do things, allows me to get to the gym, lift big heavy weights, which most people would think that you can't do if you're a wheelchair, but you can't. There is freedom in mobility aids. It took me a long time to get to really understanding that and feeling that it was appropriate for me to do it.

And actually it was because of therapy that I got to the point of really feeling like I could use mobility aids because my therapist at the time who was fantastic and I was seeing for probably about a year and a half and we were talking out lots and lots of different things, but a lot of it came back to that I was struggling to do things. I was trying to do what I'd always done and just find silly ways of being able to do what I thought was the expectation on me a dad as a human being or as a citizen when in reality all I needed to do was to start using some ability aids, let people help me a little bit more. But getting from one point to another of really not accepting that to accepting it, you do need help. And I think that's where I started to really think about, okay, it is time for me to rethink what I'm doing with my career as well as anything else and started to move towards the psychology side as well.

Yeah, it sounds like you sort of, you'd notice actually it was impacting on your ability to function and live your life as you wanted to. And either you can carry on in that vein or you can kind of just do some accepting and embracing and then think, that's not how I want to continue. I want to have increased functionality. I want to do all these things with my children. In order to do that, I'm going to need to start using that wheelchair. Embracing that

And its acceptance really is freedom. And that sounds like such a grand statement, doesn't it? But it really is because as soon as you've started to accept particularly in that context of accepting that these things, these objects are just objects that facilitate me to do things that I want to do, all they are, it's all of ability aid is. So once you accept that, you then have the freedom to use them without guilt, without feeling like you are less than feeling like you don't belong, all these kind of things that come up in your own mind and that you formulate yourself because most of the stuff that I experienced was my own internal bias. Ultimately it was my own internalised ableism of thinking that oh, if I hadn't moved to using a wheelchair, then I'm properly disabled because I'd never really thought of myself as disabled prior to that.

I was by definition, but I never really thought of myself in that way and it was that kind of acceptance period. Whereas now I'm now in the position where I've just made it into the disability power 100 list as one of the hundred most influential disabled people in the uk. I'm doing loads of stuff in work around increasing the career prospects and the way that people are treated in work who are disabled or neurodiverse in particular or just live with, I say just live with mental health conditions or just going through a bad time for that matter. And that's all because I got to the point where I could begin to accept that this is who I am and that is okay, it wasn't a big deal. It was a freedom of being allowed to do the things that I want to do. And it also opened up the freedom for me to choose that actually for me where I wanted to go with my career is into psychology and is to ultimately be able to help people in a more specific way to work through their own self-limiting beliefs I guess to a certain extent and the wider collective of mental health problems, conditions, issues.

Thank you. That's so illuminating, and thank you again for reminding me. I was told loud and clear when I was working with people with physical disabilities in the early two thousands. I am not wheelchair bound, I'm not literally tied to this thing. I'm a wheelchair user and that's really stayed with me, but it is still something that we hear reasonably often. So thank you for letting us really connect to that idea again that that's not okay.

And I think disability is something that most people will experience, but very few people are comfortable with experiencing and there's a few reasons for that. I think part of it is because we start to see our own morality, we start to see that actually people do change over our lifetimes. People do go through different things and some of these things can be really big and powerful and a little bit scary. Part of that is the educational system that we all grow up in and part of it's just wider. Society doesn't accept it without getting too political. I don't think it helps with the current governments and the kind stuff that they've been saying recently in particular. I mean to call out people with disabilities specifically as not being able to work isn't the problem. It's the wider societal and workplace situation that you just need there to be the jobs, the opportunities out there.

And I think all of that stuff and we hear different terminology across different pockets of people that are getting discriminated against and you can hear institutional racism an example, and I very much think that there is also institutional ableism and ableism is effectively the derogatory thought or feeling against somebody that's got a disability and the negative treatment that's associated with that. And there's all this stuff that's in the background that limits people, that then makes people think that as soon as you are listed as somebody that's disabled, and by the way you're not actually listed anywhere is disabled, but once you've kind of got that kind of badge against you that your life is over, it's not, there is no, that's it. You're done. And I think when you start to understand that one, people go through bad things and they come out the other side, usually when you've been through something you do change, your experiences change, they transform you into the person that you are growing up to be.

That's just the lives that we go through. And some of those experiences are really, really big and chunky. Some are less so, but they're really big chunky ones. You go through the processes and for me some of that was grief over the person that I thought I was going to be the grief of the person I was the day before and the next day was different because it's really quick acceleration that 2022 period, sorry. So you go through all these things, but ultimately you are still fundamentally the same person just with different life experiences and you're no better, you're no worse, you just are you. As soon as we get to accept that more broadly, I actually think the conversation about disability will really change very quickly and the support that sits around that will also change. It is one of the fears that I've got around going into a new career and what that might look like as a wheelchair user and needing that little bit of extra support because there is always that degree of fear over will there be that support. I mean the slightest advantage that I've now got is that I know how to fight for it and I know that I am allowed to have those reasonable adjustments to use the specific terminology. So whilst there's a bit of fear but trepidation there for me moving into it, ultimately the good for me will always outweigh the negatives that could come from it.

Thank you. And I love that idea of there is no actual register and I think it reminded me of when I was at secondary school and it used to be said, well, you'll end up on your permanent record, you don't want that. And then you get to the end of secondary school and you're like, there was no such thing as a permanent record. I've been lied to.

It's funny because I thought that there was a list somewhere of people with disabilities because you can see the stats and you can see that there are X amount of people to slightly differing figures, but roughly 23% of the population has some form of disability and that's got to come from somewhere so that there is stats that sit around that. And as psychologists and aspiring psychologists, we do like that. We like to understand these things, but there isn't a specific list that says Gavin Clark is disabled. That just doesn't exist. I genuinely thought that there was, and as soon as I said that, I was to say, well, that was it. I was going to be on a list somewhere, but there just isn't, doesn't exist,

But you can register for some additional support with things like energy companies and things, can't you? And even the role that you're doing currently is for people with additional needs so you can flag yourself as perhaps needing some additional support or consideration.

Exactly. So there is a plethora of support out there, not always easy to access. And that keeps me in a job at the moment because about finding easier or simpler ways to access that support and making sure that that's being followed through, but is a lot out there. There's ranging from something called personal independence payment, which is, I don't like the word benefit, but a extra payment that people with disabilities can potentially get stress that because actually most disabled people don't get it. It's quite difficult to go through the process for. Yeah. So PIP is this kind of benefit, this payment that you get that has two components. One is a mobility or daily living component and one is the pure mobility side. So you have to go through loads of tests and filling out ridiculously large documents, explaining how your conditions impact the way that you live your life.

And the nature of that is to try and bridge some of the gap. It doesn't get anywhere near the real gap of how much more it costs to live with a disability. So the latest figures, so SCOPA, which is disability charity came out early this year with the latest figures and it's around about £975 a month, more expensive to live with a disability. So that's just for me to get out of bed and just live my normal life. It's roughly that a month. If you have one disabled person in the household, obviously that then increases if you've got more than one and there's some slight fluctuations if it's a child rather than an adult. But broadly we're talking about that Mark, the maximum that you can get with PIP is around about £745 I think from memory. So there's an element of that.

I don't know anyone that actually gets the whole amounts, most people don't. But it helps you with things like getting access to mobility, which is great for someone to get a car potentially, or it might not be a car, but it might be a mobility scooter that just bridges some of that cost. These things are obscenely expensive. My wheelchair, so I've just got another one on the way actually, but my wheelchair was just over 8,000 pounds for the one wheelchair. My next one is about seven and a half thousand pounds. And then I also play wheelchair basketball, so that's about another four and a half thousand pounds, and that's just for me to get from one place to the next. So there's a lot of costs associated with living with it, but there is support out there, lots of great charities. And then there is this thing called reasonable adjustments, which is both in the employer employee relationship as well as in the service and patient or customer perspective that as a disabled person you are protected under the Equality Act that you cannot be discriminated against, that you have a right for reasonable adjustments.

And there's always been a debate over what that looks like and what that might mean to allow you to the same experience. And that's important to realise that it's not an enhanced experience, it's the same experience as anybody that doesn't have a disability. So with work that gets me things like the chair that I'm sat on currently, so it's a slightly different chair, it's got some slightly different adjustments than a normal chair and work brought me that it might also be that I work from home more than others do because travelling into the office can be quite a big ask for me at the moment. Or it might be something as simple as some software on your computer. And you also get that when you're studying as well. So there's the disability allowance that you get, disability support allowance, which is basically through student finance and that will help pay for some of the things that you might need.

Again, because of being disabled, you might need to, I print something out because you can't sit and stare at a screen because you get chronic migraines as an example. Or it could be that you have support to get from in and out of university and some support for additional transport costs because most normal transport you actually can't use because they haven't got a wheelchair access in most vehicles or a swathe of other things. So there is lots of sport. It can be a bit gruelling to access it, but particularly in the university context, actually most universities have got a really good student support centres that will help you through that process as well. I think the most difficult part about it is knowing that these things exist because I didn't even know that PIP existed up until last year.

Thank you so much for helping our audience learn more about complex regional pain syndrome, living with that, being a wheelchair user, letting us think more about ableism, letting us think more about some of the struggles that a wheelchair user or someone with additional physical health needs might have as they navigate their career in mental health. So thank you. Could you tell us a little bit about your podcasts, if that's okay before we finish?

Yeah, of course. So two, I've got the Safe Place podcast, which you'll hear on my dult tones on that as the host. There's a mixture of episodes. There's me sharing some of my own experiences, which is kind of the first season. Then season two and the upcoming season three goes into more of guests and you'll hear from people across the board. We've got pain psychologists on there, we've got CEOs of organisations, and we've also got people that just experienced their own mental health conditions and wanted to share their own experiences. So it's a real comforting zone that was built out of me feeling like I needed a space to think about my own life experiences and how that was impacting me. And then the Disabling Me Podcast is brand new. You'd have to look for at the moment, it's currently on YouTube only, but we're going to be releasing that properly in more of a formal launch over the coming weeks, and that is really a social conversation on how living with disabilities can be frustrating, can be wonderful, but also how society gets in the way sometimes and thinking about some of the things that we can do to improve that too.

Thank you so much. And was it your podcasting that landed you on the Disability Power 120 23 list?

It was, yeah, so that was for the Safe Place podcast. A few other little bits that I do in the background, which I should probably give more a time, but I never do because I get a little bit just kind of shy and don't like talking about myself too much. But yeah, that was for the podcast, for the types of casts that I was having on and just really bringing more of a voice to people with disabilities.

Thank you. So thank you so much for your time and yeah, if people want to reach out to you on social media, where's the best place for them to do that?

So your best bet is either through LinkedIn and you can find me Gavin Clarke, and I'm sure we can put a link to that in the show notes or you can find me on Instagram, which is I am Gavin Clark. I will just caveat that I do tend to change my name on Instagram now and again, but it generally is I'm Gavin Clarke, which you can find me at,

And you are Clark with an E for anybody that might not be watching this on YouTube. Perfect. Thank you again for your time, and if anyone didn't catch our previous episode where we were looking together at studying for conversion masters, then we'd absolutely recommend that you check that out.

Definitely.

Thank you again for your time, Gavin.

Thank you Marianne. It's all a pleasure.

Welcome back along. I hope you found that interesting. I certainly found that it helped flesh out some of my knowledge-based gaps, so I hope you found the same too. I'd love to know what you thought to this episode. Come along to the Aspiring Psychologist community and let me know. Please do bear in mind that the Aspiring Psychologist membership is a wonderfully nourishing, enriching, compassionate space that helps you grow and helps you to achieve your potential, but the peer support in that membership is also off the scale. So if you are feeling like your journey is a little bit singular at the moment and you'd welcome some buddies come on in, which you can do from just 30 pounds a month. There's details in the show notes or you can always dmm me for a link and I will pinging that across to you. Please do also check out the books, the Clinical Psychologist Collective book, the Aspiring Psychologist Collective book, and the podcast is an ever great resource, fling a few likes around, and tell your friends forward the links that you think are really great links and thank you in advance. If you do do that. We'll be along with the next episode of the podcast from 6:00 AM on Monday. Thank you so much for being part of my world, and I'll see you very soon. Take care. If

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