Social Work Spotlight - Episode 122: Lisa

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

In this episode I speak with Lisa, an accredited mental health social worker, psychotherapist, and author of Finding My Invisible Sun: Overcoming Trauma. Lisa has lived experience of trauma, mental illness and institutionalised discrimination and has practised therapy for a combined 15 years within a domestic and family violence prevention service and then as an accredited mental health social worker.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:Lisa’s Points of Resistance Theory webinar on eiseEducation - https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing/1209211Janina Fisher (and her book The Fragmented Self) - https://janinafisher.com/Pat Ogden - https://sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org/therapist-directory/pat-ogden-phd/Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy - https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/4317035Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score - https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-scoreEMDR Association of Australia - https://emdraa.org/Lisa’s book Finding My Invisible Sun - https://australianselfpublishinggroup.com/finding-my-invisible-sun/This episode's transcript can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tDX4X9nDpOkKhOf8gVPdcU5rPElTM1p36wnp7IR3iDk/edit?usp=sharingThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

I begin today by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eura Nation, traditional custodians of the land on which I record this podcast, and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people listening today. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have an intrinsic connection to this land and have cared for country for over 60,000 years, with their way of life having been devastated by colonisation. Hi and welcome to Social Work Spotlight, where I showcase different areas of the profession

each episode. I'm your host, Yasmin Lupus, and today's guest is Lisa, an accredited mental health social worker, psychotherapist, and author of Finding My Invisible Son, Overcoming Trauma. Lisa has lived experience of trauma, childhood sexual abuse, mental illness, and institutionalized discrimination. Lisa has practiced therapy for 15 years, 11 years within a domestic and family violence prevention service and four years as an accredited mental health social worker. Prior to practicing therapy, Lisa taught English, history and drama to secondary school students and transitioned to teaching students with special needs. As a self-professed idealist and opportunistic, dissident intellectual, Lisa encourages people to grasp every opportunity to challenge

the status quo. Hi Lisa, thanks for meeting with me today. I'm looking forward to having a chat with you about your social work experience so far. Well, I'm excited to do that, Yasmin. Thank you for asking me. Yeah, I'd love to know firstly when you got started in social work and what brought you to the profession. It's a very, very long story to get me there. I'm ready for it. Well, it was actually around about 2016 when I was introduced to social work from a friend. And that was following a long stint probably with counselling and prior to that I taught for 14 years and it was because I had studied psychology and then worked in counselling in DV and I was becoming more and more frustrated with systems that were involved in counselling and psychology and my friend was studying social work

and she said you need to do the masters of social work it'll give you precisely what you need because I had been wanting to go into working in palliative care at the time. And that's how I fell into it. But it's really interesting in some ways because my mother studied social work when she was 50 after having been a counsellor and previously a librarian. So I think I've just fallen into this and I'm so glad that I have because it allows me to work with people within systems and attempt to rearrange.

I won't go so far as to say bring down systems, but to help people to work within systems at the same time as being able to work in mental health, which is the area that I love to work in. What area did your mum work in? She worked in, well, majorly, I suppose, to begin with couples counselling, but then she worked in the youth prison system for a while,

which was really horrendous, really, really, really awful. But she has a wonderful way of working with people and teenagers and making them feel human and standing up for them because nobody else seemed to be at the time. Yeah, she did a tough stint there after working with acquired brain injuries and then sort of drifted out of it again into what she really enjoyed, which was couples counselling. Okay.

So I guess she was probably quite helpful when you were going through your studies in terms of directing, guiding, at least troubleshooting if you were coming across things that didn't fit well with you? Yeah, well, she still does. She's fantastic. I mean, she retired about 10 years ago reluctantly. I think she did it before people told her that she needed to leave. She was worried people would say she's too old and she doesn't look even too old now. Yeah. But I love being able to talk to on the phone and write about certain things or which is very politically attuned. So it's fantastic to be able to talk to her

and have a sort of the occasional external supervision that's not the usual external supervision, I suppose. She's very, very wise. So it's helpful like that. So I think I've probably fallen into working in communities because both my parents have been very heavily involved in community work. And so is my brother, he's a doctor.

so we just all seem to do it. All lefties that enjoy people. Amazing. What kind of teaching were you doing? Originally I started off as an English history teacher. Then I ended up teaching English and performing arts and drama and that was simply because I taught English dramatically and a performing arts head of department decided you need to teach drama now. So I fell into that and as I was teaching, I again became became really frustrated with systems and how they seem to overlook the real needs of students in terms of helping to feel like real human beings and being respected and having their

individual needs met and having a really good developmental psychological understanding of kids. So I ended up shifting over into working in special needs and working mostly with children. with autism. So from almost preschool age, up to school leaving age, and then became frustrated again. Okay. The lovely guest two episodes before yours actually completed her PhD in performative critical social work pedicogy. And she works in the sort of performing arts and drama. And I'm just, I'm just feeling so many crossovers. And she's also, well, she's just moved down from Queensland. Actually, I was about to say I should introduce you to. But my.

be a bit more challenging. But yeah, there's clearly so much work to be done and so much work that's continuing to be done around social work and performance and using those sorts of methodologies to help students understand or even role play, right? Like that's fundamentally part of our training and even our ongoing supports and our work that we do is as a student, I remember, So I know that I don't want to do role play, but it's such an important tool and something that's really useful to even troubleshoot or try things if you're doing something for the first time. So I imagine you've got to use a little bit of that. It is.

And I find more so I'm quite a visual person. And I find storytelling is really, really very important. And I find that perhaps it's the part of me, the English teacher part of me, or the love of the arts, because I studied a Bachelor of Arts before I went into teaching, that it's helping people to retell their stories and have wonderful endings instead of having the same story told and is a story that's usually being written by somebody other than them and helping them to shift out of those stories into their own stories. And I use a lot of visualization for that and EMDR therapy,

which is just incredible to work with. combination of both. And occasionally I have to prevent myself from singing at my clients because they often have a string of words together that reminds me of a song. And I've even had one client say to me, don't start singing. I've just done this same thing. I've just started singing in my own head of a Hamilton song. The very final song in Hamilton is who lives, who dies, who tells you.

story. Yeah, that's wonderful. It's funny how that happens, yes. Yeah. So given that you had the interest, I guess, in helping people with autism and also palliative care right from the get-go, I know I got ahead of myself a little bit there, did you get a chance to work with any of those areas as a student? What were your placement opportunities?

No, no. My placement opportunities, that was another story, I suppose. I was actually offered in my first placement to work in palliative care. But prior to that, I'd been working out of a DV service, out of a women's shelter, working with children age zero to eight and their mums. And that was because somebody had contacted me and said, Lisa, we're wanting some funding for a program and we want you to write the funding proposal. And that was when I was studying a master's full time and working in DV.

and I said, well, okay, I'll give it a go, having never done it before. And then they said to me part the way through, oh, by the way, if we get it, the job's yours. And it so happened that the job came up because the funding proposal worked. So I got stuck in that and I couldn't do what I really wanted to do, which was the palliative care because I felt some kind of loyalty to the place that had helped me originally. And so that opportunity passed me by. However, I've recently been talking to my external supervisor this morning, not my mother,

a paid one. And I said to her recently that I feel like the angel of death because so many of my clients who I work with, I work with for grief. I work with them because they are dying or some of their loved ones are dying or have died and I seem to be surrounded by dealing with grief on so many levels, whether it's because of lost dreams or because people have died and a large percentage of the population I work with happen to be autistic as well. I don't know how it happens, but it does seem to have these people find me and they don't leave me and it's lovely that they don't. I love them, but it is

it's odd how it happens. Yeah. What a wonderful ego boost as a student coming into the world of what am I going to do when I finish uni, is anyone going to employ me kind of thing, that imposter syndrome, which to be honest, continues throughout our career to a certain extent that they thought, yeah, yeah, you're the one run this program. That would have been pretty incredible. I just couldn't believe it. And I've never thought of it like that, actually. Now that you've said that, I can see that it's rather extraordinary, but it had happened because I'd been working for an organisation that I won't name, and I had been looking very hard in that organisation with the community that I grew to really love. And some very strange things happened within that organisation. And I found myself

without a job. And because I had a large group of clients who were extremely upset and a community that was extremely upset with that organisation that when I left, one of the people called me from that community and said, look, we don't want you to go and we'd like you to work for us. You need to get your own A-B-N. Wow. And working out of the women's shelter, and I go, oh. So this is how it all worked. And then my friends said, well, you know, go and study Masters of Social Work with me.

And it all happened from there. I just seem to have had a lot of adventures in my life and have never really expected to find myself where I am. I never expected to go into teaching. I didn't want to teach. It's a good thing I love kids and love teaching, but as I said, I don't particularly like systems. I don't very much like rules and uniforms and routines that impact people's individual expressions. So I find myself in very strange situations and at the moment I'm working in private. practice and there is absolutely no way that I want to be a business person. It's just the big.

But you just flew into it. But all I want to do is therapy. Yeah. So you would have had to figure out pretty quickly how to run a business, how to develop these reports and templates and how much to charge, which would have been a bit of an adventure in itself. Six weeks. Six weeks could do it in.

So yeah, it's been, and that's just been this year. So it's been since March that I've been doing this and pretending to be an admin work at the same time. It feels like a roller coaster, really. Yeah, because my first thought is what's the plan for the business? But I feel like you haven't even had time to let the dust settle and figure that out. No, definitely not. I think it's forcing me to almost feel like a grown-up, which I resent because I don't want to feel like one. So I guess it is what it is.

It's astounded me in so many ways. And last year, I think it was last year, the beginning of last year, I published a book on trauma. And again, I never expected people to start asking me to do podcasts or webinars and things like that. So when you say imposter syndrome, absolutely, on a daily basis I wake up and expect somebody to say, you'd be making this up all along, haven't you, Lisa? No, I haven't, but it feels like that at times. Really done. What was the process for you thinking I have this idea for a book?

I want to write something. I'm going to publish it, even just from the, how do you pitch it? Because, you know, there's so much out there and you have to find a niche, right? Yeah. I don't know if I found the niche. It came about because I had experienced sexual abuse when I was a child, you know, when I was really little, the age of six and as a result of that I really experienced a lot of trouble in terms of very, very chronic deep depression and all sorts of things like that, including dissociation,

which was, I believe, incorrectly diagnosed when I was 26 and then incorrectly treated right up until the age of around about 40 odd. And I experienced lots and lots of horrible discrimination in mental health settings throughout life really. So hence my dislike of systems to a great degree or institutionalisation. And I became angry about it because I felt really, really unheard. and because I was apparently high functioning, people took that for granted. And it became more a case of being personalised and pathologised. And if there's something that really, really upsets me, it's those two things and discrimination. So I thought, right, well, if I can't get the help that I need, I really need to write about it.

And so that's when I started doing that and I started writing it about 2014 and I had lots of different ideas about where I was going to end up with it. And I also was able to have free access to journal articles because I was studying a Masters of Counseling at the time. So really, I think I've been a permanent student just as I can have access to at the time, free journal articles and wrote this book. And actually by the end of that, I'd sort of worked out, well, no, it wasn't bipolar disorder. It was actually complex PTSD. That's precisely what it was. And fortunately, I had EMDR therapy from a friend in 2016. It was just the one.

And it seemed to resolve everything for me. I don't have a single day and haven't had a single day since then of depression. That's amazing. It is. It's absolutely incredible. The nightmares have stopped. It's been a wonderful, wonderful thing. Hence, I've studied EMDR therapy and practicing it. And I suppose that's why I know that when I work with people with complex trauma, which I do three and a half days a week, that I know what helps. And I can have people walk out the door, having filled in an international trauma questionnaire with really, really high results for PTSD and complex. PTSD and then at the end of their treatment, complete that form and discover that they're just not writing on those forms. So it seems to me that we pathologise trauma so, so badly. So that was the journey with that.

So I ended up writing the book and doing the illustrations for it, the paintings were the paintings I've done over the years. And there was no way it was going to be published by anybody other than me. because I'm not a journalist and I don't have a lovely resumator sent to an editor and say, please edit. I have this resume of all of these publications. But it was published and it seems to be doing well, thank goodness, of its own accord. So maybe when I've finished the second one, some publisher will say, yeah, okay, she's worth it. You know. Yeah. So you are working on a second? Yes, I'm halfway through it. Yeah. This one's around.

the social theory I wrote in 2016 and how to how to use it as a framework for therapy and for generally for life. I wouldn't consider myself an ambitious person but it does sound ambitious when I say it out loud but I'm enjoying writing it in my spare time. Yeah. Yeah which you don't have much of I can imagine. No. No. Yeah even that process though of disclosing elements of your own trauma in a written and very public way. That's tough. I can't even begin to imagine what that was like. I wonder if that was part of that healing process, though, for you that made the EMDR that much more effective? Possibly, when I was writing it between 2014 and 16, I was really just gathering loads and loads of journal articles

and doing a sort of a cross-study over all of them. So my study was just piles and piles of the journal articles and in various stacks. And so I didn't write a lot other than the first, probably three or four chapters. And when I was writing those, they were very, very raw, extremely raw. And I found them incredibly painful to write. I would absolutely stop as I was writing it. And I'd have to go away and collect myself and come back and keep doing it because I hadn't said the words out loud. And it had been so long. that I'd kept this stuff to myself and get the majority of it an absolute secret. So that was very, very difficult.

But then when I came back to writing it, because I stopped and started again, I think in a roundabout, maybe I did a little in 2016 and then got very busy with the Masters of Social Work and Full-time Work. So I couldn't do much more. And then I started writing again. I think I must have had at least four years or more in between of not doing anything and coming back to it. And the thing was that I had the EMDR therapy and I noticed that I could recall the stuff, but not the depth of the feelings that I'd had attached to it because it had been desensitized.

And I found that very, very interesting. It really helped me to have perspective standing back and looking at it from a whole new light. And then I found that once I'd completely written it, when I had finished it all, I thought, well, that's it, it's all resolved, right? The trauma's all resolved. The feelings have all gone. But it was only really resolved for the part that my friend had processed with me, without even knowing what she was processing because we didn't speak of whatever it was.

There were other things that had happened to me that weren't processed and were only process through my writing. But I found that once I'd finished the book and I thought, right, that's it. I've done it and I'm over it all. This is marvellous. I decided to record an audio book of it. That's when I discovered, wow, there's some parts that are still left there that really impact me emotionally. And I think it was just desserts really because I frequently set some tasks with clients where I'll say, okay, I need you to write a letter. You know, it might be a letter to a part of themselves or to somebody else. They're not going to send it, but they need to write it out and write out how they feel

about this particular thing and all the different emotions in their hopes and dreams the whole lot. And then I want you to read it out loud to yourself because when your ears here, you're doing it, your brain gets excited. It's in rich learning and all parts hearing and then they can heal. I've been saying this for years. Do you think I've ever done it? Well, you'd never even written it, let alone say it. So here I am reading out this e-book, recording an e-book,

and I'd get to parts where I'm talking from my little person self. And man, it hit me. It was so hard doing it, reading out loud. But that finished it all off for me. I think it resolved absolutely everything that was left. I certainly know after I had the EMDR therapy, I was able to work with children who'd been sexually abused. Before that, I would never have been able to do it.

So it's truly amazing the way I can talk about it and not become terribly impacted by it. It's just a matter of fact, this happened to me and it's informed my practice. Sure. Yeah. Do you have any safeguards in place to kind of, you know, if that sort of content comes up for you, that it's not retriguing? With my work. Yeah, I don't, I just don't get triggered by people anymore. I get upset for them, but not triggered. I had deliberately not worked with young kids who'd been sexually abused up until when I'd had the EMDR because I knew that that was something that I didn't feel safe. in, I didn't think I could do them justice in it, even if they insisted on seeing me because they

felt safe. I wasn't going to do that because I don't believe that. You need to sort your problems out before you become a therapist, in my humble opinion. And I thought that I had been. And after the EMDR therapy, I just haven't been triggered by it. And I hear some terrible, terrible, terrible things. But somehow I'm able to create a space that feels safe for me and for my client so that I can hold those things. Yeah, I'm just very fortunate. I feel incredibly fortunate that my friend offered me that day without knowing what was upsetting me. She thought it was all to do with the organisation that I was no longer working for, but that was just probably the straw that broke the camel's back. Yeah, so I'm just remarkably fortunate. I've heard mixed reviews of

the accredited mental health social work qualification process. What was yours like for you? How did you navigate that? Terrible. Okay. That's the majority. Yeah, oh absolutely. It seems to be the thing. It was absolutely horrendous. I think I'll probably be struck down by lightning, but I have a real problem with the AASW in general, you know, and the whole perspective of mental health in Australia and the way the AMA and the APS and AASW and then all of these little affiliations that are counselling affiliations all struggle with each other for power and pecking orders and all sorts of things like that and have their own rhetoric. And it absolutely gets to me that the AASW is involved in that because it seems so damned hypocritical. When we're all working, I would have thought to help

the clients or the patients. And we've just got to get over ourselves regarding that. The cost of doing it and the cost of maintaining it and jumping through hoops, I think is appalling if we're looking at equity to begin with. In terms of the language that they want, within the time that they want, it seems to me to be incredibly artificial. I've had a friend recently who was rejected the first time around because she sounded too much like a counsellor. And that's just like that's just gobsmacking off. For goodness sake, please. You know, she's been working in this field for so long and she's absolutely brilliant.

So yes, I found it stressful. I got through it and I thought it had been the worst exam I'd ever sat. I couldn't eat after it. I just wanted to vomit and I was convinced that I'd failed. So I'm glad that I'm doing it now. I thought it was pretty loose before that, I think, because I went through during the first time, I think, that they had decided it was going to be online. And within the three hours and bam, van, you've just got to get it out really fast before that.

I'd had friends who'd gone through and they'd been able to do it in their own time and had had help to do it. So I think they needed, I guess, to tighten it up. But the thing that gets me is now they've got accreditation for mental health, for domestic and family violence, for clinical and all of these other things. things and I could fit into so many of them, but they're not going to offer that to me. They'd want me to jump through some more hoops and I don't know how they can justify it. I'm not sure if you were expecting that kind of an answer, but... You'd be surprised. I've had a couple of people who have found the process fairly straightforward, but they're definitely the minority.

I don't know how. I honestly don't know how. But I do also know that there are changes. They're constantly seem to be changing the way and the method and the format and someone fairly recently was telling me they had gone through and they prepped everything and then the format changed and they had to change everything. So yeah, it's difficult. That was it. You know, when I was doing it, when it was going through first with this online thing, they had said there was a word limit to it.

And then when I went in to do the word limit, it wasn't a word limit. It was a character limit. Oh, no. So I was having to spend my time going in and getting rid of really important words. Was it proving? Was it proving knowledge and understanding or was it proving that you could count character spaces? That seems I'm just gobsmacked that anybody would think that's okay. It's unnecessary. And there's no one who's accountable in it because they're all contract workers and working in different states.

And again, disgusting. I'm absolutely disgusting. Has it paid off in the sense that you are getting a lot of Medicare-based referrals from GPs? Do you get your funding from other sources? No, I get it mostly, well, word of mouth and referrals, loads and loads of referrals. They're coming in my ears and out of my ears regularly. And I'm really pleased with that. Again, it's a Medicare system where there's this terrible parity, you know, for work.

If I were a clinical psychologist, I'd be allowed to have a lot more. And then people would have a bigger rebate. So that's my, I suppose my main gripe in working in a business is that mental health is not considered as important as general health. And it's for people who can afford it. That upsets me. And so I tend to find that I reduce my fees a hell of a lot for a number of people because I'd rather reduce my fees. fees a hell of a lot to make sure that those people have their needs met and that they can keep coming and then maybe if they can afford it later on pay a little more so yet that makes

me incredibly angry at times because with layers of disadvantage it's more likely to be the people who can't afford to pay that need the support the most right absolutely and there was this whole argument that during COVID that the increased number of rebated sessions was only going to people, I don't know what they were thinking, you know, angst-filled housewise, who had nothing better to do, but I found that I had a hell of a lot of people who benefited extremely from it and maybe they needed to go to different socioeconomic populations to find out what was really going on, but that would have meant that it had to spend more money. But the same people I was seeing during COVID, I'm still seeing now, and they'll turn up fortnightly

no matter what, if it means missing food, they probably miss food. But I don't want them to have to. It's a terrible situation. I don't think it serves the nation well. If we look after each other and look after each other's mental health, we're going to prosper a hell of a lot more. You've mentioned a few things that are negative, challenging, about the work you're doing in terms of the parity, the equity,

but also developing and managing a business. What do you like? What's working well? what how do you enjoy about the work you're doing? I absolutely love it. And I frequently say to my clients, when I win a house, I'll do this for free. I don't get enough of it,

and I live and breathe and talk about it all the time. I absolutely love the interactions with people and love seeing people discovering themselves and discovering their own voices. I love seeing people develop secure attachments for the first time and seeing them feel loved for the first time. And it's not that I have to say it. I've had them turn around and walk at the door and I'll say, I'll say something to them and

they say, ah, yes, but that's because you love us. You know, and I know that they feel that. I love the moments of playfulness and the laughter. I love the fact that I learn something absolutely every day from each of my clients in some way, whether it's something that they just happen to be knowledgeable or they've had an experience that I haven't had or I learned something about myself. Whatever it is, it's so enriching and I know that so many people say this to the point that it sounds almost superfluous, but I honestly feel privileged to work with people like this. I absolutely love it. And I'm constantly

learning because I'm constantly doing professional development. I watch so many webinars and continually read and I wish I had more time to read. I've actually got two bookshelves, well, bookshelf spaces where I've got books that have filled them up that I'm going to read at some point in time. And I hope that time comes soon because sometimes I feel like I'm running out of it. But it's just my brain would turn to mush if I didn't. do this work it's thrilling it's absolutely thrilling and doing EMDR and doing visualisations i get to travel to new worlds in people's imaginations on a daily basis as well and who else gets to do that for a living really you know it's pretty cool it is it's very cool do you get to use some

of that artistic flare with your writing and your drawing you know just the creative stuff Yeah, sometimes, well, I think that's what therapy is. It's very, very creative. I mean, there's a science to it. Of course, there's a science to it with neurology, but I find it to be incredibly creative because I'm always blending different therapies in different ways that I haven't done before. That's creative in itself. And then I found this year alone with a couple of my clients who I've been trying very hard to help them to understand dissociative identity, disorder and that their parts, you can't, even though it's a lovely thought to have, a lovely

wish to have, you can't necessarily want about 27 different parts to all go off and do their own thing. It's not possible. And so helping them to understand why their parts have separated from trauma and getting to know those parts, I've ended up drawing pictures for them so that they understand it. And just seeing their faces when they look at it, I think, aha, right, okay. It's sort of like I'm this planet that's being ripped apart and sucked out by all of these other black holes all around me.

Or it's because I've been going from one parent to the other and back in again and not being able to connect with them because they won't connect. And having them look at me and say, you got up and you did this for me during the night. yes because it was on my mind I could see an image that might help you to be able to see it and so I find that that's very helpful

or I'll just sort of use the whiteboard and draw something or tree of knowledge or something like that and symbols using symbols so I probably use it to some degree every day that I work with them I think I inflicted upon them more than they ask for it who knows. Yeah, but they're coming to you for guidance, so if you can find a way to tap in, that's wonderful. I think it's important. You know, even if it's that or if it's music or something like that, whatever they relate to, I think it's essential. I'm not going to be making them

bend to how I talk. I need to be able to tune into the way they express themselves and understand the world. Otherwise, they're not going to feel safe. It makes me be speaking a foreign language. I do find it wonderful. All these new things that are coming around. There have been so many changes over even the last, say, five years, but definitely 10 years, 15 years around how counseling can be provided, how we understand it. COVID helped a little bit with that, I think, but I think it also helped to breed additional stigma. I'm just thinking like EMDR is, you know, it's such an emerging way of supporting someone. There are so many things that are just, you know, when I studied 20 years ago, just wasn't a thing. Well, yeah. I remember when I was studying psychology in around 2007,

I remember them talking about EMDR and I remember them talking about it as though some kind of pseudoscience and distant away from. And I, you know, I'm so glad that I bothered to have a look into it and saw the hell of a lot of science and the evidence of it in neuroimaging that is definitely, not a pseudoscience. It's just that they didn't understand it at the time and that, oh, it's okay now, you know, now that Medicare's approved it, it must be a science and it's because psychologists are using it now. Well, what be doing for them? We can all use it. It's a marvelous thing. And I think the idea of using a combination of different languages or modes of education and has been important to me since I was teaching English and history.

I mean, hence, that's why I ended up being a drama teacher because I was busy burying kids out in the playground to help them understand what it was like to be a Neanderthal and doing rituals in terms. People would walk past and say, what is teaching today? I had a district director come around and they were introduced to me in the English class, but we were busy dancing, Madonna's folk dance,

because I was teaching symbolism. Amazing. And the principal just came to her, this is Lisa King. She's a, oh, what did she call me? I don't remember what it was. You can't be put in a box. She said, she's an unconventional teacher and just walked out. I would have loved that.

I've got a history of it. It's just hilarious. That's so great. Yeah. I feel like one of the downsides or the risks of having your own practice is isolation. And I feel like you're the kind of person who would thrive on having a network, a tribe of people, even if it's just because you see a gap somewhere and you want the brain power to be able to address a gap and to advocate for something on a higher level.

What do you do to stay connected while you're busy managing a business? Yeah. You're right. It is a lonely world. but I am, believe it or not, I'm fairly introverted. So I'm quite happy in my own space and with the clients who I see. But I have a very wonderful friendship group, and they're all made up of therapists.

And so little groups here and there. So I meet up with some of them monthly. We just get together, we talk, we debrief. I run an EMDR practice group. We meet monthly, so we get to debrief and talk, which is incredible. And I suppose because now that I've been asked to present webinars with IS education, which is it's an organisation that presents professional development and it presents it from all around the world to all around the world,

now I've finally getting into my niche of my little community are people who are really interested in theory and practice and so I get to have conversations with really interesting people. So that keeps me going. And then I suppose outside of that, I have, well, my family is very much into music and talking philosophy and politics and things like that. So that keeps me going as well. I don't have time to get too lonely. But it's good to be able to bounce off.

people and to say, well, you know, I'm stuck with this particular person or this worked really well today and to share ideas. And I couldn't advocate enough for supervision. I think it's incredibly important. And I'm always gobsmacked at the number of professionals I meet who don't get external supervision. I think, well, how can you practice ethically without it? How are you reflecting. So yeah. Was it challenging for you to find someone who kind of shared your ethics, background, passion and also EMDR focus? Yeah. Well, I have, I'm really lucky I have two external supervisors. I have to do that because they notoriously take off to Europe for extended periods at three years. And I just hope that they do it at different times of the year. So you have a rotating

And they're both wonderful people. I was lucky. I met both of them when I felt like I was a victim from this particular organisation and they had experienced the same kind of experience with this organisation. And so they were like-minded to begin with, which is wonderful. And one of them doesn't practice EMDR, but she thinks very much like I do. and she's wonderful. I learn a lot from her. She does neuro-biodefeedback and she's most definitely very much a humanist. I really, really enjoy her a lot, great amount of depth and not afraid to challenge me on anything, which I like. Both of them are Dutch, so they're very blunt with me. But she's now going to be studying EMDR, which is wonderful. And the other one actually had encouraged me to study EMDR therapy.

And she's very experienced and wonderful too. So I'm incredibly fortunate, just incredibly fortunate. But I do know that it is difficult to find good supervisors. I provide supervision, but so far this year I haven't had people, but I love doing it. And I used to do it as a clinical practice manager of a DV service. I used to do it all the time and just thoroughly enjoyed it because you learn learn from the person coming in as well. Of course.

It should be the case, yeah. Yeah. Do you have any interest maybe given your education background, teaching social work, having some sort of academic role? Oh, look, I've always wanted to lecture. I mean, when I didn't want to work in intelligence in the Air Force, I wanted to lecture in literature and that was the thing I was going for, that's why I did the education degree.

But now that I've just recently presented a webinar and will be next year and writing some short courses, I feel like that's my opportunity to do the lecturing without the marking. And well, without the politics that are involved in university campuses, because I thought they were sacred places of learning when I went to uni for the first time. And I thought I was just in heaven. and it's been disillusioning, listening to people complain about the politics and universities. So maybe it was the great escape that I needed, you know, to have dodged a bullet, so to speak. But, yeah, I mean, I would have loved to lecture in something like that.

I'm not sure that I wanted to lecture in social work, but certainly in some kind of counselling therapy, I think that is where I would like to. Maybe TAFE is an option then? Could be. I know TAFE has its own political issues, but yeah. It's possibly riddled with it. I suppose I see myself as somebody that really belongs to the 19th century. I figured it has to be something like philosophy or literature.

I'd just like to read books out loud and give my opinion. That's possible what I'd like to do when they grow up. Maybe I'll have an opportunity later in life. I'd love to live in the academic world. That would suit me very much. I think unless you've really delved into psychology, a lot of people don't realize how much philosophy is in psychology and how much psychology is in philosophy. And I distinctly remember having two textbooks at uni that were exactly that. There was one from that side and one from that side.

And I just ate it up. I just thought it was the most interesting thing. Oh, it's wonderful. It's so wonderful. I remember having my mind blown when I just turned 18 and I'd finish reading one of Freud's books and Jung's books and. Jung's books and Marx's book and then I discovered nature and that was it. It was sort of like, right, this is blown my mind completely. This is how the world works. And I just simply adored it. And the wonderful thing was the uni that I went to, it's first year as a foundational year.

So you had to study all sorts of different things, literature and history and sociology and media and politics. And I could go over to the science school. and studied theirs. I studied Darwinian theory and all sorts of things like that. And I could go to the modern Asian language school and to the law school. So I did all of these things and I thought, this is just heaven on earth. And I just wanted to do that for the rest of the degree and came out not really knowing what I wanted to do. And I didn't want to be a journalist anymore. I just wanted to be a philosopher. And I knew I couldn't do that, that I wouldn't be paid for it. So I I just keep going through life thinking,

oh, this is what I love doing, that's what I'm going to do. And I'm fortunate that I'm doing that now, but you're right. I mean, psychology has developed in a particular era through different movements, and it's not in isolation. It's impacted by everything that's going on. And I suppose that's why I like social work, that at least it recognises that. It recognises that we don't live in isolation,

which is something that I found. Psychology didn't do that as much, although it did look at, I do recall reading a journal article that again made a lot of sense to me in my undergrad psych that was dealing with the person in context. And I thought that's just so important, isn't it?

We don't live in isolation. So we have to see people in their context and work within that rather than isolated. Yeah, of course. given that you do read so widely would you recommend any resources anything for people to check out if they wanted to know a little bit more about the type of work you do or social work in general yeah i've got a few i think that this one in particular which you're probably very familiar with yeah yeah that's fantastic and because of the worksheets in it i love that i also

love Janina Fisher's The Fragment itself. I don't know if you've come across Janina Fisher at all. I have, yeah. And she does these wonderful courses on complex trauma, which I completed course one and two in complex trauma. I've learned a hell of a lot from her. This book here is the one that I studied when I was doing honours in psychology. and it thinks really well into EMDR.

Apparently at the time it was only being taught at a master's level in master's courses in America, but we did it for a subject. And it's really intense, but I love the language in it. And you see that... That's learning emotion focus therapy. I'll put a link in the show notes. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fantastic. It's process experiential approach.

So it combines skisdahl. and emotion theory and learning theory is wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Just really closes everything I do. And I would really recommend the I's education because of all of the webinars that are involved on that. We get to listen to people who are on the World Health Organisation and the head of European psychiatry and lecturers. from Washington, D.C.

uni and from Holland, and they're just right at the forefront of their work. So that's www. e-I-S-E-E-Education.com. All one word. It's just they're fabulous for that kind of thing. And there was one more book that I wanted to mention. I don't know where I've put it.

Oh, well, I think a no-brainer is Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score. I think that is an absolute no-brainer. Yeah. I hope that's helpful. That's so helpful. Also, given, I'm sure there are people who are interested in learning more about EMDR, and there's just so much out there, so much content now, where should people start? What was pivotal for you when you were beginning?

I think that what was pivotal for me was one, I was introduced to the person who trained me, Graham Taylor. He's a clinical psychologist who works in Western Australia. and his attachment schema-based. So he's just a wealth of knowledge. And I think that finding out really good information would be best to go to EMDR, the EMDR Australian Association.

And they have resources on there. If you become a member, and it's really dirt cheap to become a member anyway, you have free access to journal articles. There are just so many journal articles about EMDR and the kinds of things that you can use them for. It's really state of the art. So that's where I went.

And to train with Graham, we had to do over 100 hours of reading. You know, it was just, it was ridiculous how much we had to do. But it was worth it, absolutely worth it. It's amazing how much you can stick in the back of your head and you think you've invented it yourself, but you haven't used to store the reading you've done. So, yes, I mean, I don't. keep my ears and eyes open to everything that's around me. I mean, I've got, I've got so many

books. I, it's hard to know where to start as to to what's helped me the most. And honestly, even things like Winnie the Pooh has helped me, you know, or, um, the very hungry caterpillar has helped me in terms of seeing the beauty and things and the metamorphosis of people. So I use everything I can lay my hand on. Yeah, there was even a quote from Winnie the Pooh this morning. for Walt Suicide Prevention Day. And it was just along the lines of, you know, Winnie and Must have been Tigger or Rabbit or something, went over to Eeyore and he was sitting by himself and looking blue.

And they were like, what's wrong? And he said, well, you know, I'm just not feeling great. You probably don't want to spend time with me. It's okay. And they just sat with him. And he said, why are you sitting here? We're not saying anything. We're just looking out at the woods.

And they said, well, that's the deal. we're here with you now. Yeah. Oh, it's so many feels. It's so sweet. I've often used it. In fact, I remember doing it with a teenager who was carrying on a bit and I went over to the corner of the room and went, oh, what are you doing?

I said, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I thought you might understand what I'm going on about. You know, when you turned your muzzle around and looked at, I said, there's more to life than eating thistles. You know, it's absolutely true. we can pop ourselves into so many of their identities. But taking the middle path that poo does, I think is a good place to start. Yeah.

You're absolutely right. You mentioned you're working at this three and a half days a week. How do you spend your downtime? What is the rest of your week like? How do you make sure that this is sustainable for you? That's a good question. At the moment, I'm hanging on by the skin of my teeth. I spend in the mornings on a Monday morning,

instead of going to work, I spend the afternoon working. It's in the mornings, I have an exercise class, and I have an exercise class on a Saturday as well. So I do that, not because I'm an incredible fitness buff, but because I've got a number of autoimmune disorders, and I have to do it, and I love doing it, and I try to make myself keep up with the 24-year-old instructor. And on a Friday, I tend to find that I have many appointments

that I have to attend, but I like to go out to lunch with my husband, which is a really nice thing to do. Weekends, I get out in the garden or I go and do something amazing with a few friends or something like that. At night, I collapse in a heap in front of the TV. I often listen to music or I'll, I have my 24-year-old lives with me, so we'll put music on and we'll dance around the lounge room until we drop. And that's a hell of a lot of fun too.

So I'd get my sillies out that way. Can you get them along to your exercise class maybe? Yeah, make up with the 24-year. He sits on the side and cheers me on. Come on, Rocky, he says. And at night, I tend to find that I'll either watch some, well, no, I do watch a lot of things that are to do with foreign affairs and stuff like that, like foreign correspondence.

but I also like comedies that are absurd and I often am in trouble because I'm constantly watching psycho thrillers or something like that. And my son has said, why do I always come out and you're watching somebody being killed? And I think it's because I listen to horrific things

in morning till night at work that it needs to be something way beyond that. Yeah. For escapism. Get into the Scandinavian or the Nordic ones that particularly good. something like that or a bit of peeky blinders or whatever it is. You know, I have to escape that way because I can see eight clients in a day and all of them have complex trauma. So I need some kind of

way of escaping from it. I can see how he might not see it as different though, but for you, it's obviously a very big distinction. It is. It seems to be a big distinction. I don't know how, but it's enough for me to get out of it in some way. because you see that there's a journey and then there's a wrapping up of sorts so it's actually probably feels really good to go yes there's this horrible thing but at the end of it there's a resolution yes and i don't always have that in my work so this is actually feeling really nice usually the bad he gets it in the end you know i have been doing a marvel marathon recently like to pretend that i'm you know dr strange or someone like that that's fantastic

Yeah, but yeah, that's pretty much how I do it. It used to be coming home and watching King Julian. I used to love watching King Julian and allowing my inner lemur to come out, very much like that, or Pepper Peak, but I don't often tell people that. So now I've gone and blown it. Your secret safe is making everyone else. How do you have found time? I kid myself in.

to thinking I'm going to watch things. I have an endless list of things on my phone. Every time someone says, oh, you really need to watch this. It's like, okay, it'll go on my phone. Maybe once a month, maybe every couple of months, I actually watch something that's on that list. And I have every intention of doing so. I just, yeah, don't really have the time. I spend a lot of time looking after my friends, animals or house sitting. So that's, you know, I love doing that and I love supporting my friends, but it is disruptive and it does take time because for me, if I'm, as I told you earlier before we started recording, I'm looking after two dogs at the moment. They're 15.

One of them has dementia. It's best in their own home, so I'm also house sitting. But for me, it means that they get so many more walks than they normally get. They love having me over probably because of that. They don't have to battle with the almost three-year-old for attention. So it's that sort of thing that helps me break it up as well of going, I like routine, but I also like a little bit of distance from that structure and schedule every now and then. I am the same in terms of exercise. So I usually, unless I'm just too, too

busy and it doesn't work, I almost every day go to the gym to do a class. And I don't go and just do my own thing. I will always go to a class because it's that opportunity to switch off from having to think what comes next, which we do in our work. And I'm an ex-gymist, so I like being told what to do. Just give me a thing to do and I'll follow it. So a class is perfect for me because I can just completely switch off, focus on the physical things that are happening or my technique or whatever else it is, the music, and just enjoy being in that semi-social environment.

And I love hiking. I plan hikes with friends and colleagues at least every couple of weeks. So that gets me out in nature and you can't possibly. be on your phone or doing other things while that's going on. And just connecting with people is so important. And I volunteer as well. So two days of fortnight, I volunteer for a homeless charity.

So in amongst the full-time work, that helps me balance it up. It's a hell of a lot. There's a lot to balance it. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't have grand bookcases with, you look like Bell from Beauty and the Beast.

You've got all these books. I feel like you need that ladder that moves across. It's so fantastic. Oh, I so want that. I so want it. That's my dream. But my bookshelf is my list on my phone. Oh, no, I want to have a house with the library.

I would be happy as a peak in March. You know you need to buy a lotto ticket in order to be eligible for the lotto. That's so I keep telling one of my colleagues. She complains that she's not winning the lotto. Yeah. Every now I get in, then I buy a ticket in a house and I never win it. But yeah, I tend not. to buy the lotto. I just one day, one day, I'll do something. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah.

One day you might develop the business and that'll be lovely too and not suggesting that that'll be an opportunity to step back at all, but it'll be at least something to shake it up and to help yourself surround with wonderful people that are like-minded. I think that is a really fun direction that things could go in and the teaching as you are suggesting and just doing more professional development is definitely a focus for you. So I don't think there's any end to what you can come up with. Thank you very much, Jasmine. Is there anything else before we finish up, Lisa? I feel like I could just chat with you all day and recite lyrics, but anything else that we haven't mentioned that you wanted to talk about. Oh, I think one thing I find is extremely helpful

that is the magic of this work is helping people to develop reflective capacity because people who present to me with complex trauma are so inward looking. Their whole world leaks out of them like Edvard Munk painting, Gishirai, you know, the screen. The whole environment is impacted by how they feel, their emotional sponges and giving them a sense of perspective, being able to step back and have a look at everything in context, taking themselves out of it and seeing how they fit into it and how things impact them is so empowering. And for them to be able to one day say, well, I think that this person might be thinking this or feeling this. And finally being able to step away from the complexity that they've been my idea.

in and being able to constantly ask them, well, what do you think first? Or when you walk away from here, what's one thing that you'll think about a little differently or more? And is there anything you'd rather I never did again? Is there good questions to ask at the end of the session? Because after a while, they start thinking for themselves in that way too, because I haven't been given permission earlier to do that. I think that's important and it was important for me as a supervisor to encourage the therapists who are on my team to do the same thing in their case notes to constantly be thinking,

well, I use this particular modality today for this particular reason and this was the outcome and then to put their feedback at the end of their case notes as well that the client, you know, develop the insight of or this is what we'll be doing next time. I think that that is an incredibly empowering thing to do and it's not necessarily something that seems to be ever taught. You know, in any of the courses that I've studied, it never seemed to be taught. And I think that would be a nice thing to know.

I don't know if that's wise or not, you know, some pearl of wisdom or guidance, but it's certainly, I think, a powerful thing. I think it's a really beautiful approach and it's very reflective and curious as well. Yeah, it gives people personal power. It certainly does. We're not very much encouraged to think for ourselves anymore, but we need to be able to. Yeah, yeah.

Again, Lisa, thank you so, so much. You've shared so much with us, even, like, from the beginning when you're talking about your family, connections to social work and they're helping professions, and you've clearly got a lifelong learning desire and interest in learning and supporting others through sharing your own experiences, which is very difficult and thank you for being so open with me today. You're acutely aware of the challenges that people are facing and the inequity and the types of people that you're supporting and the systems

and doing a great job of advocating one step at a time. You love your work. You find meaningful connections with the people that you say. support and the other networks that are doing similar things to you. You're writing your second book, you know, in your spare time. Keeping yourself as current as you can and interested in the work, which is what we need to do. It's what we need in order to continue to be able to do the work that we do. That's really hard.

So thank you again for sharing. I've loved hearing about it. Oh, thank you, Yasmin. Thank you for asking as well. It's been a pleasure talking with you. I'd love to talk to you again sometime, even if it's been offline. line, you know, just talk some song lyrics some more. Yes, please.

That sounds amazing. Or if I'm up in Queensland, I'll find you. Thanks. Thank you. Appreciate your time. You're very welcome, yes, man. Bye bye. Thanks for joining me this week.

If you would like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Lisa, please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm slash social work spotlight. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or you can email SW Spotlight Podcast at gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. Please also let me know if there is a particular topic you'd like discussed, or if you or another person you know would like to be featured on the show. Next episode's guest is Amanda, a social worker who has spent most of her career working with older people. Recently, her passion for research and search for clarity in her career led her to enroll in her PhD, researching access for people with dementia to voluntary assisted dying.

I release a new episode every two weeks. Please subscribe to my podcast so you're notified when this next episode is available. See you next time.