Social Work Spotlight - Episode 73: Rebecca

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

In this episode I speak with Rebecca, who has 25 years of social work experience in child protection, legal aid and more recently in private practice. Rebecca has extensive skills in risk assessments and complex case management for young people, and has worked also for the physical abuse and neglect of children counselling service. The majority of her career has been as a criminal consultant for legal aid, and supporting high risk young offenders. More recently Rebecca has moved into part-time private practice, where she continues to specialise in family group conferencing.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:Legal Aid NSW (podcasts, annual reports, mental health, Work Development Orders, Closing the Gap Project, Health Justice Partnership Outreach Services and more) - https://www.legalaid.nsw.gov.au/Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare - https://www.cfecfw.asn.au/Australian Institute of Criminology - https://www.aic.gov.au/Safe and Sound Protocol (Unyte Integrated Listening) - https://integratedlistening.com/ssp-safe-sound-protocol/Trauma Resource Foundation - https://traumaresearchfoundation.org/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIw-SEz-eh-gIVRQ4rCh0EkQJHEAAYASAAEgL3ivD_BwEPESI mental health continuing education seminars - https://www.pesi.com/Psychotherapy Networker magazine - https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/Internal Family Systems Institute - https://ifs-institute.com/Tania Singer - https://taniasinger.de/Janina Fisher - https://janinafisher.com/Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory: The Emergence of Polyvagal Informed Therapies by Stephen Porges and Deb Dana - https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324000501The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe by Stephen Porges - https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393707878The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk - https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-scoreThe Wisdom of Trauma by Gabor Mate - https://thewisdomoftrauma.com/This episode's transcript can be viewed here:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gmut4QtNyyiA0D4go9VjHPYXr6RI23yBsuU3SQF1oxc/edit?usp=sharingThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

Hi and welcome to Social Work Spotlight where I showcase different areas of the profession in each episode. I'm your host, Yasmin McKee Wright, and today's guest is Rebecca, who has 25 years of social work experience in child protection, legal aid, and more recently in private practice. Rebecca has extensive skills in risk assessments and complex case management for young people, and has worked also for the physical abuse and neglect of children counselling service. The majority of her career has been as a criminal consultant for legal aid, and supporting high-risk young offenders. More recently, Rebecca has moved into part-time private practice where she continues to specialize in family group conferencing.

Thank you so much, Rebecca, for coming on to the podcast. Lovely to meet with you and really excited to have a chat with you about your experience. Thanks for having me. I'd love to know when you started as a social worker and what drew you to the profession in the first place. Okay. Well, I've finished my degree in... Oh gosh, when was it? 98, but I actually started working in 97 in child protection back in the days when they didn't require you to have a degree.

So I was one of those pocket people. There's so many layers to that question. One layer is it was the career that I believe that would allow me to fulfill my innate drive to serve others, to make an important contribution to people's lives and somehow take the opportunity when welcome to. to ease of suffering that people experience within their life. Another layer is my own lived experience of cultural diversity and the identity struggles, the legacy burdens, medical and other traumas that surrounded me

and drew on my compassion towards people who suffer, struggle and survive. I never knew social work was a career or an education pathway. I didn't even know social workers existed. I went to university following a scientific career. possibly marine biology, genetic engineering or environmental engineering. I knew I wanted to make an impact on life. I fell in love with psychology when I was doing my Bachelor of Science, but I didn't like the pathologizing of people, nor the statistics component.

I actually don't know anyone who does. So I looked for something that looked at more than just a clinical perspective. The combination of sociology and psychology resonated more with me, probably because of the many layers I knew that made up me and knew it was true for the rest of the world. And I think I've grown more into this perspective that we are vessels of psychology, biology, neurology, spirituality, physiology, and diversity. There's so many layers to us. And I think social work really provided, you know, an overall.

opening to that, whereas psychology I felt was limited. As much as I loved it, it was fascinating. I just felt it was limited in its perspective. It has become so much a part of me without raising eyebrows, because I know this comment might kind of raise eyebrows. I kind of don't know which came first, you know. Was I always a social worker and this degree made a career out of my life or did it make me a social worker? So, yeah, don't know. Interesting. I'd love to go back to just myself coming from a multicultural background.

I'd love to just unpack if I can and what you meant by a legacy burden. A few things. So growing up as a first generation Australian, I come from a Lebanese culture. I'm a very proud Lebanese woman, but it hasn't always been like that. So, you know, my culture often gets scrutinized in the media by, you know, secular kind of views without people knowing what my culture is. So growing up in Australia, I was always divided between my Lebanese culture, which, you know, my parents really tried to make us so much aware of.

But they also really wanted us to become very much part of. of the Australian culture. And so fitting in, somewhere in there was really difficult because you couldn't kind of fit in with the migrated Lebanese, so my parents who migrated here, and then fitting in with the Australian people who don't really know much or have their own views of Lebanese cultures to whatever experience they've had, could be subjective, media, whatever. it is and then being somewhere in between that. So you kind of really only identified with people who have similar background where their first generation Lebanese. And then there was the legacy

burdens really are what happens in the media, what people know of Lebanon in the media, the stereotypes, what people understand of people who are first generation, who are living here. Yeah, so it's just kind of that understanding of culture can be quite limited. So look, my parents always raised us to say we are Australian because we're born in Australia and I identify with being Australian. I also identify with being Lebanese. So when people ask me, oh, what's your background? I will always say first and foremost I'm Australian because I'm born in Australia.

And people look at me with so much confusion because I don't look Australian. And I wait for it. I wait for it. Oh, okay, so what's your background? And there's so much more to just being a Lebanese background. There's so much to that. And it's not just the food. It's not just religion.

It's so much culture and it's so much diversity. And, you know, people's understanding of what it is to be Lebanese is not, we're not a homogenous group. I guess that's the legacy burden is that people will see you as a homogenous group. you're from that culture, therefore you must be this. Yeah. Right, right. Okay, that makes sense to me.

How then do you feel that that fitting in, like you said, has influenced personally, culturally, professionally your identity as a social worker? Has that background kind of had any impact on the type of social worker that you are today, do you think? Yeah, I think all of the last. layers that we have influenced the type of social work that we are or we do. We're made up of so many parts and my culture is one of those parts. My identity is one of those parts.

It I think allows me to really be very open to all kinds of diversity because I can really relate to the experience of being. perhaps misjudged or being stereotyped or being misunderstood. So it's really a place of humility because I understand the process that people of minority groups of diversity experience in society. when facing organizations, when going through systems, in social sectors, there's so many different kind of components of our social structure. What then has led to this point in your career?

What sort of skills and experience have you developed? Well, this is a very transformative part of my career, actually. You've caught me in a collision, I suppose, a full circle kind of thing. So when I was thinking about this, I thought it's possibly the beginning of completing the full circle of my career. When I first started social work, my plan was to become a therapist. I finished my degree and although I was working in child protection, I jumped straight into an undergraduate in counselling with applied psychology, feeling very insecure about my skills to work clinically with people.

child protection was confronting, extremely challenging and exhausting on the mind and body, but I think it was such an important foundation to understand systems, trauma, integrative and collaborative work and developing an enormous skill set from risk assessment, complex case management, report writing management, supervision that transferred across intake, care and protection and out-of-home care. So it really gave me a massive fundamental understanding. I worked then in Panark, which it's no longer called that, so it's the physical abuse and neglect of children counselling service. The skills and training developed there was fantastic.

But again, I felt my context was lacking and I needed more. I landed with legal aid as the criminal consultant, assessing people facing sentencing and writing meaningful reports that provided context to clients with so much complexity. It's been here. that I've seen so visibly the manifestation of trauma and truly understand what all my experiences in lived, learn and practice experiences were I piloted the first interdisciplinary project in legal aid as the social worker in the Children's Civil Legal Service, working with high-risk young offenders at risk of recidivism and entering custody, working with criminal civil lawyers as the leading social worker. Since this project, legal aid has incorporated social workers in a domestic

violence unit, a family law unit, in our elder abuse unit, the veterans unit, the disability unit. So it's been a really great expansion of social work within legal aid. Ensuring the role of social workers within the core business of the organisations has been a strong focus for me over the last four years of my career because it's, it's a real. It's a very important. It's can get messy, so it's really important to stay focused as a social work within the core construct of our business at Legal Aid. Since COVID and the rise in mental health suffering and further marginalisation and isolation of certain groups, I have been more drawn to return to clinical practice and have dedicated a lot of my time to upskilling and amalgating all

of the layers that have made sense to all my personal and professional experiences. Neuro science and Stephen Porges, along with Bezell van der Kolk, Danzig, or Dick Schwartz, Janina Fisher, Tanya Singer, Gabon Matte, and many others have developed evidence-based practice, science behind clinical practice and speak to the language that I have known all along. looking at people from a top-down approach and connecting an internal and external system of individuals. So it's actually from a bottom-up approach, you know, so it's no longer looking at them from a top-down. It's really looking at them from a bottom-up. I have never been more excited about my career and experience humility every day. The more I learn, the less I know

and the more I want to know. So this is where I'm at in my career. I'm just juggling my public office along with my private practice, sharing half the load within a week. Yeah. Okay. And I would imagine then within the Legal Aid Commission, a lot of what you're seeing is people with disadvantage to begin with coming in contact with systems. So their access to support would be one of the main challenges. But what does a typical day look like for you?

the Legal Aid Commission. Okay, so within legal aid, continuing to write reports. So the role, the function is assessing writing reports, the people facing sentences, the wishes reports for children who are within the family court system, reports to NCAT or the Mental Health Tribune for Civil Matters, and we provide consultation to solicitors, you know, what to do next, where to go, how to kind of work with a really complex matter.

Lucky enough I did this from home, which is so convenient. for me and I conduct most of the AVLs from home because a lot of the clients that I see are in custody. As part of the closing the gap, the role for cars, which is the client assessment referral team within legal aid and many other units within legal aid has been to implement change to prioritize indigenous clients who also make criteria for complexity. So we are really seeing the most disadvantaged and marginalized people within the community who have really really fallen through the gaps of the system. So some of this work may include complex case management and consultation,

but most of it has been assessment and report writing. The look at the day is interviewing client over AVL, writing up the assessment report, putting in professional opinions, sending that off for editing, consulting with solicitors, looking at referral pathways, and that's been kind of pretty much more current. working a lot with the support that's offered within custody just to kind of start the process of, well, perhaps these people might not be released into the community once they face their sentence,

but perhaps let's get the ball rolling for what we can set up when they are released or what we can set up while they're in custody because there are not a lot of services that are offered whilst inmates are on remand. And it's a really awful kind of situation because they can be on remand for quite a long time. So it's really not a rehabilitative process. That's another part where the system is broken. Yeah. And you've worked for legal aid for, was it 17 years? It's been quite some time. Yeah, since 2005. Yeah, it's a long time. Yeah, well. So in that time, it sounds as though with your support, the role of social work and perhaps the uptake of employment of social workers has increased.

But is that an area where you're seeing social work really shine? Is this something that legal aid across the border trying to prioritize? I think every solicitor would love a social worker attached to them. There's so much demand because, you know, legal issues come about, often especially with the clients that we see because of their well-being issues because of social issues because of marginalisation, because of disadvantage, and that's where the world of social work exists. So those two worlds always come together and it's because we are working with such complex clients, our system has been triaged to work with the most complex cases.

It really is important to embed social workers within that structure so that clients can work on say civil matters, civil issues, whether it's housing, whether it's financial issues, whether it's relational issues, whilst they're dealing with their legal issues, which is majority of the time influenced by their social issues. Sure. Yeah, a couple of years ago I spoke with Alexis who works for Slater and Gordon and I don't know if she's still the, like if it's still the only private firm that have social work on the books, but she was saying obviously there's such a need and especially in the criminal world but for all

other things like family and and civil matters like you suggested yeah so yeah hopefully what we can see is an additional amount of funding or priority that's put in for social work in some of those private law firms just to enable the lawyers to do their thing you know and to be reassured that the psychosocial matters are being supported as well as someone. goes through the system. It's really important, for example, because I have been the crime consultant for the majority of my career at legal aid, it's really important to highlight those socosocial issues that impact a client and it creates a context for judges who are reading the reports that

we provide to understand why this person is before the court. and not just as a behavioural kind of component, but just to understand and unpack all of the things that have influenced why this person is now presenting before the court and is criminally offending. Yeah, and it's interesting you mentioned N-CAT. Are you suggesting you prepare a lot of reports for guardianship? Is that what that comes in?

Yeah. So there's a mental health tribunal. The Guardianship Board, absolutely. There are a lot of people with disabilities that really get lost in the system and those issues really need to be. And even immigration, they get lost in the system. You know, there are a lot of services that aren't able to kind of really meet the needs of clients who have so many different kind of complexities, maybe homeless or losing their accommodation, facing criminal offences, and it just kind of gets shifted and pulled to this

service or that service. And somewhere along the way, the client gets lost and dropped and falls through the gap. So, you know, they're the kind of clients we end up with and they're the clients that we advocate for. Do you find that challenging yourself, dealing primarily with criminal matters, kind of being able to really switch off and say, okay, well, there's a lot of, person has perhaps offended in a way that just doesn't sit well with me and how do you then find a way to support that person and see past that? Okay, in the 17 years I have been working for legal aid. It's very rare for me to meet with a client that does not have a trauma history and trauma really provides a context for why people offend and why people end up on this trajectory. So,

it's really hard then to separate the trauma from the behaviour. So I don't switch off. I'm actually very switched on about that. And it's really important for me to raise that kind of awareness to judges, two solicitors, so that they really understand the person that they are working with. It's not a person who is often seen as calculated or manipulative or of that kind of underground mind.

It is the person who's most of the time working from an autonomic nervous system that is really dysregulated. And a lot of the times their responses are autonomic. Yeah. Are you the only social worker in your team or do you work with a team of social workers? No, we have a team of social workers. Yep. So there's social workers who have worked really kind of

closely with the family courts, children's court, mental health tribunal, section 14s, civil courts, and me with the criminal courts. So, yeah, we do share the workload, but there is always a consultant that identifies more with a certain kind of legal discipline. Do you then supervise those social workers? What does that look like for you? No, we're very, a lot of the social workers in my team have, been social workers for a very long time. They're very highly skilled experts. So we all share each other's knowledge and skill. We do have a supervisor, so a CARS manager, a client assessment referral manager. And that structure has recently changed. So we do have that CARS manager

and we've then got, I think, a grade 11 or 12 who is the Allied health practice. practices kind of manager who oversees, because we have social workers now in different teams and different units, so that manager oversees all of the different social workers from the different units. That is more managerial and administrative supervision. Clinical supervision is something that you would seek externally. Yep. Okay. And given that you've got that wealth of knowledge and experience within your social work team, do you have an opportunity to supervise students in the role? Yep, I have supervised students from Western Sydney University in their fourth year placement because of the nature of our work and the complexity of our clients. We only really kind of

encourage fourth year students who have had some experience from their third year placement. Yeah, and in my experience, they go through quite a process and interview process to suss out whether they'd be able to really kind of take on the role. In terms of whether there are any triggering potentially issues. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. And just to kind of meet the high demand. as you talk about that switching off, which you need to kind of be quite switched on.

Being very self-aware, I would imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Do you find it difficult, given that you have a real interest in therapy or therapeutic approaches, do you find it difficult focusing on those short interventions, those assessments for reports, knowing that this might be sort of a very short opportunity to work with someone and then you just have to kind of do as much as you can before handing them over? Initially, when I first started with legal aid, that was quite difficult because I had come from

Panock, which is where I provided therapy. And then I was just doing assessments and reports and I was getting really frustrated with, we need to do more. This client is so dysregulated, how are they going to go back out into the community, and they haven't had the clinical treatment that they require. I really had to kind of make a shift to what my. role is and that's really important for clients to know as well because when we are assessing clients I'm able to attain so much information from those clients I think because they know

that they're only going to see me once and they never have to see me again they don't have to go through that process and the reports that I write the narrative that they give me is a testament to their life and something that they can use with any other organisation say, don't need to repeat this again, here you go, here's this report, this says everything. The biggest and most important thing in my role at Legal Aid is to ensure that I'm not retramatizing the client by going through their narrative. So that is the most important kind of focus that I have when I'm assessing, holding that client and getting the information that is not.

needed to really help advocate for their situation without kind of disregulating them further. And that's a really tricky thing to do and takes a lot of clinical skill to do. So it's, I do use it. I do use the clinical work, of course, but not in a way where I would love to kind of continue working long term with clients. But I think it's important to have that container. That container is important for the client and it's important for the client and it's important for my role to, you know, remain unbiased and to provide an unbiased report.

Yep. Sure. And is that where your private practice has kind of shifted a little bit more because you've seen, you've come from that therapeutic background, you've then needed to contain for the sake of assessments and reports and really targeted intervention. And now you've got a bit more of an opportunity to branch out and prioritize some of that therapeutic work? Absolutely.

Absolutely. In my part-time time, so I divide my weeks. You're a fair time when you're not being a mum and a legally permission worker? Well, what I didn't mention is I'm also like a family group conference facilitator. So I do that as well. So that's usually through DCJ. The referrals come through there. And I'll talk a bit more about that later. So in my part-time work at the moment in my career, I've been building my private practice.

to fulfill that original dream of becoming an amazing psychotherapist, which I'm still working on, and I believe I'll continue to work on probably for a very long time. I'm certified in Stephen Porges' Safe and Sound Protocol, an amazing program that is embedded in polyvagal theory. It's a bottom-up approach, tapping directly into the autonomic nervous system to regulate the nervous system, into a safe state, enhance the therapeutic process. So that's why, like, I really love this tool. And because of my work within legal aid,

it's these kind of interventions that I feel would work with clients who have been in custody, clients who have experienced so much trauma, who are so dysregulated, because even though they sometimes are able to provide a narrative, it's the non-talking therapies that they, all really request. They don't want to have to keep on revisiting their trauma. It's the non-talking therapies that they really request. So I've been combining it actually with IFS, which is the

Internal Family Systems model that Dick Schwartz has developed, and I've seen amazing results. I love seeing the results with clients, and I want to spend more time doing this with clients, because I can really see. It's almost like an awakening and they see it. It's not something they're going, I want to, like people walk out of counts and going, I wonder what I got out of that. Whereas I'm seeing a different kind of outcome. I'm seeing people becoming more curious about themselves. You know, once that safe state is established, they become really curious and they become really fascinated with what is going on internally. And how does that affect me externally? and it's amazing.

And they're able to, the tools that I use with mindfulness, with IFS, the skills that they learn through that, that they incorporate through their everyday kind of learning more about their parts, it's giving them more control of how they respond to themselves and to the rest of the world, which is, that's incredible. Yeah, so I love seeing the amazing results. I'm looking at working with other allied professionals, such as education. educators, OTs, speech pathologists, behaviour specialists, which I believe will require a lot of advocacy working on my part. Yeah, so I'm just wanting to kind of collaborate because I think, say,

the Safe and Sound Protocol would be used beautifully, especially within our education system. You know, really looking at children rather than kind of trying to manage their behavior in the classroom, let's look at children to see how we can actually regulate their nervous system so that they can actually get the most out of their classroom. Yeah. Yeah. So as I said, I facilitate family group conferences with DCJ. This is also amazing work.

I've worked with DCJ for quite some time in the child protection unit, managing the specialist as well. I fulfilled that role. But I just thought, especially coming from my cultural background, I really thought there's another way of working with families, you know, and that is working with families, allowing families to actually really take control of the situation and come together and make decisions as families should.

So facilitating that process has been really rewarding and watching families kind of really take back that decision, making power in their lives when it comes to, you know, meeting the needs and prioritising that child. Okay. Have you noticed with the trauma responses and the counselling, is there, much overlap with the approaches between children and adults having come from working with adults for so long? I have to say that I think I mentioned before I needed more. I needed a context. I needed all of that kind of understanding. It wasn't until legal aid that I really, it all

kind of came together because that is where I saw the manifestation of trauma, the end result of trauma. So that's where it's kind of really cemented everything that I misunderstood or didn't really kind of put together when I was working clinically or when I was working in child protection. I really got that when I was with legal aid because I could see the end result and I heard the stories. You know, I was more in a listening role in legal aid than I'd ever been throughout my career because I wasn't in that crisis-driven practice. I'm not in that crisis-driven practice. I am in a place where, you know, I can sit and I can listen, actively listen, and I can give back from what clients give me. So, yeah, very different.

What has the process been like for you of starting your own practice and everything that that entails? Oh my gosh. Wow, it's not a hobby, that's for sure. It is huge. You're building a business as skeleton. So it's a skeleton kind of and you're building the muscles into it and the systems around it. It's huge.

It's huge. Can I say that my experience in public office has helped? Yeah, probably because I can kind of navigate any legal or liability issues. that might arise and also the structures and the systems that I need to kind of do my job in the public office, I've kind of really translated over to my private practice. So I have kind of templates, easy access to things that make it really more efficient for me to kind of work with clients. It's huge building your private practice and kind of shifting. You know, you've got to shift from that really comfortable place of working for someone where everything is kind of really

already set in place and you can analyse it, you can critique it and you can say, hey, we need to change these. But when you're actually building your own private practice, you are it. You are the person who's building. You are the person who's critiquing. You are the person who's creating the safety net or different avenues. You've got to figure out referral parts. You're pathways, you've got to be the marketing system, you've got to be the advertising, you've got to be the financial kind of management, and you've also got to look after yourself. So you've got to be the well-being officer. So it's really, there's so many hats that you have to really kind of put on to build a private practice. Yeah. And how do you segregate all of that? Do you say,

I'm going to focus on my private practice two days a week and then just really strict with your timing. How do you actually coordinate all of that? It's really helpful having two computers because it separates my two different boxes of my career. So, you know, this is the computer that I use for my work at Legale. And this is a computer that I work with for my private practice. And those two only come out the hours that I have allocated to say, my public office and my private office, they only come out when they have been assigned. So like I work strictly, I'm very much a heads down, bums up type of person.

So when I'm working for legal aid, I am working strictly for legal aid. Even like my family know, do not interrupt me. This is my legal aid time. And then private practice, because I work part time, that's the stuff that can kind of creep in to say family time because I am building from skeleton up. And I also offer a lot of flexibility for clients so that I am available, you know, after normal business hours or before normal business hours and maybe on a Saturday. So that kind of is a little bit more spread out, whereas legal aid is quite solid. It's like the three days a week, quite solid. This is

legal aid time and there's no other legal aid time after that. And the rest of the time is my private practice. Okay. So you've gotten really good at switching off, which I think is really important and just setting those boundaries. Yeah. Obviously, you're just starting to develop this private practice, but what would you hope to create from it? How do you want to build the private practice? You mentioned bringing other allied health professionals into it. Are you wanting to expand the team eventually? What is your view for the business? Oh, look, I'll have to be honest. I would love to collaborate.

Expanding the team is not something I want to look for because I don't want to manage people. Been there, done that. Been there, done that. And, you know, I've been asked to kind of manage temporarily the cars unit and I've always declined because it's not something I really love working with clients. Yep. And I'm not saying that your team can't be your kind of clients. But I just, I don't.

I see colleagues as colleagues equal. colleagues. I don't like being in a hierarchical system. Yeah, I like to work collaboratively with people, but not manage people. So when I talk about bringing in other disciplines, I love learning about the way other disciplines work with the same client and bringing those worlds together. I think Gabel Merté is probably one of my favorite psychotherapists because he really brings biology into, and this is probably my scientific mind. He brings biology into psychology, just like Stephen Porges brings neuroscience into psychology. And it's just like the amalgamation of those worlds. And that's why I think collaborative work is so important because, especially say with the

safe and sound protocol, it's something I really want to get out there in the many different kind of systems in society, education, whether it's custody, whether it's juvenile detention, because I really believe that regulating that nervous system gives you a better opportunity to work with those clients therapeutically. Or, you know, even if it's not therapy, in occupational therapy, to work with them on their education. Whatever it is, it's just a really great way to get in there and open up that person's capacity to absorb and to receive. Yeah. And in learning more about what that other discipline can offer,

that perhaps informs your direction as a social worker. It's not just being able to work together with another discipline. It perhaps informs and enriches your own practice. Absolutely. Absolutely. Would you like to build it up to a full-time load of any? or are you enjoying having a little bit of both worlds? I love writing reports.

I really do. And I love the outcomes that I get. And I love when judges mention the social workers report in their findings and really rely on what we've written in their findings for the sentencing of the client and really start to understand trauma. I love having that impact. But I also really, I light up so much in clinical practice. You know, people talk about, oh, you know, I wonder if that client, how that went for that

client, whatever. I walk out of therapy with clients just on a high. Because I just find, I'm in a place of so much curiosity and I'm in a place of so much compassion. It's just so good for my system and that co-regulation that I offer them is so good for their system. It's such a really enriching process. Would I like it to grow? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Where does that leave the balance? I guess it's something we'll just have to wait and see. Yeah, I think with most things, there's only so much you can plan and then it's really up to the universe to provide. And if the business expands and things start going well and you start building that reputation, fantastic. But it's nice to have these other options, not as a fallback because that's not even what it is. No. It's such an integral part of who you are and your social work identity. But just being able to know that there is that opportunity to continue.

to work with that subset or that cohort to further diversify your practice and keep things interesting. Yeah. And I love the diversity and I love being part of processes that work. And that's been really important for me because when I see people fall through the gaps, that's the part that really frustrates me being part of a system that doesn't work. So when I am part of a system that does work, it's so rewarding. I think you've been a little bit modest here because part of the reason the system works is because you've put so much into it and you've educated other social workers and you've

developed a really good social work foundation for practice in other areas like the family and the civil matters, not just the criminal. So having that opportunity to work somewhere for such a long period of time has given you that opportunity to leave that legacy. I think that's really incredible. Thank you. Are there any other projects or programs? You mentioned the interdisciplinary project that you've pioneered, but is there anything else that you're working on at the moment? Apart from building my private practice. I feel like you're the type of person who has like a million little things going on at once. Pockets in everything. I am doing a lot of

training at the moment lots and lots of training that's informing my practice not only in my private practice but in legal aid so I'm trying to change in legal aid in the role currently it is report writing via assessment so you do your assessment you do your report writing you make recommendations and it's kind of stops there right so it's really more about building now some relationships within the custodial systems of support and changing the language there in terms of what they can do in the interim periods. So talking a lot with those support people that I can encounter to kind of start maybe shifting their role a little bit without making it a massive systemic change because, I don't know if that's something, not that I can't influence,

but something that I can change on my own. So it's really, at the moment for me, it's about influencing change within other systems that have consistently not met the needs of our common client. If people wanted to know more about the areas, that you're working in both legal aid and the private practice and the trauma work, where would you send them? What are some good resources? With legal aid, get onto our website. There is a whole load of information for people to navigate what we do, what programs

are occurring in legal aid. There's so many different kind of outreach services and programs that they can, especially social workers who really don't know where. social work fits within the legal aid system. There are reviews on their reports, annual reports, annual reviews. You know, there's stuff about outreach services, health justice partnerships, outreach, partnerships between legal aid and whose. WDO scheme, which is the work development order scheme that not a lot of people will know about unless they're actually in practice. The Children's Civil Legal Service and the Youth Hotline, the Family Law Social, so there's, you know, divisions in each, when you go onto the website, you can go into each sector, the family law,

the DV unit, the elder abuse unit, our annual report, the mental health unit. We have podcasts. They're called what we do on the go podcasts. So you can go into them and kind of listen to what's happening, what people are doing within legal aid. And is that run by the lawyers or is that a social work-led thing? So we have a communications unit and they, I think, somewhere under there, there's somebody who does the podcast and interviews lawyers about what they're doing and social workers about what they're doing, what's new. There's podcasts about how to do things, you know, as you kind of navigate the system, making it easier for clients and stuff like that. So there's a whole lot of kind of information on there. In terms of what I do in my private practice,

there's a safe and sound protocol website. You can go into the Trauma Foundation. I think, that reading anything written by Stephen Porges and Deb Dana around polyvagal theory is essential now because this is like when I started social work these developments in the science of psychology had not yet developed right so I think it was 2014 that polyvagal kind of hit the scenes you know it was a working in progress and polyvagal hit the scenes in 2014 so this is new really current scientific psychology. So I think everybody should read the clinical applications of the Polyvagal theory that was written by Stephen Porges and Deb Dana or the pocket guide to polyvagal theory by Stephen Porges. If you want to learn more about internal family systems, Pezzi

have a lot of trainings on there and Frank Anderson does amazing training in that. The Centre of Excellence in Therapeutic Care is also really good for finding out. a lot more information on issues for family group conferencing, I suppose. The Australian Institute of Communology is something that we rely on a lot, like especially in my role at Legal Aid, because they do a lot of research. They have a lot of journals about different kind of areas of crime and, you know, what's the most up-to-date statistics on deaths in custody or when coronavirus, when the pandemic was really at its course.

what was happening to people who were in domestic violence situations isolated at home and the statistics around those sorts of things. So that's a really good place to kind of get forensic information and how that applies to social work. They have media releases and research. I think anything released from Gabel Merte with Compassionate Inquiry, Peter Levine, Bezal-Vandekog, the Body Keeps the School, that book, but he's on the Trauma Foundation, He has so much research there and so many kind of podcasts, seminars, webinars that you can kind of get into just to be really more up to date with trauma and the evolution that is going on at the moment in the trauma field.

So, yeah, that's a good start. Yeah, that's a good start, I think. Well, I'm curious as to, and I'll have to ask my next student next year, whether some of that stuff is being taught now because it is so contemporary, whether it's being taught at university, because I was looking at things like Panock the other day, just preparing for my conversation with you. And I came across an article that was written by Leslie Lang in 2000.

I'm like, that's the stuff that I was learning about. Leslie Lang was a lecturer when I was going. to university. So unless like yourself, you're incredibly on the ball in terms of, and putting the time in to go out and read all this stuff, we haven't learned this. This is all new. This is all stuff that we need to be exposed to if we're keeping abreast of and doing the best buyout clients.

So, yeah, that's so interesting. I'm going to go down a fun rabbit hole and have a look at some of these resources. Well, if you go on to the ASW website, they do. have like the progressive kind of treatments like EMDR. EMDR is something that polyvagal theory has influenced a lot of different and new modalities such as EMDR, such as EFT, such as compassionate inquiry, even the work with Bezell van der Kott. And Janina Fisher, who does Tist, these are all psychotherapists who kind of, it's almost like they were brought together all at the same time and they just awakened the soul of psychology, psychiatry, and it has influenced so much the work of social work, I think.

So I believe that the AASW have some of that information. I've never seen anything on there about polyvagal theory specifically, and I have never seen anything on there about the Safe and Soren Protocol. I really want to bring that out to the year because I think it's such an incredible tool. and I've seen amazing results in it. Yeah, and I think I've said so much about it already. And it works across the board, children, adolescents, adults. It's amazing, yeah.

I really love that you've been able to bring your cultural background into your professional life and being able to hold the perspective of humility and supporting people to navigate those systems. But also what I'm hearing is that trauma is so intertwined with the reasons people come in contact with the legal system, right? There's such an intersect with disability and law and outcomes for people, but what you're able to do is use the law to empower clients to have their needs met, which is so incredibly important. It's a real area of learning for social workers. I think we do a lot of learning, especially as undergrads, around the intersect of law and

the body and the person, but I feel like we don't do a lot of work on specific areas of law. It's more around how we got to this point as opposed to where we're heading. So, yeah, there's such a diversity of clients and experiences that social workers can come in contact with doing this sort of work. And you mentioned it's a real privilege of holding and representing people's stories, but I think it's also quite a burden because there's a lot of responsibility, maybe some of it that you're putting on yourself, but if you're meeting with someone and you know it's going to be their only opportunity to be able to articulate what their experience has been, you really want to capture that in a way that is fair to them and really represents them. I love that you're bringing

other allied health perspectives and professionals into these therapeutic spaces and you're prioritizing curiosity and compassion to create an enriching practice and really continuing to influence change and making a difference like you've set out to do in the first place. So I think as you said, everything's kind of come full circle. But the wealth of experience that you've developed over these years has been incredible and I think it's a really good thing for people to see that there's no such thing as a social work trajectory. It's just what it is and you get out of it what you want to I think at the end of the day. Yeah and you give back what you know is going to work you know. I think we can often get stuck in this is what we do and this is what we are and I just think

there are so many different kind of ways you can really incorporate different learning into your practice. Like when Gabel-Matte really started talking about the biology of trauma, I was like, oh my gosh, finally. Finally somebody actually really gets that we need to listen to what is happening when we're sick or our gut is not working properly or our skin is falling. apart and I can so relate to that. So it's finally, this is not just we're sick. This is embedded in something deeper than that. And you know, you need to be compassionate about those things instead of kind of let's use a medical model to really address our situations. It's not about a medical model. It's really a collaborative approach of so many different kind of learnings and understandings.

That's why I guess my career is a bit of this and a bit of that. And I think that is a reflection of how I see practice. It's a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of this and a bit of that. So it's just incorporating so many different kind of learnings, knowledge, skills into my own social work practice. And I love that you've had the flexibility to do that. I think you've worked really hard to foster those. opportunities that have come your way and develop it based on what you're interested in. Yeah, yeah.

It's reflective practice, you know, it's not kind of like getting in there and just this is my role. It's like reflective practice. What else? What else can I do here? What's missing? What's really great? It's different.

I guess, you know, there are disadvantages. There are things that you don't like kind of seeing. And I guess I don't want to be cliche in saying. that, you know, when you are operating in these systems, it's a system that's broken, it's resource issues and whatnot, but that's some, a lot of the times what it falls down into. And that can be really disheartening when you're working with people in the most complex situation, but you've got to find a space where you know what you're doing is having an impact. And you've got to make that impact, you know, and that's, that's the way through

a broken system. Is there anything else before we finish up that you wanted to mention about your work or priorities? Any words of advice? Words of advice, I'd never give that. I think as practitioners, whether you are working in complex case management or whether you are working in therapy or whether you are working in the hospital setting in crisis, settings, I think it's really important to do the work on yourself first. I really do think that we as

social workers, clinicians, whether you're psychologists, whatever it is. I think when you are working with clients, you need to know what you are emitting. And co-regulation is so important when working in any of our disciplines. And it's really important. And it's really important. to know what's going on in you and your parts that come up when you're working with the client. When understanding yourself in parts and understanding yourself from a polyvagal lens as well really takes away things of shame, of burdens, wounds, because you're then able to kind of work from a place that is self-led. And working from a place. place that is self-led with clients allows them to actually come to a place where they can be

self-led, no matter what you're doing with them. And working from a place of self-led provides clarity and curiosity and takes away shame and wounds. So I just think it's really important to do self-work first. And I'm not saying that everybody has to go get a counsellor or do clinical work, but it's really important to do clinical supervision, to have reflective practice, to take the time out to really kind of go inside you, you know, and know who you are. And this is the stuff, my identity issues are just a part of me. There's so many other layers. There's so many other parts of me, know those parts and know what is working with the clients. So, yeah, I think that's really important. Sometimes it's just as important as the front facing the actual work that you're

doing is doing that work with yourself. Yeah, absolutely. Regardless of what area of social work you're working in. And I think that when you kind of raise the issue about being able to shut off, when I say switch on, that's switching on knowing what parts are being triggered, what parts are present, what parts are coming up, that switching on is really important to actually kind of set those boundaries and to kind of really kind of provide a container for you as a practitioner or whatever you're doing in social work to protect the integrity, to protect the self,

to protect the well-being. This has been amazing. Thank you so much, Rebecca, for meeting with me, taking time out of your busy schedule. I'm really looking forward to seeing where the private practice work takes you and, yeah, I'm looking forward to sharing this with everyone else and, yeah, hopefully they can find some inspiration and what you've been talking about because I think it's all really good stuff. Thank you, Yasmin. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for kind of noticing and the questions have been amazing. Very broad, so much information. It's hard to pack everything in. It is, it is. But,

you know, you've done a great job of kind of really just capturing all of that. So thank you. Thanks for joining me this week. If you would like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Lucinda, 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 SWSpotlight 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 Kathy, who in over 25 years as a social worker, has worked in the community sector and multicultural age care in an acute teaching hospital in rehab and aged care

and has developed training tools and social work group supervision. Cathy has now returned to community social work in northern Sydney for the community nursing program, visiting patients with chronic and complex issues. I release a new episode every two weeks. Please subscribe to my podcast so you'll notify when this next episode is available. See you next time.