
The #TherapistsConnect Podcast
The #TherapistsConnect Podcast
Dr Cheryl Fuller
This week Dr Peter Blundell interviews Jungian Psychotherapist - Dr Cheryl Fuller. Cheryl lives and works on the coast of Maine, USA. Cheryl is passionately interested in depth psychology, psychotherapy, feminism, fat studies. Her areas of interest are weight, eating, and body image issues, all from a fat positive approach. Another special interest she has is psychotherapy focusing on issues of chronic illness, aging and finding purpose in later life. Her website is - https://jung-at-heart.com/
Cheryl has written a book called The Fat Lady Sings. "In the analytic encounter, body meets body, yet rarely is body mentioned. Without a body, we become like the nymph Echo, a disembodied voice condemned to echo what she hears. Rooted in analytical psychology, The Fat Lady Sings challenges the notion that the fat patient must change to fit into a thin world".
Cheryl has written an episode by episode Blog of HBO's - In Treatment - can be found here - https://jung-at-heart.com/hbos-in-treatment1/
If you want the recipe for her Chinese Steamed Bun, you may need to wait until she finds it first!
#TherapistsConnect is a platform for connecting therapists.
Website: www.Therapists-Connect.com
Twitter: @Therapists_C
Instagram: @TherapistsConnect
Facebook: @TherConnect
Origins of #TherapistsConnect
Hello, my name is Peter Blundell and you're listening to the Therapist Connect podcast. Today I'm interviewing Jungian psychotherapist Cheryl Fuller. And she lives and works in Maine in America, and we connected initially on Twitter through the Therapist Connect hashtag. And Cheryl is interested in depth psychology, psychotherapy, feminism and fat studies. And she's even a written a book on fat studies called the fat lady sings, and which brings in both some personal experiences, critique of psychoanalytic theory, and the treatment of fatness by the wider therapist community. It's lovely to meet you properly.
Cheryl Fuller :Yes. Indeed.
Peter Blundell :We've had a few conversations on Twitter and a few retweets and I thought it'd be really interesting. Somebody's self living in Maine USA, which is further away than most of the therapists some I'm talking to on Twitter, right? They usually UK based so a very different perspective I think to hit from yourself. Great.
Cheryl Fuller :The end of the world and I'm way past training.
Peter Blundell :So, how did you come to be a therapist and and and whatbrought you into the profession?
Cheryl Fuller :Well, there's two, two explanations once I started out college as a physics major,
Peter Blundell :oh,
Cheryl Fuller :and was utterly and completely defeated by calculus. I had only two ways to go, you know, without having to backtrack and pick up more courses. When I was an undergraduate at Duke University, and so, the two majors I could switch to easily were religion, or psychology and I couldn't imagine what I could do with a religion major so I chaged to psych. The other piece of it is my mother was well, my mother was crazy not in the quirky eccentric sense but diagnoseable and that's certainly a breeding ground for therapists
Peter Blundell :so there's two kind of different motivations like
Cheryl Fuller :Yeah, they were both parties led you down this path.
Peter Blundell :So can you tell us a little bit about your career so far then since you did your initial training and and where you've been and what you've what you've done since then,
Cheryl Fuller :um, I started graduate school at the University of Connecticut right after I graduated from college in 1968. I hated the programme. It was a clinical psych programme, which I left all but dissertation because they really didn't want us to become therapists they want us to become academicians. And, or I can think of is they put up conceptual leaders and I couldn't think of any concepts that I wanted to lead around so fast? And I became I had done my, we had to do both a master's thesis and a dissertation. So I left after having completed my thesis, which had been a community mental health centre, a community mental health project. So, I got a job with my husband, then husband and I moved to Maine in 1972. And I had a job through the mental health centre, designed and directed a therapeutic nursery programme for very young children and then in my career was going right along with Reagan who was closing down community mental health centres. Yeah. It's just like there's no requirement unless you're in an analytic training programme to have personal therapy, which I think is criminal.
Peter Blundell :Yeah. And I think you know, again, Well, again, supervision and personal therapy is absolutely key for any therapist throughout their career. Really
Cheryl Fuller :I hit my 30s I'd had my kids, I hit my 30s. And I had to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. So I decided I wanted a private practice. So that's what I started doing. The clinical psychology in America is the APA is a guild has a guild function. And so I didn't want to go back to an APA approved programme because I'd have to start all over again, though I had experience and had already done all the coursework, so I wasn't sure what to do. So I was really doing independent study of my own. And I would pick up a book on something psychodynamic or psychoanalytic or Jungian and I would read it and then I go to the bibliography and go through and find what I wanted to read. My analyst once told me I had read more in the field than anybody he knew. And I began a personal Jungian analysis and I got lots of supervision. And so I've been in private practice now since 1975. And I've just finished all 25 year long personal analysis, just because I don't like to do things quickly. I went back to school in 1999, there's a, I had two or three places in the world where I could get a degree in Jungian studies without having to backtrack and do all that stuff. Onev was Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, the other was the University of Essex in the UK, and the third was the Jungian Institute. So I did that because it was a low residency programme. And I could do the, my goal was, I wanted to do a dissertation that was a piece of good writing. I was not interested i n learning anything. When I was in graduate school before, mostly what we studied was college sophomores. I was, I figured that the body of information about college sophomores was as complete as it was ever going to be. So I went back to school got my doctorate in Jungian studies, which I did not so that I knew it wasn't going to change how I practice, but it would make getting published easier, and I would have completed something that I started. My family has a long history of not finishing things. So I it was important to me to finish and so I finished in 2004, and have continued since I wrote a book, in fat studies and published in 2016.
Peter Blundell :Fantastic. So I'm really interested in the fact that you spent 25 years doing personal analysis.
Cheryl Fuller :I always have to say it was in two chunks. Okay, it was 11 years. And then I left. And six years later came back and I just finished a month ago.
Peter Blundell :Okay, wow. And so what was that, like kind of reflecting back on on that now?
Cheryl Fuller :Well, it certainly changed my life. And I have a complicated family that my brother's 12 and 13 years older than I am. So I always thought of myself as an only child with brothers. Within my family. It's like two separate families all together. Dad was in the army when I was growing up. He was not when my brothers were growing up, it gave me space to deal with a lot of family stuff. My mother died during that time period. And my father did. And I got a divorce from my first husband, which to quote my analyst, although I'll clean up the language, he thought it was effing amazing that I ever left him and and that enabled me you know, I was I was single then for seven In years, and when I remarried is a much better marriage. I'm much happier. That's certainly an outgrowth of analysis. I'm much more relaxed. I'm not as anxious. Well, I didn't even know I was anxious when I started.
Peter Blundell :I mean, I think therapists we all have that element of wishing to do a self exploration and look beyond that. But I think that commitment to that as a as a project towards yourself is quite amazing. Really. It's quite fantastic.
Cheryl Fuller :Well I was the Woody Allen of my world of it was it was very fruitful. He just retired. I'm not sure if we would have ended. My ex husband said he was when I told him I was leaving analysis. He said I he said, Oh, I figured one of you would have to die first.
Peter Blundell :It was the only way it was gonna stop.
Cheryl Fuller :Yeah So we didn't die. But it was it was an extremely fruitful I'm not sure I would have written my book Have I not done that work? Certainly made me a better therapist, and just all around. It's made my life immensely better.
Peter Blundell :Yeah, it sounds it sounds like it's something that you've really had a lot of passion for and really enjoyed doing.
Cheryl Fuller :Oh, yeah. Yeah, for as long as I can remember having known anything about therapy, I've been drawn to psychodynamic psychoanalytic approaches and depth approach really appeals to me. And so I certainly know the principles of CBT. I know how to do that. I don't want to do that. I started out working with young children and their parents, working with little kids. And as soon as I had once I had my kids, I didn't want to do that anymore. It was too much Im not a true believer Union. I'm sort of an amalgam of, I guess, object relations and analytical and Jungian analytical psychology. I like the Jungian approach, because it's not pathologizing Yeah, yes, it's looking at what things mean. Not how sick are you? And that really shapes my practice a lot. I love dreams. So that's really where I look. I call myself Jungian, but I don't know any really good Jungian, who's a pure Jungian and there is no pure types. So we, I'll tell you something that has struck me as, as kind of amusing. When I was training and when I was learning things, we talked about Rogerian approaches not Person Centred.
Peter Blundell :Yeah.
Cheryl Fuller :So when I first heard the term person centred, I thought, well, unless you're a vent veterinary therapist, we're all persons centred. So I had to look it up and see. Most of what I know here is that that approach is in educational psych. So it's not been I mean, I know what I learned about it , I read. But that's that was different for me. If you could drop in and watch any hour therapy, our except probably for the most hardcore cognitive behavioural stuff, it all looks the same. It's just you know what journal you're going to publish it that's the language that you use.
Peter Blundell :Cheryl, what advice would you give to somebody who is thinking about entering the profession right now in this day and age
Cheryl Fuller :in the US I'd say steer as clear as possible, if you can, which is hard when you starting out from the whole third party reimbursement stuff because I was at a wonderful workshop years ago. Fred Clought, who was one of the early Jungians practising in London said he reminded us that he who pays the piper picks the tune. So if you want to have the agreement between you and your patient be between you and your patient, then it has to be clean. It's not clean if there's a third party involved. And that's very hard and people think, Oh, no, nobody, well, that means you aren't going to get huge, you know, really high fees, which make a decent living that way. So that's one part and, and I I know that at the beginning, people get wedded to whatever approach that they have embraced, but I and I urge people to spread out as much as possible to expose yourself as widely as possible and for God's sakes, hire a supervisor. You're working in a clinic that's not supervision that you're lucky if it is good supervision for supervision from the best therapist you can find,
Peter Blundell :but we're just picking up on your point there in terms of supervision. And I think that is that is even valid within the UK as well. Sure, you know, wherever you're working, of course you will have supervision and people support you within an organisation. But to have somebody independent away from that is really is very, very important, I think. Yeah,
Cheryl Fuller :absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, just what I've done all I mean, I have somebody I call on even now, from time to time.
Peter Blundell :What do you think of the rewards and the challenges that you've had? Being a therapist over the over the course of your career? I
Cheryl Fuller :can't imagine choosing to be anything else. I really feel like this is what I was meant to do. I experienced it as a calling. When people asked me about, about, about why I'm a therapist, the most basic thing is I'm nosy. I like hearing about people's lives. I think it's and then on a deeper level, I think it's a real privilege to sit with another person as they explore the issues and experiences of their own lives and where they want to go. And I think that's an incredible privilege. You know, that we're all storytellers. And I blessed to be a part of those stories.
Peter Blundell :Couldn't agree more with that. And I think that's one of the privileges isn't it of being that therapist is actually been able to sit with someone and share to some degree, their experience and understand where they're coming from? Yeah.
Cheryl Fuller :Raffia Lopez Pedraza, who was another Jungian I think he was from Argentina. He talked about how being an analyst he he got to learn, okay, like when he was working, he was working with someone who was in business. And along the way he learns about business. You know, it's like you have to learn the language, that the person that you're working with speaks in their everyday life, which I also think is quite wonderful.
Peter Blundell :For myself, I work in private practice as well. And so the variety of people that you see is quite amazing. Really? Yeah. So one of the things I found was particularly around the Therapist Connect hashtag was just how many people got involved with it really from all around the world, which was just amazing. And I just wondered what your experience of it was, and also kind of social media in general, really, for therapists.
Cheryl Fuller :Well, I live in a small town on the coast of Maine, which is a small state. They're only a million and a half people, the whole state. And so already as a union, if I depended just on my community, I wouldn't have a practice. So I've had to extend my reach out anyway. It's very hard for your professional group., grouping to satisfy the needs for connection And for me, I'm for so I'm quite introverted. And so for me when social media came along, you know, it's like an introverts paradise. Well, I thought if I could live my and when it was just text, I thought I could live my life in text. Perfect. So for me, it has expanded my world considerably. And I like that. I have found Martha Crawford who saw Twitter as shrink thinks I encountered her a couple of years ago, we've had some love. She and another therapist, too, sadly, is now dead. The three of us on Saturday mornings used to have these rather long Twitter discussions about stuff because there's not a lot of opportunity to do that. It's not cocktail party chatter, you know, it doesn't work that way. And I know for me, I feel disconnected from a lot of what is going on in the therapy world in this country, or they're more concerned about HIPAA rules and kind of, you know, what's, what certification do you have in this or that then how to do the work, actually doing the work. So it's allowed me to connect with people who think about the things that I think about. Yeah, I met I think I mentioned to you in one of the emails we exchanged, I've been part of a peer supervision group. We do have an analyst who works with us, and we've been going for nine years now, nine years this month. And I'm a member of the group died on the weekend. And so the remainder of us divided up his his caseload made the calls to his patients to tell them that he had died. That's been the most meaningful that group has been the most meaningful thing for me in terms of connecting with other therapists. Because we're all the analysts and I are the same age the others are 10/15 years younger, and so not quite as experienced, but we're all experienced therapist, and it's a place to be with each other. It's not like a personal growth group. We don't talk much about personal stuff, except that the personal and the professional of course overlap and, and outside of social media, that's where I saw that.
Peter Blundell :Yeah. And and it sounds I mean, to have a attended group like that for such a long period of time, you must know each other extremely well. So I imagine losing that colleague and friend of yours must have been kind of uh, oh, yeah, I shock and, you know,
Cheryl Fuller :he died of a heart attack on Saturday afternoon and So I wake up Sunday morning to a text from one of the other members saying he had died. And then I had eight people to call and deliver bad news, which is, it's the worst thing I can think of to have to do, because we don't have to do those kinds of things. Yeah.
Peter Blundell :Yeah.
Cheryl Fuller :And it was a . It was a mitzvah to do that. It was a blessing.
Peter Blundell :Yeah. And I think it's sometimes something maybe we don't think about as therapists as well, actually. It's not as what happens after we're gone.
Cheryl Fuller :And who are you going to ask to be to call you? Because this is not your spouse can't do that. That
Peter Blundell :No,
Cheryl Fuller :too much of a burden.
Peter Blundell :Yeah. So I suppose you've got those connections through the groups that you attend, and also then in social media, how do you what what are your thoughts about the wider therapists community than in general? Do you have any thoughts on that or
Cheryl Fuller :I think Facebook is a terrible place to connect to other therapists. I think Facebook, I'm on Facebook, mostly to keep track of my children. And because there's a really good group for the town I live in that's much better than the small weekly paper. And it's a place so I can I use to promote my practice. So other than that, I don't have much use for it. But interestingly enough, I find Twitter a much more rewarding place to participate. I agree. And, and, and that's, I mean, I think that's incredibly valuable. I think it's just difficult climate. I know it's this is a weird climate there. Lots of pressures on those of us who are therapists who are not psychiatrists to yield to them. I mean, when when I started out, I moved to Maine. Two years after that, a year and a half after the first licencing for psychologists, social workers couldn't practice independently, counsellors, couldn't nurses couldn't. So psychologists were the first group after physicians and the psychiatrists opposed every single added licence category, everyone, and that's a guild function.
Peter Blundell :makes you think about the idea of power. Doesn't it? Who has the power and who doesn't?
Cheryl Fuller :Yeah, absolutely. And I mean that I see that cropping up on Twitter, also psychiatrists going after the virtues of the medical model, which was already questionable, a zillion years ago when I first started grad school. So you know that so there's that but at least with Twitter, you can connect with other people. And it's almost, I think, unless you're in one of the really large metropolitan areas. I have. I have some friends, a friend who's an analyst in New York. Of course, there are so many analytic institutes in New York, that you know, she doesn't have to go far. To find another one, um, Michael Eigen who's a psychoanalyst, lovely writer. He has. He's been running a study group, kind of for a long time through Google Groups. And out of that has sprung another group just looking at his book. He's written about 25 books. He's a really interesting and lovely character. That other than that, it's I'm hard pressed to think of things like that. I know. Donald Carver, who's a psychoanalyst in Toronto has YouTube, a long YouTube series, but how are we gonna find each other if we are in private practice? We're not talking to
Peter Blundell :absolute like, and I think I think you'd be surprised that I think even in the UK, it's like that, you know, most of the training is in London and the biggest cities and actually if you live further out, then actually it's a it's extremely difficult. Yeah, absolute like, I suppose the only thing I suppose recently is fact very fact that actually online training has just kind of become so huge. Even within the last few weeks,
Cheryl Fuller :I've been working online for a long time. I left Maine for four years, I moved out to Michigan to be with my husband. We had married and when I moved, and I wasn't, and I was in school, I was in the Graduate Programme. I didn't know what to do in my innocence. So take your practice with you. Oh, I got it. You can do that by phone prior to them and the ones who want to look at and they did. And so then when Skype and FaceTime became available, so two thirds of my practice has been online now for 20 years. So it feels normal to me. I'm kind of amused that people who are paying lots of money for training into therapy online, it's not that different. Um, but so I think That's an incredible right now I have, in my case, little people in Canada, in other states and one in Australia. And I have worked with people in Belgium, and the UK. And it's not because there aren't therapists where they live, it's that that they want the convenience of not having to drive somewhere and find a parking space. You know, all that. Yeah.
Peter Blundell :And I think the other thing is, as well we're working online is that, you know, if you only in your local area, then you're you're limited to who's there whereas now you've got the whole world if you want.
Cheryl Fuller :Like I said, if I was limited to 25 miles of Belfast, I'd be in big trouble. Yeah.
Peter Blundell :Fantastic. So i notice as well, that you've got a blog that you write, and I was just wondering how, how you got started with that and also kind of how does your writing fit in with your practice or your role as a therapist
Cheryl Fuller :as I started the blog, In 2007, partly I've been a writer for a long time, but I hadn't published. And I was a shy writer. And so that was a way of for me to write, to express myself in writing, and have it available to other people to read it. But I they weren't just my friends. When the HBO show In Treatment came along. I blogged every episode.
Peter Blundell :I've seen it, I've seen it on your blog, I was quite impressed. And
Cheryl Fuller :I still get people contacting me because for a while I knew where when it was showing and what country. And that was fun. It was real. I loved it. And it turned out to be a good way to attract people to my practice. And based on what I see is I don't I don't disclose a whole lot about myself no more than I would to patients. Anyway. But it enables people to know who I am before they contact me because I write pretty much the way I talk. And, and it lets me express my own ideas and thoughts and enthusiasms about this work. When I first started it, it had three parts. There was what you see now, I also had a whole bunch, I'm an avid knitter. And so I posted about knitting. And I had a section with recipes that I still have people asking me about the recipes because you know, nothing ever goes away of it. That's fun,
Peter Blundell :What was your most popular recipe?
Cheryl Fuller :It's a recipe for a Chinese steamed bun. It wasn't mine. It was just one that I made. And chicken pepper cash.
Peter Blundell :You get lots of requests for that. Now that we've put it in.
Cheryl Fuller :I'm gonna have to find it. But that so it's that it's that a venue for me to, again, because I'm an introvert, it's a way for me to express myself. And there have been times when I got when I couldn't think of things to write or I didn't want to write. So there are gaps in it. But when I, I had it redesigned in December, and since then I've made the effort to post at least twice a week. I'm working on something now of this. I think one of the terrible things in this whole COVID-19 thing is this an exacerbation of the split between millennials and baby boomers. You know, this whole idea that it's okay that older people are more vulnerable, we could just let them I mean, it's quite appalling. And so I'm working on a piece for that, but it's taking a while to put it together.
Peter Blundell :No, I think that's a really interesting point. And one of the lines I've highlighted this I sent this to you before we met but I really really liked this because it was about self help books I'm gonna read out. And I'm never entirely happy with self help books in order to appeal to a large audience. In my view, they lose bytes in favour of what is palatable, unlikely to engage masses of readers, rather the same way that food from Taco Bell is suggestive of Mexican food, but lacks the complexity and range of real Mexican food. I loved that line. What did what did what prompted you to write that about self help books?
Cheryl Fuller :Um, I have a certain scepticism about self help books because in order to be successful, self help book has to promise more than it can deliver. Because otherwise the market for self help would dry up.No, it has to because it can't know those books. Can't Deliver people are looking for, that sends them looking for more of them. Although they they're not without value or certainly but it's shallow, like a book that a book, or ideas that that take you deeper tend not to sell off or or demand more than people want to give.
Peter Blundell :It's like that promise of something, isn't it? And what can I just say? How, how easy is it to achieve that just by reading a book, say for example?
Cheryl Fuller :Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah,
Peter Blundell :no, I got totally understand that. Talking about books, you've written your own book
Cheryl Fuller :I did,
Peter Blundell :called the fat lady sings. I have downloaded a copy, but I haven't managed to read it yet. So you may have aware of this a few days a few days ago before we spoke. Could you tell the listeners then what it's about what inspired you to write it?
Cheryl Fuller :Well, I'm not going to describe it as a weight problem because it's only a problem if you think it is but I have been a fat person since I was a child, that means I have contended all my life over much less so now with the biases and issues that flow from that. So it started really out of an argument with my analyst who he used to dream of mine in an article he wrote, which was fine, I gave him my permission. But when he showed me the finished article, there was a line in it that I that really annoyed me. No, that's too mild. It enraged. He said her weight belies her intelligence. And we argued about that. I mean, he's now says, that was a terrible and stupid thing to say. But it was a very fruitful argument for both of us in the there's actually Almost everything that's written from a psychological point of view, about weight is about what you ought to do to lose weight. That's the end. So, Marion Woodman who is now dead, you bear it was a very popular Jungian analysts do a lot of books for women, wrote a book drawn from her dissertation at the Jung Institute. The owl was a baker's daughter. She tried to make an equivalence between anorexia and being fat, and it doesn't work, but she's not a researcher anyway. And so in my mind is so as I read her book, I mean, I had all these arguments. So it started out the first part of the book. So a big chunk of the book is an argument between me and Marion Woodman. So I imagined being her patient and in that analysis and how I would respond to these things she said. So that's part of it. Another piece of it is memoir about how this has been a thing in my life, how I've dealt with it. And then the third part is about is really directed to therapists and to people or people seeking to be in therapy. Because weight loss, only two to 5% of people who seek to lose more than a few pounds succeed in keeping it off for more than five years lower rate of success then, pancreatic cancer treatments. therapists who see losing weight as a measure of success in therapy, or as a reasonable goal, are asking patients to fail and telling them their bodies are wrong. So I wrote about that. And I also wrote about being fat as a trauma of its own, it's not not as the result of trauma. But having to move around in the world dealing with the microaggressions that we face all the time. Is traumatic and it that needs attention. Nobody in the Jungian world had written about nobody in 50 years. There's very little in the psychoanalytic world. There's lots of cheery sort of behaviorally oriented self help stuff, you know, think this thought and you'll lose weight and you'll find true love and happiness. That's why there are so many because they don't hurt. So it's a it's kind of an amalgam. I think it's pretty accessible. I don't do jargon much. I review the literature.
Peter Blundell :It sounds absolutely fascinating that you've explained that really well and I'm looking forward to kind of delving into it really and having a read if it what kind of response Have you had from people who have read it?
Cheryl Fuller :I thought if I sold 20 copies that would be a big success. So apparently I've sold about 400 copies I never thought I published with Carnac in the UK, just before they got absorbed by Routledge, which is unfortunate, because, you know, the. So in a way, we were orphaned, the buck book is still available. I got reviewed in the fat studies journal, which was interesting. And then somebody that I know, not really well wanted to review and one of the Jungian journals, but the interesting thing is, which the review that she wrote was not so much of the book, but about her her experience was somebody that she knew who was very fat, and it was more about her talking about how wonderful she was. So it was a very peculiar review. Mostly, what what has happened is people have read it I've had a number of people write to me, email me and tell me that they really liked it. I haven't had anybody tell me they hated it. I think I don't have very many reviews on Amazon, but they've been pretty positive. So
Peter Blundell :I look forward to reading that. And I'm sure our listeners as well as well. So one of the things which we haven't really spoken about yet, or you've touched on it a little bit was the obviously the worldwide pandemic that's kind of happening at this moment in time. And I suppose I was just wondering, from your own perspective, as a therapist, what kind of impact that's had on you really, and and how that's going,
Cheryl Fuller :I think the burden of anxiety that we end up carrying because our patients are so anxious, even if they can't, if they can't tie it directly to that. So it's, we can't be living in this kind of situation that we're in, where there's this invisible thing out there that that we could contract and die from there's, it's there and we can't make it go away. And we can't see it, smell it, taste it, feel it, touch it. So it's this kind of existential threat. Of course everybody is anxious, whether they realise it or not. And so I hear I think hearing that and having to deal with it and trying to help people to navigate their own lives Against this background of anxiety creates a load on me as a therapist, I can't imagine it does not everyone. I haven't been out. I've been anywhere I've been in contact directly with anybody except my husband for six weeks. He's a lovely man. A bit much. On the other hand, I see in my town this is as a therapist I see in my town, the ways that it Maybe one of the ways that living in a small town is really a blessing that people pull together and try to help each other out. That's very encouraging to me. But yeah, it's a terrible, it's terrible.
Peter Blundell :It's very strange, isn't it as well, because in in many ways, we are all in the same boat. We are all going through exactly the same thing, even though we're all responding to it differently in different ways and having different different things that happen to us. But I can't ever remember ever having that across the world before. No, certainly not in my lifetime. But I know there have been other other pandemics, you know, before this. And, and it's interesting, you know, US speaking, you know, from the UK to America training. Yeah, actually, the two of us haven't really been outside of our house for the last six weeks
Cheryl Fuller :. Yeah. And the other thing I see is I see younger people like under 40. Having the people that I'm seeing have a higher level I have anxiety, then, like my age group, I'm going to be 74 this summer. If I get sick and I die, I've had a good life. Like, I don't have lots of years ahead of me, my children who are both in their 40s do so it is a bigger factor right now anxiety for them, then for me. So it's which I think is interesting. That's not usually the way it is. Yeah.
Peter Blundell :I thought it was interesting, as you mentioned before, didn't you in terms of some of the responses that people have had in terms of you know, the age of people who may get it or people with underlying health conditions and the kind of the attitude is almost as different between different generations of people?
Cheryl Fuller :Well, among millennials this whole thing like, okay, Boomer, oh, it's really I take umbrage.
Peter Blundell :I don't blame you I can totally understand that. . And I think as well maybe that's another thing of social media is actually we're starting to actually realise actually, we're all more connected to most similar than maybe what we thought about before.
Cheryl Fuller :And one of the things that I see happen has happened here. The reason that insurance companies have so much power is that therapists don't speak in a single voice, we speak by discipline. And so it's easy to lose. If I ran the world, there would be a single category, psychotherapist, it's not about if you if you want to train to be a social worker, that's fine. If you want to be a psychotherapist, that's an additional leap. And so that would be the same. And then you'd have a larger group that could speak to issues that affect the field, because we don't do that.
Peter Blundell :I think, again, to go back to the Therapist Connect idea was actually one of the things that came out of that was this idea of actually working together collectively. Typically, we could have a much stronger voice in terms of advocating for quite a lot of shared values, you know, even though our approaches might be the same, there is a lot of shared values in there.
Cheryl Fuller :Absolutely.
Peter Blundell :And that might be a really good note to end on, actually.
Cheryl Fuller :Well, I've been I've been delighted to do this.
Peter Blundell :Oh, thank you so much. It's been lovely to meet you properly and have a chat. And I'm sure we'll chat again.
Cheryl Fuller :And do you think about the book?
Peter Blundell :I will, I will, I promise I will. Thank you. Thank you very much, Cheryl. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai