(See below for a transcript of the episode, or watch it as a video with subtitles)
When work and life hurts being able to talk about how we feel and have those feelings heard and validated can make a huge difference to how we navigate and survive trauma.
For those working on the front line, during the COVID pandemic, this has never been more important.
I spoke with Claire Goodwin-Fee, a psychotherapist who set up an organisation called Frontline19 to respond to this.
Frontline19 offers free psychological support to frontline staff, delivered by qualified and vetted volunteer therapists. To find out more about Frontline19 you can visit their website at Frontline19.com.
I’d love to connect with you so come and find me on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.
Sign up to my weekly newsletter here to get updates about the podcast as well as psychology tips and insights direct to your inbox.
Follow and subscribe so you don’t miss an episode!
Transcript
[music]
Paula Redmond: Hi, I’m Dr. Paula Redmond, a clinical psychologist, and you are listening to the When Work Hurts podcast. On this show, I want to explore the stories behind the statistics of the mental health crisis facing healthcare professionals today, and to provide hope for a way out through compassion, connection and creativity. Join me as I talk to inspiring clinicians and thought leaders in healthcare about their unique insights and learn how we can support ourselves and each other when work hurts.
[music]
Paula: We know that when work and life hurts, being able to talk about how we feel and have those feelings heard and validated can make a huge difference to how we navigate and survive trauma. For those working on the front line during the COVID pandemic, this has never been more important. In this week’s episode, I spoke with Claire Goodwin-Fee, a psychotherapist who set up an organization called Frontline19 to respond to this need. I started by asking her to explain what Frontline19 does.
Claire Goodwin-Fee: We currently offer emotional support to the NHS and frontline workers. We started back in March of 2020, and it was a small idea I had while sitting on my sofa. Back in 2018, the NHS had saved my dad’s life, and he’d been intensive care for a few weeks and he’d been in a coma. When the pandemic hit and the type of illnesses that people were having, obviously to do with COVID being put into [unintelligible 00:01:44], I kept thinking back to these people that I knew in intensive care that we’d got to know pretty well. I just thought I wanted to do something. I felt quite incompetent. What can you do to help people and to support them? I knew they’d be hit pretty hard by the whole COVID pandemic, and so I thought I’d do a very small project.
I just thought it’d be me on my own, to be quite honest with you. If could get a few friends because I’ve been a psychotherapist for I think nearly 20 years now. I thought if I get a few friends together, we can match some doctors and nurses up to some therapists and that might help for a bit. I thought we have 40 people maybe or 50. It sounds like quite a lot. It snowballed from there. In the first day, I did a little page on Facebook. Now laughing back, I was very naive to it all, but I did a page on Facebook. I think it was called something like Support the NHS with COVID-19.
I put it up and I pressed the button, and within about half an hour, my phone was just going crazy with these pings going off and 700 people in the first day alone said, “We need support and also, by the way, can we help?” I just thought– I’ve got to be careful not to swear today. I thought, “Oh gosh, and darn it, what they’ve never done.” As you do. Basically, it took off from there, and we’ve just done 100,000 counseling sessions that we’ve given away. It’s been very, very busy, and it’s taken off in a way that I would never have anticipated it to do. That’s the background, really. At the moment, we do one-to-one counseling for people that want it. We do up to a maximum of 12 sessions, but some people just want 1 session just to debrief and to offload, others want to have a whole block of sessions, and we just offer that support to help them through what is a very, very difficult time.
Paula: I know because I have done some volunteering for Frontline19-
Claire: You have.
Paula: -that part of what your offer is matching qualified, well-trained clinicians who are volunteering their time with frontline staff, which I think is an important part of your offering.
Claire: It is. I think it had to be balanced. We had nothing. We had literally no money. We haven’t got a huge amount now, but we literally did everything on a shoestring. When we first started matching, we had an exercise book and we literally was just matching people up like that. I’d love to be able to pay all of the therapists that give their time even though quite a few of them have had that discussion, they’re like, “We don’t want pay, and that’s not what it’s about.” I came up with this idea of this bartering system so that qualified professionals would give one hour of their week, and in return, we would give them really good training, CPD opportunities, clinical supervision, support templates for any kind of paperwork they might need, contracts or agreements, all of that sort of thing, and a really supportive team.
Because when you join us as a volunteer, I think you’re joining a family really because we’re all doing the same thing and all wanting to contribute to what has become a huge wave of positivity.
Paula: I’ve really enjoyed the work that I’ve done. It’s been-
Claire: You did.
Paula: -very rewarding. I wondered, Claire, now we’re nearly two years into this experience, I know you said that you’d initially thought it would just be a few months, what themes have emerged in terms of why people, my frontline staff are seeking the help?
Claire: I think part of something that I didn’t really appreciate at the time was how underdeveloped, that’s a polite way to put it, how underdeveloped the helping professions are in looking after themselves, but also in their levels of emotional literacy. By that I mean is, how do I feel, why do I feel this way, and what can I do? They just don’t ask for help and there’s a huge amount of taboo around asking for any kind of support with mental health, and that really surprised me. A common question, we don’t get it too much now because I’ve been very vocal about the fact that if anyone contacts us it’s a confidential service, but the early days, we used to get email after email of, “Really interested in your service, but are you going to tell my boss that I’m in touch with you?”
That was really quite surprising, and so some of the biggest themes have been about– It comes in waves really, a bit like the pandemic. At the start it was very extreme anxiety about what was to come, how dangerous was it going to be, am I going to be okay, people have got children, husbands, wives, partners that perhaps were vulnerable, some people were shielding, there was all sorts of different things, but the main thread was about anxiety. I guess we can all relate to that really because I felt quite anxious at thinking, how does this work? I remember looking out of my front room window, it was about three o’clock in the morning, and seeing the lights of my neighbor, and they were doing the exact same, we were almost like looking down the road, you expected to see like this Sputnik thing come marching down the road because this thing was taking over and I think people could relate to that.
Then it changed a bit and it got very quiet, and I was like, “Oh, maybe the work’s done. Maybe they’re okay.” Of course, they weren’t okay. They were just very busy in their hospitals and in the community getting things sorted out and working with the patients under extreme, extreme pressures. Then when COVID numbers dropped a bit, we then got really, really busy again, and so it tends to follow up and down. In saying that, it’s been pretty solid, pretty busy probably for at least the last six, seven months. Things like post-traumatic stress disorder, we see that quite a lot, which is understandable. Some of the conditions that people have worked within have literally been like battle zones, like a war zone, and so I think you need the mental space to unpack that really.
That all the time you’re busy, you might feel really tired and exhausted, but you tend not to perhaps get the sharper end of PTSD-like symptoms until there’s a little bit more space. That’s like a generalization. Then I think just recently, this probably will come as notice surprise to you, is burnout. The biggest thing is burnout. We are seeing so many people leaving the professions. In healthcare, nurses, consultants, doctors, paramedics, community nurses, people that are really incredibly experienced and they have just had enough. That really worries me because I think, what does that mean for the profession, what does that mean for the community, what does it mean for the NHS as itself?
It comes in ways, but that’s, I think, the current trend, if you like, at the moment, is about burnout and being emotionally exhausted. Again, I think that’s also echoed outside of the healthcare professions, too. I don’t think anybody’s okay at the moment, I guess is what I’m saying.
Paula: It’s interesting when you were talking about that sense of when COVID numbers dropped, and that then saw a bit of a surge in people reaching out. That was my experience, too and I think what I noticed in the work that I do also with doctors and nurses was that during that period, people were having and experiencing post-traumatic stress symptoms but because they were no longer in that context, they couldn’t really make sense of it. Their nervous systems were still in a fight or flight state but because in their heads they were past that and out of that phase, that disconnect was really worrying.
They could make sense of the stress and the tension when they were in it, but they couldn’t make sense of it when they were out of it. I think that was something that was really helpful about having a space to talk and to talk with someone who understands trauma and understands the impact on our nervous systems, and just helping people to make sense of the fact that our bodies keep the score, and it was still needing to work through that stress and the trauma. For many people, not actually having the time and space to do that, it was the shift, COVID numbers dropped but then suddenly, everything else was business as usual almost from a health service point of view which was very overwhelming.
Claire: I think so, and I think you’re right, it’s about being in that moment and not really understanding what’s happening. There is, within the health care communities, a real lack of knowledge about prevention, about management, about resilience, and also, I think, I don’t know quite how to say it, but there’s a huge issue with perfectionism. When you look at doctors and nurses, there’s this thing around, we know that health is important. That goes without saying, however, there’s this massive thing about, it has to be perfect, there’s a perfection to it. Even some of the junior doctors put themselves under so much pressure.
The hours that they work and the way in which they work is very back in the dark ages and I think that when you have a community of people that all do the same thing because that’s how it’s always been done, then it becomes quite difficult to challenge that, particularly in times where you really got your back up against the wall. I remember talking to a research scientist that had been moved on to a COVID ward. She used to be dealing with research and being not really in the midst of having lots of patients and stuff around him. Was on a ward and their first job they were given as they walked in, the sister gave me a huge pile of papers and said, “There you go, this is a list of names,” like, “What is this?” “That’s a list of all the people that have died, and you need to find their relatives and tell them.” This person said, “Well, what do I say?” Then the sister said, “I don’t give a shit what you say just go in that office, take the paper, the numbers are there, just tell them they’ve died of COVID blah, blah, blah.” You think, “Oh, my God, you’re a monster.” Being that person, how do you manage that? You have to, at some point, you’re human, you shut down, you have to just do, not the bare minimum, but emotionally you can’t be present within that because it’s way too damaging.
They went into this room and started making the phone calls and some of these people because at that stage it’s pretty early on. At that stage, we had that vaccine and it was affecting people that normally would be considered fit and healthy. You had 40-year-olds who had died, who had children and this person’s having to phone these people up. When we did the HopeLine campaign which is the campaign to leave messages for the NHS to support and you can phone in as an NHS frontline worker and listen to those and they’re ever– Honestly, if you have a bad day, phone in and listen to them because they are such lovely messages and they’re loving you supportive.
Some of them are deeply moving. I remember when we started doing the film for that to advertise it and they asked me about different case studies. I said, “You have to say about this,” and we swapped it around a bit but one of the first opening credits is about that particular story. It’s about having to make those phone calls and being emotionally not equipped to deal with that. It blows my mind that you have people who work in, I don’t know, cancer or palliative care that have never been given any training on telling someone that they’re going to die. That blows my mind, like how is that even a thing? You think to yourself, no wonder people are stressed before the pandemic.
If you put me in a situation where you want me to talk about something that I don’t know or do something that I’ve not been trained to do, the gap between what you believe your competency is and what is needed is huge in there. In that space, it’s a lot of stress.
Paula: Especially as you say, for people who tend to not only really care about doing a good job but also have a layer of perfectionism around that then that’s a horrible place to be.
Claire: It creates an untenable situation for everybody because we have these, I guess, unrealistic expectations of what medical professionals can do. There’s a lot of pressure. I remember sitting with my dad and every single day, he was in King’s in London and they were magnificent. I have no doubt but if it wasn’t for them, he wouldn’t be here. I remember every day, one of them would sit with me and say, “Look, you do understand that your dad is very, very sick.” I said, “Now, I do understand that.” They said, “Well, that means that he may not survive this.” They were very good because they gently– it wasn’t doom and gloom but they had to keep it within reasonable parameters.
I’m sure they would be happy that he’s still here and he’s doing okay but it’s having those conversations and having the boundaries with some of the families, that’s been a very, very difficult thing for them. Also, it’s been an assault on every level. They don’t know how to treat this new thing that’s just appeared they got a battle-style red light, whatever, more to say red light response. They’re working shoulder to shoulder with colleagues that are living in garages or hotels so they can keep away from their families because they don’t want to pass this stuff on. They’re losing colleagues to COVID. They’re nursing them, their paramedics might lose one or two people a week in their shift pattern.
That’s, unfortunately, the nature of what they do and they’re losing four or five in a shift. They’re loading people back onto an ambulance and they’re dying on the trolley because they’ve left to [unintelligible 00:18:19], too frightened to go to hospital. It’s horrific. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what the people have been through. Then to get abuse for not doing X, Y and Z or people mourning about the length of time they’re waiting, of course, nobody wants to wait while they’re uncomfortable or in pain. These people are human beings and actually need lots of support, lots of care, and actually, they need a space to be able to decompress. This whole experience of the pandemic has been a bit like been poisoned.
There’s only so many people you can talk to about it. You can’t really go home and, “Oh, how was your day, love?” “I lost 60 people overnight. We had to ring round mortuaries trying to find freezer space because we ran out.” It’s horrible stuff. It’s been very heavy, I think, for a lot of people. I certainly will never be the same person I was before. That’s for sure. I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. It just is what it is really. Even if everything finished tomorrow, I don’t regret doing what I’ve done but it’s certainly been hard. It’s been difficult and there’s been a lot. If I think back to this very naive idea about helping a few people and how quickly it’s spread and how big it got and the depth of need that’s there, it’s been a real journey.
Paula: Interest to think, Claire, about, I guess some parallel processes there around, you and your organization supporting the frontline who are holding so much for their patients and their colleagues. The sense of, I guess the behind the line support that maybe the psychological well-being workforce it is trying to hold. How has that been for you? What impact do you think that’s had on you or/and the people that you work with in terms of holding that for clients?
Claire: I think that I’ve reduced my own client. I had a private practice. I’ve got very reduced numbers now because when this first happened, it was only meant to be little and obviously it took off and I’ve had to cut back. I think that within our industry, I think that we are also at risk of burnout. I know that a lot of the recommendations is about having clinical supervision, which is, I always describe that to people that aren’t aware of it. It’s like there’s space between management and therapists, this little space that that happens in between where you can talk about your own stuff but in respect of client work, I know that we’re expected to do it once a month for hour and a half. I do it every two weeks.
That I found really helps because that’s my space to offload. Also, I think it was at the start of this year, I had some sessions with a psychologist just to help me make sense of what I’d been through, not only in just a professional capacity, but also I’m a mum of two young children. They were out of school. My husband was at risk, I was at risk. I’ve got two parents, I was going to say are elderly, but if they hear this, they’d probably tell me off but they’re in their 70s. It’s had an impact on us all. My life doesn’t look anything like it did pre-pandemic. I think that we are all– no one’s okay. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but nobody’s 100% living their best life, everybody’s struggled or have been through something.
The reason I say that is not to be a Debbie Downer, but to say that’s very normal and it’s a natural response to what we’ve been through. Actually, the more you talk about it and you share it, the easier it becomes. Actually, other people are like, “Yes, it is a bit rubbish and I’ve really struggled with this and this. It alleviates the pressure on you. Also, you start to perhaps be kind as you often expect less. We’ve all been in a marathon, and we’re expecting to now do a sprint at the end of it. That’s not possible. “Well, I don’t have the output that I used to have.” “Well, no, of course, you’re not going to.” We’ve been running with this high level of stuff and it’s not having too many tabs open on the computer.
Oh, am I going to get toilet roll? Are the kids going to be okay? Are my mom and dad going to be all right? Oh my God, we’ve got this chance of vaccine. Is it going to poison me? All of these things. Having discussions with people and friends that perhaps don’t feel the same way about the vaccine as you do, that’s the thing of itself. Political considerations, losing the laissez-faire attitude about getting just a common cold. I miss, who thought we’d ever say that? I miss the chance to go, “Oh, it’s just a cold.” Now, it’s like, “Hang on. Have we done a PCR,” and all this language. Lockdown, PCR, lateral flow, all of this stuff that we’ve had to learn. There’s so much ambiguous loss about the loss of what we could have had, what we should have had, what may have been. Then the normal loss is like normal things about taking a holiday. It makes me laugh now. We couldn’t go away, but it never occurred to me to take a break from work because I wasn’t going on holiday. When you talk to people, other people like you, I did the same thing. “Why didn’t you just take a week off work and stay at home?” “It genuinely didn’t go to me.”
Paula: There’s something about, you used the term “heavy” that this is heavy load to carry. One of the things I think that’s been so difficult is that not only has the load been heavier and for some of us that’s been greater than others, those on the front line or those who’ve had to deal with financial uncertainty or illness or bereavement. Some of us have been lucky not have to face those things so directly. At the same time, as the load being heavier, we haven’t had access to the things that normally would help us lighten that load or share that load. We haven’t been able to just hang out with people or do fun things or see art, all those things that would help us manage and process that stress. I think, a real double whammy there of heavier load and not able to relieve.
Claire: Definitely. I think that my learning since this all started, and it sounds very cliche, but it’s honestly genuinely men. It’s the little things that matter, I now could not care less where I make my friends. I could sit on a park bench, and we could both have a packet of Wotsits and I wouldn’t care. As long as we’re together and we’re chatting and I’m with that person, anything else is a bonus. I generally mean that. I remember meeting a friend of mine, I don’t live too far from Bluewater, the big shopping center, got loads of car parks and we parked up next to each other but had this space in between, had the window down, she had her snacks. There’s me sitting there with my little hummus and cucumber, chatting and it was freezing cold but it was magnificent.
Because in that moment, I was just with my friend. Although I couldn’t touch her, and again, that’s another interesting thing is about touch because I’m quite a tactile person and not being able to touch different people like friends and hugging them, that was a real– if I look back now, it’s quite a bereavement of sorts. I know that sounds a bit drastic, but when I lived in America years ago, because obviously, I didn’t know anybody there, people, they’re not that tactile. Well, they weren’t where I was anyway. I really remember really missing that thinking, “Gosh, I’ve not touched anybody in three months.” Not even just like a hand on the– nothing. I remember during the pandemic sitting, watching TV and holding my husband’s hand and saying, “Do you know what, it’s really weird, I really miss touching people. I even noticed people drove differently during lockdown as a carer for my mom and dad and being a front-line worker myself, I had to get out and about and do certain things and work.
The cars were actually keeping a distance away from each other, and everybody was trying to get where they needed to get in a hurry. There was still this gap. Even I was doing it, you like stayed way back and it was so ingrained into us at that point to keep away from people that I think a lot of people shut down and really isolated themselves from other people. I think that’s had a massive impact on people, too.
Paula: I think, Claire, not just that absence of touch, but that touch became a threat. The thing that was a source of comfort was actually a source of threat. To hug someone or to receive a hug.
Claire: People became unsafe, didn’t they?
Paula: Yes.
Claire: That’s a really good point. Even the silly thing, just before lockdown, I’ve got asthma and I went in, it was cold and I went inside a building and so if I’m going to cold to hot, it makes me cough. All my days, this lady launched herself at me and was like, “You’ve got a cold.” I was like, “Whoa, I held up my Ventolin well, so I was gasping for breath and went, “I’ve got asthma, I’ve got asthma.” She was not happy. I said, “I haven’t got a cough watch.” I used it. I said, “Look, there’s nothing there now.” She was like, “Okay,” but that dealing with other people’s fear levels. You know yourself, you’re in a supermarket, if someone cough and you can’t help but go, “Hmm, is that a normal cough or is that something else?”
This is why I say nobody’s okay because I think we’ve– normally, if I’d have felt some of the things I’d felt during the pandemic, I never would’ve worked. Also, previously, if you were going through something then you’d be like, “Actually, I’m going to take some time out,” you’d pass your clients onto someone else or you’d go, “I’m taking a bit of time out.” Everybody was going through stuff. What I found very difficult was when I was working with my clients, and they would talk about something pandemic related and I could really feel myself responding to that. A couple times were quite triggered. I had somebody that was not a fan of vaccines and it was very difficult because emotionally, normally of course you do emotionally respond to things in therapy sessions.
This felt really raw almost as if I’d have a bereavement, was working with a bereavement client, which we know would never be an ethical thing to do. Not in that moment. No, it was so raw and it was just so odd thinking everybody’s going through stuff all at the same time.
Paula: Like a collective trauma, isn’t it?
Claire: I sometimes sit, and I think about how society will change because of this situation and I am in no doubts, it will. I’m hopeful that some of it will be positive so I’d like to think that people perhaps appreciate each other more. I’d like to think that, but I also see at the moment, a lot of anger, a lot of hurt, a lot of people looking for somebody to be angry at whether that be people that haven’t had a vaccine or the government or whoever it is, they’re very angry about what they’ve been through. We’ve all sustained loss. We’ve all had some level of trauma of some degree, whether it’s mild, moderate, or significant and I think that– I used to think about in the early days of the pandemic, I used to think about my grandparents who went through the Second World War.
There were at times thinking, “I just can’t do this.” I was at home with a four-year-old, a seven-year-old, my husband, two dogs, parents that needed support, couldn’t go out shopping, so it felt like a lot and I was working and living in the same space and that of itself taught me a lot. I just thought, “I don’t feel I can do this and I used just sitting and thinking about, “Hang on a minute, Claire, look, your grandparents were bombed. They used to go to sleep in the underground because their house was unsafe or they’d be in an air raid shelter and they didn’t have enough food to eat, they were on rationing and all of that stuff.
You know what, you can get through this and you just have got to do what you can when you can and just look after yourself in the best way that you can. I kept thinking back to at some point COVID got to become something where it’s a treatable, manageable thing, and I just kept thinking, I have to keep the faith that we’re going to get to that point and so I think that what’s really interesting is that I personally used previous history and experiences to help me in the here and now to manage what I found quite a difficult, challenging situation.
Paula: Do you think that potentially one of the positive things to come out of this is to highlight the emotional impact of work on healthcare professionals and the need for psychological support for the health service?
Claire: Absolutely, for me, that’s a big part of my reason, my “why”, is because people in the healthcare professions, hospitals, community paramedics and frontline staff will stop police fire. Their support sometimes it’s just is not there and other times there is a basic support system there but is it effective? No, it’s not. It needs to be, we are expecting so much of this collective of people and yet I spoke to somebody the other day that said, my trust does have emotional support. I said, “That’s amazing,” but the wait is three years and this person was at the extent where they were actually feeling suicidal because they were so emotionally exhausted by what they’d been through and we know physically and mentally, they’re both enmeshed.
At the start of this, you mentioned about the body knows its score, Bessel Van Der Kolk who is one of the world leaders in trauma, he talks about that connection all the time and it absolutely is there. When you’re a bit run down, the first thing that goes for me is my throat gets a little bit croaky and our bodies are a mirror about our mental health and vice versa. What needs to happen is it needs to change for future generations. It needs to change for the paramedic that’s just started their training, it needs to be something where people’s mental health is honored across the board. Whether that being corporate, private, public sector, work-life balance needs to be much more considered and I think in the healthcare professions, this toxic perfectionism, which is rife, is absolutely rife and this blame culture of, okay, something’s wrong who can we blame?
It has to stop because we’re going to get to a stage where people are not going to want to work in this community and you know what, it’s a rough deal. People, how they get paid this money. My doctor phoned me at nine o’clock the other night. 9:00 PM to talk about a standard thing that I needed some support with. I said to her, “Have you got many more people to see?” She said, “Yes, I’ve got about another two or three.” I said, “Is it normal that you’re working to this extent?” She went, “Yes,” and this lady has young children of her own. One of them is definitely, I think, four and works part-time and part-time consists of working two and a half days a week until 9, 10 o’clock at night. That’s not part-time.
Then to read about your profession in the newspaper as being incompetent, lazy, rah, rah, rah and all that stuff. I think there needs to be training in every form of healthcare profession. If you sign up to learn, if you’re going to do a degree in nursing, you need to do a section, even if it’s two days on mental health for you, for your colleagues, and also for your patients. If you are going to train to be a doctor, same thing. I also think they need to make CPD, continual professional development. They need to make that one day a year to do with mental health because if you’ve got a doctor that is struggling to tell somebody that they’ve got a life-limiting condition or they are terminal, they’re going to go one of two ways.
They’re either going to burn out, or they’re going to turn into this very robotic detached person who for the patient and their family’s going to be difficult to be around and it actually has an impact on the care that’s given within that space but also as a human being, we just need to know that everybody has ups and downs. Everyone has good and bad days. You know what, perfectionism just doesn’t exist. All perfectionism does is robs today of your joy. Good enough is good enough. Winnicott did this whole thing about being a good enough mom, and mom guilt is a– oh gosh, is a huge thing and a lot of women in healthcare are moms and they’re trying to manage home life, being a mom with having a career and everything else and it’s really bloody tough.
We need to have these conversations about, one, it needs to be at the start of the career. It needs to be in the middle, and it needs to be at the end but also I think just generally as a society, we need to just start talking about how we’re feeling. It is utterly ridiculous to me that people say things like, “Oh, don’t cry, you’re upset yourself.” Hello, news flash if I wasn’t upset, I wouldn’t be bloody crying. Also, you wouldn’t say to somebody, “Don’t go to the toilet because you’ll be really weak.” Pardon, but people say this all the time, or don’t get upset you’ll be weak or people think I’m weak if I do X, Y and Z or if I get upset, it’s a very natural, normal response.
If I poke you in the eye, it’s going to water. If you’re upset, you may cry, that’s totally standard. Do you know what, let’s stop playing this bullshit game about we shouldn’t do this or we should do that and how’s this going to look to other people? Just stop. Let’s just start having these conversations with each other and listening to each other.
Paula: Just on that note, you’ve talked about some of the things that you have in place to support you in the work in terms of professional support but what are the other things that keep you going in this work?
Claire: Something I’m passionate about and I’m doing naughty smile because it brings out my inner child is adults need to be kids, they need to play. Who made up the rule that we don’t get to play anymore? That’s a rubbish rule so I decided that wasn’t cool, that was being chucked out. I’ll do things like, I’m lucky I’ve got two little kids, I have that as an excuse, but do you know what, I do it anyway. In the morning, I put on music and I dance around to it if I’m feeling low. Self-care for me is not about– I don’t do face masks or stuff like that, but I do do singing very badly to Michael Bublé or I might do hideous dancing around the front room.
Paula: What are your favorite tunes to dance to?
Claire: Oh, I like Christmas All Year Round, I have to be honest, and I got married in May and I had Christmas songs at my wedding. Everyone went, “You know this is good.” I said, “Yes, I do and I don’t care.” Anything and everything from Stevie Wonder to The Pogues to everything in between. I love reading, again, people expect me to be reading, I don’t know, the history of Jung or Freud, and no, at the moment I’m reading Milly Johnson book which is an absolute chick flick type book. I’m a huge fan of Harry Potter and any of that stuff. Disney, I love a bit of Disney. I just think, you know what, do what makes you happy and have fun with it, you haven’t got to be serious all the time.
I think self-care looks like having fun, enjoying yourself have a bubble bath for 4 hours if you can get away with it please do it for my sake, if nothing else, but top the water up, take books in there, take snacks in there, have fun. Dance around the front room. I’ve got a puppy, she’s coming actually a year now, who is an absolute, she’s bonkers, but I adore her and I know you’ve got a dog, too and taking her for a walk, she makes me get out because if she doesn’t she sits and she puts her head on the computer saying, “Mom come on we need to go out,” but all of those things, I think it’s about just do things that make you happy. Don’t worry about what other people think. If it makes you happy and it’s not harmful, do that and then do some more of it.
Paula: It sounds for you there’s something about connection to your playful side, something about movement.
Claire: I’m open to any of it.
Paula: Yes and keeping it. I think that’s one of the things, isn’t it? that we need to remember that when we are stressed and when things are weighing heavy on us that we have a tendency to shut down, to withdraw and to drop some of these things whereas if we can enable and allow ourselves to open up.
Claire: Even asking for help and I know that that’s difficult in the helping professions, just asking for some help and I had to learn how to do that and it’s not easy, but asking for help and just if somebody opens up to you because very often we focus on it’s good to talk and all of that stuff but then it’s like, then what? Because we’ve just said there’s not the resources there so tips if someone opens up to you and says they’re having a rubbish time, don’t try and fix it, it’s really simple just listen and say, I’m really sorry.
Paula: Thank you, Claire.
Claire: Thank you, Paula.
[music]
Paula: Thank you for listening, if you’d like to find out more about Frontline19 and the support they offer, go to frontline19.com and if you enjoyed this episode and you’d like to help support the podcast, please do share it with others, post about it on social media or leave a rating and a review. I’d really love to connect with you so do come and find me on LinkedIn or Twitter and you can also sign up to my mailing list to keep up to date with future episodes and get useful psychology advice or tips straight to your inbox. All the links are in the show notes. Thanks again and until next time, take good care.
[music]
[00:43:56] [END OF AUDIO]
