← Compassion in a T-Shirt
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Hi, I'm Dr. Stan Steindl, and welcome
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back to Compassion in a T Shirt, where we explore how compassion changes everything. Today's conversation is about a fascinating question. In the context of compassion, how much of ourselves should we bring into the work of helping others? As clinicians, we're often taught about boundaries, professionalism, and the importance of maintaining therapeutic distance. All important stuff, but what happens when that distance becomes disconnection? What if some of the most healing moments in therapy come not from expertise alone, but from our shared humanity? My guest today is Dr. Glenn Roberts, consultant psychiatrist, writer and editor of the wonderful book Personally Speaking, in which leading psychiatrists reflect on the personal experiences that have shaped their professional lives. Glenn has long been interested in recovery, relational care, and what it means to remain human within healthcare systems that can sometimes feel anything. But we begin with Jung's provocative idea of the wounded healer and explore authenticity, boundaries, self disclosure, and the subtle but powerful moments of human connection that can make all the difference. And so I bring you Dr. Glenn Roberts.
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Doctor Glenn Roberts, welcome to Compassion in a T shirt.
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Oh, thank you, Stan. And it's a real pleasure to see you. And as I mentioned in our little warm up, you've not spoken to me, but of course I've heard a lot from you and it's a delight to have as a kind of two ways. Yes, speak personally.
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A
Exactly. No, wonderful stuff. And I, I actually have a bit of. Bit of show and tell for you to begin with. Well, first, your beautiful book, personally speaking, and wonderful and wise and full of interesting reflection, but also prompts, I think, for, for one's own reflection. There's the butterfly on the front and actually the, the crest of the, the Royal College of Psychiatry, I think it, well, it, it has the staff of escape. Asclepius, I think, and this is something I wanted to show you is my little statue of that particular character and surrounded by. By butterflies. And, and so the butterfly is. Yeah, sort of a motif. The. And that references Psyche and his cupid and Psyche as well. So like I say, a little show and tell there. But your book starts quoting Jung. The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. Only the wounded physician heals. But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armor, he has no effect. And so, yes, I wondered about that. This idea of the wounded healer and, and that our own suffering, I suppose, can shape our capacity to help others. So how do you see that. And how do you see that playing out, I guess, in clinical work, you know, and, and so on?
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C
Yeah, sure, right. No, thanks for the. Thanks for the lead in, Stan. And, of course, you know, the butterfly being psyche's symbol. And interestingly, psyche in Greek literally translates as soul. So you've got this kind of connection with things that are profound and heartfelt and sort of metamorphic in this symbol of the butterfly, you know, right at the, you know, the heart of things. And, you know, we get our names from it. Psychotherapist, psychology, psychiatry. And I think all of that relates to suffering and to the relief of suffering because, you know, that is our purpose. That's our goal, our hope, our aspiration, to relieve suffering, the people that come to us and seek our help. But our own experience of suffering is perhaps the kind of fundamental basis of how we make sense of that, you know, that kind of experiential understanding of what it is people are talking about saying, manifesting. You know, can we. Can we hear them? Can we. Can we see what it means that they have these experiences? And the quotation of Young that you. You just read, we put right at the front of the book. You know, it's a kind of framing quote. And of course, most people remember, you know, only the wounded physician heals. And you think, well, okay, I kind of get that. That there's something about the wounds a physician has that might inform them about woundedness and that might give them a certain maturity and a certain understanding. But actually, Jung says a bit more than that. And in the. In the frame around that phrase, that famous phrase, I'm just looking at my own copy, it says, the doctor's effective only when he himself is affected. Only the wounded physician heals, but if he wears his personality like a coat of armor, he has no effect. Well, I think this speaks about the doctor's sensitivity, the clinician, the practitioner's sensitivity, and not just that you've had wounds, but that you're willing to be wounded in the context of your care and your treatment of others. You're willing to be touched and for suffering to feel like suffering, not like something that bounces off wearing a personality like a coat of armor so that you're not affected. So this idea that the doctor, the clinician, the practitioner is effective only when he himself is affected, I think draws this kind of bridge. It draws. It draws a connection across the experience that someone is suffering and brings to you, seeking help and care and relief, and whether it matters to you, whether you can feel in touch with them quite literally, and whether you're open to that being an uncomfortable experience, but something that your own. Well, processing your own Experience, but your training, your professionalism allows you to sit with and beside so as to be more effective for the person you're seeking to help. That.
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That really is sort of enlightening for me, actually, because I have used. I have tended to interpret that quote, or at least that middle line as meaning, you know, our past wounds help us to connect with people or understand people and so on. But when you look at that first sentence, it's that sort of being affected. And it just made me reflect on, obviously, Paul Gilbert's model, and I'm a sort of very keen cfter and so on. And one of the competencies of compassionate engagement is that sympathy people piece, which in a way is about feeling moved or touched or affected really by the other person or the person suffering or their experience. And. And it's sort of different to empathy, but this sympathy piece and, and feeling touched.
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C
Yes. Well, it's in the word in a way, isn't it? Sympathy, that kind of feeling together, suffering together and bringing it alive. So, as you say, it's not just a kind of historical thing. You know, you've been through dark times, you've been through troubles, you know, it's left its scars and its memories, but you've kind of learned from that and you kind of know your way around. No, it's. It's kind of the openness to that, remaining part of your ongoing experience, your ongoing education. And so in coming into the room, coming into a relationship with someone, coming into a conversation, how willing are you to be touched by what people are saying, feeling, experiencing? And I think they know it. I think people know instinctively that you're there, you see them, you hear them. And this is much more than method and technique. This is something about the humanity and the presence of the practitioner, being with. Being with.
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And I think this is what you were alluding to, but it really speaks to all relationships actually. You know, to actually have an investment in a relationship and to be thoroughly present. And it means exposure, in a way, and a willingness to be affected, sometimes in wonderful ways and sometimes in more painful ways. So as another relationship, a therapeutic relationship, it really applies there too. But then in term, it sort of relates then to the actual effectiveness, I suppose, of that interaction. It relates to one's sort of therapeutic effectiveness.
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C
Well, and you're aware that, you know, one of my kind of deep interests is the relationship between the personal and the professional. And, you know, I see this as a. As a personal capability, but one that gets trained, rehearsed, refined, that can mature in a professional Context. So this isn't a, this isn't a naive kind of just, you know, heartfeltness and, you know, but is more a sense of developing a sophisticated capability that you bring into your relationships with people. But it is fundamentally personal. It's a human connection, albeit in a professional context.
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The crest, I think, for the Royal College of Psychiatrists says let wisdom guide, which I suspect wisdom is a bit about reasoning and kind of feeling in a way, and sort of professional and personal. Perhaps maybe it's reflected it in, in the motto a little bit there as well. What, what do you notice about, for example, early career doctors or psychiatrists or practitioners generally, in terms of bringing their humanity into the room? And, and in terms of this personal, professional. What, what, what do you notice there with, with all that?
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C
Well, there are, of course, a whole variety of perspectives on that because, you know, there kind of early career manifestation of the practitioner. They come from all sorts of backgrounds and perspectives. But I think very often people do come to this sort of work because of life experience, because of things they've, they've had in their personal life which have got them interested, have opened their eyes, maybe opened their heart, had them kind of lean into, you know, why would you want to spend your, your time with people that are struggling and suffering and are unhappy and anxious and confused? Well, maybe there's something about, you know, what has happened to you in your own life that opens that door, opens that window to this being important, interesting, something you're motivated to step towards. There's a kind of sadness in my response to this too. I mean, personally, I came from a family background in which there was depression and confusion, and my mother was subsequently diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And it was a pretty turbulent time growing up. And I'm sure that's why for me personally, as a student traveling around the medical placements, coming into psychiatry, I thought I'd come home. I felt I kind of understood what people were saying. I had a sense of, you know, affinity and kind of connection. But I think perhaps because of my personal experience, I do worry about the satisfactoriness of training and whether the person of the practitioner is met, responded to, enabled through these kind of formal training processes. And my hunch is that as time's gone on and especially in recent years, our training structures and processes and our organizational context have become a bit more depersonalized and the, the opportunity, the capacity for, you know, a young person to come into this sort of work, perhaps with some degree of personal motivation, personal experience, to have that attended to. In the context of training, I do worry about that, and in some ways that's why we've, we've made this book at this time as an illustration of many, many leading and senior practitioners talking about intimate personal experiences, how that informed their practice, what they learned from it, and that's the content. But they're also modeling something. They're modeling that you can be a very senior, highly credible, well respected practitioner and have had a lot of difficult things happen in your life, and one doesn't disqualify the other. Both can come to the table.
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A
It's almost in both being at the table that really is the power of that, that, that experience and that therapeutic relationship. It's interesting you say that about training because it's the case in psychology and clinical psychology a bit as well, that people have to have done so well. You know, at school and then at university, the focus is on grades and learning and the intellectual pursuit of it all. And there's often a lot of competitive motivation at play there, and sometimes even, you know, a really, really painful competition with one's fellow students and to get into tight places and to, or to, to a small number of places for that training program or, or the jobs and so on and so forth. And so people are often, they have that competitive motivation really honed, but it's also sort of influenced bit by threat system too, you know, and so once they're out there in the world of work and so on, it can be hard to really express one's vulnerability, feel comfortable with the vulnerability that you describe that I guess experienced clinicians feel more comfortable with. Although even experienced clinicians sometimes it can be. It's, it's scary really, to, to be vulnerable, whether it's to do with our own past experiences or whether it's to do with the vulnerability of being affected, you know, in the room.
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C
Well, and that's absolutely just true, isn't it? Authentic vulnerability is scary. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just, it's just in the nature of it. But if you're, if you're averse to feeling scared and if it's a bit shaming to feel vulnerable, and if, you know, you are growing up, you know, professionally in a competitive environment where it's all about being, you know, accomplished and, you know, winning prizes and being conspicuously effective and being, you know, expert and competent, and these kind of, these kind of presentations can seem somewhat contrary to being tender, open, hurt, confused. And yet, especially within a training environment, I would say these are not only sort of normal but legitimate. I'd say they're maybe even essential because, you know, therein is you being affected, being in touch with the reality of what's in front of you, which at times is. Is dreadful. It's appalling, it's shocking, it's scary. I mean, people come to us with some of the worst experiences that people can go through. And if we're not, you know, a bit shocked by some of that and a bit scared by some of that, we kind of not in touch with the reality of what people have experienced and what they're telling us about. But how do you then handle yourself in with those experiences? It's unhelpful to the patient if you, you know, you're knocked out by it. And, you know, therein, I think, is this reconciliation of personal sensitivity and vulnerability with professional capability and confidence, you know, so that you can. You can be in touch with it, but you can be alongside it and, and with it and hold it. And if you can hold it for yourself, then clearly you're a better place to hold it for another, too. But I think these competitive dynamics are perhaps extremely unhelpful because they mitigate against people feeling comfortable being vulnerable, comfortable being real, comfortable being open and trusting and sharing, you know, if that's a black mark or if that's a shaming thing or a demerit in terms of your professional competence, you know, if your peer, if you fear your peers are going to look down on you rather than, you know, walk across the room and give you a hug sort of thing. And so I think what I'm. What I'm aware of and what I'm fishing for is a kind of different professional culture in which, as healers, using Jung's term, we value our own experience and see that as the raw material out of which we shape our professional practice.
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A
Listening to you, I'm reminded again of Gilbert's model that it's sort of sympathy, empathy and distress tolerance might be how he sort of refers to it. But that ability to, yes, sort of be grounded and create that stability and, and find equanimity that. That allows or sort of enables really connecting with our own feelings and, and our own responses to the feelings and experiences of others, there's a bit. There's a bit of. Of effort there, isn't it? Actually, it's no small thing being a healer, you know, is to be able to create that sweet spot amongst, you know, those different pieces. What are your thoughts about supervision and perhaps therapy for therapists?
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C
Sure. Well, I Think you've, you've, you've had a look at the book, Stan, haven't you read it? And there are, there are 20 very senior psychiatrists who describe their personal experience in the book. And I think one of the intriguing things that comes out of the detail of some of their stories is that some of them are, you know, senior psychotherapists, but they make a distinction themselves between training in therapy and entering therapy personally. And quite a few speak of the considerable value of entering therapy personally. And somehow that's qualitatively different to training as a therapist. Now, of course, some trainings do bring the two together so that, you know, training as a therapist is a personal training. It's training of the person and, you know, welcomes and is hospitable to the person's experience. But that's not the case for all of them and certainly for doctors, you know, we have quite a problem really in crossing that bridge between the, the personal and the professional. And, you know, I would see this as a real opportunity and something that's perhaps significantly lacking if this bridging of the personal and the professional isn't, you know, standard element of support, supervision, mentoring, training, maybe even management too. So that, you know, all of these processes that are built around a responsible role can simultaneously look at how you are discharging that responsibility through doing your work, but also how you are experiencing it and how you are maturing in role whilst you're doing that work.
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Yes, certainly over here we really seem to have a very strict line between professional supervision and personal therapy. And, and it's, it's that sort of thing that your supervisor really holds the line. And if they feel that something else is needed because of more clinical problems, then you're referred, you know, to therapy. But you're describing something where that, you know, we're sort of trying to bring the, the personal in actually alongside the professional and how to do that. It still needs boundaries, I guess. If you sort of your professional manager versus your clinical supervisor versus therapy. I mean, I suppose they are different roles in a sense, but what do we lose, do you think, if we keep things impersonal, you know, both clinically, but, you know, in the relationship, the working or therapeutic relationship, what do we lose?
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C
Well, I absolutely agree with you about the importance of boundaries, because to be boundaryless, you know, everything kind of blur together. I mean, that is kind of what people are often coming along with as a state of suffering, isn't it? But I think in our care for boundaries and our emphasis of the Importance of boundaries. My sense is that we often overdo it and boundaries become sort of barriers and the permeability of a boundary and the capacity for a boundary to be something on the cusp of a relationship, you know, is often sort of reified and maybe even becomes rather rigid. And that then creates this kind of them and us in and out division. And so our professional context, our peer groups, our, you know, support structures can be ones of sort of non disclosure. They can be ones that are, that are so focused on the, on the case, the symptoms, the treatment, the progress or the managerial things about, you know, quantities of cases or cost to the service or you know, development that somehow then eclipses the fact that all of this is refracted through a human being, through a person. And there's a person or a dimension and a personal correlate to all these things. So how do you, how do you hold these in relationship? And you know, your question about the concern or the in costs about impersonality. Well, it's kind of in the question, isn't it, that they become impersonal. And our work, our mission, our hope is to help people personally. So I'm not arguing for a blurring and a sort of dismantling of boundaries. I think I'm arguing for recognition of the person, of the practitioner and that personal maturity, personal development goes hand in glove with professional maturity, professional development. And there is a kind of a sweet spot that brings the two together. So that this is a personal profession, it's populated by people, its context is working with people, and the content is the personal connection that we have with people. And my concern is that somehow that gets lost or eclipsed or somehow we establish cultures that are not warm and hospitable to that.
- [26:12]
A
This is a real kind of adjacent sort of topic in a way. But I'm on a little bit of an AI rampage at the moment. I'm sort of not so for it. And I think what you're talking about is really sort of behind this feeling I've got about it. And, and that is that in a way an AI therapist is, is at that extreme end of no personal, you know, sort of impersonal as much as it might simulate empathy or even compassion and maybe even give, give good advice or which is what proponents of, of AI often tell me. But this is the, this is the thing it misses, it does, it just doesn't. Obviously it's not a person, it's a machine. And it really is what we would get at the 100% impersonal. End of that spectrum. I don't know if you have any thoughts about this particular topic.
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C
Well, firstly, I applaud your, my rampage. Your rampage, yes, yes, good luck with your rampage there. And it's funny because I'm, I'm looking at you, Stan. You're on my screen here. I've got head and shoulders and your lovely smiling face and I've got compassion written across the bottom and the, you know, the two sit together as an experience for me meeting with you this morning. And in a way I see that as, you know, sort of waving a flag for, for how I would personally feel that authentic, compassionate connection is fundamentally personal. It's, it's a, a human and humanitarian connection. I know very little about AI. I'm quite low tech, so I get quite, quite lost in discussions about, you know, technology. But I, I certainly feel a kind of instinctual wariness about trusting machines to resolve human problems, especially human problems that are to do with our experience of our humanity.
- [28:30]
A
Yes, yeah, I think that's, that, that's absolutely it for me as well. And I'm trying to think if, if, if a therapist, if a human therapist is somewhat more impersonal in their approach and an AI is completely impersonal in their approach, what is the effect of that? There's something in the felt sense of that experience for probably both parties, if both parties are human, but certainly for the person opening themselves up for help, there's something in the felt sense it doesn't feel, it doesn't feel real, it doesn't feel reciprocated, it doesn't kind of, there's not an energetic exchange of something's missing, you know, and I think it's felt by humans.
- [29:29]
C
Well, it's interesting that you, you know, you sort of reference, you know, the other person, the person in the room that you're seeking to help because, you know, I spent my working life working in rehabilitation, which is very largely with people with long term and complex mental health problems. And you know, it took decades for my own profession to get properly interested in working with people and tuning into not just their experience of their problems, but their experience of us and their experience of the service. That gave rise to the service user movement and that gave rise to, you know, collateral movements like hearing voices movement and that gave rise to something I've been very closely related to, the recovery movement. Now all of these take the testimony of personal experience very seriously and regard people as having authority by virtue of their personal experience. You know, they are the experts on their own experience and so I'd even, you know, I'd even backpedal a bit on us being healers. You know, we can't recover anybody, but what we can do is to support, help, work with someone to make more satisfactory progress on their own journey of recovery, on their own recovery pathway. And so much of what we do, I would suggest, is trying to support and enable the person themselves to come into their own resources, to come into agency, to come into a capacity to use supports and services in ways that works for them, is relevant for them, that they value. So that, again, is a kind of personalization agenda. But in particular, I've been strongly influenced by listening to what people say about me, about services, about psychiatry. And a lot of it is very unflattering, a lot of it is quite worrying and, you know, it's quite sobering to realize how unsatisfactory a lot of people with significant serious mental illness find the services that they're offered. And, you know, there's a big movement in psychiatry, certainly in the uk, of taking that a lot more seriously and bringing people with direct personal experience into every professional context, so that we have that intelligence, that sympathy, that opportunity to reference what it's like for the person receiving this in designing services, in managing services, but in particular, this bring it right down to the quality of the relationship. Because if you listen to what people say, they very rarely are concerned about our technical skills. What they're concerned about is our care, our kindness, our compassion, whether things seem to matter to us, whether they feel understood and kind of met. So these personal qualities, which I would suggest arise from digesting and making sense of your personal experience, these personal qualities are incredibly important to people that come to our services, and I think arguably are significant components of what makes therapy therapeutic. Going back to the good. Dr. Jung. If people coming into the room can see that we are affected and we're not, they're experiencing us as a. As wearing a coat of armor. They feel they. They can be in touch with us and that we're in touch with them. They actually meet them and so they come into a room, they spend time with us. What do they leave with? Do they leave with a sense of having a compassionate human interaction? There might not be, you know, a kind of intellectual formulation that comes out of that. They might just go away feeling a lot better for having been met and able to think a bit more clearly about their own experience in their situation. So those kind of rather sort of diffuse human qualities, what I think this personal perspective gives emphasis to, and it's not, it's not an alternative to professional skills. It's not an alternative to technique and to research and to knowledge and understanding about what is generally true for populations. But I think it's often missing or un. Amalgamated, unintegrated. And so I think that's what I'm particularly interested in. And that's what all these stories are about. And that's why they're stories. They're not, they're not, they're not theories, they're not, they're not case histories. They're personal stories which take you through someone's life experience, but in the form of a personal story.
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A
It's, it's, it's so interesting and thought provoking because on the one hand where thinking about, you know, vulnerability for the practitioner and the openness to feel and to be affected and that sort of a thing. And then we're also asking the practitioner to open themselves up to feedback and to hear from, you know, perhaps their clients or patients what their experience was like. And, you know, that takes a whole lot of solidity to, you know, kind of receive feedback as well. And, you know, it's, it's sort of, it's a lot, isn't it, in a way to, to be, to be a therapist and, and to, to kind of manage all of that. And, and yet that seems to be the, the, the, the, the secret sauce in a way. It's, it's skills and strategies and techniques and other offerings. But we're just trying to warm all that up, I guess, with, with what,
- [36:03]
C
what, what would be interrupt there because. Yeah, I don't want to skip past the word warm. Okay, okay. I want to, want to, you know, warm my hands on the word warm because. Yeah, I mean, this sounds, this sounds unmanageable if you're just thinking about, know, sort of tipping it out of a bag into the lap of a trainee or, or, you know, practitioner in, in the early part of their career. And so it's inherent to valuing personal experience and personal development and personal maturity that you're not just kind of imposing it on someone or expecting they do it, you're supporting it, you're cultivating it, you're nourishing it. So I'm envisaging a professional process which is simultaneously nurturing of the practitioner as well as giving them the opportunity. And you can't have this as an expectation. People make choices and you need to leave the door open for them to make these choices. You know, sometimes, you know, when I'm teaching on Burnett or something, I say, well, you can do this job in three dimensions. You know, you can do it as a job, you can do it as a profession, you can do it as a vocation. And I guess what I'm pointing to is the more vocational end of that spectrum. And to work vocationally, I think needs a lot of support, a lot of encouragement, and maybe we can provide that for one another. You know, we can. Instead of these competitive cultures of developing, you know, training environments where people are always aspiring to the next achievement or the next paper or the next presentation, they simultaneously value enriching an understanding and a connection with their humanity. And you kind of, maybe as a tutor or as a trainer or as an educational director, you know, you're, you're nourishing that stream of influence as well. You know, sometimes I, I talked about AI earlier on, and, you know, I've got an anathema about, about mechanical metaphors. I much prefer organic metaphors, so I love gardening metaphors and, and see this as, as kind of cultivation. You know, how do you cultivate the practice and the practitioner? And so, so, yeah, you know, I want, I want this to carry a strong sense of warmth rather than a sort of unmanageable expectation. Huh.
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A
The warmth of the sun and, and the, the, the. The water in the earth and, and the cultivation of the. And then the plant just grows in it into its own self and into its own shape, I guess. And, And I suppose the, the fears of compassion across the three flows kind of come up for me at this moment. A lot of. A lot of clinicians and therapists and so on. They can sometimes be or feel quite wary of compassion from others or nurturance from others and so on. So it's interesting to kind of see how that then sort of really can be part of it too. How do we do a bit of a desensitization to some of those fears of care and compassion and nurturing. And then bit by bit, gradually, you know, we, we end up, rather than competitive environments, it's these compassionate environments and, and compassionate teams and compassionate organizations where there is, you know, things are happening across the three flows.
- [39:43]
C
Well, that's, that's great, Stan. Well, and of course, you know, I mean, I've not trained in compassion focused therapy, but I've, you know, enjoyed and valued, you know, reading and looking at and listening to Paul and the whole, you know, group of colleagues that are cultivating these influences for years now. Yes. And, you know, this is tremendously valuable and, and within that discourse, I have been very intrigued when the issue about resistance to compassion comes up, or aversion to compassion often, you know, and Paul would teach about how this is a kind of misunderstanding. You know, it's a kind of misunderstanding of what's being described as compassion. To feel threatened by it or, you know, as though you're letting yourself into some rather. Rather uncomfortably vulnerable place if you. Compassion. But this idea of cultivating a community of practice values a community of practice. And in a. In a sense, again, the book is seeking to model that. It seeks to be a community of practitioners in a book. And in recruiting them, you know, I was looking for people at different career stages, different ethnic backgrounds, good gender mix, different specialties. They. So it's kind of seeking to model the community of practitioners talking about their lives. And modeling is a good word here, too, because these are all very senior practitioners. And they're saying, I've been there, too. I've been depressed, I've had cancer, I've had marital breakdown. I know what it's like to be suicidal. You know, they're talking about the intimate difficulties of their life, but as competent and capable people and modeling how you can be both. So I'm imagining. And, you know, I'm imagining a training environment, a therapy environment, a service environment in which the community of practice support one another in cultivating these qualities. Bit like a garden, you know, you don't just grow the. You don't just grow the one plant, do you? You grow the. The whole thing. And. And, you know, there are different plants doing different things and they got different needs. But you, as a gardener, you take an interest in the overall health of the. Of that community of living organisms. So I kind of got that kind of idea for what a team would be, what a service would be, what an organization would be. You might think I'm a little idealistic, and I would agree with you there, but it's a direction of travel. It's a direction of travel. Yeah.
- [42:23]
A
And I think services are doing it. I've talked to people even on this channel that really are exploring team compassion in health services and how team mindfulness and team compassion and those sorts of things, but crossing it or. Or crossing the. The workplace training, education sort of system, you know, that's.
- [42:49]
C
Yeah.
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A
Very aspirational, Glenn, which is. Which is great. I wondered, I. I didn't warn you about this question because it's only just popped to mind, but would you. Would there be a particular, you know, sort of one of the stories from the book that. That stands out for you or that. That you could share briefly with us just to get. Get a bit of a feel for. For exactly what you're talking about there.
- [43:13]
C
Yeah, sure. So, you know, having recruited all these authors to contribute, I value all their stories, but there is one that particularly is important to me. It's important to me personally. We've got five presidents of the Royal College of Psychiatrists contributing their personal stories to this book. And one of them, Mike Shuter, is, Is. Is someone I hold very dearly and. Oh, you know, actually, even just saying this to you, I feel quite, quite touched because we had the launch of this book at the Royal College a couple of months ago and, well, most of the authors came to it. Mike came to it and he gave me a big hug. Do you know, that hug has stayed with me. That's a precious. That's a precious hug. But the reason I value Mike's story, and it kind of illustrates all of them, is because when he was applying to the members of the Royal College to be our president, you know, he was on the campaign trail. He spoke about his own experience of depression, of suicidal thinking, of what he called the wasted years. And he's a. He was a child psychiatrist and, you know, he'd worked with a lot of very disadvantaged, very, very traumatized people and families. But in presenting himself to our profession as a for high office, he valued his own experience and put that in his submission to, you know, as someone to vote for. Now, I came across that written up in the British Medical Journal. He'd been interviewed by a journalist and he'd given this very personal account of his experience. I came across it at a time when I was very depressed myself. My life was. Was kind of in a bit of a mess. There were significant losses. I was feeling very lost and confused. I was feeling quite disqualified in terms of being a credible professional. And I read Mike's story and I thought, oh, my goodness, you know, you can be both. And he was elected by the members to be our president and it kind of was an affirmation that you can be a patient and a doctor, maybe, maybe not at the same point in time. Maybe you need to spend time as a patient and then come back to being a doctor. Maybe you can do both at the same time. Just depends on severity, doesn't it, and complexity. But it wasn't. One didn't disqualify the other. One didn't make you ashamed of being the other. And I was in that position myself. So I was very personally helped by Mike's personal story. And when I started to gather people for this book. He was the first person I approached, and I got in touch with him and I said, look, this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm proposing to do. What do you think? You know, would you be willing to contribute to it? And. And bless him? He said he'd be honored. And. And he wrote a compelling story about his own experience having a background in child psychiatry. He. He drew the illustrations for his own story because all the authors were invited to illustrate their own stories. He drew cartoons in the genre of the Beano comic to illustrate his own story. But it's a tender, poignant story. And for me, it still carries that sense of him being a kind of model, a mentor, an example of how you can be a highly credible, successful, compassionate practitioner. And you could have had really dreadful experiences, you know, you could have visited the, you know, the depths of the shadows of our human experience. So that, that story is. Is precious to me, but it's a bit of a model for all of them, really. Does that make sense?
- [47:29]
A
I love it. I. I think that what strikes me is that, yes, we. We can be the. The patient. You know, we can be the doctor. Sometimes there might be overlap there. Sometimes they might need to be kept, you know, separate in some sort of a way, but we're always human sort of thing is the real feeling that I get from that. And. And one of the things I love about the book is the beautiful illustrations. You know, the. I think this is the page. Is it me and Billy Wiz, Mike Shooter.
- [48:01]
C
That's the one. Yeah.
- [48:02]
A
Yeah, that's Mike for those of you watching. You can maybe see that. But lovely. Quite, quite sort of. What's the word? Evocative, I suppose. Drawings that he's done, the colors, the shapes and others have put in photos and there's. Yeah, there's lots of those really great elements that communicate the ideas, I think, in lots of different ways. And it speaks to that role modeling idea, you know, to hear. I mean, that that story is very moving and. And inspirational, really, that. That we can be both.
- [48:43]
C
Yes, well. And I mentioned earlier, didn't I, about how influenced I've been by the service. You're movement, Recovery movement. The testimony of personal experience from people that go through our services. And in a way, my connection with Mike's story connected me with my experience and opened the door for me in the context of my practice, to be more open and available with people using the service. So the line of dots for me, that kind of connect one thing to the Other. So I've walked that path that we've been talking about of having difficult personal experiences, meeting inspirational mentors, changing your kind of attitude to your own experience, becoming more comfortable with it, and then being open to the experience of others a bit more hospitably. I would say there's a sort of
- [49:35]
A
a D shaming almost, isn't there that.
- [49:38]
C
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
- [49:41]
A
For clinicians or therapists or practitioners or doctors, you know, that, that might be trying to find this balance between the professional and the personal and, and being, being the, the human in the chair type of, of thing. What, what would you, what, what feels important, you know, that, that they might keep in mind.
- [50:09]
C
I'd like to try and answer this very simply. And I think what's important to keep in mind in making this link between the person and the professional, realizing that we're talking about a relationship, we're talking a relationship within yourself, your relationship with your own experience, relationship between yourself, you and your co professionals, your peers, you in relationship with your patients, clients, and that maybe this, I would see it as a maturational process is best worked out in relationship and as a first step, welcome that, welcome that difficulty, welcome that possibility, relate to that opportunity with warmth and then maybe look up and see who around you might share that interest. And you know, our book is called Personally Speaking. Start talking personally, just tentatively, in a safe way. Start having chats about this. No big model, no big kind of qualification course. Just look for value, human connectiveness and see if you can warm something up, cultivate something and go slowly, take care for yourself. Don't take big risks, but take risks. Risks that will enable windows and doors to open, connections to be made, things to warm up, start growing.
- [52:13]
A
Well, yes, powerfully said Dr. Glenn Roberts. Well, I, yeah, it is a, it is a wonderful book. I, I thoroughly enjoyed it and, and I'll put links and everything to, you know, in the description and I would encourage people to, to absolutely check it out. But yes, also thank you for speaking with me on Compassion in a T shirt.
- [52:39]
C
Oh, thank you so much for inviting me and thank you for your relationship here today. This, this, this connection which, you know, I was a little concerned about. I didn't know where it was going to go and if I'll be able to be kind of succinct and coherent. But it's felt a good experience and I really thank you for that. Thank you.
- [53:02]
A
No, I appreciate. It was really, really wonderful. Thanks.