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To understand how and why we get caught up in unhelpful dynamics with our work we need to consider the role of the unconscious.
Dr Libby Nugent is a clinical psychologist who uses a psychoanalytic approach to understand our complicated relationship with work. She draws on Jungian theory, myths and fairy tales to explore the painful complexities that face us as healthcare professionals – and how to respond to these through creativity, community, care and choice.
You can find out more about Libby’s work, including the reflective groups she runs, at www.libbynugent.co.uk.
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Transcript
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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. For this final episode of this current season, I spoke with Dr. Libby Nugent, who is a clinical psychologist who works psychoanalytically with both individuals and groups. She’s done a lot of work with NHS staff and in thinking about the conscious and unconscious dynamics of working within healthcare. I began by asking her what a psychoanalyst is.
Libby Nugent: Good question to start on. Partly, I think it’s a good question to start on because I think it’s quite confusing that there are so many different terms: psychologist, psychotherapist, and psychoanalyst, and it can feel just a bit disorienting. I suppose, for me, what a psychoanalyst means is someone who is interested in patterns in relationships that normally start when you are quite young.
The first relationships that we have are with our parents or caregivers and our family members. We only know what we know. We only know those patterns. As we get older, we go to new environments, meet new people, and we often find ourselves repeating those patterns. A really important part of, I guess, psychoanalysis and what makes it a little bit different from other types of talking therapies is that we’re really interested in something called the unconscious.
All that means is the bits of the patterns that we do that we’re not aware that we do, or I guess, a different way of thinking about it might be I might know what I need to do to lose weight. I might know that I just need to exercise and eat less if it’s really straightforward, and yet, I can’t quite do it. There’s a bit in me that I suppose a psychoanalyst would say that’s just not conscious. It doesn’t know why it does what it does. I might think, oh, I just need to write a better list or I might need to get a better motivation. Yet I still can’t quite do it. That’s really what psychoanalysis is about. It’s about looking at patterns and also looking at why we keep doing the things that we’re doing, even though sometimes we don’t want to.
Paula: One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you was what I noticed in my work and in myself is that as a health professional, our relationship with our work can be quite complicated and problematic. Just when you were talking there, I was thinking we can find ourselves doing things, being stuck in patterns, keeping going, even when we don’t want to and even when we know it hurts us. I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts about what’s going on there.
Libby: Well, gosh, probably all sorts of things depending on the person. I think work’s a really good place for us to go to look at why we keep doing certain things even though 10 minutes earlier we were saying we were never going to do it again. I’m never going to take another patient on or I’m going to make sure I take that lunch break or I’m absolutely going to leave work on time.
I’m going to talk to that person and tell them exactly what I feel. Yet 10 minutes later, we’re back in the puddle on the floor thinking, “Gosh, what just happened there?” Or maybe telling ourselves, “Oh, it’ll be better this time, it’ll be okay, just this once.” I think a lot of my work is really working with healthcare professionals, either through reflective spaces or sometimes I do some work with the practitioner health service and these situations come up a lot for people. They just do where there’s a rational bit or a conscious bit that knows work isn’t working and yet it’s really, really difficult to do it differently.
It can activate some really strong emotions in people, actually. I think working in healthcare professions and I’m sure this will apply to other occupations as well, but, but I think there’s something particular about healthcare professions and there’s something particular about the NHS within that. Many of us just are there for restorative reasons. We want to help. We want to make a difference. We care. Then we find ourselves in this place where we’re not quite caring and helping the way we know how to, and yet we can’t do it differently.
The bind is to walk away from that. It’s not just walking away from a job. It’s not just walking away from something that pays the bills. It’s trying to walk away from a part of yourself, from a part of your identity. Maybe a part of your childhood, if you’re in a profession where you grew up in it, like medicine or nursing or psychology. It’s really painful, actually. It’s really painful and can leave people in a lot of internal conflicts where they might know what they need to do, but they just can’t quite do it, and yet staying is unbearable.
Paula: I suppose I’m wondering, as you were talking about what the unconscious reasons are that we might go into this job that that might be part of that conflict.
Libby: I don’t know if this would apply to everybody. I think that would be quite a lot of hubris, but I certainly, think for lots of people, there’s this idea of restoration. I think a lot of people who want to help have grown up needing to help in some way, needing to be helpful. That being helpful was something that wasn’t really necessary for the person caring for them. I just keep it in a very simple story and say maybe it’s about mom. Mom’s not being very supported. Maybe she’s not been appreciated or valued enough, and the child learns, “I can help. I can be helpful to mom.” One of the ways that we learn to be helpful is to be quiet maybe, or we learn to sit in the corner while she’s busy and not play, or we learn to be polite and play nicely.
Or if she’s working long shifts, we learn that we don’t need as much company, that we’re okay by ourselves, or that we don’t need to eat when we’re hungry. We can just wait a little bit longer or wait till there’s more food in the cupboards when there’s a bit more money. You learn to put things on pause and to prioritize something more important, which is maybe the whole family, the family as a group, or mom in particular. You learn that if mom’s just supported properly, everything would be okay because mom’s great. That’s the story you keep being given. Not necessarily consciously, but unconsciously, you have this pattern of in order to receive love, something has to be removed or killed off or delayed or denied in some way.
Now we have a culture that I think, again, I should say I’m interested in two different types of psychology. One is it’s something called Jungian psychology, which is very interested in aspects of creativity and in storytelling and how stories exist in big groups and collectives in society. The other psychology I’m interested in which I’m training is group analysis. That’s very much this idea that everybody is naturally social. Both of those psychologies are interested in language and in talking and they’re both interested in stories. The reason why I’ve taken that detour a little bit is to explain a little bit about how our society has stories about mothers
It used to be a long time ago, that mothers were quite ambivalent characters in stories. So you might have a story Hansel and Gretel, which lots of people are familiar. The original versions of that story, because it’s really old. It was just a mother, it was a time of famine, and a mother said, “The children have to go out into the woods, we can’t feed them anymore.” Which would’ve been a very real situation. That would be a dilemma that mothers have, is how do you feed your children when you’ve got no food and actually if you die, then everybody dies, and really difficult choices.
The mother in that story grieves and actually dies at the end of it. It’s sad. Hansel and Gretel eventually get back home but the mother is dead. The Grimms Brothers took that story and they edited it a bit and changed it and as the culture, we changed the story. So it stopped being a natural mother, as in a birth mother, and it became a wicked stepmother. A natural birth mother is such a tricky language, isn’t it, but a birth mother somehow wouldn’t do that to her child but a wicked stepmother would. Something unnatural, unfeeling, uncaring, and it’s the wicked stepmother that sends them out into the woods. When she dies, it’s a punishment at the end because she’s terrible.
We have kept bits of that story in our culture alive now. W we think that mothers are only good and we talk about love changes everything. If you look at all our songs and our music, we’ve got so much about how love saves the world from everything and that we don’t really talk about the need for grief, the need for loss, the despair a mother might feel when she can’t feed her children. We imagine it doesn’t matter how many much the government cuts funding or however much, that somehow we’ll keep surviving, we’ll just keep going. Endurance and willpower are going to save the day.
Collectively, we’ve made unconscious the part of the mother that has to deny a child. The part of the mother that should rightfully be hated by the child. There’s nothing likable for that. What we have now are mothers that are supposed to endlessly provide with nothing in the cupboard, and children that should only be grateful and shouldn’t rage or protest.
Hopefully, this isn’t too much of a detail, but you really see that in people’s work culture, their attitude. The NHS is a kind of mother and it’s part of the British family structure. You’d be hard pressed to escape the NHS in this country.
She’s everywhere, even if you don’t use it directly, and most people do. Friends, family, colleagues, use it and we are very dependent on it. In lots of ways, that’s a really great thing, but she’s also chronically underfunded and unsupported and politicized, and we all have an idea if the NHS could just be supported properly, then everything would be okay. That’s also a story we have. To be the children of the NHS as in the staff that work there when she’s unsupported, but not allowed to fail, because she has to just be good. People end up in really tricky situations where they’re hungry or symbolically hungry, symbolically underfed, and they’ve got no place to take that.
Paula: Sometimes literally hungry and literally underfed people not being able to meet their basic needs when they’re at work, not being able to take time, or having access to food, toilet breaks, water.
Libby: It’s true, and you could see it in the pandemic in a really literal way as well. Certainly at the beginning where NHS staff will be sent in and people were banging pots and saying, “Thank you,” and then they couldn’t get into the supermarket to fill their cupboards. We have a wish for caregivers to do without, and to just endurance and willpower that we call love, which is a slightly perverse thing but we call it love and care that somehow that’s going to save us all but then the dilemma though, which is very real if again you look at the Hansel and Gretel story. There was a famine and actually the grief that a mother would have to go through to send her children away.
It’s unthinkable and actually, that’s the dilemma, I think, a lot of staff have. I’ve heard stories of people just being left with no one to call for support with a ward full of patients. If you go home, there’s no one to take over. If you’re going home just to get some sleep, just to get some rest, who’s going to take over and it’s impossible. It’s such an impossible choice people are put into. There isn’t an easy answer making things conscious. Actually, is a task of being able to make pain conscious, and that’s hard.
Paula: Libby, I know that you’ve written about the NHS as death mother. Can you expand on that particular term?
Libby: That’s a death mother archetype. It’s a really bold name, isn’t it? It’s quite a frightening one though actually with the story I’ve told just then, it’s an apt one. There’s a few different authors who have talked about this archetype. Marion Woodman was the first one. I think she did some joint work with Daniela Sieff. Danielle Sieff is still very much talking about this archetype. There’s someone called Violet Sherwood as well who I think is in New Zealand who talks about it.
It’s a way of trying to describe this idea of what happens when we split mothering up. It’s what I just described, really, about the state of mothering or sometimes we call it the feminine. The feminine being anything to do with nature or the body. We currently live in a period of time where we really don’t value very much bodies or mother nature. We really prize mind over matter attitude. Matter is another word of saying mother.
We really try and encourage more and more science, and I’m very pro-science. This might sound an odd thing to say, but the more and more technology, more and more solutions to things. The more we do that, the more we can disconnect from how things actually work, where waste goes. We can create fantasies of living in pain-free societies if they’re not being death, which are necessary but can create a disconnect. It’s an odd tension. The death mother archetype is what happens when we deny grief and pain and suffering and that part of life. It’s the bit that’s just about endurance and willpower. I guess the phrase is it’s the shadow of nature, that’s what always sticks in my head.
It’s the bit that we don’t see very clearly that if we ignore what’s real, what things actually cost. An example of that might be flying somewhere abroad, and the holiday. We can think about how relaxing that is and not really think about how it hurts the environment. I don’t mean that in any kind of judgment way, it’s just speaking to something real. Or we can talk about avocados being super healthy.
I live in North Wales, and we don’t grow avocados around here. So whilst it might be really healthy for my body, I’m denying a big part of the story, which I can do, because I don’t know how it works. The death mother is this archetype that’s really kind of such you don’t need to know how things work. It’s not important. You don’t need to have a connection with the body or with nature, or what’s natural. We just need to do what we do and pretend it’s all nice but that’s the– It’s probably more psychoanalytic explanations than the one I’ve given, but that’s my working idea in my head that I go with.
Paula: It makes me think about what it’s like to work in the NHS. It’s a lot like that kind of opaqueness of systems and the power structures. You’re not really allowed to know what happens and where it goes.
Libby: An NHS example of that might be, we have waiting lists for services, and people don’t really sit and think, what does it feel like to be on a waiting list? To two, three-year waiting list? We just think, “Oh, well it happens. Poor them.” You have to wait, a bit uncomfortable, but we don’t really think about the psychology of waiting and what that means to a person arriving. The longer you have to wait, and I’m not saying no waiting either, because sometimes you have to wait. It’s not about removing waiting lists. It’s about understanding what’s real in them, but the longer you wait, the more you are making it very clear that as a caregiver, you are under-resourced, the more you are activating in a patient, the idea that they probably need to behave, they probably need to be doing something to support that unsupported caregiver.
It makes complaint quite difficult then. It makes it difficult to say, “When you finally get to the end of the queue if you’ve got anything else, is there another person I can speak to or maybe a better fit? Are you sure? Are you sure?” Or if someone says, “Well, you can have this treatment, but it’s going to take 12 months or you have this treatment and it will be three weeks and you can get it from the pharmacy.” All of us, people want to be useful and not cause a bother to their patient siblings. That’s an ethical problem. It’s a real ethical problem for mental health services particularly. There’s other services that have these very, very long waiting lists and people kind of being, I want to use the word declawed, before they arrive.
Paula: It also creates the sense that, well, you’re lucky to be here. Because there’s so many other people who want and need this.
Libby: It’s the whole system because this also hurts the clinicians, the clinicians are making people wait. One of the really difficult things because the NHS is a whole family. It really is. Clinicians are both patients and caregivers. It’s much more about a sibling dynamic than it is actually about– your caregiver is actually your sibling. They are also wrestling with the feeling dependent, not being able to say no, where do you protest, wanting to champion the more unwell sibling in that dynamic, but at the same time, knowing that everybody needs care and nobody’s quite getting enough. It’s really complicated or it’s a complex, there’s a real social complex going on for us around this.
Paula: I can think of times when being aware of waiting lists and how terrible that feels to know that you’re asking people to wait for so long and knowing that people are suffering while they wait, but it’s just overwhelming and paralyzing to go there.
Libby: I guess you’re making me think of another story actually. One of the stories that I sometimes think about when I think about the death of the archetype is I think about the story of Medusa. I do not know if you know, she’s Greek goddess story, and she worked in a temple of Athena, who’s the goddess of wisdom. She’s, I do not know, depending on which version you read, she’s either sexually assaulted or she’s overcome by this god. Either way, she’s violated and she’s not very happy about it, in protest and she’s punished and she gets turned into a monster, where her hair is full of snakes and whoever she looks at gets turned to stone.
In lots of ways, we could say Medusa is the embodiment of trauma. She’s kind of, your head full of snakes. It’s squarely. You don’t know what’s going around. I do not know if I’m allowed to swear on this podcast, but snakes are a bit [unintelligible 00:24:55]. It can be quite difficult to get close to, they bite, but hugely creative potential, all of that life. When you get close to someone, who’s in a lot of suffering, as we’re all inherently social, it’s terrifying, it’s petrifying, we turn to stone. It becomes very, very difficult.
You’ve got trauma everywhere and everyone keeps being turned to stone. That’s the paralyzing feeling that we often have where we want to move towards something, but we don’t know how, and then there’s all this anger and rage that you might get located in certain clinicians or in certain patients. You’re just like, “Oh God, like, do they have to.” It’s often the feeling, it’s a really emotionally numb feeling. It lacks such empathy, but that’s the turning to stone bit.
Paula: That really resonates. I guess that becomes, we could operate in that mode for a bit, I can totally remember times. When I’ve been managing people and said the same thing of we can just– All we can do is what we can do. That’s okay for a bit, but I guess then the discomfort sets in where you’re not then able to be the good child because you’re stuck. My son and I are reading the Percy Jackson book.
Libby: It’s amazing.
Paula: The statues turned to sand, like an annihilation, is what it can feel like.
Libby: I think annihilation is the right word. I think for some people and particularly for staff that have to leave. I do not know if people always have to leave, but for people that have to leave, it can feel like an annihilation. It can feel like, it’s not just work, it’s your community, it’s your friendship group. It’s people that you grew up with. There’s something very difficult about telling people you left the NHS. It’s not a story that you can say with a lot of pride. It’s really difficult. It can feel very shaming and that somehow you are supposed to survive it, it’s supposed to be survivable.
Again, I think the NHS is very important and I signed up to protect the NHS, but I’m also signed up to reality about what it is that we’re protecting and what people really do need to be sustained in environments that there is just not enough where you will be letting people down. You will probably be being hated, certainly breaking people’s hearts in terms of not giving them what you want to and maybe what they deserve and averted comments. It’s really difficult.
Paula: What about the aspect of– We talked, I suppose, about the patient care side, but when work is really actively hurting us in terms of brutal rotors, no breaks, the exposure, lack of support. It’s also paralyzing.
Libby: I think I’d probably turn to the Medusa story again for this. In the Medusa story here, I was chosen to stop her, but he has to approach her in a particular way. You can’t look at her directly, so he has this shield that’s so shiny you reflect in it. He approaches just looking at the reflection, walking backwards, and eventually he gets there and he is got very fast shoes. I think they’re winged. He gets there and he removes her head from her body, which is interesting thing. Her body becomes transformed. Her body becomes transformed into this huge golden giant with a sword, which is fight, I guess, and this winged horse, Pegasus.
Pegasus we associate, I guess with fight, you’ve got fight and flight that have come out. That’s the movement of trauma into something a bit more functional. Pegasus, you also associate with poetry, with creativity. I think for me, you have to learn how to pick your battles. You have to learn how to be in part a connector more, a body part of this, something more instinctual, which might be Pegasus, that horse bit that. Also, it can be incredibly important to connect to creativity and just something that’s nourishing. It’s cheesy, but I heard something recently where that who was talking they said, “We’re not human doings, we’re human beings.” Learning how to just be learning your value beyond usefulness is really vital connecting to the animal part of ourselves. That’s a little bit less socialized. I don’t know what the word would be. For me, it’s creativity, community, care, choice. They’re the principles of it.
Paula: I guess that answers the question I wanted to ask you about how we respond to this stuff.
Libby: In terms of everyday stuff, I think the more we learn to speak honestly and not gaslight each other into pretending awful things are survivable or nice is probably the first step. It’s remarkably difficult just to speak honestly about things to say I can’t and that’s terrible or something even worse. I don’t want to stay in work any longer. I want to go home and watch Netflix or I want to go–
There’s something almost blasphemous about that. People have to come up with something worthy as if just having any life outside of work is not worthy. People have to throw their kids high in the air or throw their pets high in the air and say, “I’ve got to take care of these other people. I’m useful away from here.” You can’t just say, “Actually, I just want to,” I don’t know, “Eat some cake and watch,” I don’t know.
I’m trying to think what I’ve been watching recently. The Witcher. What’s wrong with that? It is terrible. I guess I’m saying it flippantly, but actually, I suppose the reality is that it’s wrong someone would say because somebody might die if you don’t, and then why should I be watching Netflix and drinking coffee and eating cake when somebody is dying and then you get in this very difficult sibling dilemma of whose life is worth more.
They’re terrible, terrible choices. The reality is if we don’t self-care at all, eventually, there will be no caregivers left and it will all be gone and that’s dramatic, but actually, people are leaving the NHS in big numbers now. It’s really difficult or if people go back in, they’re going in on contracts and then they get to scapegoat to the bit, because they’re so expensive or all this stuff that happens. It’s just so difficult.
Paula: Something about being able to voice that and maybe I can ask you about these other things that you mentioned. You talked about creativity, that really resonates with me. That’s one of my strands of my work. I really feel that there’s so many benefits, but I’m wondering if Jung could say more about that and what you might say about why it is so essential, why it’s so important for us beyond the, I don’t know, it feels good and it’s nice to do something pretty with stuff.
Libby: I guess it’s about Eros. It’s about life force. Psychology is the study, I guess, of soul or of breath depending which translation you go. Psyche, I think it means butterfly or breath or soul. It’s the study of that. The story of Psyche is that she falls in love with Eros who’s this son of Aphrodite and then has to go on quite a battle because she betrays him and he runs away and she goes, has to go on quite a battle to claim him back.
I think, often, work becomes soulless. I think work can become, people are drawn to it for love. It’s a really again quite a simple way of thinking about it, but people want to give love, they want to care. This idea of soul and love coming together is important because people go there to give love and to make a meaningful life, to have some soul in their life. Then that’s not what happens because work becomes soulless.
How do we create more soul in our lives? I know this all sounds very flowery. I really appreciate that it can sound a bit hook a tree or something, but I actually take it really seriously. I think there’s something very necessary about being more than useful. There’s something very dark that happens when we just see people as expandable. You’re just only as important as the job you can do. Creativity and doing things, not because you’re good at them, not because it’s irrelevant. It’s nice to be good at the stuff we want to create, but it’s not really the point, and finding ways to allow yourself to just be is really vital. I think Jung would talk about Eros. I have no idea. I’m more of a group analyst than a Jungian in terms of training, but that’s what I think.
Paula: No, that’s great. Then the other thing you mentioned was community.
Libby: I guess this is the group analytic bit of me, really, that I think people are inherently social. One of the really striking aspects of my work again whether it’s in any of the bits of clinical work I do or the reflective spaces that I run is that people are really lonely often and feel very alone with their struggles with work. There’s a lot of shame in it or sometimes you get a bit of bravado eye roll like, typical NHS, blah, blah.
That’s hiding in plain sight. Underneath that, there’s something really despairing going on. If people really saw the loss and the sadness that healthcare professionals are carrying, I think they might be quite shocked actually, if people really saw it. I say people, the society at large and I think we can’t deny the reality that painful things are painful and difficult things are difficult, but we can bear witness to it.
I think the more people bear witness, the easiest something is to not feel mad with it, to not feel alone with it and it becomes survivable. I think community and groups, they can shame but they can also take shame away. Shame really is about just being isolated with something. Just thinking part of you is unacceptable. It shouldn’t be there. It shouldn’t exist. Again, it’s very death mothering. It’s somehow we’re not supposed to, that bit’s not human.
I think community is really vital as well. For lots of healthcare professionals, their work is their community. This is when it gets really, really complicated. The banter that you get with your team, with the ward, the often very dark humor, all that kind of stuff. If you’ve got this dilemma of, should I stay or should I go, the main thing that people talk about that leave actually is the loss of that type of community. How do we support the communities within the NHS better, but also how do we support people that leave through community as well?
Paula: Care was your third point.
Libby: It all links together. It’s quite hard to separate them out, really. There’s something about really understanding that if we feel something, then it’s human and that’s okay to talk about it. It’s a basic thing. It’s really important that we talk and that when we talk, we experience someone on the other side that cares. They don’t have to agree. They don’t even have to understand and again, community helps with this because the more people you have in the room, the more likely is you’ll get at least one person that knows what you’re saying.
We need to learn to care and expect care and for that care to not be conditional on being tidied up, you have to present it in a particular way. It has to come prepackaged or with the right sort of joke. You can just arrive and it will be there. The only way, this is all sorts of cycles back really, but the only way we can be authentic with offering care is also being authentic with offering limits. It might not be that everybody gets enough care in any given experience. It might not that you have to kind of you have to try and give care consciously.
Paula: Libby. The last point was choice.
Libby: I think we’re in a world that very necessarily, and very importantly, is grappling with ideas of power at the moment and who has a choice and who doesn’t have a choice. I guess there’s something in me that likes to kind of qualify that a bit in that it actually, most of us have, we may not have great choices, but we probably always do have a choice and some people have a lot more choices than others.
It can be really when we have less power in a situation and we’re shrouded in shame, it can feel very, very difficult to know what choices we have and they can become quite black or white stay or go if or I have to stay, you often hear that. “I can’t leave on time. I have to go, I can’t do this. I have to, I have to.” I don’t really have a straightforward answer to kind of what people should do with their choices, but just it’s really vital that gets part of this conversation. Where is the choice? What’s our relationship with choice? How much choice do we have? What is actually real.
Paula: I’m just, I suppose, thinking about some of the stuff going on in the world around abortion and choices around what happens to your bodies and, I guess thinking about people’s experiences through the pandemic and again, choices around risks that people are exposed to. I suppose my mind has gotten to times when the choice feels like it’s taken away from people in relation to the power that is operating and how traumatic that is. Not only in terms of the internal conflict of that but the real-world consequences of that.
Libby: The death mother archetype in her more kind of, sort of more shocking story incarnations, you’ve got stories like Medea, who is a woman in a story who chooses to kill her children. A more recent version would be Tony Morrison’s, Beloved, an extraordinary story that is really is got elements of Medea in it. Also, a woman who’s been enslaved and abused. It’s just horrific.
Again, she chooses to kill her children rather than have them be put into that system of abuse. These are terrible choices, they’re terrible choices. I suppose from a psychoanalytic perspective, it’s about the importance of making them consciously rather than trying to pretend anything is nice. Anything is uncomplicated, trying to reserve judgment on ourselves and other people, which again, is the care in the community. People are faced with terrible choices.
If we don’t hold them consciously and really understand that part of mothering actually is death and that we might not like that as an idea, it might feel disgusting. It might feel like we are just really repulsed. We want to keep away from it. Unless we understand that that is really a part of mothering, the things that we do to each other and our communities and our societies and our countries is so much worse. We either have death in mothering or we live a death mother archetype, which is horrifying. The most horrifying aspect of it to me is that we say it’s nice. We say it’s love. We say it’s care.
Paula: That makes me think of the trickiness around the kind of Clap for Carers. This kind of real range of emotions, people I’ve experienced in that.
Libby: I think that’s a perfect embodiment actually. Also, community is so important because, part of the thing that I love about the story and reflective practice is not about holding one interpretation and saying, that’s the truth. We need to understand there’s lots of choices in our stories. There’s lots of interpretations. So Clap for Carers for some parts of the community, it would’ve been a way of saying thank you. It would’ve been a way of saying pride of trying to show support. It would’ve been profoundly important to do that and maybe profoundly important to receive it as a healthcare professional. You need some kind of exchange to go on, but it can very quickly also be experienced as a silencing, as you can’t complain. You have to, you’re supposed to be okay. It’s supposed to be nice going into a place where you could die.
The stories at the beginning were like, we still don’t really know what was going on, but in the beginning, like really, it could have been walking to death. For some people, that was true, that was realized as well, and being clapped on your way is just like, “My God.” To be the person who clapped is also, “Oh my God, what did I just clap?” Then, of course, there’s the people that didn’t clap that stood in silence or protested in different ways and we need lots of different voices to be heard so that we can have our experiences validated, so we can see that we have a choice, that we’re not alone with some things. Chances are someone will understand. The shame will be dispersed either of wanting the clapping. You might be in a certain group, like everyone says clapping is awful and you’re like, “Oh my God, I liked it.” Then there’s another group that might be saying clapping is amazing and you’re like, “I didn’t want to be clapped to my death, no.”
Paula: I guess for some people that’ll be feeling both of those at the same time. Loving it and hating it.
Libby: Yes. Which I think is probably most actually, and which makes this stuff so complicated. There’s a phrase that I really like that says what’s out there is in here as in inside myself is back then as in the past. Whatever I’m drawing my attention to in the outside world is something that resonates with me in my internal world, which is going to be linked to something in my experience, either directly in my family experience or in the socializing processes that I’ve experienced growing up.
Paula: Libby, if people want to find out more about your groups and about the work that you do?
Libby: I have a website, www.libbynugent.co.uk and I have a blog on there as well where I kind of drop-down thoughts. Sometimes I like to talk and I like to write. They’re quite long. I put ideas down, and there’s an events patient. People can just come along. Actually, everybody’s welcome. The groups are normally– they’re not massive. They’re between 5 and 12 people normally, that kind of space. It’s trying to create not too big, so there’s space for people to talk.
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Paula: Thank you for listening. 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 review. I’d love to connect with you, so do come and find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. You can also sign up to my mailing list to keep up to date with future episodes and get useful psychology advice and tips straight to inbox. All the links are in the show notes. Thanks again and until next time, take good care.
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