Jeanine Connor is interviewed by Dr Peter Blundell for the #TherapistsConnect Podcast

Therapists Connect Podcast – Episode with Jeanine Connor
In this compelling episode, Dr. Peter Blundell is joined by Jeanine Connor, MBACP, MSc, MEd, BSc (Hons)—a psychodynamic psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, prolific author, and editor with over 25 years of experience in the field.

Jeanine shares her unique journey through psychotherapy, publishing, and editorial work, offering sharp insights into the inner worlds of children and adolescents. With wit, warmth, and clarity, she reflects on her writing process, the challenges of working with Gen Z clients, and what therapists can learn from the raw, unfiltered language of young people.

Author of three acclaimed books—including You’re Not My F*cking Mother and Stop F*cking Nodding - Jeanine’s work challenges and inspires therapists to truly hear and understand the voices of youth. This is a powerful, thought-provoking conversation that will resonate with practitioners across modalities.

Jeanine's Links and socials 

New website:https://www.jeanineconnor.com/
LinkdIn:https://tinyurl.com/yp2n8kbz

#TherapistsConnect is a platform for connecting therapists.
Website: www.Therapists-Connect.com
Twitter: @Therapists_C
Instagram: @TherapistsConnect
Facebook: @TherConnect

Origins of #TherapistsConnect

Transcript

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And welcome to another episode of the Therapist Connect podcast. My name is Dr. Peter Blundell, and today I'm back interviewing therapists about their life and work. I'm delighted to be interviewing this month's guest, who is Janine Connor. Janine is a psychodynamic psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in private practice, a presenter and a workshop facilitator with 25 years therapeutic experience. She's the author of around 250 publications, including three books influenced by her work as a psychotherapist. They're called, 'You Are Not My Fucking Mother. And other things, gen Z say in therapy'. 'Stop Fucking Nodding and other things, 16 year olds say in therapy' and 'reflective practice in child and adolescent psychotherapy' as well as lots of articles, columns, blogs, reviews and resources. Janine is also the editor of the BACP, children, young People and Families Journal and reviews editor for BACP therapy today. So I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did recording it if you'd like to support the podcast, please leave a review on your favorite podcast platform as it really helps with our visibility.

Dr Peter Blundell 1:04

Janine, welcome to the Therapist Connect podcast. I feel like we've circled each other for quite a while, but haven't actually met before now. So it's nice to finally well meet you virtually.

Jeanine Connor 1:17

Yeah, it's lovely to be here. I feel the same way. I feel like I know you, but I don't,

Dr Peter Blundell 1:23

you know of me. See you moving and animated alive. Sometimes people freak out 'cause they can they know this room that I'm in 'cause they. They've seen it on like YouTube and stuff like that. Yeah. Obviously people can't see this, but it's got a lovely backdrop with plants and everything in the, in, in the backgrounds, which is really nice to look at. I'm a bit jealous of your space. I.

Jeanine Connor 1:44

Thank you. It's just a little cupboard full of greenery.

Dr Peter Blundell 1:47

It look, it looks, it doesn't look like a cupboard. It's nice. So I think a good way to, to get to know you a little bit better is to go through some of these questions then I suppose if you're okay to do that. Yep. So the one that I ask everybody who comes on the podcast is what brought you to be a therapist in the first place and brought you into this profession.

Jeanine Connor 2:06

Yeah. I am a big fan of your podcast, so I've listened to lots of your other guests talking about their great plans, about how they came to be a therapist. I never had a great plan. It all happened quite by chance with one thing naturally leading into the next. So my previous career was in teaching 16 to 19 year olds. And I found that a lot of the students. Wanted to confide in me and that my tutor slash pastoral role was almost important to them as my teaching role, if not more so for some of them. And I dunno how I was aware of this thinking back, but I was aware that I wasn't really equipped to help them with their personal stuff. I was just there to teach them. And that's really where I, that I. That seed was planted about wanting to, to help in a different way. And then over time in teaching, I became more and more disillusioned really, with the education system and teaching to the exam rather than helping students to learn how to think for themselves and those sorts of things. So I was open to the idea of doing something different and then. I've told this story before. It sounds very unbelievable, but I promise you it's true. I had a chance to encounter with a discarded newspaper on the tube. I was living in London. I just picked up this newspaper that had been left on the seat. I. And there was an article in there about the place to be, which was at the time, brand new charity. And I thought, oh yeah, that sounds quite good. So I wrote to them with an actual pen and paper. This was a long time ago, and they got back in touch with me. They invited me to go for an interview. They were just starting their counseling training courses, and that's where it began. I, I did a training with them. Worked as a counselor in schools, and I really got a thirst for the theory as well. I wanted to know more, and I was working in primary schools with place to be, and I missed the teenagers. I missed the adolescents, and so I spent a long time looking for a course that felt like the right fit, and eventually I found. What felt like the right outfit, which was the psychodynamic adolescent training at Beck, and that's when I trained to be a therapist.

Dr Peter Blundell 4:37

Fantastic. It sounds a lot of the students who come on the courses that I teach on come after already having a career somewhere else. Teachers, social workers, nurses, things like that. And I think that used to be a lot more common. I think with training to be a therapist. People had usually done some other kind of career first, I think.

Jeanine Connor 4:54

Yeah. I think so, and I think that's a good thing because we bring a lot of those skills with us and the experiences of life of being a bit older and having a previous career, and there's a huge overlap, I think between those that you just mentioned there. Teaching, nursing counseling, therapy, there, there's a lot of overlap between those things.

Dr Peter Blundell 5:15

So you did your initial training qualified. Can you tell us a little bit about your career then so far since then?

Jeanine Connor 5:22

Yeah, I was trying to formulate my career because I knew you were gonna ask me about this, and I think there's probably four main strands to my career. If I try and break it down, there's the therapy and supervision. The editing and some journal writing, the presenting, and then my books that I see as separate. Again, there hasn't been a plan. They're all interwoven and one thing's led on to another. So when I was first teaching, I was teaching Anatomy of Physiology and there weren't any books that felt like the right pitch for the students that I was working with. They were either way too detailed, aimed at medical students, or they were really basic aimed at. Sort of children. And so I thought I'll write one. So I wrote a book and anatomy in physiology for therapists, which was not. Psychotherapist, it was body therapists and that was my first foray into branching out, into published work really. And around that time there was an opening in the college where I worked to do some cover teaching in a level psychology and the head of available news that I had a degree in psychology, which I'd done out of interest, not out of career progression. So I started covering the A level psychology classes and ended up. Teaching that full time. And that's when I did my therapy training and started writing psychology resources again for the same reason, just because I needed them to do my teaching job. And then so at that time, that's when I started doing my therapy training and my. Therapy placement was, I was really lucky. I got a placement in a CAMHs clinic and it was a baptism of fire, but I learned so so much from that experience. Working with a multidisciplinary team, working in the community and in mental health settings, mostly with, again, adolescents with really complex needs. And I stayed in CAMHs for 11 years. While at the same time tentatively starting a private practice about halfway through that time. And then again, as with the education system became quite disillusioned with the NHS and about, I don't even know how long, about six years ago perhaps, I left CAMHs and I've been working completely. Freelance and in private practice since then. And I've since completed my supervision training and I supervise as well as offering therapy.

Dr Peter Blundell 8:14

Wow. I feel like there's loads of different organizations that you worked in. I'm just imagining you said you became disillusioned with quite a few of those, so imagine like the systems that were in place were not conducive to the work you were trying to do.

Jeanine Connor 8:30

Exactly that. Yeah. And when I first worked with CAMHs, as I said, it felt like such a privilege to, to work there and to work within the NHS. But over that period of time I worked through, I think, three lots of restructuring where I, three times had to reapply for my job and. You're, you are competing against your peers, your colleagues that you've been working with, and I was successful each time, but each time there was a restructure, it seemed to shrink the service for me and I didn't feel like I was working in the way that I had been trained and working in the way that I wanted to work with young people. And I, yeah, I couldn't do it. I it didn't feel true. I wasn't being true to myself and what I wanted to offer, and that's why I left. It was a hard decision.

Dr Peter Blundell 9:22

It's, it almost sounds like being squeezed out of the service.

Jeanine Connor 9:26

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it, the service has diminished hugely over the years.

Dr Peter Blundell 9:32

I think that's really sad to hear that, and I wonder whether that's why a lot of people work in private practice, actually maybe have experiences like that. And then you haven't talked much, you talked a little bit about getting into your writing career, but you haven't spoken much about your your other books that you've written.

Jeanine Connor 9:48

Yeah, so the writing, as it, as I said, Bob bubbled along alongside and I the way that I got into writing therapy type stuff was when I was a trainee, I answered a shout out in therapy today. I'm smiling because I know I'm the person doing those shout outs for people to do book reviews. And I thought, great. I can get free books and I can write what I think of them and get that in print. So that's how it started. And I was invited to write a regular column then in I had one in Therapy today and one in the BACP Children in Young People Journal. And I wrote occasional articles as well. When I left CAMHs, I had much more kind of head space, and it was a, it was at that time that I thought, maybe I can turn this into a book, because articles and columns are very short. So they're anywhere between sort of a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand words. And I had loads left over in my head. So my first book, which was. With Routledge reflective practice in child and adolescent psychotherapy was all the stuff that was left over in my head that I just needed to get out. And also at that time, coincidentally, the editor of the Children and Young People Journal was retiring and suggested that I apply for the job. I thought, I didn't think I could do it. I didn't think I wanted it though. It was so not on my radar. And I, the reason I applied is because. Again, this sounds a bit odd saying it out loud. I thought it would be really good to go to BACP house 'cause I'd never been there and meet all of these people whose names I knew, but I'd never met a bit like meeting you today. So I, I treated it like a bit of a day out. And because of that I wasn't nervous and normally I get really nervous about things and. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I got offered the job and so I've been editing that journal now, six years in January, 2025. And since then have also written two more books.

Dr Peter Blundell 12:07

That's amazing. And I love the fact that you were so relaxed because you were I don't think I'm gonna get this. So it took the pressure off almost

Jeanine Connor 12:13

totally. I didn't want to get it. It was not only that, I didn't think I would, I didn't want to I couldn't imagine myself doing that job at all.

Dr Peter Blundell 12:22

So that's been interesting. And then so did you feel like the. Books came from that? Or are they separate in terms of the themes and stuff that have come out in your other books?

Jeanine Connor 12:33

Yeah. You're probably picking up on the fact that my kind of, my passion lies with adolescents. And I really love writing and. The book, my first book with PCCS, which is, stop Fucking Nodding, another thing, 16 year olds saying Therapy. That was an homage to all the 16 year olds that I'd ever worked with, and when I, even now still, when I talk to people and say, that's an age group that I really enjoy. If people don't work with that age group, they often say things like, oh my God, that they're so adolescents are so scary, or they're so challenging or such hard work, and I wanted to show No, they're not. They're really not. They're great fun and yeah, it can be a challenge to do the work, but they just wanna be listened to and understood and we can do that. And this is how I do it. And then the next one, the one that came out in April this year, which is called You're Not My Fucking Mother, and other things, gen Z Say in Therapy was a continuation of. Of that series really. So widening the age range up to late twenties young adults, and I wanted to focus there on some of the contemporary issues that, again, people of my generation, I. Gen X and older boomers, things that don't come naturally to us. So things like internet, dating, social media, all the stuff that is commonplace for young adults and adolescents, and weave it into the stories, the therapeutic stories to help people to understand that a bit better.

Dr Peter Blundell 14:25

Do you have more books planned then? You might not be able to tell me about that. There might be secret books.

Jeanine Connor 14:30

There's no secret deal happened, but there's lots of things ruminating in my mind. Lots of ideas forming, but yeah,

Dr Peter Blundell 14:39

And how does a book come about then? Does it, is it right this is an idea and then it builds on that? Or have you got a kind of, oh, this has to be written,

Jeanine Connor 14:48

I think with each of those three therapy books, I had a slightly different intention with each of them. They all felt like I had to write them. They all felt like, when I say had to, that feels like it was pressure. It wasn't pressure. It feels like a real luxury for me to be able to sit and write. I really enjoy that. Yeah, I always have more to say. I'm picking up ideas all the time and being inspired by people and experiences all the time. And I, that's my way of processing it for myself. I think I've always found writing a really good way to process. When I was a student, I used to write copious amounts of therapy notes from sessions which really helps me to understand it, and I hope that. When people read my books, it helps them as well, particularly. Less experienced and newly qualified therapists

Dr Peter Blundell 15:42

and parents. I think people don't talk about that enough in terms of the, I suppose the therapeutic process of writing, but also that way of figuring things out. I did an interview with Linda Finlay and she was, I was like, you know what motivates you? And she's I'm writing to try and figure out and understand the top the topic. Not necessarily 'cause I know everything on it, but I'm actually trying to explore it and then I can write about or write about it.

Jeanine Connor 16:05

Absolutely. Absolutely. And the way that I've written in these two books, nodding and Mothers, is that they're pretty much books of short stories. And so each chapter is about a different character and they've come to life on the page as I write them. The way that a client comes to life in the room, that's been quite a. An interesting process as well. When we get a new referral for somebody, there might be the presenting issue is X, nine times out of 10 that's not what they've come to talk about really. And the same thing happens when I'm writing a character. I might think, oh, I'm gonna write about somebody who. Is having trouble with dating and I start writing and they just grow and become something else. And I don't know where that comes from, somewhere in my deep unconscious imagination. But it is fun. It's fun to write.

Dr Peter Blundell 16:57

How do you define your therapeutic approach and has that changed over the time you've been working?

Jeanine Connor 17:03

Funny you should ask me that. My, my core training was psychodynamic and I think that I. I know that I am still very committed to that approach and I know that's, I think it's quite unusual now, and I often find myself as being the lone, purely psychodynamic person in a group. I think I. I dunno if there's been a shift in the training that's offered or just what appeals, but I speak to more people who are either integrative or holistic or person centered. But yeah, I do remain committed to that approach. I think I'm not. I'm certainly not blank slate, psychodynamic. And anybody who's ever seen me or met me will know that my face is very expressive. My language is very expressive, but I do sit at the non-disclosure end of the disclosure scale. I think I share my personality, but not my personal stuff, information. And I absolutely believe in the. The power of the unconscious mind, and I think it, it really motivates everything that, that we do. It makes sense to me and it makes sense to me that our earliest experiences that we perhaps can't remember, and I'm putting remember in quotation marks, they. Must affect us. They must be part of who we are. I don't think they cannot affect us. They get remembered somewhere in our minds and somewhere in our bodies. And I think helping people to access those things can really help them to understand their current difficulties and behaviors and make the changes that they come to therapy to chain to make.

Dr Peter Blundell 18:50

I'm really interested 'cause I consider myself person centered and not integrative despite many years doing all the kinds of training. So I am interested in you sticking with your modality and not being, I dunno, sometimes it feels like there's a pressure to be integrative or to move or to shift away from your approach, I think, and I just, I find that interesting that you've actually remained with yours.

Jeanine Connor 19:17

Yeah I sense that too, and I, and have been challenged on my modality and why I just stick with that one thing, but it works for me. And having said that the thing, the most important thing I think other than modality is. The relationship. And that's true across the board and all the evidence backs. It doesn't it that no matter what our qualifications or training or therapeutic approach, it's the relationship that matters. And if we are a good fit with our client, then it's gonna work. And if we're not, it's not. But I think having a really sound robust core. To our training is really important, whether that's single modality or more holistic.

Dr Peter Blundell 20:05

Do you see the wider therapy community and how connected do you feel to other therapists?

Jeanine Connor 20:12

As an independent therapist working totally in private practice and an author and editor sitting in my plant field cupboard. As you can now see, the temptation is to say not very connected at all, but I think that has changed recently. Obviously in part thanks to you and Caz and the wonderful therapist connect which has been a great way to link people up. When did that, was that during Covid that you started?

Dr Peter Blundell 20:41

It was, yeah. So it was started like January, 2020, and then obviously as the, that a pandemic hits that's when it Yeah. Develops even further. Yeah.

Jeanine Connor 20:51

It's crazy. It's like it's always been there. It's automatic hashtag therapist connect. That no, that has been really, and still is really great. And social media. I'm not particularly tech savvy, but I am making more of an effort to post on LinkedIn and I like LinkedIn much better than I liked. Twitter XI think it's a much, in my experience, a much friendlier and more supportive space and I have made genuine connections with people on there, either people who I've approached and invited them to write something for the journal or people who've approached me and invited me to present at their events. So that's been really good. Going to events obviously is a really nice way to meet people. In real life usually in the in-between sessions, over lunch or coffee and have a chat and meet people. So yeah, I think connected enough with what's going on out there. Yeah. And I suppose as well, if you an independent practitioner, I know you've got connections maybe through the BACP and the journals and stuff like that, but I imagine it can still be quite an isolating experience being a research, not researcher, sorry, a practitioner on your own. Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I, one of the things that I really enjoyed when I worked in CAMHs, for example, was the kitchen conversations. Coming out of a session that might have been really tough, challenging, and just going into the kitchen, putting the kettle on, and there being somebody else there to go, oh my God, I've just had this session and I dunno what happened, or I dunno if I said the right thing. And when you're in private practice. There's nobody, you're there. I have supervision a couple of times a month, but I would love to be able to just chat it out as and when it happens. So yeah, I do miss that. But there's a lot of benefits as well to working in private practice. Yeah.

Dr Peter Blundell 22:49

What do you think is the biggest challenge the counseling and psychotherapy professions face right now?

Jeanine Connor 22:56

I think at the moment there's a lot of discourse that is dividing the profession, and I could go on and on, but I think two of the big ones, one is the discussion around SCoPEd. I think there is a really great need to regulate our profession. And hold us all to account, but I don't personally think that is the right way of doing it, and I think that's causing quite a divide in people who are pro and anti or even not so sure. And I think another area of challenge and division is the discourse around how we support LGBT. Clients, and I think especially t, especially transgender, and the challenge for me personally has been how to use the platforms that I'm privileged to have through the journals, through my online presence in a way to. Help those conversations to encourage people to really think about the language and the discourse that they're using in a more inclusive and respectful way. And, it is really tricky. It is. It's something that I feel very strongly about, but by putting my head above the parapet, I have also then been at, on the receiving end of some not very nice comments about my allyship, let's say. Which has been really challenging. And the fact that, conversion therapy still hasn't been banned. I think that's horrendous. How can we live in a time where that's. Going on and linked with that in terms of marginalization, I think the effect of misogynistic media and violence on women and girls and how that gets brought into the therapy room and how we manage those sorts of things. I, I think there's a lot of not very nice things going on in the world at the moment and. We have to be in touch with that as therapists. And that's part of what the themes in the book were about what's going on out there and how does that get brought in here and what can we do about it. So yeah, I think they're the big challenges.

Dr Peter Blundell 25:31

Three huge challenges there. And I think just echoing some of what you said around trans rights and the challenges, and I've spoken about this on the podcast before, the difficulties we've had within the community in terms of. The language therapist use and the way they express themselves around topics that aren't necessarily related to them. Yeah. They don't have any lived experience of, yeah. And I just think, yeah, it's really important that people are actually mindful about how they talk about other people's lived experience and, challenging our own prejudicial and bias views that all of us hold on some level for all different topics.

Jeanine Connor 26:10

Yeah, sure. I I was one of the presenters at an event at Metanoia recently, which was about working therapeutically with transgender clients, and it was such a fabulous. Event. 50% of the presenters were transgender. The two moderators, one was cisgender, one was transgender, and then there was such great representation and everybody who was invited to present had a, had an interest in being there. A personal and a professional interest in being there. And it, it was so nice. It was sold out event. It was so nice to be in a room where people were. We're really wanting to do the right thing and have conversations about how can I do better? And we can all do better. I can do better. But to be open to having those conversations with each other,

Dr Peter Blundell 27:01

And I'm really glad that was a supportive space.

Jeanine Connor 27:04

Yeah, it was. And

Dr Peter Blundell 27:05

okay, so that's the end of my questions apart from my very last one, which is what are your future plans? I haven't got it out of you. What your next book might be,

Jeanine Connor 27:16

because I don't know, Pete,

Dr Peter Blundell 27:18

then you unconscious somewhere.

Jeanine Connor 27:21

Yeah, I'm still digging for it. More of the same. I think I, already getting some bookings of events for 2025. I've got one for each of the first three months of the year so far, which I'm really looking forward to working some with some different organizations that I haven't worked with before, as well as presenting again at the BACP Children and Young People Conference in March. Yeah. And find some time to write the next book.

Dr Peter Blundell 27:53

Yeah. It's exciting. Yeah. Janine, you've been a fantastic guest on the podcast. Thank you so much. And we will make sure that we put all of your links and links to the books and everything in the show notes for people who wanna find out more about you and read some of your work.

Jeanine Connor 28:06

Thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. You're

Dr Peter Blundell 28:09

very welcome. Take care.