Therapy Natters

Re-evaluating The Past

• Richard Nicholls • Season 2 • Episode 18

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This week Richard & Fiona are looking at how early life experiences shape our adulthood.


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Richard:

Hello there, podcast fans. It's yet another episode of Therapy Natters. This is the podcast series where two psychotherapists pick a topic or answer a question and have a little natter about all things therapy. I'm Richard Nicholls and there in the co host chair, as ever, is my wonderful favourite friend, Fiona Biddle. Hello to you!

Fiona:

favourite friend! Oh, that's nice.

Richard:

even if you're not.

Fiona:

you can

Richard:

Right now, you feel as if you

Fiona:

can say it, you can say it, I don't mind if it's true or not, I'm happy. Because last week we talked about strokes, didn't we? So that was, that

Richard:

Yeah, we did,

Fiona:

that was a nice stroke I just got, so thank you.

Richard:

Because we speak, well, we speak every week when we're recording these, these. but, know, we chat on WhatsApp and stuff, and there's the Evolve to Thrive bits that we talk about. And out of all my friends Yeah, I probably do speak to you more than any of the others. And there are some that I'm really close to. We go to the pub every Wednesday. And I don't chat that much in between.

Fiona:

I quoted you just about an hour ago, to my brother when he, I can't think of how we got onto it, but we were discussing OCD Oh and I said, my pal Richard says things are only a problem if they cause a problem. Um, and. You know, that was, it was relevant to the, the conversation about OCD because it's where do you, where do you draw the line to when, when is it a problem and checking that you've got, checking you've got your phone,

Richard:

Yeah.

Fiona:

you know, two or three times, well, is that a problem? Probably not a problem. Checking that you've turned the gas off once or twice, probably quite a good thing to do.

Richard:

But not trusting your memories and getting up at three o'clock in the morning because you know you can't sleep

Fiona:

yeah. So it's,

Richard:

to bed and then thinking, I wonder if after I checked that, I knocked it. I better go and check

Fiona:

again yeah, it is, it is where to draw the line. And

Richard:

That's when it becomes an

Fiona:

some people do draw it too far down to say that they've got a problem when actually it's not a problem

Richard:

And in a way that's not so bad the reason I think that sometimes is because if as a culture, as a society, we have fewer problems, then the little problems that we do have might feel like the worst thing in the world. And it's, that's tricky because we want people to be happy and have no problems. But actually, we don't gain any resilience without any problems.

Fiona:

Yeah, and I mean, I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Caring for, in some respects, an elderly parent. When the little things become huge.

Richard:

Yes, because they've got nothing else to worry

Fiona:

Yeah.

Richard:

Hmm,

Fiona:

focusing on the fact that a message keeps popping up on the computer. Well, just click the X. So what? But, oh, no, no.

Richard:

yeah, I hear those stories a lot. That's common, yes, and it's something we need to bear in mind, for ourselves, for our elderly friends and relatives and so on, that you might be making a I'm mountain out of a molehill here. Yeah.

Fiona:

And of course, in my experience, each generation says, I'm not going to do that when I get old. And then they, then they all do. So, waiting for my turn.

Richard:

we age and we change and we do go through these stages. We start as an infant, as an absolute blank canvas. And then we change with every day that goes by. And we're constantly being nudged and moved and altered and manipulated for good and bad, constantly. It's just what happens. To think that, oh, that stops when you reach 25, that's a lie. There's this myth, and you've probably heard this myth, that your brain isn't fully developed until you're 25. Have you heard that? Or 26

Fiona:

It kept going up as, as Greg was growing it, it went up a year just as he was going.

Richard:

Do you know, where that number came from?

Fiona:

Well, it did keep changing. So, but go on. No, what

Richard:

Really, it was because of the only people taking part in the research were university students. So they didn't have anybody older than that.

Fiona:

right.

Richard:

In the studies, The brain is always developing. It doesn't stop. We don't stop learning. And don't stop the ability to

Fiona:

changing. Do you remember the, um, Daniel Kahneman theory of 20, 000 moments in a day?

Richard:

Yes. Yeah,

Fiona:

Yeah, shall I go through that for our listeners? I've probably mentioned it before in our series one, but, I think it's one that can stand being repeated. Yeah, these, Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate, one of his things was stating that we all experience 20, 000 moments each day. And, you know, we all know what a moment is. It's quite hard to describe, but we know that it can be a split second, it can be several seconds. So, it's just a quantity, but fairly meaningless, but we sort of know what it means. But the thing is that every one of those moments we experience, we evaluate, and we do something with it. Now, Young children, their moments are very likely to be new things. And so there is a lot of evaluating going on and storing the result of that evaluation of the experience. So, for example, I saw a video of Rory who's now seven months old, trying yoghurt for the first time. The expression on his face was just a picture. But he was experiencing something that was new and storing that in, in his little brain somewhere. So the next time he has yoghurt, it would confirm what he knew about yoghurt.

Richard:

Yes.

Fiona:

As we grow older, we're still having our 20, 000 moments. We're still experiencing them, still evaluating. But the vast majority of the time, when you're probably over that 25, 26 age, they're confirmatory.

Richard:

Yeah.

Fiona:

The experiences are just,

Richard:

It's what I already knew. It's what I

Fiona:

I knew. But we still do have some experiences that change our knowledge, our belief systems, etc. That can happen throughout life, it just happens less frequently. Unless you go out searching for things to learn about. So, I've just started a Egyptology course. So, I'm deliberately setting out to learn stuff that I didn't know before. So, some of my moments are that process. So, it's a lifelong process, but the thing is, the crucial thing here, I think, is the fact that when we're evaluating as a child, We're using the child's mind to evaluate.

Richard:

Yes.

Fiona:

so, some of those evaluations won't have been the best. We will have got things wrong. Let's say, you're six and a teacher says, you made a mess of that piece of work I just set you, you might evaluate that to say, I'm no good at that maths. I'm, you know, that's not for me. clearly that expert says. You're no good at maths. And then you can have repeated sort of instants, of that same sort of feedback that you take to reinforce that message.

Richard:

Things either confirm what we already believe, or get ignored.

Fiona:

and it takes a lot to deny it and to change it. But that teacher might not have meant that at all. He or she might have just meant, I meant he because that was Mr. Phelps, my teacher, at that sort of age.

Richard:

that's a memory.

Fiona:

yep, there we go. Um, Mr. Phelps might have meant that it was a bit scruffily written. You made a mess of it. He might have meant that it should be a bit neater next time. But it's just that, that, that interpretation at the age of, say, six, isn't necessarily correct. Because you can't, you can't necessarily understand what somebody else's intent was. And even if you do, well, you know, Mr. Phelps might have had a right to comment on my ability at maths, but the kid I was sitting next to didn't. So the kid I was sitting next to, said, Hey look, I did really well at that maths, what about you? Yours was rubbish. Do I still take that on?

Richard:

Hmm.

Fiona:

But of course we do,

Richard:

We do, but as an adult, if you were looking to buy a new car, and you were unsure what make was the best one, and you went into an Audi dealership, they're going to say Audi. And they might genuinely act as if they mean it. Well, genuinely, this is, this is exactly the right car for you. This is exactly what you need. That's a coincidence. What about, what about if I go to the Mercedes garage around the corner or the BMW one? What if I go to the Volkswagen one and get something that's similar, but a completely different price? Or, how about I get a motorbike? Well, whatever, you know. No, no, no, no. We sell Audi, so these are the best ones for you. Are you gonna genuinely say that it comes from a trusted source? that they've got your interests at heart. They might have. Nice people sell cars as well. But they also have an agenda.

Fiona:

Yeah, anybody who's selling anything has an agenda. I mean, it's quite nice when you occasionally get the, the sort of person who says, No, that's not, that's not for you.

Richard:

But it goes to show that there are multiple perspectives to everything. Depending on your existing viewpoint. Your existing beliefs and ideas. And it's okay to challenge them. It's okay to look at the past and re evaluate it. And think. That belongs in the thoughts of somebody who didn't know what was going on. That belongs in the mind and the emotions of a six year old, not in a forty six year old. And we do have to do that a lot, but we don't do that unless we recognise what's going on for us.

Fiona:

Yeah, unless we think

Richard:

We go, I'm feeling like a six year old!

Fiona:

Yeah, unless we actually think, oh, I could look at that and see what happened, where this belief has come from, that I'm living to. Let's have a, let's have a look and see, well, what did cause this belief system to be in play? And then, once you've gained that awareness, you can change it.

Richard:

Sometimes it's well meaning people. Parents particularly, might think it's the right thing to do to criticise somebody's homework, or schoolwork, or behaviour, or personality even, as a motivational tool to nudge them in a positive direction. There might be occasions where that helps, but more often than not that's going to nudge somebody in a negative direction, to be fair.

Fiona:

sometimes the positives can actually be negative. One that I'm sure you've, found with clients is the people who've been told that they're, they're good. They're the good girl or the good boy. You're the good one. And

Richard:

they make a mistake.

Fiona:

then they have to, they have to live to that, belief system. So they have to be the good one. And so it limits.

Richard:

The issue here it's the terms and conditions. And I was thinking about this this morning that we needed, when we're young and if you're a new parent, here's a hack for you. When your child is so young that they believe everything you say, they need to learn that you love them even though. Not that you love them if. I love you even though you broke that toy. I love you even though you're screaming and it's two o'clock in the morning. I love you even though. As opposed to I love you But, I love you but. Can you not do that? that Anything before the but is bullshit. I love you even though is the attitude that we need to have and not these terms and conditions of I love you if So, yes, you can say you're so great. You're so great. You're so smart. You're so clever and the kid thinks. Yeah, i'm so great. My parents love me I'm, so great,

Fiona:

but

Richard:

But. They love me because I did that. Because I'm great. As opposed to. I love you anyway and you're great. And it seems like the right thing to say to a kid doesn't it? You're great, you're fantastic. Because we're born to attach, we know that. Attachment theory has shown that for 60 years. And we're so young.

Fiona:

sure it was blooming obvious before that.

Richard:

Oh, it was, yeah, although John Bowlby was the one that really got the ball rolling.

Fiona:

formulated a, a theory around it. Yes. Yeah.

Richard:

There was, there was definitely a Hungarian psychologist at least 20 years before

Fiona:

Yeah. But I'm thinking the, the Romans would've known that you I mean Everybody would have known that you attach they just hadn't formalised it,

Richard:

all we want when we are that young is our caregivers to love us and look after us and keep us safe. And so

Fiona:

And respond our needs.

Richard:

yeah, and everything revolves around that. So if we are feeling good about ourselves, it's associated to that, because that's just hardwired in. And if we're feeling bad, then It might be because of that, because it's hardwired in. But if their foundations are so positive, because they've been attuned to, they've been heard more often than not, very much more often than not, and as we've said before, Hey new parents, you're going to kids you've got your fingers in

Fiona:

your not going be perfect

Richard:

Yeah, You're going to go, I can't take this, I can't take this, and you walk out of the room. That's normal. As long as it is not the norm.

Fiona:

Yes. It's normal, but shouldn't be the norm. Yeah, absolutely.

Richard:

We had a question that we were saving

Fiona:

We did indeed.

Richard:

For this week.

Fiona:

Sue from Northumbria.

Richard:

It was, well remembered. Sue says, I've been reading about reparenting and wondering what it actually is and how it would work in therapy. I'm just starting out in training in counselling and hoping, if all goes well, to move to psychotherapy training. My hunger for knowledge is growing fast. And that's Sue from Northumbria. Thanks for listening, Sue. Sorry it's taken us so long to get to this, but

Fiona:

it's because it's because we're doing these episodes in parallel with the weeks of Evolve to Thrive. that's why had to, wait, but we're there.

Richard:

yeah, for the listeners who aren't therapists in training for the next few years, you might not fully get what we mean by re parenting. And actually, probably means a couple of different things. And maybe that's what Sue was talking about. I think Sue is a, maybe she's a listener to another podcast that I do. And I've talked about or referenced it on there, but not gone into details because that's not what that project is about, whereas this one is. So, it kind of means a couple of different things to me. From a therapist's perspective, reparenting is Really creating corrective experiences for a client. If a client had judgmental parents, then we take the place of their parents. Because we're a, We try not to have any hierarchy in therapy. We're supposed to be on an equal level. But there's always going to be, for a while anyway, that little bit of a dynamic.

Fiona:

It's, it's an odd one. I know I've struggled and I probably will right now to define it, but yeah, we're sort of equal but sort of not at the same time.

Richard:

Yeah, they're coming to us for help. And paying us money

Fiona:

we don't, have the answers, but we have the skills, hopefully, the skills to enable the client to find their own answers that they are not able to find without it, that sort of. So there is a little bit of an expert sort of dynamic, because otherwise, I mean, you could talk to your friend, but that's not what therapy is.

Richard:

Sue mentions starting training in counselling, maybe doing an extra year, or whatever it is for psychotherapy training as well. And there might be two competing ideas there because in counselling you are reparenting by being there, by listening, by attuning. You're feeding back on what they've said. So, there's this person here that does get me. That is listening. And then in psychotherapy, There might be more theoretical stuff. Like transference. Which wouldn't come up much in counselling. But in psychotherapy, you'd probably talk about it quite a bit. Having said that, I didn't train as a counsellor, I trained as a psychotherapist. You also trained as a counsellor first. Did you go through those theoretical approaches? Well, this was a while ago, wasn't

Fiona:

it? It was, but I do still remember quite a lot of it. Some people listening will know that I was involved in the SCOPED project, which was a project which is defining what psychotherapy and counselling are between all the major bodies, professional bodies in the UK. and we did find that there was nothing that a counsellor does that a psychotherapist doesn't do, which we were surprised. Everybody sort of started off thinking, well there must be things that a counsellor does that a psychotherapist doesn't do, but we didn't find anything. So, oh goodness, the amount of evidence that we looked at for the whole project was immense. But, counselling courses, well, any therapy courses, they vary hugely. The one that I did, I think it could have, if they'd upped the academic level, they could have claimed that was a psychotherapy course, because that's one thing that is different, is the academic level of the course. So there aren't any psychotherapy courses in the UK that are not at, possibly six, level six, but really level seven. So, we did go through, all sorts of theories, including transference, in that course, but there are counselling courses that are purely person centred and stay in that Rogerian person centred realm

Richard:

Mm.

Fiona:

without dipping their toes into other things. I quite often like to work with the Erik Erikson Psychosocial Stages model, because it's a nice framework. Not everybody likes it, sometimes a client's eyes glaze over, because it's quite theoretical and the terminology is a little bit tricky to get your head around. But, what he did, Erik, he divides life into, phases, and each phase he says that there's a task to be achieved. So, from nought to one is a continuum between trust and mistrust. I know we've talked about this one particularly before. But is the child learning whether the world is trustworthy or not, generally. But the whole of life is divided into these phases in, right up to death. In fact, his wife added an extra phase right at the end, having experienced him, Erik, dying. And so she, uh, she added that, phase in. What's Is helpful with this, if a client does take to it, is seeing where there are gaps where they didn't end up the, the positive end of the continuum. And even with the, the early ones, now nobody remembers nought to one is it's not possible to remember, nought to one, but people get a feel. They can get a feel of whether it was okay or not. And so we can work with the feel. It doesn't matter about the facts. But there will usually, I mean, not at that age, but let's take, you know, the six year old or a twelve year old or an eighteen year old, anything. There will be facts then that they will be able to recall that show where they've ended up on those continua. And those can be reworked within therapy.

Richard:

If they are where they are when they're six, twelve, there's a fair chance that where they are then is a result of where they were when they were two or one. Because they still had two siblings and parents who worked 40 hours a week, then. As they did early on, with very little help from the external world, maybe.

Fiona:

Yeah. I mean, things can, things

Richard:

guess that things can be consistent. But they might

Fiona:

not be consistent. If, you know, for example, if a parent died or is taken seriously ill or something like that at the age of six or something and somebody else comes in as a carer, then things could change. But it can also go the other way, so let's say somebody who had a really terrible start maybe gets adopted and then things get better, but they still have had that experience at the beginning so they might need some work to repair that if it wasn't done whilst they were a child by the

Richard:

Yeah.

Fiona:

new parents..

Richard:

And can we do that to ourselves? Can we re parent ourselves?

Fiona:

Yes to a degree is my answer. I think it depends on, um, the severity of issues, you know. If you've got, going back to that idea of the six year old thinking that they weren't good at maths because Mr. Phelps was actually commenting on the messiness of the work rather than the messiness of their maths, yeah. You can work with that yourself. If it's more significant trauma based stuff, then you would need to work with somebody.

Richard:

Yes, so if memories pop into your head and they overwhelm you, and it ruins your week, then, yeah, that's neurological. There's a trauma reaction there. That needs dealing with with a professional who can help you with that, who is trauma trained, specifically. Or at least trauma informed, but preferably trauma trained Because frustratingly, I've spoken to a lot of therapists about this over the years. I've not met a single one who during their actual training as part of the course, not as something extra, but as part of their course, had trauma training. It was always added on after.

Fiona:

Yes, and I think that the crucial part here is whether they know that because I've known people who think that they can work with it because they've done courses that say oh, yeah, you can work with that, no problem. So there's a sort of you know that that thing of unconscious incompetence and

Richard:

You don't know what you don't know.

Fiona:

Yeah, that certainly can apply. The first course I ever did they would have said yeah go for it. You know, it's fine. But I sort of knew that it wasn't, so that's why I did further training. So yeah, there are people who will work with trauma when they really shouldn't. But If I put my old trainer hat on, I'd say you can't, you can't do everything at the beginning. So a recognition that there are things you can't work with when you're first qualified is a good thing. So just a different thing, from trauma. But depression, we would say, after initial training, when you've got your certificate or even your diploma from the National College, which is what I'm referring to, you could work with reactive depression, which is, I'm feeling depressed because my mother died, you know, that sort of thing.

Richard:

It's situational,

Fiona:

Yeah, it's a reaction to something that's going on, has happened or is happening, but we said you can't work with clinical depression, which is the depression which is not as a result of something, it's that sort of pervasive. Why are you feeling depressed? I don't know. That sort of thing. You're not trained to work with that as a baseline qualification.

Richard:

Yeah, that might surprise a lot of people because they think That's why I'm going to go to therapy, because I've been feeling depressed all my life, so I need to get this sorted.

Fiona:

We also need recognise that depression is one of those words. I often just say, is it with a capital D or a little d? And, there is, again, a continuum. If you're feeling down, so depressed with a little d, that's different from Depression with a capital D, which is, can be so debilitating.

Richard:

It does need psychiatric assistance. There's something extra that you, you need that leg up, so that you can see a therapist and talk about how you are in the present moment. And, I'm not saying that people with depression can't go to therapy. Not at all. What I'm saying is that that you work with your depression with lots of different people. Your GP and your psychiatrist. And then you bring you to therapy. To work on the fact that you have depression and how that upsets you and how that's, that frustrates or angers or whatever and we work with, we work with that but we cannot legitimately say by sitting and talking to a therapist it will cure your depression. Because that isn't the case. It's multi faceted and needs lots of angles

Fiona:

But the reactive depression, it can.

Richard:

Yeah, reactive depression, yes, yeah.

Fiona:

it's very different. Very different.

Richard:

But sometimes people might not know. Because they've been depressed 20 years, and it started when their dad died, or their mum died, or their dog died. It started then, and life hasn't felt particularly fulfilling since. Because they got stuck in a rut, got nudged in a direction, and they kind of forgot how to feel contented. And we can work with that. That'd be really good, because that Means re evaluating the past and going, well that feeling, it belongs in that 16 year old who's just lost their mum, or whatever. It belongs there, and it's the right feeling to have.

Fiona:

Absolutely. I mean, feeling down, depressed with a little d, is a perfectly valid response to a lot of things in life. We've talked in the past about defense mechanisms. Because, you know, if we look at the world generally, then we sort of ought to be down most of the time. but you have to

Richard:

sounds a little hopeless but I get what you mean. That's why denial can be

Fiona:

That's why, that's why we, we use our defence mechanism, But there's an element of choosing how you feel, and with clinical depression, that's not really part of it. The Stop It! Doesn't, doesn't work with clinical depression. Although I do think this is a personal view, I do think there can be an element that can help if you, if you're going there, going into a depression, sort of a little bit of, you know, you're going over the cliff, well, cling on to the top and get help to get up before you fall off.

Richard:

Yeah, yeah I like that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Fiona:

So we did talk about defence mechanisms back in Season 1 in Episode 17, so if anybody wants to know more about that they can go back and listen to that one from 2022, wasn't it? Wow. Yes. We've been doing this for quite a while, haven't we? I mean that first, first season we went, that was 101 episodes every one a week. So yeah, we were doing that for two years plus, we won't be repeating defence mechanisms in this series but it's there if you want to look at it

Richard:

Well, we might repeat it because we are quite tangential

Fiona:

Yeah, well, we've already gone to it to a small degree,

Richard:

Yeah.

Fiona:

anyway so yeah

Richard:

It's part of being human, and that's what we're gonna be talking about for all of this podcast series. Yeah, absolutely, in a chaotic world.

Fiona:

But

Richard:

But I'd rather be a human than anything else, apart from a golden retriever. I'd live with that So, we'd better love them and leave them for, uh, another week. We will be back next week where we will be talking about pros and

Fiona:

cons. Ooh

Richard:

Pros and cons

Fiona:

I like pros and cons

Richard:

Yeah, that'll be quite interesting for everybody. Right, if anybody has any questions about anything at all to do with counselling, psychotherapy, mental health, whatever, whatever, do let us know. We can probably squeeze one of your questions into into this, the rest of this season maybe. If not, certainly in the next one for definite. Right, love you and leave you everybody. Links to all our stuff is in the show notes. If you need us, you know where we are. See ya!

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Fiona Biddle

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Richard Nicholls

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