Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast

Episode: 37: Garden party psychology - boundaries and conversations you might have as an aspiring psychologist!

Thank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast.

When you tell someone your job title people might just here the “psychologist” in assistant psychologist or “mental health” in mental health practitioner and then look to you for help. Considering the recent news in the press on SSRI’S and depression, people may be asking for your advice, and you may not be sure what is appropriate to say. Today is a short episode, filmed in the sun, that gives you some tips and guidance around navigating (or avoiding!) these difficult conversations! I hope it helps, stay kind to you!

The Highlights:

• 00:28: A sunny day to record a podcast
• 01:23: To socialise or not to socialise?
• 02:14: Staying mindfully excited about life.
• 03:08: Are you a garden party psychologist?
• 07:23: What to do if people around you want your mental health advice?
• 16:30: When people hear your job title!
• 19:15: Come and let me know what you do!

Links:

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

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

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

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

Like, Comment, Subscribe & get involved:

If you enjoy the podcast, please do subscribe and rate and review episodes. If you'd like to learn how to record and submit your own audio testimonial to be included in future shows head to: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/podcast and click the blue request info button at the top of the page.

Hi, welcome along to the aspiring psychologist podcast. I am absolutely making hay whilst the sun shines. I am recording this in the school summer holidays, and my children have just gone to the park with daddy. I've gotta go to the dentist shortly. And I was like, I've got some time I can record this podcast episode. That's been floating around in my head for a few days now. So here I am. Where are you? I hope you are living your best life right now. And if not, that you've got plans to unwind and de-stress and make yourself feel a whole lot better. Some things that make us feel better. And sometimes things that make us feel worse are socializing and getting out and about. You will know whether that is a good thing for you. You will know whether that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable and not entirely like you are thriving.

We are all different. And what the pandemic showed us is that sometimes stepping back from social pressures can be a good thing, but other times it makes us feel like we are not really connecting to people when we are not meeting people and getting out and about for some people, zoom just doesn't cut it. And like I said, you will know where you are at on that. I am very much looking forward to this coming Friday when I'm going to be meeting up with one of my very loveliest friends who I actually trained with and then life and children have somewhat got in our way and also the pandemic of course, of face to face antics. But we are going out for dinner this coming weekend, and I cannot wait. And I'm like, I'm totally gonna pick you up to maximize all of our gossip potentials.

So yeah, don't underestimate the value of having things to look forward to and having things to be excited about. My sister-in-law uses her fridge as a method of helping her feel really excited about life. She likes to have like a little list of things she's got booked up. And once that list starts looking a little bit light, what she does is she makes sure she's booking things so that she can be really mindfully excited about them in advance. Every time she opens or closes the fridge. So yeah, that might be a little technique that you find useful to be like having a dream board, isn't it, but it's on your fridge and it's stuff that's actually gonna happen. You could put things that you dream about as well. You could well put your goals for psychology on there as well, so that you see it day in, day out and becomes part of your daily fabric.

But anyway, this is my roundabout waffle for helping us get on track with thinking about being social and being a psychologist. How does that work for you? Do you tell people what you do for work? Do you tell people if you're working in mental health or if you're working in education, if you're working in forensic services, how does it make you feel when you do share stuff? Does it make you feel exposed or does it make you feel good? Do you like being the garden party psychologist? Do you like having people ask your opinion and helping them feel differently or better about things? Or are you finding that when you mention what your job is that you are welcoming in, you know, complicated questions that you'd rather not have, or maybe you are finding that your viewpoint is very different to the viewpoint of people that you are socializing with maybe in your culture or around your friendships, there's not much of an understanding around mental health.

Maybe there's a pull up your socks kind of mentality and get on with it. Well, maybe there's just a lot of stigma, shame, kind of guilt inducing stuff around people who do need your service. Or maybe people are even shaming. You thinking you ought to be the service user and not the person offering the services. Maybe other people find it hard to take you seriously as an actual grown up offering useful stuff. Maybe you find it difficult to take yourself seriously in that regard as well. You know, I'm acutely aware of when I was an assistant psychologist and I didn't feel like me on paper, my life was looking as professional as I wanted it to personally given the level of responsibility that I had in my job, you know? So the things that myself and my friends got up to at the weekends, you know, Laura, I'm thinking about that trip to the Brad law.

fun times, but definitely stuff that's of then as an era, not now, you know, so I absolutely treat all of those escapades as being really important and really fun. And part of what has led me to be this qualified psychologist before you, but there was that sense of a bit of a life mismatch, really that I was doing really proper and important stuff. And that was the case during training as well. So when I first moved for training, I was just renting a room from one of my brother's friends. And it just didn't feel like I was a proper enough grown up. Actually when I moved out the next year and got my own place, it felt much more holistic as a grown up experience. If that even makes sense, I felt like I needed to have all of my ducks in a row.

And one of my clients never heard that expression before. And so I had to explain what ducks in a row are. So in case you don't know and it might not be a super common phrase where you come from whichever part of the country you live in, or maybe even which part of the world you originate from, ducks in a row means kind of all of your stuff lined up, you know, and doing reasonably well. So it might be occupational, it might be educational, it might be relationship. It might be your living environment. It might be your birth family. All of those ducks are behaving themselves and not like meandering off in random directions. So that's what I mean by ducks in a row. And that may or may not resonate with you too, but this is a little bit of an aside.

This was not a podcast episode about ducks in a row. Maybe that is a conversation for another day. This was about how you feel when you talk to people about what you do, whether you choose to, whether you don't choose to. Okay. So this episode is inspired by the recent news about SSRI medication and depression, and what a number of my audience have found is that people who have been taking the medication and then reaching out to their friends, i.e maybe you as the most senior kind of mental health professional that they know. And it's about the impact of that on yourself and the weight of responsibility that you carry as well in the role. And of course, this is also linked to the previous episode that I did with Dr. Tara, where we were discussing what it even means to call yourself a psychologist and who should or could be using this title and whether it necessarily infers a professional trained qualification.

So, you know, what we know is that people, especially people that trust you in your friendship role or in your family might well seek your opinion on this kind of issue. Really, you know, people are wondering whether they should continue to take their medication given what's been in the news and it's really difficult. You know, it would be good if they've given us a bit of a heads up that this was coming out because this obviously sends patients, friends, family into turmoil and also can bring up all sorts of complicated feelings around. Have I been misled? Is it just me then? So if it's not a chemical imbalance in my brain, am I broken? Am I the problem? Should I be feeling responsible, you know, guilt shame. And I think if you are being asked these types of conversations, it's always really useful to direct people back to their GP or whoever is prescribing that medication.

So it might be that it's being prescribed by an adult mental health team or for that matter, a children's and adolescents mental health team, in which case these questions are especially important to be directed back towards those healthcare providers. It may be helpful to kind of suggest actually, cuz we didn't see this coming as research being published that you don't necessarily know anymore than this in the press and your take on medication and your take on diagnosis and, you know, presenting problems is going to be based on a number of bespoke facts, you know, formulations around the patient and around the person. And because you don't have privy to all of that history it's not really appropriate for you to be the person to advise them. So you can talk through options, but you may not choose to, you might not want that in your life.

You know, you might just wanna be your friend's friend. You might not want to be your friend's sounding board for mental health. And that has to be okay. Otherwise what might happen is that you are holding a caseload of everybody in your work environment, but you are also holding a separate caseload of your friends and family and random people that you meet along the way. And of course you wouldn't be supervised for those impactful relationships and nor would you be insured, you know, if they, if they took advice based on what you've discussed. So I think it's absolutely important to recognize that you can say, no, you aren't being cruel. If you, you know, do refuse to comment or suggest that you're not the most appropriate person to comment. That's absolutely. Okay. And it is good to be able to talk through things with someone that's impartial.

You will not be impartial for a member of your friends or family group even for a colleague because you will have, you know, history with those people and you'll be invested in whatever the outcome is. Whereas you know, a therapist or a GP is that much more removed and able to be just there for the person to hear them with any luck. So absolutely not suggesting that you couldn't do it, but it's whether you should be doing it and whether it's kind to you and to the client to do that you know, you could recognize with them that you can see that this is causing them some distress and that it's okay to reach out for support and advice in times like this and that it doesn't say anything bad about them if they do and that you would encourage them to do that.

It's really important to be able to have these open honest communications. So it can be difficult before you are qualified because it, you know, you might feel that you have a professional opinion, but it's whether it's appropriate to share that with people. And, you know, I have absolutely been at parties when I've had a couple of glasses of wine and people ask me a question. And then before, you know, it's like being on the therapy on the therapy couch with Dr. Trent, and it's not that appropriate, is it really? But that said, people have said to me, you know, wow, I really valued that chat. We had, it's really different than what I've got from anyone anywhere else. And it's not always about therapy. You know, people would sometimes just value my stance on the world and my stance on things. So yeah, it's just thinking about what is appropriate.

What is professional? What is within your, you know, current qualification realms as well? We don't wanna be totally renegade punting out advice left, right. And center possibly for people who haven't even asked for it. You know? So when I'm working with clients and we're looking at the window of tolerance they notice when they start to get better, cuz they start to notice how unregulated the world is and they find themselves wanting to soothe and regulate the world, but it wouldn't be appropriate to walk up to a stranger and go, I'm really noticing that you're outside of your window of tolerance. And I think you're using this, that and the other strategy cuz they haven't asked you for that help. So sometimes the power is of being qualified and or experienced in mental health is that we can observe what might need to be done in future, but it doesn't necessarily need to be us who says that or does it's a here. I will be back on soon.

*Jingles*

So yeah, people aren't necessarily going to know the difference between your job titles, you know, psychological wellbeing practitioner, assistant psychologist, hire assistant psychologists, you know, mental health support worker, trainee, clinical psychologist, or trainee health or counseling psychologist. They're just gonna hear, you know, the word psychological or mental health or psychologist. And they know you've been to uni, you know, so you must know your stuff, but they don't know that you are not perhaps the most appropriate or the most experienced person that they could ask. I would love your thoughts on all of this. I'd love to know, you know, what you do when you are asked for your opinion or whether people do ask or whether, you know, you tell people that you just work in a supermarket when you meet them as strangers, you don't tell them what you do.

Maybe you don't wanna bring that to your door. Let's have a conversation about this. On Instagram you can find me Dr. Marianne Trent, and on the Facebook group, the aspiring psychologist community come along and join us there and do join in the conversation around this so that we can really make sure we're thickening the narrative here. You might also find that people find you, they connect to you. They sense that you are a great listener and before you know it, you are drowning in life stories that can feel quite heavy or unwelcome. You know, I only wanted to come to the party and drink mojitos I didn't wanna be therapizing. And that's okay. And you might find that cuz people see the psychologist in your title, maybe, maybe on LinkedIn or you know, other areas where you might be networking professionally, they might be saying, oh, could you just, you know, create this video for me on talking to people about X, Y or was Z?

Could you talk about this? Could you do that? And it's like, well actually I don't really feel that comfortable. I don't feel it's that appropriate for me to be offering that and to just empower you to know that it's okay to say no and to direct to other areas other areas of support, other people that might be able to support it's okay to say, no, you're not a meany for being boundaried in saying no. And again, this might be helpful for you to refresh your memory on what I believe is episode eight. Yeah. I should never doubt myself. It's episode eight. I just checked episode eight is boundary setting for yourself and your clients. And you might find that really useful. Right? Speaking of boundaries, my friends it is time that I get out of my jogging bottoms and into my jeans to go and see the dentist.

I hope you found this helpful and I would really love your ideas around what you might do in these situations. What do you think? What are your thoughts? Do you come and discuss this with me over on the Facebook group, the aspiring psychologist community with Dr. Marianne Trent, that is where lots of good stuff happens. And it's totally free to join. So come and do that. Won't you? In the meantime, do come and connect in all the good places. I am mostly Dr. Marianne Trent, but you can also find me as good thinking psychological services. Thank you for being part of my world. Sorry. This is a briefer episode than usual, but you know, the dentist calls! Take care of you and stay kind. Bye!

*Jingles*