Social Work Spotlight - Episode 125: Josie

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

In this episode I speak with Dr Josie McSkimming, who has practised in a wide range of settings for over 40 years, including hospital social work, inter-country adoption, post-adoption services, drug and alcohol treatment, individual and couples therapy and adult mental health. In addition to her private practice providing therapy and clinical supervision, Josie is an adjunct lecturer at the University of NSW and the author of two books, ‘Leaving Christian Fundamentalism and the Reconstruction of Identity’ and ‘Gutsy Girls’, a memoir to be released early 2025.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:Writings by Michael White, courtesy of the Dulwich Centre - https://dulwichcentre.com.au/writings-by-michael-white/Master of Narrative Therapy and Community Work - https://dulwichcentre.com.au/training-in-narrative-therapy/masters-program-in-narrative-therapy-and-community-work/Josie’s memoir “Gutsy Girls” - https://www.uqp.com.au/books/gutsy-girlsJosie’s book “Leaving Christian Fundamentalism and the Reconstruction of Identity” - https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315591926/leaving-christian-fundamentalism-reconstruction-identity-josie-mcskimmingMaster of Counselling Social Work at UNSW - https://www.unsw.edu.au/study/postgraduate/master-of-counselling-social-workThis episode's transcript can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZSihUMKK6udoa8BmmbkkuozNhdjESYkUFxb16tz4xDo/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 Dr. Josie McSkimming, a proud social worker of more than 40 years experience. She has practiced in a wide range of settings, including hospital social work, inter-country adoption, post-adoption services, drug and alcohol treatment, individual and couples therapy, and adult mental health. Josie is an adjunct lecturer at the University of New South Wales and the author of two books, leaving Christian fundamentalism and the reconstruction of identity and gutsy girls, a memoir to be released early 2025. She is in full-time private practice as an accredited mental health social worker and clinical supervisor. Welcome, Josie. Thank you so much for meeting with me today. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. your social work experience. My pleasure. I'd love to ask firstly when you got started in social work and what brought you to the profession. I'm sort of a bit hesitant to answer that question

because it'll make me sound like a dinosaur and some of your younger listeners will be going, oh my God, but it's, I graduated in 1981. It's a long time ago. So I did social work straight out of school, age 17, graduated, got my first job at 21. So, and I've been a social worker ever since. So that's a long career. And it's been an outstanding career choice. I've never regretted it, which a lot of people don't say at my sort of stage of their career about their choices. I mean, the thing is about

social work is that it's offered me so many different opportunities, so many different places that I've been able to work and I've just enjoyed being able to engage in social work practices and being a social worker for a very long time. Yeah. And did you know much about the profession before you started studying? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I was going to study medicine and I went to medical summer school in the January of my final year. I don't know if that exists anymore. And then I had a rather traumatic incident that happened in my final year of school where my boyfriend committed a very serious crime. And I was so caught up in this crime and my confusion and, you know, keenness to understand it that somehow I thought studying social work,

would help me to understand what had happened, which was kind of peculiar in some ways. He also went to prison, and I also thought, if I did social work, I might be able to understand the prison system better and what he was experiencing. So what a reason to go into social work. As it turned out,

I never visited him in prison, and I didn't have anything more to do with him because my parents were so distressed, and it was quite reasonable for them to restrict my access to him. And I started social work not really knowing anything about social policy, social welfare, human behaviour. But I liked it right from the beginning. And never thought to change, never thought to move to another career. So people go into their careers in all kinds of weird ways.

Yeah. Did you have a clear understanding of what kind of social work? work you wanted to do once he had finished. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I did the four years and honours and I basically just wanted to get the first job I could. So there was a big thing when you graduated to get a job. So I used to work as a nurse's aide or a nurse's assistant all through my university years and I didn't want to do that anymore because working in a nursing home as a nurse and I was no nurse was really that's a tough job and it didn't suit me. So I got a job at the Children's Hospital in Sydney which was then at Camperdown. It had an enormous social work

department. Those were the days where we had secretaries and we all had an office on our own, you know, probably nobody even remembers that. I loved it. And we had people who actually answered the phone and did you typing for you and it was a different world and it was a very big social work department and I learned a lot there and I was involved in you know a general medical ward and a neurosciences ward so I was dealing with children with neurological and neurosurgical problems age 21 I mean it was just unbelievable it's such an incredible responsibility. I don't know how equipped I was for the job, but I certainly learnt a lot. And then they formed a team at the hospital called the child abuse team. I believe

it was the first one in New South Wales, probably Australia, where we were called child abuse social workers. We're on call. And I'm sure people aren't called that anymore either. But we used to work with paediatricians and get called out in the middle of the night for suspected cases of child abuse mistreatment. So that was a profoundly challenging and groundbreaking role. And, you know, again, I learned a lot. But also as a very young professional being called out to do that sort of thing in the middle of the night, how did you manage that? I still remember it so clearly. I remember that we had pages that used to go off. And you'd have to ring the hospital. And the nurse or the pediatrician would tell you what it had.

happened and say you've got to come, so you'd have to come and do an assessment of a baby with a skull fracture. It was incredibly distressing and nerve-wracking. Thankfully, we had good pediatricians and we had a good team. And so the other so-called child abuse social workers, we'd have regular meetings and discuss what was going on. We also had extremely good relationships with the Department of Community Services. I know some of your listeners are going to be thinking, oh, those were the days. We used to complain about them, but I think about the situation now,

and it was much better then. We had very close relationships. So we'd get to know local district offices, as they were called, and we'd talk to them all the time and try and work out plans and what had actually happened to this child. So yes, it was. Yes, very young social worker,

but you're very keen when you're young and very energetic. Yeah. And I guess that was me. Given that I've done the on-call shifts as well in a hospital setting, the amount of stress that you don't realize you're holding until after you leave that setting. There's sort of this arousal level that continues to climb and even just going to bed of an evening knowing that you could get called out at any point. It really messes with you longer term.

Oh, it's terrible. I think so. I mean, I actually think it was better doing it then. I couldn't do it now. I kind of feel a little jaded now. Even now, I'd have so much more experience, but I just don't think I'd have the capacity. I mean, you would be sometimes at the hospital

for hours and hours and hours. You wouldn't get a wink of sleep. And that was just an expectation. I don't even remember if we got paid non-call allowance. It was, yeah, but I didn't, I stayed doing that work for some time, but then I moved to the Department of Community. services and started working in inter-country adoption.

Okay. So that was a huge change. And so... Yeah, and very niche. It was very niche. I was very interested in the whole concept of inter-country adoption. And even then when I started, I had grave misgivings about it as a sort of an exercise in colonial and imperialistic appropriation of children.

Maybe I wasn't the best person to work there. But yeah, I worked there for quite some time and then worked in the post-adoption services within the Department of Community Services, which then equipped me for moving into post-adoption services with the Benevolence Society, which I did from a number of years after adoption laws changed, which allowed the opening up of the birth records. So I was involved in the adoption world and did a lot of sort of supervising and teaching and consulting for many years. So that was actually quite a big chunk of my career being involved in adoption and post-adoption work. And I guess it's not until you reflect back on that. You think,

man, I learned so much in such a short period of time that really has taken me throughout my career. It was. It was when I was working for the Benevolent Society, it's when I started to realize that I really didn't know anything about counselling. And we were doing a lot of counseling and group work, mediation and it was very challenging therapy you know anybody who's worked with or is an adopted person themselves or a woman that may have relinquished a child or been forced to relinquish a child knows the complexity of this whole dynamic and the enormous problems associated with those closed adoptions that were so commonplace in the 60s and the 70s and so. So that was when we as a team, and it was a wonderful team, started doing training in narrative therapy.

That was in the early 90s. Michael White was really kind of forging ahead with a different style of therapy. And that actually did change the course of my life and my career learning narrative therapy, which I did and studied it, which meant that then I was able to move into more detailed or diverse counselling. and I started to work for an NGO, Anglicare, and we were doing mostly couple therapy. So I did that for years and years, couple therapy, any individual therapy. So that, you know, that was a really solid time. Oh, and during all of this, I did have three children, so, you know, that you sort of squeeze

that in too. Yeah, just wherever there's a gap. Yeah, and, you know, we didn't really have maternity leave provisions. They were incredibly meagre. when I had my children. Like you were allowed to take a certain period of time off. And if you didn't go back and return to the job, you had to repay any money that you were given.

And it was a really small amount of money. And I desperately needed that money. So our maternity leave provisions were terrible. But anyway, that aside. Yeah. So and then after I worked doing this, you know, quite detailed day after day, hour after hour of counselling, I went into private practice. So I've basically been in private practice, a private practice social

worker, psychotherapist, since 2000. So that's a long time. And you've focused on specific kinds of therapy, right? You've not generalising. Oh yeah, no, I'm sort of a general psychotherapist, if you like. But my primary modality has been narrative therapy, which I then taught at the University of New South Wales for maybe nearly 20 years. But anybody who works in the world of therapy knows that you have to keep learning and learning new ways of understanding and assisting people. And so I've done lots of other study in different counselling methods. But I guess I do come back to narrative therapy because it does suit me very much as a social worker because it's so contextually based it's a non pathologising approach it understands people's

problems that develop in families in groups in cultures and society it's not individualizing it's not pathologising it's not diagnostic we don't treat anybody we actually work collaboratively with people about the problems that are troubling them and I think it really fits with certainly my social work values. And was it your therapy and the types of concepts that were coming up for you? What informed your PhD and your research? Were you seeing kind of that theme rolling through? Yeah, well, look, the PhD was another thing altogether because I was involved for many years with evangelical churches. And, you know, evangelical churches and fundamentalist churches can be like cults in some ways and cultish, not definitively cult.

And, you know, I've written about this, and some people may know my book I've written about this called Leaving Christian Fundamentalism, which is all about my research with other people who've left and my own journey of leaving. And so that book was based on my PhD. So the PhD was all about how your identity is. shaped by being in a particular culture and in this context, church, church communities, and how when you leave, you reshape and reform a sense of identity. And so, you know, I was very interested in power and control and coercion and what I've been experienced, what other people have been exposed to. So anybody

who's interested in doing a PhD knows or anybody who knows anything about a big piece of study is that you've got to be interested in it and you've got to be interested in it that you'll be interested in it for years because it's so awful the the arduousness of doing it and I was interested I was really interested and that was very sustaining and having your own personal approach is important because you can see the themes that go through. You can relate to the content. And I guess in a PhD kind of scenario, you wouldn't have the capacity to bring as much of your own context to it. But the book would then allow you to do that a little bit more to weave it through. Well, in fact, I did do that in the PhD because the analysis I did was this sort of

iterative analysis where not only did I interview the clients, but I also analyzed in the PhD how my own experience that they, a lot of them were aware of how that affected the interviews. Fascinating. And that was a very important piece of the research because I realized as I did all my interviews, my story influenced their story. And so I had to have a whole chapter on that because, you know, qualitative research requires this very, you know, particular lens about what's happening in those interviews. You can't just assume that they're neutral or objective because they're not.

No, you're not doing research on a person. You're doing research with a person. That's right. That's right. Or a group of people. And so, yes, and I certainly wrote about that in the book as well, but also in the PhD. I tried to make the book a little bit more accessible than a PhD, but it still has got an academic focus. Yeah. There are so many layers there in terms of types of trauma, religious trauma, the sense of escaping the system and being so entrenched in a world where that's your identity, which is what I guess you were talking about. But yeah, I just find it so interesting from a grief and loss perspective as well around that sense of group identity and personal identity. and yeah, I've just had a lot of friends as well who have, I'm going to say, escaped the church and really struggled with that sense of connection afterwards, that sense of belonging. Oh, yeah, it's a huge thing.

Excommunication and feelings of blame and, yeah, it's incredibly traumatic. Interestingly enough, though, Yasmin, people's mental health often improves. So even though they leave and there is that sense of loss, and the loss of community and the quest for a new community, I find that some of the more distressing mental health experiences are while people are still in it. So even with managing the aftermath, the residue, you know, the challenges of losing something

that you've been so invested in, there's also a sense of lightness, freedom and personal agency. And as I argue in the book, people completely reframe and remake their whole sense of ethical substance, which can be challenging, but can also mean that people feel as though they're breathing clear air for a long time. And for someone like yourself who enjoys reading widely and absorbing the world around her, I can imagine just the freedom of feeling as though you can take things in, you can explore other perspectives.

that would have been incredibly wonderful. Yes. And I think that when you are in one of these very controlling communities which controls the way you think and your sense of acceptability and there's a lot of compulsion and a lot of policing, you police other people and they police you. I mean, the power is kind of dispersed

throughout the community itself to actually, yes, realize that different things are possible. You can think differently. You don't have to think in the same way that you've always thought. You know, it's kind of incredibly refreshing and exciting. And you also don't have to have your relationships with people saturated in the quest to save souls and being an evangelist. Because when I was at university, I was very involved with the university church. And I was on campus.

We used to do this cold evangelism. I mean, it's just nightmare stuff. where you kind of approach people on the library lawn or various other places to talk to them about the good news of Jesus. And it was so stressful and so awful. And to actually let all that go and relationships can be interesting and different and not tainted or saturated in the need to convert. It's life-changing. But you know, this is what I research in detail, what it was like for other people too, not just my experience, but. how that all unraveled or how that trajectory happened for others.

How did that affect your most personal relationships? I'm thinking in terms of family support, were your family members quite evangelical or linked with the church? Or was there very much a youth thing? And you had your own sort of, I guess, connections around that? Well, it's an interesting question because for lots of people, particularly who come from very religious families and their spouse is still immersed in the church.

It's very difficult. For me, I came from a sort of a nominally Jewish background. My parents were not evangelical Christians by any means. I actually didn't tell them what was going on for a long time. You know, I don't think they really knew what was going on until they read my book. You know, I was a lot older then and I, you know, I just didn't feel like.

explaining and I was lucky because my husband of many years also deconstructed his faith and so it's very difficult if one deconstructs and the other stays firm so we both left we both took sort of slightly different well actually at times quite significantly different paths to get to the same place yeah and the kids by that point were oh they were all in the church but okay they all drifted off and now my kids are in their 30s they all make jokes about it and you know I'd say they're atheists really yeah but you know they're kind of philosophical they don't see it as all bad I mean there was a sense of community and camaraderie and engagement with others I mean you don't stay in churches because they're all bad you don't stay for so long because they're just terrible from

woe to go. There's lots of good things and I think they are quite philosophical about it, but they don't have any religious involvement at all now. Okay. I'm always interested as well in the uptake of research, specifically PhD research, because it is often marketed or targeted to a specific audience within academia. Do you get a sense or do you hear about other people who have perhaps taken your research and wanted to or have further developed it or taken it in a different direction? Look, I don't know. I think certainly I know people have read it.

Because I don't have a lot to do with the university anymore and I don't have a lot to do with academia anymore, I tend to know more about the effects of my research in a clinical sense. Sure. So I get lots of emails from people and, you know, speak on podcasts. and sort of fellow apostates and whatnot. But certainly the research has been quoted by other academics. And I'm presuming other people read it as the basis for the, or, you know, as part of the reading for their own PhDs.

Or it becomes part of the body of literature to do with deconstruction. Okay. Religious deconstruction. So, yeah, I, as I say, I'm not really involved in academic, research anymore. During the pandemic, a lot of us casual or adjunct academics lost all of our hours. You'd be familiar with what happened in the universities during the pandemic. I mean, they just, they didn't get job keeper and lots of people lost their jobs. And I lost my hours. And so I started to pursue other things. Yeah. Yes, I should say now, that's when I wrote another book.

But the book I wrote, the second one I've written, this was because people kept saying to me to write it and I just didn't want to do it at all. I didn't want to do it. It was too hard to write a book about my own deconstruction like a memoir. And I didn't want to do it. I just wanted to keep it academic. But as it turned out, I did do it. I have written a memoir, but it's mostly, it's a sort of a family memoir. And it's about my older sister.

and how she and her influence in particular changed my life and helped me to deconstruct my religious faith. So it's a memoir about her and about my family. She has died now. So it's a kind of a memoir, a biography of her because she was quite a well-known person. And how that affected me and my slow emergence from that cloud of fundamentalism. So I did do it. I didn't want to do it at all. Yeah.

Because it was too hard. And it's taken me quite a long time to do it, but I'm so glad that I've done it. In fact, I found it much harder than doing the PhD. So if people think doing the PhD is hard, I found this harder. I wonder whether it wouldn't have happened necessarily if you hadn't lost the hours at the uni. There would have been a lot of excuses or a lot more to not do it. Yeah. Look, I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't done the PhD first.

And I wouldn't have done it if I, because I mean, I started writing it before the pandemic. I started writing it because I thought I've got to write about my sister and I've got to write about this deconstruction. It just seemed to be the moment. So I started thinking about it in 2018. But then the pandemic did present me with huge opportunities, you know, when we're all in lockdown, to write. which I did. So that is true. The pandemic, I think it gave a lot of people who were doing creative projects some space to do them.

I mean, what else were we going to do? Yeah, exactly. How did you find your therapy and your business through that period as well? That would have been challenging to adjust. I was busier than I've ever been. And working online, you know, every day, so exhaust. I didn't enjoy all of that working online and I know that it has changed a lot of people's practice, a lot of people still do a lot of work online. I much prefer to have people face to face.

But yes, it was a very tiring period. But because I didn't really have a social life, I mean, who had a social life? On the weekend, you'd do your walk within 10 kilometres or whatever you're allowed to do. And then I would sit at the desk and write and read and my sister was a writer, so I read all of her books again. And I just started that process of thinking about our family and our lives together and how they are entwined. And it's in the remembering and in the recollecting that a new story is forged, things that I hadn't realized. Anybody, who started writing about their life, things that they've been through,

try to piece things together, start to realize that as you start remembering, so the story changes and the story develops. And you said that your family members read through the PhD. Yeah, I had to wait until my parents had died, to be honest, before I've published this memoir, because they knew I was writing it, but they really didn't know how Frank

I was going to be. It's very frank and it's very honest and it's not always complimentary to them. And so they've died now my parents and I feel happier that they aren't going to read it. And I have one sister left and she's read it and made comments. I don't think she's been entirely happy with it either because it's just one story that can be told about a family. and everybody knows that for every possible event and for every possible family, there are many stories that you can tell and I've just told mine. Yeah, of course. So, yeah, that's been a lot of navigating all the different personalities

because, yes, a lot of people I've written about in the book aren't dead. So, you know, there's an ethical consideration too that you don't want to misrepresent people or unnecessarily hurt people's feelings. Yeah. That's what I mean. it's easier to do a PhD. And from the time it gets submitted to the publisher, then can people access it? Well, that's of course anybody here listening who's ever tried to get something published

knows that you have to submit it first to a whole bunch of publishers before somebody likes it. And that's a very dispiriting process in itself because you get so many rejections. I mean, there's so many opportunities along the way to give up. I mean, you could give up at so many times. And then once it is accepted by a publisher, which is like jubilation, then an editor wants it all changed. So then I've been working for at least 12 months reshaping it

so that the publisher, which is UQP, think that it's a book. that will sell. Sure. It's not like an academic book where they're not that worried if it has small sales. Yeah. So it will be available with any luck January, February 2025. Lovely. So very soon.

So it's not long. It's not long. Okay. So once that's done, what's the next step for you? What's your next project? Because it sounds like you just move from one thing to the next. You know, I was really thinking about that, the next project that I wanted. do and I've thought about is there another book I want to write and I just don't know yet.

I kind of think that as you read and as you talk to people and as you keep your mind open, things present themselves and sometimes try to force something doesn't happen. I don't want to do any more academic research. I mean, you know, I've been working at sort of fairly full throttle for a long time, you know, more than 40 years. So I don't want to do any more academic research, but if there is something that I'm interested in, I don't mind researching it and reading about it. I've had a few ideas, but nothing that I could talk about just yet. Sure. Yeah. Or maybe I'll start to wind down gently. I mean, I don't want to work forever as well. Yeah. But lots of social workers work kind of well-past

standard retirement age in my experience, they just keep on working because, well, it does depend on the place that you work, but we enjoy the work. And we enjoy the engagement and we enjoy working with people. And being a therapist and a counselor, you do have some longevity in your profession. It's one of those professions that you're not irrelevant when you're older. In some ways, more people want to see you when you're older because they think you must know what you're talking about. Absolutely. People I see don't want to see somebody in their 20s. They want you to have some life experience so you understand about trauma and broken marriages and heartbreak and loss and all the things that we deal with. So I don't know. I sort of wouldn't mind winding down

and having some longer holidays. When you're self-employed, you never have any long service leave. Yeah, true. That sounds good to me. Has the way that you've provided therapy or perhaps conceptualised therapy changed over the course of time, given that you've been doing this for so long throughout different stages of your career, what's changed or, you know, what direction do you hope it might go in? Well, it is interesting because I've always been very persuaded by, as I said before, a narrative therapy approach because I found it so congruent with social

acknowledges and values and I think the therapy has changed me so I understand my life differently and when I talk to my colleagues in peer supervision we kind of feel the same that the therapy has changed us as much as it perhaps has we hope had a beneficial impact upon the people who consult with us that we understand our lives in less pathologising way, we understand problems as being able to externalise them. We understand our lives, how we've journeyed them, how we've made sense of them. It's helped all of us as therapists, certainly my colleagues and I, that's why I don't regret this profession at all, to change as people, which I'm not quite sure I would have if I'd been a medical

professional as I always wanted to be a doctor. Would I have had the personal transformation? Would I have understood my own trauma and my own life in the way that I have if I hadn't been thinking in a sort of a post-structural way for many years? Because post-structural therapy is what interests me. So as I've thought about them for 30 years, they have changed me. And I think they change the people that you work with too because your whole approach to them you know is not peeling the onion to get to the center of who they are but you know as michel foucault always said maybe the task is to refuse what we are so how you've been constructed or how society has constructed you or church or other families or groups or communities that maybe you can actually refuse some of these

constructions rather than see yourself defined as impermanent and unchanging and, you know, some of those rather internalized language that people use to describe themselves. Yeah, I feel like our social workers, if we're not constantly growing and developing, it's something that we need to be so mindful of all the time is that if we're not growing, if we're not developing, if we're not resourcing ourselves, how can we possibly understand what's coming before us and how can we support the people. And that's what professional development is about, whether it takes the form of supervision, whether it's actually doing research, whether it's going to a course. It's all helping us to shape the kind of social worker that we want to continually become because it's a fluid thing. And that's

what I say to students all the time. What you're seeing is a snapshot of a social worker in time, who has a set of experiences, what I'd like to encourage you to do as a student is to think about what kind of social worker you might be and how you can set yourself on a path, I guess, to making that happen while being still cognizant of the fact that that will change over time and it should change over time.

So yeah, it's such a fluid profession. It is, and you can never really, I mean, you can set your foot on a path, but I never actually thought I was that interested in counselling. I always thought, oh, that's too hard. I don't know how to do that and it sounds very intense and can I do it? And I kind of found myself, you know, as you sort of take opportunities, as I say, as you talk to people, as you go on courses, as you read things, I think, oh, okay, something, some sort of portal opens, and I don't mean a divine portal, you can follow. And that's what I've always done.

I haven't done too much planning. I've just thought, I'm interested in that. I'll see how that goes. And I think it prevents burnout too. I think a lot of social workers get burnt out. They, you know, it starts off as being sort of exhausted and then it becomes, you know, irritable and bored. And once you're at that stage and lacking compassion and even blaming clients, you know, that's where things can go. I think that as you constantly monitor your own, you know, critical self-reflection

and professional development, that is a huge antidote to burn out, as well as joining with other like-minded people. You know, join with others in justice doing, as the social worker Vicki Reynolds says. You know, that this is what is unique about our profession is that we are committed to justice doing. we are committed to social change. And the minute we're just subscribing to the status quo, we're going to get burnt out, I think.

Yeah. How do you prevent that for yourself then as a counsellor, as someone who is in private practice as well, which is an extra layer of complication potentially in terms of perhaps in isolation? It is. How do you forge through that? Look, it doesn't suit everybody to be in private practice.

And when I started, I thought, how am I going to do this? But I was so fed up with the health department at that stage. I'd been working in drug and alcohol. It was another place I worked, drug and alcohol treatment. And I was kind of so fed up with all those layers of bureaucracy and all of the form filling and admin. And I just couldn't stand it. And I loved the autonomy.

Maybe it's also to do with I was moving away from the church as well. I love the autonomy and the fact that I could make my own decisions in private practice about what I did, the hours I worked. But it doesn't suit everybody because you can have some incredibly challenging experiences and you have to manage them on your own. That doesn't mean completely on your own. And so that's why I've always had good supervision myself, good peer supervision. I now meet with colleagues and we support each other.

you've got to be very careful not to get isolated. I used to really enjoy the teaching because teaching the students is so great because you find out what everybody else is doing. You've got to stay connected to the profession. But look, it doesn't suit everybody doing private practice because the isolation and some of the anxiety can be, you know, quite overwhelming. But, you know, I kind of find now after all these years, I've seen so many different presentations and different things happen in therapy.

I'm not saying I know how to handle them all, but I've seen a lot now. So I generally kind of have a sense of what I might do, what might be helpful, and who I can talk to. I mean, you've got to have that reasonably in place. But I mean, I love private practice because I love the flexibility. You don't make any money, though. I mean, social workers don't make any money anyway. Yeah, yeah. You know, if you were to charge what the ASW suggests,

which is completely ridiculous and outrageous and people can't pay it, maybe you would make a lot of money. Yeah, but that's not what we're here to do, is make it inaccessible when most of the people that need the service are disadvantaged. That's what I reckon. And that's why I find social workers, my colleagues, we never overcharge because we just come. bear it that things are inaccessible. We see clients pro bono. We see clients for very little money

for sort of pepper corn amounts of money because we don't want to make it inaccessible. Social workers just can't overcharge. I just don't think we can do it. Yeah, it's not in our blood. Indeed. Advisory and supervisory support is a real strength and interest for you. I just wonder if that's something potentially once you start to scale back, maybe you can do, I don't know, student supervision and those sorts of things for people who are on placement. Oh, yes. Look, I've definitely, I've definitely been thinking about that for a number of years and I've got a number of supervisors. I was nervous about doing supervision and I started when I went into private practice in 2000, I started doing group supervision and telling people I was available and just jumped

right in. I did some training in supervision back in the day at ACAP. Is that still there? It is. Australian College for Loto College. Yes. Okay, so just training there. And sort of started trying to do it. And the group supervision is actually harder than the individual supervision, which I didn't realize. It's very hard because sometimes you don't kind of know what's happening in the group. And there's often people who don't want to be there. And so there's a little bit of management. But I like groups, so I did that for a number of years, but now I see lots of individuals and I see lots of clinicians and it's very enjoyable. Yeah, supervision is much easier than it used to be. Yeah. So in answer to your question, a few questions ago about changes you make, you realize that you do have a few skills under your belt.

Whereas before, you know, I was racked with self-out and didn't think I could do it at all. I start to think, well, maybe I do have something to offer. But, you know, I see my supervision as very collaborative and, you know, that I hope that my supervisees feel very supported and encouraged by me in the work they do. Yeah. I completed training on group leadership back in the day that was offered by an agency and organization that no longer exists, unfortunately. But I might even just out of capacity if ACAP is still a lot.

offering the supervision training because that'll be a good thing to put in the show notes for anyone else interested. Yeah, it was pretty good. I thought it was pretty comprehensive. The ASW offers some introduction to supervision and I think they've got a few courses that build on each other. I've noticed that being advertised. And I think anybody who's interested in doing supervision, it's good to start with an introduction about what's involved. And I do my supervision differently than I used to. I think that changes too. And when I'm, I now tend to see people who are very experienced. So I used to see very early career social workers. I saw everybody. And as I say, some of these groups, nurses, they weren't even therapists. You know, I used to see

groups of methadone nurses and do a whole variety. That was all really good because you actually had to develop all kinds of skills. But now I just tend to see quite experienced counsellors and psychotherapy. So it's a different style. Very different. Yeah. I've just recently created a model of group supervision at my work with our teams, which I think has just been such a long time coming.

But with these things, if you don't start it, it's never going to happen. And I found that providing supervision as a group to people who are not social work, because I had to create this little package. It was like a PowerPoint presentation on what is supervision and what is it not? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think how are they operating as professionals and dealing with some very complex traumatic content, never having had this support.

It's astounding to me. Well, the nurses that I used to see, they in the 2000s, they had no idea what supervision was. They weren't offered anything, had never been offered anything. I mean, it was really, yes, remarkable. And, you know, I think when I was a young social worker, when I was at the Children's Hospital, when I was working in adoption, I always had supervision.

And it was always with a social worker. And it was of a high quality. And we'd have external supervision as well as internal supervision. It was regarded as an absolute priority. And I meet lots of social workers now who just sort of get line supervision, like how many cases have you got can you do another one, that sort of supervision. And I'm thinking, wow, we've lost something really important that I experienced through the 80s and 90s where, I mean, sometimes they were healthy in days and we didn't realize how good we had it

in terms of the support we were getting. Often new grads, they don't get supervision. Or they get it not from a social worker. Or it's not supervision. It's a sort of an accountability discussion and I think that we you know need to think about social workers new grads and early grads and how to support them to develop their skills because otherwise they'll leave the profession or get discouraged you know I think about me at the children's hospital counseling parents whose children have been diagnosed with cancer at 21 yeah but I had a very secure and stable. I know. I know. I was extremely keen to do the right thing. So I know that I was coming from a good place, but my maturity, I mean it's ridiculous. But I had a very stable and

strong supervisor who used to say, talk to me about the nature of compassion and being in therapy. Yeah, she was very good. She's died now. But I don't know. No, hospital social work, I think maybe you know better than I do, I think does offer reasonable supervision. Yes, yes, absolutely. And in my situation when I fought for it not to be my direct team leader, it was particularly excellent because it's someone who understands the system that sits slightly outside of your immediate report. And we had solo, like one-on-one supervision and group supervision. and our group supervisor was the most wonderful Pam Cohen, who you probably know what I've heard of.

So I got the crem de lucre on the social work supervisors. You were lucky. So incredibly fortunate. And Mari Hayden as well for a small time before us. So, you know, you can't get better than that, really. How lucky am I? Yeah. And, you know, to people who are listening,

who are unhappy with their level of supervision, supervision support, I'd really encourage them to just don't let it go. Try and find somebody. Even if you have to pay, it is a tax deduction, pay for an external person that you can see maybe once every six weeks just to support your practice. Because I know when I went into private practice, I had one-on-one supervision, but I also had peer supervision, which are different. So I'd go to my supervisor with the cases that I didn't really seem to know what I was doing with. And with the peer supervision, we would really just try and support each other as well as discuss challenging presentations and whatnot. But there may be people listening thinking I'm just not getting enough support.

And I know there's a lot of people in that situation and really you've got to make it happen. Because I think, you know, some agencies let people down. They're just not offering it. I think also these days when everyone has a phone and in the hospital you have a pager, but the pager gets left with someone, like even if it's your reception person. Yes, yes. Having had to step out of, so I worked in the sub-acute area of the hospital, which was a completely different, like it was across the road from the main hospital.

So to get to group supervision and one-on-one, I had to cross the road. It was a literal leaving behind of everything so I couldn't be distracted and just stepping into that zone of support, which was perfect. And not many of us had that opportunity because there were only, I guess, four social workers in sub-acute. So, yeah, very lucky in that sense too. Yes. Well, you know, I think that there are some settings that are more challenging than others.

And I talked to a lot of social workers who work in mental health. And look, I don't want to single out mental health as being particularly difficult, but there's been a kind of such a surge in, medical model and such a decline in personnel since I worked, even in placement in mental health and in child mental health and community mental health, I feel as though they're under particular pressure. They need their social work colleagues to remind them that looking at mental health that totally medically is not the only way to look at mental health. Yeah. So there may be people listening who are going to be saying,

yes, I know exactly what I'm saying here. I mean, because I'm in private practice, I deal with adult mental health and people who have been through community mental health or through hospital, public mental health system. And it's chronically under-resourced. And yeah, anyway, that's another whole conversation. You mentioned a couple of resources,

including the supervision training and Michael White's narrative therapy. If people wanted to know more about the type of social work you've discussed or that you do or you have done, where would you direct them? Well, if they're interested in counselling and psychotherapy, there are lots of opportunities to study all the diverse ways of conducting counselling. I'm not a great kind of aficionado of CBT, even though I've studied it. I'm an accredited mental health social worker. We use CBT, but I am more persuaded with a more systems contextualised approach, like the more post-structural approach.

And there are lots of opportunities to study narrative therapy. You can do a master's in narrative therapy these days. You can do life training at the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide. There are opportunities. You can also do, which is the course I used to teach, the Masters of Counseling, Masters of Social Work bracket counseling at University of New South Wales. That was what I used to teach it. And we used to have supervision groups and I taught narrative.

But in that course, it's only social workers. They teach a variety of therapeutic models, CBT, IFS, mindfulness-based, CBT. Yeah, I mean, if people want to do counselling, it's there. You know, you can do this master of counselling. There used to be a Masters of Couple and Family Therapy, but that folded, sadly. Yeah. Are there any grad dips for people not wanting to do a master's or higher degree? I'm sure there is, but look, not at UNSW, but maybe at ACAP. Yeah. Speaking of ACAP. Right. I'll do some research. Yeah, yeah.

But I think that a lot of social workers these days want to get accredited as mental health social workers because then you can get a provider number and clients can get a partial rebate through Medicare. I personally preferred the old system where there was none of that. Because what's happened is it's pushed out a lot of people who've just got a master's of counselling who aren't social workers who are often extremely good psychotherapy. So a lot of them have been frozen out. Yeah. And had their careers sort of truncated.

I've seen a lot of Clint Sykes price gouging and charging well above the scheduled Medicare fee. That's not right because that's meaning that people can't act services. I feel as though it's set up a real hierarchy within psychotherapy. And I'm just not convinced it's the best way of doing it. And it's meant that all the people, prices have gone up. I mean, it's not as though the rebate for social work is particularly generous. It's about $80. But all the prices have really gone up. And it's also seems to me

quite challenging to get that accreditation these days. There's exams and whatnot. But I know a lot of social workers want to do that. I sometimes say to people, if you don't want to do that accreditation to be a mental health social worker if you really just don't want to do that you can do other specialist counseling degrees and you just have to find a niche you know you just have to find something that not everybody else is doing couple therapy you know there's lots of people who don't want to do couple therapy and if you do it you'll get work or a specialist area there are social workers who specialize in intellectual disability or they specialize in families where a family member has diabetes type one.

You know, they find a niche. Super specialty. Yeah, they do. Yeah, they do. And they can find work. It's just that clients these days always ask you if you're kind of got to provide a number thinking you're going to, you know, that by the provider number that they're going to, you know, have their counselling paid for by the government.

I don't think, I certainly don't overcharge. believe I do, but a lot of people will get a $120 rebate, let's say, from a Clin Syke, but the ClinSyc charges 250. So you're really out of pocket. Yeah. Yeah, especially if you have your heart set on a specific kind of provider. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So a social worker who doesn't overcharge and finds a niche might not want to be an accredited mental health social worker. There are avenues to work. There are places that you can go. You don't just have to be accredited mental health social worker. And limitations in that.

Yeah, for sure. We've had the wonderful opportunity to speak about so many things today. Is there anything you feel like we haven't touched on or anything else that you really want to leave people with? Oh, no. Look, I've said enough. Yeah, it's great. You know, I hope, you know, my book might be interesting to people.

You know, I'd be mad not to take this opportunity to. promote it. So please look for it. It's called gutsy girls. And it's about social work and about being sisters and about complicated families and trauma. So it's got everything. Yeah. And it'll be coming out very soon. They'll be coming out very soon. But that's all from me for now. Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity, Yasmin. It's very kind of you to ask me. Thank you so much. I think the fact that you have been offered so many opportunities throughout your career is just testament to and the longevity. I think it's testament to the breadth of social work and you've just stayed open opportunities, but also you've been able to leave a real legacy in the sense of helping other

people to find ways of conceptualizing religions and institutions and even through your sister's life, being able to kind of unpack some of that and finding therapy as, I guess, a way of understanding or making sense of our own world. So it's gone both ways where you've really learned from the people that you've supported over those periods of time. And that's what's kept it fresh and helped you avoid burnout and kept you interested in wanting to do this work for such a long time. So thank you so, so much for sharing your experience. I've loved hearing about it. And I'm sure other people would as well. Thank you. That's a very good summary. Thank you again for your time.

Thanks for joining me this week. If you would like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Josie. Please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm.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 Lauren, who has predominantly worked within the domestic family and sexual violence sector. Lauren discusses how her career has intersected with other disciplines along the way and how these experiences have shaped how she practices as a social worker. Lauren currently works as a senior practitioner, supervising an interstate team supporting victim survivors of financial abuse with coaching. I release a new episode every two weeks.

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