Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode 118: Exploring LGBTQ+ Identity in Psychology

Thank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast.

In this episode of the Aspiring Psychologist podcast, we speak with Phil Pampoulou, a trainee clinical psychologist in his third year where we speak about all things on LGPBTQ+ identity and mental health. You might remember Phil from a previous episode speaking about personal growth and self-discovery, so definitely check that out. Join us as we delve into why research matters, the experience of working in the mental health field as someone with an LGBTQ+ identity, the importance of understanding cross-cultural differences and how you can get involved in Phil’s fascinating research study!

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
• (00:59): Welcoming back Phil
• (02:36): A little background on Phil – in case you missed it!
• (03:23): Exploring what your third-year research project may be
• (05:09): More about Phil’s research study
• (06:04): The current stage of the study
• (08:05): The experience of being a gay man whilst on training
• (10:47): Exploring the intricacy of relationships and what that means for sexually diverse people
• (13:23): On the difficulty of internal acceptance and guardedness
• (14:45): How are people culturally shaped in a society?
• (17:28): Research matters because it can transcend different cultures
• (18:53): Thinking beyond the surface on the flipside of those with an LQBTQ+ identity
• (21:00): Take part in Phil’s research!
• (22:18): Summary and close

Links:

📱 Connect with Phil here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-pampoulov-6666a740/

🖥️ Check out my brand new short courses for aspiring psychologists and mental health professionals here: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/short-courses

🫶 To support me by donating to help cover my costs for the free resources I provide click here: https://the-aspiring-psychologist.captivate.fm/support

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

📖 To check out The Aspiring Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3CP2N97

💡 To check out or join the aspiring psychologist membership for just £30 per month head to: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/membership-interested

✍️ 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 Aspiring Psychologist Book, Clinical Psychologist book and The Aspiring Psychologist Membership on her Link tree: https://linktr.ee/drmariannetrent

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

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Coming up, we've got a special treat for you in this episode. As we welcome back to the incredible Phil, a trainee clinical psychologist, we are unravelling the rich tapestry of LGBTQ+ identity and the crucial world of research into this space. Get ready for a candid conversation that goes beyond boundaries as we explore the intersectionality of lgbtq plus experiences and dive into the importance of understanding cross-cultural differences. Whether you are a psychology enthusiast, an ally, or just someone seeking fresh perspectives, this episode promises compassion, insights and a whole lot of heart. Hit that play button and join us in this illuminating exploration of the diverse and ever evolving landscape of LGBTQ plus identity. Hope you will find it So useful.

Welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. I do try and keep my finger on the pulse and help you become aware of really important issues, whether or not you've got access to supervision, whether or not you've got access to people where you can ask questions and learn things about their lives. Sectionality is a really big and important issue and our ability to reflect upon our own lives as well as being aware upon individual differences for other people's lives can be really, really important. Today's episode is going to be doing just that. We are welcome back, Phil, who is a third year trainee, and let's dive in and see what we have got to say and I'll catch you on the other side. I just want to welcome back the wonderful Phil Polo to our podcast.

You might well remember our chats in episode one three of the podcast where Phil and I were talking about what you learn on the journey in psychology, and it wasn't our original a plan to talk about that, but it was such an organic fluid, lovely chat that we decided that we'd do. What was our a plan as a follow-up episode because it's also such an incredibly important conversation to have. So we first met on LinkedIn, Phil, and it's fair to say that I'm now going to be your groupie and follow everything you do and comment and share even more because I'm like, oh, Phil is now my best friend. So you are a trainee clinical psychologist, and we first met on LinkedIn. Could you tell everybody a little bit about how it was that our paths crossed and what you were doing on LinkedIn? Of

Course. Yeah, so as you said, Marianne, I'm in my final year of training now and I am currently conducting a piece of research as part of my doctoral thesis. We went on LinkedIn because I was sort of in the middle of trying to promote and advertise my research study far and wide. And yes, I think you spotted it on there. You were like, yes, let's talk about that because this is an important topic. But going back a bit to my first year of training, that's when we were kind of encouraged to start thinking about what we wanted to do research wise and to pick at least two supervisors for the thesis based on their research interests, annuals. And the thing is that at the very beginning of my training, I didn't really know what I wanted to do because there's just so much out there that you can do.

And I think as the months went on, I was sort of thinking to myself, I want to do something on LGBTQ+ community and mental health and being a gay man myself, it's something that I'm probably very passionate about and biassed in that sort of sense. But I felt that it's a very important topic, especially with the current cultural, social, political environment worldwide around this community. And I was thinking to myself, I want to do something for a particular population. But again, I didn't quite know in my first year exactly what I was doing. And I thinking it was towards the end and the beginning of the second year when I kind of had a more concrete thing in mind. So I'm not sure how it works with other courses, but in our course, the thesis is kind of broken down into two chapters or parts or sections, whatever you want to call them.

The first one is a systematic review that you do on literature and then you critique that literature. And the second one is an empirical kind of study that you carry out and then you write it up as a report. And ideally both of these should be on a similar topic, not a carbon copy of each other, but similar sort of topic. So my systematic view that I'm currently writing up is on the relationship between self-compassion and help seeking in men specifically, so that's men worldwide. But my empirical study, the one that you saw, Marianne online on LinkedIn that's specifically for adult gay men. It's kind of evaluating the effectiveness of a compassionate mind training, which is online on different sorts of psychological outcome measures including help seeking compassion, internalised homophobia and shame. So yeah, it's like a randomised controlled trial. So it's open to any adult gay men over the age of 18.

They don't need to be UK nationals. They could be from any part of the world as long as they have a sufficient level of English. Those are basically the only requirements for it. And what they do is they all complete a set of questionnaires at the beginning. They're all online, and at the end of those questionnaires, they get assigned to one of two conditions. So the reader going to be assigned to the compassionate mind training condition or to control condition. And if they're in the compassionate mind training condition, they get sent daily links to different practises over the course of 14 days or two weeks. The people in the control condition don't get sent anything during that period. And then both of these groups complete the same set of questionnaires. So two weeks after they've completed the very first set and then another two weeks pass and then complete the same questionnaire for the third and final time.

So it's like a two week sort of follow up set of questionnaires. And the people who are in the control condition who didn't have access to those practises, they get access to all of them all together after they've completed the third and final set of their questionnaires. And at the very end, people can opt in for a prize draw. I'm trying to remember how many. So basically it's like Amazon vouchers that they can opt in for. They can say yes or no to that. And that's essentially it. And I'm still in the recruitment stage of that. I have started writing up some of the bits of the report that I can start writing up before I see the results anyway, but hopefully I can get even more participants because I think I calculated I need around 140, 150 ideally, and I'm still not very, very close to that, but getting there slowly.

Okay, I will make sure that we tweak the dates when this is going to come out, so we bring it forward. So it will probably, I guess, yeah, so our first one was one three. I'll make this one shortly after that so that we can hopefully maximise people listening, being able to take part or mention it to people in their teams or their families. Is it uk? Is it potentially international? What are the limits? Or

Anyone? So as long as they're above the age of 18 or above the age of 18 and identify as a gay man, that's basically it. So they don't need to be living in the uk, they don't need to be UK nationals as long as they have a sufficient level of English to engage with the questionnaires and the practises. That's basically

It. Yeah, thank you. And you told me yourself before the recording, and obviously during this recording that you are a gay man yourself. How is that in psychology and how does that crop up with clients or does it not crop up with clients? I wear a wedding ring, but I could be married to a woman. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm heterosexual or I'm gay, but how has that been for you?

Yeah, good question. I guess I'm just sort of thinking in terms of the training, the clinical training from an academic point of view as a course and as a cohort, we've often sort of thought about the social graces, so gender and sexual orientation, et cetera, and what that means in terms of who you are, but also how that affects and influences the way you work with other people. So I've often sort of thought about that. We've been fairly open within the cohort when we've had discussions like that within clinical practise, let's say on placements. I have been open with my colleagues about it when it has come. I'm just trying to think when it would've come naturally. Let's say if we've talked about the topic of LGBT in some sense or another. I wouldn't just sort of say, by the way, I'm a gay man, so this is, yeah,

I don't think, it is not like you need to come out to each placement visit. It's just that you say in the same way that I would say my husband's name, you would say your partner's name and it's up for them to join up the dots. It's not for you to help make that process easier. It is what it is. You are who you are and these are the facts of you. And to be your authentic self with your colleagues and hopefully form lusting therapeutic working relationships and sometimes even friendships, you absolutely should feel hopefully empowered to just be yourself.

Exactly. Yeah. And as you said, yeah, I might just say, oh yeah, my partner and I went to whatever and he did or said this, and they can then guess from the context. But yeah, I don't feel obliged to be saying it to people If they're curious and they want to learn more about my partner, then I might kind of expand on that or, oh, when did you guys meet? Or where did you meet? That sort of thing in terms of patience. Yeah, I think that's a bit tricky because obviously in there you've got sorts of ethical considerations around that. And even would it be appropriate to even mention that? Why would I mention it in the first place? And I'm just thinking the placements I've had so far haven't been in the most diverse areas. So I have reflected on that as well, what that's meant in terms of me not having seen a lot of the lgbtq plus community that I might've been working with. But yeah, I don't think I have mentioned my sexuality, my sexual orientation to any clients. And again, I'm sort of thinking to myself, is it because I'm not sure what sort of context it would've come up anyway. But yeah, I think I'm a bit sort of more guarded in terms of that with clients.

And I think probably the same would've been true of me during training as well. I think it's only probably since being qualified that I probably do occasionally mention husband and thinking of just about the intricacies of relationships. And I'm obviously not talking in great detail, but just when you do live with someone, it can be tricky sometimes because you might want different things, you have different expectations. And just to mention in that sort of context, but I absolutely know that that's, especially if someone's in a dynamic service that ain't happening. But it's as you move forward in your career and as you may end up working in a really specialist way, that means that actually some more personal disclosure is relevant and important and helpful. It makes me think about one of my dear friends and colleagues who I was an assistant with who now has her specialty as working with families who have experienced stillbirth or late miscarriage or pregnancy or even child loss. And that was purely because that's something that she experienced, I think it was seven years ago. And so it may shape you, it may be relevant in future even if it's not now, but I love that it's something, it's just part of you. I hope you feel proud of yourself and there's so much to be proud of. So I really hope you do and that yeah, hopefully you are surrounded by people who also feel proud to be your colleague and your friend and your partner too.

Thank you. And I'm really blessed in that sense that everyone's been really accepting of me because it wasn't until later on in life when I did come out both to myself and to other people, and I've said so many times to other people that coming out to myself so much harder than coming out to other people. And then the previous podcast we spoke about where I come from and the cultural mentality around certain things. So I come from Bulgaria where people still hold a few people still hold a very sort of homophobic, racist, sexist sort of views, which growing up in that environment as a child, you might not really think it's anything harmful and it could get easily normalised within their culture. But growing up as an adult, I'm sort of realising, gosh, none of this was really okay. And I think that's probably where I mentioned our guardedness earlier with clients where part of me isn't a hundred percent sort of comfortable, so let's say holding hands with my partner, where would I feel comfortable doing?

That's something that lots of straight couples might not even think about at all. For me, all of a sudden it becomes quite a sort of measured threat mode kind of behaviour like, oh gosh, is there someone around me? What would happen if I do do it? Do I feel comfortable? And I think that's probably reflected in the research that I'm doing as well, where some of the things I'm looking at is measuring different types of shame, so both external and internal shame, but also internalised homophobia, which I know some people might not quite know what that is, but I guess, yeah, people know what homophobia is, but internalises when it's you are turning it towards yourself and you are sort of feeling that being gay or being who you are isn't really okay that there's some sort of moral wrong about it or that you are ashamed of it, not just of yourself, but of the wider community.

And that can have a big effect on people's mental health. But I think as I grow older, I'm sort of thinking to myself, I can't be bothered with some of this stuff about controlling myself everywhere. I'm just going to be me. I'm not going to just tell willy nilly about who I am. I'm still probably going to have some of that guardedness, which is kind of understandably come from that past and from that sort of cultural mentality. But I'm also going to look towards being happy and true to myself rather than concealing all the time.

Absolutely. And it made me reflect upon a time that my husband and I were thinking about going to, but we weren't married at the time and that we wouldn't necessarily have been able to walk hand in hand because we weren't married. And different cultures have different levels of acceptance and different standards, and you can absolutely be, can get in trouble for that. And that's my only real experience of that being a heterosexual woman having grown up in England and as you know now Wales. But it's being yourself but being in trouble for being yourself, which is really tricky. I'm reading a historical fiction book at the moment that's set before the second World War and there's split narratives for different countries. And to me this sounds fascinating to anyone else listening, it might be that sounds really weird and boring, but it's looking at how in the post first World War period Germany, why fascism became so appealing and acceptable to the German people, why they were so welcoming of Hitler.

But as part of that, all of the attacks against people by different factions who were signed up to the fascist movement included hurting and sometimes murdering gay men in really horrendous ways. And that was making me think, gosh, I'm so pleased that we don't have that currently and that there's been more inclusion and that people can hopefully feel more comfortable being themselves. And then I was on my phone and I was on Twitter and I saw that someone had posted a photo of their friend of a man who had been viciously and savagely beaten in the UK for being gay. And I was like, God made me feel really sad. Things haven't moved on in so many ways, and that's just me from an outside perspective and it's just not fair and it's not right, Phil.

It's really sad, isn't it? And as you were saying earlier, you could get in serious trouble just for being who I am. I could be locked up or killed in certain countries legally, so according to their law. That thought in itself just terrifies me, but also makes me sad about all these people who might be living in environments and countries like that. What does their day-to-day life look like? If I have that level of governance in the UK about holding hands with my partner down the street, I can't even begin to imagine what that would look like if I were living in one of those environments. It's really, really sad.

It is, and I think this is why research matters. It's because research can transcend different cultures, different countries. I hope that this goes far and wide for you. I hope that you disseminate it really widely and that people start to begin to think about the importance of compassion, the importance of acceptance, the importance of just allowing people to be who they are regardless of who you are. That makes no difference. You allow someone to be themselves and just get on with their life, which has no bearing on yours. It doesn't matter what you believe, it doesn't matter what you feel. It doesn't matter who you are sexually attracted to and what you want to do, what you don't want to do. If someone else wants to do what they want to do, just that's fine, as long as it's legal and not harmful to someone and it's consensual. Let's caveat that, but you make a really good point that actually in certain countries it isn't legal. But I guess what I'm meaning is for this purpose is the uk it is legal and just leave people alone to live their lives and be a good person. Good. Just be nice to find. Or when I was growing up in the uk, it's like if you haven't got anything nice to say. Nothing at all.

Yeah. It really makes me think as a psychologist what's going on behind those people's lives. The ones who are attacking, bullying, assaulting members of the LGBTQ plus community, because I always keep saying that people don't wake up one day feeling or doing something like, do you know what? I really feel like beating a gay man up today. It's always interesting, especially as a psychologist to see, well, how come they are thinking that or doing that? What kind of environment did they grow up in? What kind of narratives and values have they endorsed? Because for example, I'm working in a forensic setting at the moment, working with adults, and I think some of the people we work with there have forensic histories, they've committed crimes, and I think people could often think just random as criminals, like they're bad people. They chose to do that. And it's really helpful actually in displacement to kind of unravel what's been going on for this person because yet again, they didn't wake up one day just feeling like they wanted to commit this crime or do whatever. And it's fascinating. It really is. And there's something very hamming, I'm not sure how to verbalise it, about being able to talk about that, especially in an inpatient environment where they see kind of staff the same staff day in and day out for most of the time and and it's really, really powerful. So similarly with these people, I'm very curious to know why are these barriers still there? And as you said, yeah, this is where research can really, really help.

It is. And there's so much trauma in forensic services and all of my assistant work was in forensic services, and whilst we can't redo what we've already done, I wish I'd had more of a trauma focused lens and understanding when I was in those settings because I think that without trauma, I think a lot of our forensic settings would probably be empty. So,

So

Powerful and predictive.

It permeates in so many mental health settings, trauma.

It really does. Phil, thank you so much again for your time. And I know I've taken up more of it than I advertised on the tin. That's okay.

I enjoyed every minute of it.

Thank you. It's been such a pleasure and a privilege. And if people did want to get in contact with you to think about, I seeing an interest in taking part in your research, I'm presuming it's all online, they don't need to meet you in person. No, it's all

Online. That's the beauty of it. Yeah.

And where's the best place for them to do that? Is that LinkedIn or is there somewhere else you'd rather direct people to? Yeah,

They can reach out to me on LinkedIn if they want to. Might be easier if they do it on my university email address. I'm not sure if you're able to put stuff underneath your podcast.

I absolutely will. Yes. So if you tell me what that is, we'll make sure it appears on screen as we say it. What's your email address, Phil?

It's p.d.pampoulov@soton.ac.uk

Perfect. Thank you so much. And you are, I believe you're Philip Pampoulov on LinkedIn if that's easier for people as well. I called you, Philip you were like, you're like, I think I'm in trouble. Can I be Phil? Of course you be

Phil. Definitely call me Phil.

Yeah. Okay. Alright. It's been so lovely to speak with you and wishing you well with your research. Please let me know if I can be of assistance with anything in future. And yes, it's just been a real privilege. Thank you so much.

Likewise. Thank you very much Marianne.

So welcome. Oh, I just love Phil. I honestly just think he's so interesting to speak to and I did have to say to him off camera afterwards, don't worry, I'm not going to suddenly turn up at the end of your street like you are safe. It's okay. I'm really excited to see where his career goes and to hear how his research does. And obviously if you do want to get involved with that research, please do consider reaching out to him. The details will be in the show notes or you can also find him on LinkedIn. If you have got any topics that you think might make brilliant podcast episodes, please don't be shy. Do come and get in contact with me. The easiest way to do that is via my social. I am Dr. Marianne Trent everywhere. There will be a QR code on screen if you are watching on YouTube for everywhere else.

Literally just type in Dr. Marianne Trent into socials of your choice. I do believe I'm everywhere. So yeah, come and subscribe. Follow me on TikTok, follow me on Facebook, follow me on Instagram, do all those good things. Whilst you're at it, if you are listening on MP three, Spotify or Apple, please do consider leaving me a review or a rating. If you've only got a short moment, that would be so gratefully come and join the free Psychology Facebook group, the Aspiring Psychologist Community with Dr. Marianne Trent. Check out the books, the Aspiring Psychologist Collective and the Clinical Psychologist Collective. They can both be really reflective tools for you at interview time of year or whenever you are listening to this. It might be application time of year as well. They're just really good for helping you think about your own developments across your lifespan. They can provoke interesting food for thought and personal reflections for you. So do check them out. Check them out on Amazon or this details in the show note. Thank you so much for being part of my world. I will look forward to catching up with you for our next episode, which will be along from Monday at 6:00 AM. Take care if

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