Social Work Spotlight - Episode 90: Kellie

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

In this episode I speak with Kellie, a social worker with comprehensive working experience with Centrelink and Services Australia who has recently entered private practice to assist clients with their healing and recovery journey from trauma.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:Power in Partnerships Network (PiPN) - https://www.socialworkacademy.com.au/pipn/pipn-promotion/Trauma Super Conference 2023 - https://spiritualgrowthevents.com/events/trauma-mind-body-superconference-2021/Gabor Maté - https://drgabormate.com/Stephen Porges - https://www.stephenporges.com/Anna Runkle’s The Crappy Childhood Fairy - https://crappychildhoodfairy.com/about/Trudy Scott’s presentation at the Trauma Super Conference titled “Neurotransmitter imbalances and high cortisol in PTSD” - https://www.consciouslife.com/conferences/tsc-3/sessions/neurotransmitter-imbalances-and-high-cortisol-in-ptsd-2The Melbourne Clinic - https://themelbourneclinic.com.au/This episode's transcript can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tZGNBXeQohWtPnBtvDmWDuUrG1622Qa36M83lhVdQQA/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 in each episode.

I'm your host, Jasmine McKee Wright, and today's guest is Kelly, a social worker with comprehensive working experience with Centrelink and Services Australia, who has recently entered private practice to assist clients with their healing and recovery journey from trauma. So Kelly, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. It's so lovely to meet with you today and have a chat about your experience. Yes, thank you for inviting me. I look forward to being able to share the career that I've had in social work, which I've thoroughly enjoyed along the way. I did my social work degree 18 years ago through Charleston University,

which I also thoroughly enjoyed and thoroughly enjoyed the university experience that they provided doing that degree correspondingly. From there, I finished my degree and I started working for Centrelink virtually before I actually graduated. They gave me a position. They put me on in a way that they don't normally do. So I hadn't actually finished the degree. I still had my final exam to do. And it wasn't a place I ever thought I would end up working because whilst I was doing my degree, I was experiencing some dreadful things through Centrelink. I had to rely on them a little bit through doing my degree. I had separated from my marriage and I was supporting children and I was only working part-time

and I was a carer as well. So I needed a bit of support from them at the time and my experience with Centrelink was dreadful. They were doing dreadful things. So it wasn't a place I thought that I could see myself starting a career to be honest. However, when I did apply for the position, I was really only applying for the position to practice resume writing and interview skills. And I saw the position. I thought, look, it's not a place I want to work. But it might be a great experience just to put in an application, a resume, learn to write a really, really fetching application letter and how to sit in an interview and present.

Because I was quite a nervous person. I don't present so well in interviews. I'm a very nervous person. And I wanted to just build up those confidence skills and if they came out the other end and had lots and lots of feedback that was critical, that would have been fine. Yeah.

Because that was a learning experience. That was just, okay, this is my starting point and these are the areas that I need to work on and improve. But I actually interviewed very well and they did put me on. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I remember my phone ringing, twice in the interview and me digging through my handbag to pull everything out to put my phone

off because I hadn't thought to turn it off before I walked in so I thought I'll blown it but I hadn't blown it so that was a really really a really nice feeling that I had that nailed because I didn't expect that I don't feel terribly confident so that was wonderful and to be really honest my experience in Centrelink has been wonderful within the organisation as a social worker. So while I was doing my degree, I wasn't aware that they even hired social workers until they came to lecture.

There was a social worker who worked for Centrelink down in the Wogger area who would do a lecture at Charles Sturt and educated us all on the role and the kinds of things that you would expect from that kind of role. I was a bit switched off because I'd been going through some things with Centrelink and I was a little bit sore on them. So I'm like, you won't see me working there. I was a bit ideological back then.

Well, and then it gets worked out of us, I think. But I do remember that experience as well, going through the very end part of uni and them saying, just apply for things, it's great experience. And I had the same thing of, hang on a minute, they want me to come in for an interview.

I wasn't prepared for this. So I'm glad that was your experience in terms of great, what a huge confidence boost for you, being able to go into your first interview and land the job. But if I were to slightly step back just a little bit in terms of how you got to that point, it sounds as though you were coming in as a mature age student and having to juggle a hundred things at once as opposed to, you know, a young person living at home, being able to rely on parents and not paying rent and all that sort of thing.

So how did you manage to juggle all that while doing your placements and finishing your exams and all of that sort of thing? I was very fortunate. I actually had a couple of close girlfriends. How I came to even do a degree, I'd left my ex-husband. I was about 28 at the time. My original career was in accounting and I'd worked in Sydney in different accounts roles. I'd worked for News Limited in corporate accounting.

I'd worked for a couple of firms in St. Leonard's. And then I had children and I stopped commuting. I had my son. I was quite young when I had my son actually. I was 22, so I was a baby. So I stopped commuting and I would work. I came from the Central Coast, so I worked locally part-time.

And I had a very messy relationship with the ex-husband. and I had experienced domestic and family violence. So that was a really messy, messy time. And then we had a second child, and my second child had a disability, quite a severe disability. And so it was quite the juggle. At the same time, one of my close friends was a single mom with a daughter, and she'd started a welfare degree through Newcastle University.

And she was loving it. She just started, I think a Bachelor of Art to start with. She was doing sociology. And we were both quite ideological, you know. We were very socially and politically aware, very much aware of equity and access and human rights. We've always had that about us. And we're quite strong feminists in our beliefs.

So it made sense to engage in some education, something fulfilling. But I started off in some. psychology. And I actually did half a psychology degree before switching to social work. The reason I switched to social work, there was a couple of reasons. Firstly, I think social work sat better with my values. Secondly, I think I was able to see the employability of a social worker over psychology. So when I was doing psychology, I was looking at criminal psychology. I did criminology, did behaviour analysis. I did all of that kind of work.

And, you know, I wanted to join the police force and specialise. But I think I had a very pie in the sky kind of idealistic idea of that. And being a single mother with a child that had lots of support needs, I didn't need a role where I was away from the home long as I was commuting because primarily I'm a mum. Whereas I felt social work was highly employability. There's lots and lots of roles. You could work in your local hospital.

You could work for family community services. You could work in a non-government organisation. And then, of course, Centrelink popped into my sphere, unbeknown. So nice or local position. not long hours, able to be a mum, the work-life balance was nice. So that's where that switch came from. And I think the subjects that I was engaging with within my degree sat better with me. They just sat in my heart better.

I work very much from my heart. And, yeah, I just felt the fit was great. Yeah. And I enjoyed the process. And I enjoyed my degree. and I enjoyed the discussion and I enjoyed the wealth of topics and I just enjoyed the whole thing. And I met a lot of other mums and single mums and, you know, doing the degree later in life. I think I got to, I think, a period in my life where accounting was never going to fulfill me,

dealing with numbers. I'm more a people person. Having a child with a disability also opens your eyes up to a lot of. of things. What kind of supports are out there for carers? How do people who have children with disability, how do they all connect and come together and support one another? Advocacy around the needs of the child. All of these kinds of things sort of sat with me and I became a member of two groups while I was doing my degree. One was a domestic violence group because I had experienced that and that was very much. I had a compassion.

and a drive for women and empowerment and safety, just a whole range of things. And I was really immersing myself there. And the other one was a carer's group. And I became a bit politically involved. I know that I did a couple of stories. In the newspaper, I remember the government was looking at reviewing carers allowance, and I had a carer's allowance.

And I remember it was Amanda Vanstone at the time. And she was very critical of children who had some. say autism or cognitive disabilities. And we were going through a process where we had to continually prove that the child still had a diagnosis which was lifelong, which was just ludicrous. So I became involved in the group so that I could be a voice and dismal advocacy around that as well. So letters to ministers and a couple of stories in the local paper.

So I was very active. and I just, human rights became a really central focus for me. Really did. It was just sat heavy, you know, women leaving domestic violence and levels of safety. What does that look like? What does support look like? What do perpetrator programs look like? Why are we joining perpetrator programs with victim programs

and making them parallel programs? Why are we distributing blame across that? spectrum. There was a lot of things that I was questioning and I think social work sat very well with me because of the critical, my level of critical thinking. I always go into something with a very critical mind. I very much, I look at it from the macro and then I drill down into the micro. It's here. It's been developed, but what does that look like? How does that translate when it hits the ground? How does the individual interface with that policy, that program? are the outcomes? What are they trying to achieve? All of those things. And I found when I worked

in Centrelink, I was still able to do that. Centrelink was a very pleasing place to be. I have had a very privileged time there. There are so many roles for social workers to work with different cohorts of, unfortunately in Centrelink, the language is customer, not client. So I'm not so happy with the word customer, but I think they feel it's more empowering and yes, perhaps, but it just feels very transactional to me. So I worked in Centrelink and I started off in Gosford. I'm not quite a social worker at the time, so just learning and sitting alongside the social work team, learning the clunky system that I had at the time, which was a nightmare to learn, I can tell you. And I sat under a really, really experienced social worker down there.

He was my first supervisor. An amazing man, an amazing social worker, very experienced. He's, I think, retired now, but very intimidating. Very intimidating, yeah. He had such a high, high, high standard. And he taught me a lot. He freaked me out and taught me a lot at the same time. Were there any real values that he portrayed or things that he did that to you really stuck out as,

oh, I want to remember that, I want to do that, I want to be that kind of social worker? Yes, there's lots, actually. I mean, he was very administrative and very, very officious. But when I saw him do social work with young people, he had a real heart for their protection and safety and a real duty of care. He was very, very caring and did a very, very thorough job of building rapport. And he was excellent. He was a really, really good social worker. And he did have a soft heart when, you know, he brought the casework.

He was very good at connecting with the community. He had very, very good social work-connective relationships within the area with different service providers. So there were all the skills that he had developed. over time which were very, very sharp and very, very accomplished. And I suppose as a new social worker, I was starting to do that as a student, but yeah, he role-modelled a lot of things that I think I have taken on. And we'll always remember that because he was my stepping stone into finding my feet as a practitioner.

So always be grateful for his teachings. Did you find within Centrelink there was much of an opportunity? to do any internal advocacy in terms of some of that political, there was a lot of turbulence at the time around some of those payments and the way that people were talking about people that needed support. There was lots of opportunity. That's one thing that they do allow. There's lots of let's feed the feed back up.

Let's feed it up. So if they identify something, they'll actually through the social network say, we're looking for case studies, we need to feed this up. So that happens often. But even with your client, your customer work, a lot of customer work is internal advocacy. So you would do internal advocacy around debt recovery. You would do internal advocacy around having a payment paid quicker because of a particular circumstance that a client's facing, a customer's facing.

You know, the customer may have some very, a lot of the customers had very, very complex cases. And I'm in complex, you know, really, there's so many. the areas of the Centrelink organisation that they may be involved with in their personal life in terms of debts or waiting for a payment or getting sent to pay up. There's just so many different areas of engagement. They may have a few applications in for different payments. So there was lots and lots of that. That was a big part of our role actually. The biggest area of customer engagement for a social worker, there is young people leaving home due to risk issues or extreme family breakdown. And the other is the women, or shall I say, victims of domestic

and family violence, either calling our call centres every day or presenting in the office for a crisis payment. And I've just left. Sometimes it's I've just left. What do I do now? I have no money, I've got children here. And it's very much then the role of the social worker to have a look at that, do the assessment, get a crisis payment up. But sometimes it's even, we have to create a record for a victim. They may not have a record. They may be with a partner who, like they're in a joint record.

That's got to be separated up. Then we generate payment for her and her or him. I should say her or him. So we do that. separate them, we generate the payment and we are calling refuges and doing what we can with the community to try and get some supports up and running. Yeah. Doing some counselling there, some initial support, counselling support, and then linking

to further counselling support. So that's very much the pointy end, very much, and same with our young people, same with our young people. So that work was really fulfilling for me, being able to link people. people to good supports was very, very fulfilling. It sounds like a really interesting mix of crisis and longer term because you anticipate that working in Centrelink, you'd have a lot of, I guess, repeat customers. You'd have people who are reliant on payments and supports long term, but I myself wouldn't

normally consider Centrelink to be a crisis service. But it sounds like that's exactly what it was. It was a safe place where people could come to receive that crisis support. It is actually our crisis service in a lot of ways. In the time that I worked there, there were a few things that occurred. So hospital social workers would quite often send customers to Centrelink without doing much for them at all. They would come to Centrelink. They would be in our doors and we would be putting it all together, which I found really interesting. Mental health would do the same.

we've had people present in an office with bail undertakings, that they're to be in a mental health facility, that there was a duty of care they needed to be, and they'd been released. And they would present in Centrelink with very complex presentations. We had very complex presentations, and we still do every day all around the country. Social workers are working really hard with complex presentations.

Yeah. So we were often the dumping ground, I feel, without lack of a better term, we were piecing everything together and putting the scaffolding and putting everything together around our customers to assist them to go forward safely with the duty of care. So yes. What a wonderful first roll out though, because you have to very quickly work out what the services are who can access them what the eligibility is, what timeframes you're looking at and be able to build those networks really quickly so that you do have that response and can support someone

really quickly. Yes, we would attend interagency meetings. So on our team in our local office, there might be two, maybe three, four. In a big office, you may have five social workers. It's structured a bit differently now. I don't think there is many sitting around. I know that I've always sat on larger teams. And we would get a portfolio each. So, you know, I know for my last portfolio, it was youth. I've had domestic and family violence in the past. My last Central Coast portfolio was a youth. So I'd go to the youth interagency once a month, find out who runs that, who's connected to that, be part of the publications that would come around and attend and be abreast of who's doing what, what changes are coming, what funding they have, how to refer,

what's the catchment demographic, build the relationships. And I had built some great relationships actually down there with a couple of caseworkers that worked in the youth space. And I got a point where I called one of them my off-sider because whilst she was out in the community and I was very much stuck in the office, I could depend on her. we had a great working relationship. So she might have picked up a young person who has left home or has left juvenile detention because that was some of the clients as well for her. And they had no money.

They were trying to get them into the refuge, all of this kind of thing. And I would make room to do an assessment very quickly for her. If she rang me and said, I've got a young person, I actually need to get a payment up like stat so that the refuge will take them. I would make sure I had an availability. I'd just push things around and then within a couple of hours,

eat that day or the next morning when she could arrange to be there with the young person, I'd do the interview, I'd do the assessment, I'd get that whole thing up and running. At the same token, she was very good if I had a young person who was booked in for an unreasonable live-at-home assessment, and I'd done the assessment and I had duty of care issues.

I had some concerns about where they were now living because of some things that came up during that interview that I was a bit doubtful about the stability, the safety, whatever the environment was. She'd do a home visit and, you know, we would talk together. You know, I could get an assessment up. She could get eyes on. She'd be my eyes on. She would meet with the young person, make sure they're safe where they're staying, that it was an appropriate, sustainable, stable, supportive environment.

Because there's a lot of responsibility, I think, offering financial support to a young person from the age of 15, let me tell you, to live out of home. We put a lot of responsibility on our people now to be mature and to be adult-like and to be independent. And yes, to a greater degree these days, they actually are. And they're quite resilient. But still, we have this duty of care and we need to know that the environment that they're going to be living in, if we're going to support it, is an environment that's not a place where there's drugs and more violence and lots and lots of other life trajectory changing outcomes that are on the negative scale. So she was really good. She would go out.

She would have a look and she would ring me and say, look, met with so-and-so. they seem really good. She'd let me know about the environment, the house, the people that were there. And if it wasn't great, then we would have to work towards an alternative. And I may even not pay that particular assessment until we had what we would consider from a safety perspective a more appropriate outcome. Yeah, that makes sense because otherwise you're seen to be encouraging or condoning that unsafe environment. Not our role to do that. Really not our role to do that. There's no point granting a young

person who's already living in domestic violence, in maybe alcoholism, you know, all sorts of other situations that are considered negative for them to then go into the same thing. The idea is to grant them to go into a safe and secure environment where they can start to thrive again and recover from the trauma because this is a traumatic environment. Yeah. And we know what trauma does. We know what it does to the nervous system, the brain, the life trajectories, the choices, our health, mental health, physical health.

So it's really important that we aren't re-replicating that with the, the role that we are doing. We have a strong responsibility there, really do. I see it as an extension of child protection, actually. Yeah, right. And it really is. It really is an extension of that. But I think we get to work in a way that's,

I think that space is a really enjoyable space to be in working with young people. We also started to take on social casework with young people. So we might have them for eight weeks, maybe 10 weeks. And, you know, that was about checking in maybe once a week, once a fortnight, whatever the young person was happy with. You know, they set the parameters on how they engage with us in that space, which is great. And I know for me, I was doing some work around goal setting, self-esteem, getting them back into education.

I wasn't specifically getting the back into education, but my off-sider, my caseworker from getting it together. who was a wonderful, wonderful case worker. She would be doing the legwork. She'd be at the school. But we would link together. And while she's doing that side of it, I'm talking to the young person about,

you know, what are they anxious about? You know, how do they feel about going back to school? Really having some counselling moments around, what are the barriers for you? How can we unpack this? To get re-engagement back into all of the different areas because a lot of these young people are completely, unengaged from not just family education, any support service, they're just, they're just in the

cracks and they're floating around and it's not ideal. So it's about getting them reconnected, back with supports, back on a really nice journey toward what are your goals, what would you like to do when you finish school, more education, yeah, and we've had some really good outcomes with that. I think that process of engagement with Centrelink itself is really good because it means that hopefully you're building trust with these young people and hopefully then that will be a flow on effect too. They will come to you. They will come to Centrelink. They will see it as a service that is responsive to their needs instead of falling through even more cracks because all of a sudden a payment has had to be ceased for whatever reason and they won't come back. They'll just see it as us versus them.

whereas you've created a bit more of a collaborative relationship for them. Yes, yes, we do. We do. It's very much the focus there. You know, it's not just pay them and drop them. It's very much about they're young people. They're now have a payment. They're probably more vulnerable now they have a payment.

Particularly if they're just out there in the ether. You know, it's not acceptable just to pay them and say, see you later. Have a good time with that. It all goes well. Because we know that they need to. assistance. We know they need support. We know that they need to be re-engaged with appropriate supports to get back into education. Housing's an issue. Even when they leave home, quite often, the placement or the accommodations that they take up even while they're being assessed, they fall down.

And we do review those cases in three months' time. So there is a callback. There is a hi. How's it going. And often, often I found those circumstances had changed dramatically from the moment I had started the assessment to the three months down the track. They had moved to a couple places because the friend's parents no longer want to support them. So I found it really important while I had them in the assessment process to discuss who are you living with. So when you get paid, Have you discussed how you'll contribute, how you'll pay board, and what you'll pay and what's acceptable? Can we open up that conversation? Because I think they're very kind to take you in.

So let's talk about how you're going to budget that, how you're going to manage that money. So, you know, I would very much go into those conversations. And I would bring the other caseworker from GITS into it as well. Okay, we've talked about, we would communicate regularly about what conversations we've had with a young person and where that's going so that we were both on the same page. Okay, so when there's a meeting with the new people, the friends' parents, quite often it was the best friend's parents or the girlfriend's parents or the boyfriend's parents, how's that going to look going forward? Are they sharing a room even?

Is that a couple relationship under that roof? How do they feel about that? There's a lot of things to discuss because they all become trigger points. they all become trigger points after a period of time. The shine wears off the whole new thing and then the reality sets in that they've got another teenager living under their roof who costs quite a bit of money, eats a lot of food, runs up the electricity and the water.

How do we make that sustainable? How do we support that? If that's a safe, we've deemed this as a safe, caring environment and they're lovely people and they seem to be wanting the best interest of the young person, certainly want to see them return to school, then how do we keep that going? How do we make that sustainable for them going forward so that they're not going from place to place to place to place? Or bouts of homelessness in between that, couch surfing, we see a lot of couch surfing. We see a lot of, you know, you might have a

single parent who's got a teenager and that teenager's brought home another four teenagers and they've just taken up residence in the lounge room. We see that. We see that. We see that. That happens. That would be the sort of thing I would send this other casework around to check out. Look, I get the impression that we have a collector. Yeah. And there's just a lot of people camping out here. I don't know that it's ideal.

I don't know that it's going to help us reach the good outcomes that we're working so hard towards with this young person. You know, all the lovely things that we want to see this young person. And do a headcount. Who else is there? Yeah. Do we have a couple of our other clients there? What are they doing?

Yeah, very good point. You know, are we breeding unhealthy environments, or are we actually assisting young people to go forward meaningfully, safely, with goals, you know, in life? You've got to be there to improve, not to add to, that's not the role of social work. Of course. Our role is to improve.

Yeah. It is to enhance and improve and to, to establish good connections for whoever our customer is really. Yeah. But yeah, working with young people is a lot of fun. I thoroughly enjoyed that. And I've done some work in Centrelink with Carers. I did actually go into the Carers Division.

And that was heavy work. We work with under 18 carers. Right. And I actually did a home visit on a 9-year-old. She was caring for a very chronically mentally unwell mom. Poor kid. very chronic, grand depression, really bad. And in that space, I was working with the school and getting supports

and having a look at who extended family were and what the young person's, but very parentified nine-year-old. So, yes, it was a very hard one. But I saw a few of those. I also worked with over 80-year-old carers. So, yeah, letting them know what supports are out there and talking to them about their struggles and challenges, which they wouldn't really ever see it that way.

They were always just so devoted to their spouse, because it was often their spouse that were caring for, and it was just devotion, absolute devotion. And probably not even identifying themselves as carers, just saying this is what I do. No, no, this is normal. This is what you do. It's just what you do.

And same with parents that had children who had a disability. And even parents who had terminally ill children, so we would even do that in the carer space. We'd do terminal illness reviews, which were very, very tough conversations to have and tough support sessions over the phone. But nonetheless, very fulfilling work and much needed. When I went to university, I had no idea the scope of social work. When I left domestic violence, I wasn't offered a social worker when I needed. So I didn't know they existed. And then I walk in the front door to start my career only to find out that not only do they hire social workers, there's tons of them.

There's tons of them. They're everywhere all over the country. There's tons of them. Yeah, we get in everywhere. And they're doing such diverse work. So I did majorly diverse work. At one stage I was in a program called Home Advice, Habitat Home Advice. So to explain that quickly, Faxia funded based on the idea of housing unaffordability

within a particular local government area, so one in every state, Wang Shire measured in at the highest, so they got the funding. So specific. Yep. pilot program, it rolled for, I was in the role for about two to three years, but I know that role had been going for at least 12 and it only ever went to pilot. It never rolled out nationally. I was working for Centrelink, but also tacked on alongside of a team of caseworkers at Uniting Care Burnside. So I would work for that program three days a week.

And I would go to their meetings, I'd go to home visits. And it was very holistic, very wraparound. So there was two caseworkers and a team leader and myself. Wonderful work. Very, very creative. We had a lot of scope to do counselling. I mean, one caseworker was doing marriage, counseling and interventions. So wherever the pressure points were with this family, we were assisting.

So from a Centrelink perspective, it was about making sure they're going to be. getting the right rate of payment, dealing with debt issues, getting sent to pay up, so that these things helped with trust when it came to getting a rental property. So we're talking about families that were at risk of losing their accommodation. They were behind in their rent. They couldn't budget. The cost of living was overwhelming. It was getting ahead of them.

So we were undoing some of those chokeholds by doing some budgeting. I was doing the central ink assessment side of it. I was doing internal advocacy, getting rid of the debts, doing the home visits, talking to women who were, and it was often women, actually, it was all women in this case life for me, in my experience. So I'm not trying to be gendered, but personally my experience, it was women who'd left domestic and family violence.

They hadn't received either a crisis payment or they hadn't received any exemption for child support or they weren't getting child support and didn't know an exemption existed, that's something else I could get them. So they were able to then get family tax benefit, the higher rate. So that helped with the budget. It also helped with sustaining the accommodation,

but also helped with the relationship with the real estate. So we were also trying to repair some relationship issues with real estates. And we had great real estates and we had some that were not so graceful. So we would learn if we had a family that needed a new property, we knew where we had good relationships to go looking to find a property or to try and get them over here. This is a real estate that knows our program, knows what we're doing here, accepts what we're doing here, accepts the clients and is able to market those clients to property owners. because that's not easy.

Of course, knowing that they've got support behind them, whereas your average person is just coming in cold without, I mean, you don't know, they may have support somewhere, but you know that this person has a group of people scaffolding around them. That's right. We would also, not myself, but the team tacked on to me, had brokerage.

Amazing brokerage. So it would pay for bonds. Okay, so there was a lot of funding. And there was a lot of funding to pay some of the back rent as well. So there was a lot of financial assistance that came with this program, but a lot of brokerage meant that we could do a lot of different work. So we would run smart money in groups. I was part of the smart money groups that we did.

There was a bit of work in the schools, educating young people on finances, doing smart money. It all came into the guise of this program. wonderful program. To be a fly on the wall at some of your team meetings, I can just feel the energy of this incredible group of people. Yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. I worked with the most amazing people and they are still there doing an amazing job. They are caring, compassionate souls that work as social workers in, I think, a difficult organisation. It's a very large organisation. and there's a lot of a lot that social work has to do in communication with different areas of

the organisation to get good outcomes and I think social workers are very good at doing that. So Kelly, what do you think it is? What is that disconnect? Given that you've had the experience for back of house and customer experience, why is there that disconnect? Why do you think people are having a horrible opinion of Centrelink when really the work that's being done is so fantastic. Because when you come into an office, you don't always have a great experience.

It just depends on the office, the training, the culture. It just depends on the individual, the day, the mood. I know that when I attended, I had no idea there was a social worker available. And I had just left domestic violence. I didn't come in for a cross, but I, you know, this conversation came up. Yeah. But I was never linked to any support. I had to source that for myself.

And I'm a person who will do that, but not everybody is. So that was disappointing to, once I got in there and saw everything they did, and I thought, wow, here I have been. I've been a carer. I've been a victim of domestic and family violence, a single mom, and haven't had a conversation or even any knowledge of social work. So I found that a bit interesting. I had to kind of make peace with that somewhere along the way.

But I think what helped me with that experience is I made sure that that was not the experience for others. It meant that I went into Centrelink, determined that they were going to know we existed and that we're here to help. Thank you very much. Yeah. So, yeah, that was the beauty of working there. I could put my heart and soul into it, knowing that someone wasn't going to walk out the door unsupported.

I missed opportunity. That was that simple. So I know in the offices, I worked in personally, the staff were really good, and they were very aware of us, very aware we were there, very aware of what we do,

very aware of when they can come and grab one of us and say, hey, we've got a customer at the front. Could really do with some support right now. I think they've just left domestic violence. You know, have you got time? Yes, I'll come out there and I'll have a chat. Or I've just booked a social work appointment for the two o'clock. I've had a lady present or I've had a gentleman present. I've had men present who have lost their jobs and they're not coping.

And so there's all sorts of presentations. all sorts of reasons to front up to centre length. And I've loved the work and I've done disaster recovery. I've been floods, bushfires. I was in Wogger for the 2019 fires. I worked with one of my old supervisors down there who I love dearly. She was my second supervisor who I worked within the Hunter and her and I travel down there and we were there for two to three weeks.

and we went out on different communities every day and we were there to support. We had teams of people just doing processing of disaster recovery payments, but we were there. We did a bit of counselling and support, and that was lovely. And I enjoyed the disaster recovery space as well. What I did with the Victorian fires is I actually went down and sat and backfilled the social worker

from Mirabin and Cheltenham. So we had Marabin and Sheltonham officers had a team of, I was part of participation back then, which was job seeking. So social work was often part of the role where say a job seeker was cut off payment. They weren't able to attend appointments. There's part of your internal advocacy. That was very much that role. We'd have a chat with the customer, find out what the barriers were, why they weren't. And then we would do a little bit of an assessment, send that to participate.

in the hope they'd overturned the decision and payment would be restored. So that was our role in that space. So I backfilled the social workers that were doing that job because they were on the ground in Marysville. So I sat and dealt with the team. And I did a bit of training with the team in Cheltenham. I did a bit of domestic violence, mental health training, understanding, disability.

I ran training. So that meant that the team had a bit more of a sensibility and understanding of the barriers. that would be presenting for customers in that space. And that meant, you know, a bit more empathy too when it came to overturning. So that was quite good too. So I've done close to 18 years of that work.

I've also gone out on the drought bus when the drought was on and talked to farmers about depression and suicide went into some rural communities way back. So I've done majorly various work. I can imagine part of that work also is hearing people's stories about people that they were close with who had died by suicide and had had difficult times because it's not just them living dealing with it, it's the grief or maybe even the sense of, you know, that could have been me or, you know, almost like that survivor's guilt

of why am I doing better than my colleague over there who really struggled? That's exactly right. And we know there's that secondhand, second tier of risk with suicide that when there is one, it can sort of trigger. So it's tricky space to navigate, but there was a particular town I went to there had been three suicides, and I thought for this town that's quite large. Yeah, of course.

It is quite large. It is very large. I mean, one is too many. One is too many, but three was really hectic. And so I spent some time. So these farmers were dealing with bank overdrafts, high costs, high interest rates, no income, you know, it was just really, really hard work.

And I actually found that work taxing, very emotionally taxing. I loved doing the work, but that was a pretty dark space to sit for a little bit, in that it was very emotionally taxing. And, yeah, the town, that town was just very intense, very intense work. but very accommodating and very friendly oh of course like you probably would have been welcomed and and just need to feel as though you know our town is your town you're coming in here to support us that would have been really lovely yes yes it is that was such wonderful experience to have early on in your career and it really sounds like that set you up nicely for what was to come how did you know it was time to move on what did that look like for you

Okay, so I had been contemplating private practice for quite some time, actually. It was really for me about working in a more deeper way with clients. Centrelink gave me a lot of really good varied experience with holding space for people who had come in and that they'd experienced, you know, trauma, crisis, calamity, breakdown, whatever that looked like. And it sort of only allows some very brief work, not some deeper, deeper work. And I think I needed to go a little bit deeper in my practice, in my social work with clients. I was really craving a more clinical, a more therapeutic approach and leaning into a different skill set as well and expanding my knowledge around that skill set. I love the fact that in private practice, I'm able to work more creatively.

So the decision and how that came about, just to take you back a little bit, I started this practice in October last year, 2022, in that I started to develop the business model, what I wanted it to look like, and from the ground up, sort of, you know, what's my logo, what's my mission statement, what's this practice going to do, and where am I going to be working? Who are my clients going to be? What do I want to focus on? So I had the whole month of October, as well as September, actually,

because I left Centrelink in August. I took, say, a month off, but during that month was starting to, you know, ruminate around the ideas of development. And then I made October the month where I sat and did all my development work. I joined a couple of Facebook groups that were really good for guidance around that and marketing and all the rest of it.

And I suppose I was sitting in a business headspace for a month, which I needed to do because it's a business. It's a practice, but it's also a business. I'm in a private space. So I needed to, and it's still hard to switch my head to a business head space because you're working in a government department, you're not thinking about charging. It's a whole different way of thinking. It's really good if you've got private practice and you are dealing with funded clients because at least then you're still dealing with government money.

You're not charging a client. You're not knocking back a client. People are not facing the barriers of accessing your service because of lack of finances, all that kind of thing. So that feels good for me. I have trouble charging clients. I have a supervisor who, you know, well, kick me up the bar. every here and there because I have to start to think differently. And it's not that I'm not familiar with business. I came out of accounting years and years ago and I went to a business college after high

school and I've done a marketing course. So I can do the businessy stuff. It just doesn't feel like the right mix with social work. It's two very different head spaces. But I'm making peace with it and I've got a balance happening and I'm developing. So that's all that matters. I'm growing. growing in my skills, growing in my thinking. So we moved to a rural location in 2021, my husband and I. And so we had a tree change and we just decided that when we had the tree change, we'd change some things up in our lives. And I was working at Centrelink Still, I was working from home until about August.

And I just decided I want to now make that change. It just felt right. just felt the time. I was going to super trauma conferences as well online. I was doing a lot of work watching a lot of different speakers from around the world, around responses to trauma and, you know, the people that I work with in Centrelink, all my customers were all coming out of some kind of trauma. So that's the place I wanted to sit where I was helping people to heal and recover and hold space for them and be there with them as they work through some of that more difficult stuff. I love doing that. I love being there for people. I love, it's an honour, I think, that people come to you.

They trust you with such a story. They trust you with their innermost parts. They're vulnerable with you. That's incredible, really. To have that level of trust given to you is an honour. And then to be able to work can sit with them and show them that gentleness, that kindness, but to show them that they can show themselves some gentleness and some kindness because it doesn't occur to them. To do that, you know, they're in a critic, just a lot of negative self-talks and sabotaging, you know, it all comes from trauma and childhood trauma as well, childhood complex PTSD. So being able to guide that process, being able to hold the space, being able to be there to show them that, that they can be heard, they can be validated, and they can be emotionally held in a safe space

is an amazing thing to be able to do for somebody. And I find that rewarding and I love to watch progress. I love to see positive change. I love to see healing and I love to see great outcomes and the overcoming of certain barriers. And I love that whole process. I love to watch people step away from that feeling stronger, more confident. They're able to set some boundaries. They're discerning what's toxic and what isn't toxic.

They stop trying to attach to relationships where people are emotionally unavailable. They stop people pleasing and they start looking after themselves and recognizing their own self-worth. That is a great journey. And I've been on that journey quite a few times now, even before doing victims work, because I've only been doing this for four weeks. But I've had private clients, and I've been with them through that journey. And I love that.

And I'm a big believer in journaling, and I give all of my clients a journal, a therapy journal as part of my onboarding process. I also spend a bit of time accessing resources. So during the week, I have a bit of a listen to what are the common themes. What are people struggling with this week? What could assist them to understand or to track maybe some progress or to be more aware of what can I send them this week that would assist them? And it helps them, I think it helps clients to feel held during the week as well.

I mean, they're not always going to have access to me. I'm an appointment, I'm an hour. But during the week, if they get an email where I've sent them something that I think will be a great, nothing too intense, but just something that might be a one or two pager to read, that gives them a little bit more insight, encourages. I like to encourage, assist them with strategies, tools. I work from the somatic space. So I'm very, very focused on the nervous.

system and how dysregulated the nervous system becomes after trauma. So I really do assist my clients to recognize how to be present, how to be present in their bodies, how to recognize what their bodies are telling them, how trauma's held in the body. So that's where I work from. And I love that. I really love that. I love that space. I love the aha moments. And I love it when I speak to them. And I might say something and they're like, ah, yes, I wondered what that was. I've been getting this sensation sort of in my lower back or I've been having inflamed joints. So I like to work from a holistic space. It's not just about what happened to them because we're not really doing the therapy to heal from what happened back then.

We're doing the therapy to heal going forward. It's about how they go forward. It's about how they develop relationships going forward. How's their health going forward? Moods, decisions. How do they show up for themselves? How do we teach people how to show up for themselves when it's never been something they were.

were able to do. How do we teach people to sit in their emotions, to just sit quietly and process and acknowledge when their emotions were never safe? As children, they were never allowed to. It was shut down. It was just not allowed. And so that's how I work. It's not how I immediately work with traumatised clients. For me, it's about them navigating their sessions. And, and, you know, it's about them navigating their sessions and definitely about them being able to just let off because, you know, when you're doing, you've got highly traumatised clients, they're very emotive. You know, it's like, and you wonder, you're, oh, there's a lot going on. They have to release that puffer valve.

They finally have someone that they can talk to and let it all out. And that might last, you know, two or three sessions. and then there's this karma, you know, the pressure's been released so they can start to come down a little bit and start to take on a little bit of information. So just a gentle implementation of a couple of concepts and, you know, to see people take that as little steps is really good and they take on a little bit of information that assists them to identify, identify where things are. coming from because those that have been in trauma it's all about it being their fault it's always what's wrong with me what have i done wrong why am i not lovable i've had clients say to me Kelly what's wrong with me

I'm broken what is wrong with me and it's awful to hear that because it's not about them it's not about them at all and a lot of their dysregulation and trauma response is very natural trauma response behavior So it's explaining that in a very gentle, very simple, not overwhelming way to just add a couple of concepts and then build on that as we go. And I find that as you build on some of this stuff, they're not as fixated on this stuff, but more about the healing that's a holistic healing. Yes, we acknowledge this happened. Yes, this did happen. Yes, I need to process that. But I now need to recognize that my emotions are safe.

And if I need to take some time for me and step back and sit in it for a little bit to process and metabolize that stuff, then that's what I need to do. And it's okay. And yes, I get triggered and that's okay. As I go forward, I will develop skills. I'll develop the things I need to bring my nervous system back. to a homeostatic state, rather than sitting up at hypervigilant, fight or flight, I can bring it back down once I've done some of that deep dive work

and understand how to be present in my body rather than all up in my head. Because it's in that state, that dysregulation takes off. It stays there. It's hard to move it because you can't think your way back to your calmness. You've got to come back down into your body. So that's how I work. And they're the understandings that I give my clients as I work with them, as I work with them, through the journey.

And I send them little things that assist them to understand that stuff. Yeah. And it sounds like that model really allows you to have an impact, positive change, healing space for people. And it's also a combination for you of process driven and building connections, which is a lot of what we talked about earlier. But also when you, if we go back to, I guess, some of those trauma histories with the farmers

and the suicide issues, you said that was particularly difficult work. What was most helpful to you at that time and what support do you require now to be working in those really hard spaces? Okay, so back when I was working with the farmers, I think I'd only been a social worker for maybe three years. pretty young in my career actually.

So, and that's why I think it was particularly heavy for me. I felt a lack of experience stepping into that space, to be honest. I think I'd step into that space feeling a bit more confident now. So those stories and those families and the devastation of a complete town losing people. And suicide is really provocative. It's a hard space to sit. Yeah. So what felt helpful at the time was just the idea of sitting and holding space.

I talk about holding space a lot and just being a good listener and connecting them with longer-term supports and resources because I was only there for a day. I wasn't there for a long time, you know, and it seemed a bit, it was great to meet them and it was great to have the opportunity to link people to. greater resources, but some really intensive long-term work needed to be done. And it felt, I don't know, it didn't feel right to me to just be there for a day. I felt torn. I felt a bit torn in that role. And that's lack of experience as well. Like that was just, I was young. I was stepping into what I considered to be a very heavy space. And as for support for me back then, I had a fantastic supervisor. Now, in private practice space, I have a really fantastic supervisor.

Actually, I've been with him for over a year through some other stuff. So he's fantastic. And I met with him yesterday morning, actually, and we unpack a lot of stuff. So it's really good. And I need that support. I really do. I'm learning as I go because I don't think as a social worker you ever stop. I don't think you ever stop learning, ever.

You have to continually draw on new grounds of information and new grounds of theoretical knowledge and other expertise that's out there. And you learn as you go. And you do suffer. I suffer from a bit of imposter syndrome at times. You know, I know when I'm out of my depth and I just, yeah, I'm like, ugh. But I try not to shy away from that. I always see it as a learning experience and an experience to expand and to grow and to grow into that role, those shoes, that knowledge, those experiences.

I don't pretend to be an expert to anybody, but I will always say I'm an active learner. I'm interested, I'm engaged and I absorb and I love to do so and build my repertoire of experience and my toolkit of skills. So that's what keeps me going. I'm very passionate about social work. I'm very, very passionate about it. And I love the idea of being able to sit in a rural community like I am here, build some community relationships and get an idea of what's happening on the ground in the community and how I can fit in with that support network.

And so even though I'm in private practice, I go to interagencies. It's a hard headspace for me to move from. I know that there are a lot of private practice practitioners that do tend to sit very siloed. You know, they're in their practice. They might be somewhat engaged with community, but I will always, even though I'm busy, I'm going to make time to attend meetings and be part of what's going on on the ground

and developing relationships and in those networks. I've always had a passion for that. And, yeah, so I find that very helpful. I'm also part of a network called Pippen. And I'm not sure whether you've interviewed Joanne Cottrell. Joanne's good friends with Ashton Hayes. Actually, Ashton Hayes is part of this as well. It's Power in Partnerships Network.

And it's for social workers in private practice. And we meet once a month. And it's really about developing relationships, networks, work on projects. to help develop each other's practice, training, training opportunities. Yeah, all those kinds of things, grants, all sorts of stuff, all sorts of exciting things that social workers get involved in and get excited about. It's a heap of pioneering social workers. I don't I shouldn't say pioneering, but pioneering for me in terms of this little network

in private practice, definitely very supportive, great group of social workers. There's lots of experience, doing all sorts of different things out there. So that's an exciting space that I'm involved in as well. And I'm glad because I think working solitary in private practice, it can be very lonely. Whilst it's fulfilling, you know, when I worked at Centrelink, I had two days a week where I'd sit in an office and all the team would be together. Because we all travelled to different offices. So when I was in, say, Maitland Hunter Valley team,

One day I would be at Singleton, the next day I'd be at Musselbrook. So drive to work, pick up a government car, go up to that office, do the appointments for the day, and come back at the end of the day, drop the car off, say bye guys, head home. And that was two days a week. But we had a couple of days where we were all together. And that was lovely. You know, we could sit there and do our work, but we were, you know, interacting. And it was lovely to have company.

I don't have that now. all of that's online for me now except for the interagency so and I think that's another motivation to be connected to interagency locally it's just being around other professionals and having those kinds of conversations that I miss you know those very you know service orientated funding oriented structure orientated conversations rather than client direct conversations yeah which they come up too but yes it's a balance So that's kind of where I'm at at the moment. So I'm doing Victim Services New South Wales work.

That started for me four weeks ago. That's a relatively new space. I'm getting lots of referrals for that, and that's fantastic. I'm also doing Queensland WorkSafe, so psychological injury work for work cover. That's been really, really good. I've had a couple of those clients, and I'm doing NDIS clients, who are self-managed or plan-managed. And I'm assisting the NDIS clients a little bit with anxiety,

adjustment disorder, and I'm assisting them with difficult life transition. So they're clients that can engage online. I've got a young mum that I engage with, and I've got an older gentleman that I'm engaging with, and that has been really good work that I'm doing there. The young mum, she's also dealing with some significant health issues. So we're kind of unpacking the anxiety around that

and working through some of that. So that's the work I'm doing with her. The older gentleman, he's the same, but it's a very different circumstance. He has sensory issues. So I'm sort of working around some of that communication issues. Yeah, just that kind of thing. Yeah, different work, very different space, that one, to say victims or Queensland work safe.

So they're my three channels and I have a couple of private clients. So when I started, all my clients were pretty well private clients, which was great. I'm finding the private clients are dropping off, I think, as the mortgages go up and the cost of living goes up, I think it's getting harder for people to, and, you know, there'll be people that will argue, no, that's not the case, but I've certainly seen it. I've certainly seen that people are struggling to pay for counselling, and that's hard because there's some people really need that support and may not fit into the criteria of some of the funding that's available. I'm not mental health accredited, so I can't offer Medicare. I'm looking to become mental health accredited and I'm seeing victim services as a stepping stone for that. So I'm very excited that I'm going to take that journey and get into the mental health space as well.

I think, again, that's just another expansion of knowledge and skills and taking social work to another level again, which I think it's exciting. Whenever you take social work to a new place, I don't know, I just get excited. I'm a nerd, though. It sounds like that variety is really fulfilling for you as well, not having just one group of the people that you support. Yes, yes. And I think Centrelink set me up for that. What I did in Centrelink is I'd sit in a role for about two to three years.

And I'd do that role. And I'd say, okay, well, I've been doing this for two to three. Usually around the three years, I'd like to try something fresh. and I would move teams or apply for something internal that might have gone from unreasonable to live at home where I was dealing with 15 to 17-year-olds, moving out of home due to breakdown or serious risk issues. Did that for three years,

and I remember going from that to carers. Did carers for three years. Very different, but it was really exciting to work with a new cohort and reach into a different skill base. Doing similar work, but yeah, it's still different. It's as good as a holiday to try something new, something fresh is as good as a holiday. So that's how I did things.

And I was, yeah, if there was a program coming up or something that was piloted, yep, I'll go and have a look at that. I want to stick my nose in and have a bit of a play there and develop skills, engage in your cohort, see what I can offer, see what that environment is doing for clients. Let's go there. Yeah. So that's me in a nutshell.

The work you're doing in Queensland with workers insurance, I've worked in the injured workers' space in New South Wales, but I noticed that CRA, which is our state regulatory body, are doing a lot more training for people who work in insurance, supporting people with psychological injuries, whether it be primary or secondary. So that fills me with hope that perhaps other states are doing the same thing in terms of, yes, there's a whole preventative side with businesses

and trying to not have that occur in the first place, but also there's the post-injury space of having insurers educated and supported to then provide a good level of support to these people who have unfortunately ended up with psychological injuries at work. Yeah, yeah. Yes, Queensland seems to be doing a little bit of work around that. I've only had a couple of clients with Queensland It's not a main part of my client cohort.

I've got an active client now and I've exited a client. So I'm still feeling my way with Queensland. I'm also registered with Victoria, but I haven't had work from that space yet. I haven't marketed too heavily there either though. And I'm looking at doing the Sierra training as well so that I can start to pick up clients from Sierra also in the private practice. I enjoy that work because I do the trauma.

work and I do narcissistic abuse work as well, which I know some people are either seeing that as innovative because it seems to pop up a lot now or they're like, oh gee people throw that word around.

So there's two very different responses to that, but narcissism's very real and it has a definite negative impact on other people. You know, There's empaths who are very soft and caring and can read a room and take in all of the emotional stuff that they're around. Or there are people who just, they're like an elephant in a china shop.

Boom, boom, boom, boom. And those that are sensitive, those that are empathic who do feel a room, who do take on all that emotional stuff, they do get injured. You know, they have their boundaries trampled. They have their sense of self completely trampled underfoot and it's a very real space. It's a very real space. I'm getting a lot of my clients that were private have come from narcissistic abuse.

That's how they've engaged me because they've been to psychologists, they've been to other counsellors and they said people don't get narcissism. They don't want to talk about it. They don't get the dynamic. They don't understand the relationship, that trauma circle and the behaviours, the invalidation, the complete and utter disregard. What I have noticed is most people who fall for narcissistic abuse type partners or relationships or friends or end up in a workplace where there's a boss who's a narcissist have come from child trauma.

They've experienced that in their child. childhood and they're just re-replicating it through life in other relationships. Which is why the healing going forward is so important because they don't find themselves stuck in those situations if they have the skills and the tools and the insights, the regulation, the self-worth, all the good things that the therapy has helped them to establish. they don't go forward making those same mistakes or, you know, fitting into situations which are not ideal, using strategies in their life that no longer serve them. They might have served them as a child, but they no longer serve them now. So it's a whole new way of thinking and being,

but that work there is so pivotal to a lot of the work that we do. Yeah, there's a lot of patterns, a lot of patterns when you get down to it with clients. So yeah. And hopefully doing that work when you do grab them will help mitigate secondary or generational trauma with their children. If they choose to have them, yeah, you can see the flow-on effect so clearly. Yes, yes, yes. That's often discussed.

Telehelp has been around for a long time. A lot of people have spoken to me about how COVID has impacted their capacity to support more people. Do you do a lot of local work in your rural community or is it mostly telehealth? What does that balance look like? My work mostly has been telehealth. I have had a handful of local clients. I do have a couple of clients coming through shortly that will be local face-to-face clients.

But I don't have a space. I don't have an office as such. So I'm going to have to look at that down the track. And I've kind of said to different communities, you know, if you've got a room that I can have one day a week or a space, what you hear about a space, and there are a few clients coming through, then that's worth me setting up for a day

and coming in and doing that. So I'd like to establish that. It's just not viable as yet. And a lot of my clients are coming from all over the place. So with the beauty of telehealth, I've just picked up a Western Australian client my first. So, you know, it's great. You know, you think of the time constraints.

So, you know, out here, I'm 40 minutes to a town in one direction. I'm an hour to a town in the other direction. I'm two hours to an inland city of Tamworth, that direction. So just think if they had to access me face to face, I had a little office in the little town here. the amount of time that has to be allocated to that and the fuel money and the planning and with all of the other things that are being juggled, that's difficult. So telehealth really does serve a great purpose.

I have had a couple of service providers say, oh, look, we're reluctant to refer all our clients want face-to-face. And I thought, that's okay. I'm sure there are a lot of clients of yours that would like face-to-face, but gee, they need the option. I don't think you can sit and make assumptions like that. There might be lots of them. But they might have one or two that are like, well, yeah, actually,

telehealth works well for me. I'm juggling teenagers or a child with a disability or a few young children or I'm studying part-time or, you name it. They're doing a lot of different things. And telehealth really sits in that space that helps people to organise their time and their money. You know, petrol's expensive. You have to drive an hour to an appointment. And then you have to pay for parking if it's in more of your metropolitan area.

And you can drive around for half an hour just trying to find a spot sometimes. Yeah. You know, I'm finding, though, with victim services, a lot of my clients are really liking telehealth because they don't feel safe outside. I've got clients that aren't leaving their home. Now, I don't promote isolation. We've got to get clients past that. But that's a process.

That's not going to just happen overnight. We shouldn't be forcing people out their front door because that's how we offer service. You know, if they can sit on their comfy lounge with an iPad in the privacy of their own room or space, a house, then why not? Why not? They're having quality conversations.

They're still being emotionally held. They're doing that their way. See, that's about them navigating it their way. I've got one client sits on the back veranda with a laptop, smoke while she's talking to me, having a coffee. That's her way. She's engaging her way and that's great. It's flexibility.

It's flexibility and in rural communities a lot of women, a lot of victims, a lot of people, they don't feel safe walking around the town because they don't want to go into a councillor's office because towns talk people are like, I wonder what she went and saw her for. Or I bet she's telling her this, this and this. I've got a couple of clients where it's not just the ex that has been stalking, harassing, intimidating. It's the whole family and some of the friends. So they don't feel comfortable being out and about. They feel vulnerable.

They feel unsafe. Their walls are what can keep them feeling, you know, safe. So it's really important that we can accommodate that. It's a very real threat too. I've seen where people have gone to court and walking home or walking to, their car, they've been beaten up after the hearing. So being out and about can be quite dangerous at times. Yeah. And most of the time it's not an imminent threat or a perceived threat. The threat has happened. That's how they've come to you. So yeah, you've got to take it seriously.

When I was at Centrelink, when I was in the Hunter Valley office, I saw a lot of domestic violence there. I saw it everywhere, but I saw a higher level of violence violence. So I remember interviewing a victim and her partner came in looking for her and looked in all the glass because we had the frosted glass that might have had a line but they can look between and spotted her and smashed the glass on the office. Smash the glass. Oh God. That was horrendous.

So after that there was a big concentration on trying to build a servicing model for victims where they weren't in the front of our building, not in our main area, not even in our, but interviewing in, we had a couple of offices out the back, or at the refuge, like places that weren't accessible by other people. Because that was really provocative. It spoke very loudly, and I always have that very clear in my head around, you know,

having victims engaged services, there has to be a safety factor. I think telehealth provides that safety factor. So that's why I'm very towards that because I just, I've seen it, I've seen it go wrong. And it's scary, scary for everybody. So, yep. You mentioned earlier that you're big on resources,

you do a lot of reading, you're part of these networks like Pippin, you were mentioning, and you've attended trauma conferences. Are there any really good talks or speakers or writers that you would recommend people check out if they're interested in these spaces? Yeah, so there is a super trauma conference which is run by conscious life. And that is sponsored and done by Alex Howard. Alex Howard's a social worker in England. And he does, you pay for it.

It's a membership. It goes for about three to five days. and there's about 30, 40 different speakers. So it's really worth it. They come from a different angle on trauma. So some will speak about neuroscience. Some will speak about the gut health, trauma and gut health. So it's all different perspectives.

So it just builds this whole library of understanding from the different angles by the time you join all the dots. I find that really great, really fascinating. I find it really good resource for me as a practitioner when trying to communicate to my clients about the impacts of trauma on their life. Now, the holisticness of it, that it's not just about what's going on in here,

what you're saying to yourself and what you've experienced. Going forward, it's all about every part of your body and your health. gut health even. I've even spoken to clients about getting on a good probiotic to try and build good gut biome, which helps to build balance in the body. So I've learnt a lot.

I've been part of that for a couple of years now, like the membership and watching. And I'm hoping to take part in it eventually. I'd like to speak at one of them. As I go forward and as I understand things and have an era of interest, I'd like to. Because I think it's a really valuable result. resource. My favourites, I suppose, and I look, and it's going to sound cliche, Gable and Matai

and Stephen Porges, I'm very much the polyvagal understanding of trauma, that kind of thing. Alex Howard does some really good work, just trying to think who else I listen to. I have actually become familiar recently, and it is YouTube, so it's very cliched. It's a lady called Anna Runkle and she is the crappy childhood fairy. And she's been through childhood trauma. So she's not a professional. She doesn't have any qualifications, but she has a lived experience. And her insights based on lived experience are fantastic.

Okay. And she's easy to listen to. She's got a beautiful softness about her. it's highly empathic. And she has a saying called crap fitting, which I love. And she talks about crap fitting. So earlier I spoke about, you know, those with trauma going forward, they enter relationships with people who are perhaps abusive or emotionally unavailable.

They will work in a job under somebody who's highly abusive. She calls all that crap fitting. You know, you make a crappy situation. fit your life because you don't think you're worth better than that. That's just kind of how you've gone forward, understanding who you are and what you deserve. And I think it's great. That's a great saying. It's a great insight to have to pull people out of the crap fitting mentality

and give them more self-worth so that they don't settle for things that are toxic and unbeneficial to their lives, setting them up for yet more power. of dysfunction, dysregulation and abuse. So, yep, she's got some great stuff and she's just lovely to listen to. I have actually mentioned her to a couple of my clients, and one of my clients loves her.

She says, thank you for telling me about her. I can so relate to her, and they're just finding that there's comfort in that. So I have done that, but I'm still obviously looking out at different things that pop up. I'm trying to think there was a really good speaker that I really enjoyed at the Super, it's the trauma super conference. She's South African Trudy and Trudy spoke about malic acid, getting on malic acid and how malic acids are used alongside therapy. So I'll have to look that up.

I've got it all written down somewhere. Her stuff was really amazing. So just the level It's getting the levels in your body right as well. So there were deficiencies in certain areas and, yeah, her work was really fascinating. There was a talk by a Melbourne clinic and the Melbourne Clinic, they do the pharmacy probiotics and they do the counselling. So it's side by side. So it's full health, holistic health and therapy. And they were linked with Latrobe University as well. I'd have to look that up.

I've got it all. Like I said, I do a lot of writing it all down. And that was fascinating. And it was great to see an Australian clinic participating because a lot of the participants in the Super Trauma Conference are either coming from America, Canada, South Africa or Europe. We don't see a lot of Australian entrance, but I'd like to see us pioneering in different areas around that

to build on insights and build on the professional expertise, being put forward. So, yeah, I do recommend that for practitioners, definitely. They're great listens, they're wonderful insights, they're all the wealth of knowledge. You know, it's not something you just have access to normally. Like, you know, you might pay a couple hundred dollars for the membership, but it's well worth it. And these conferences come up all through the year, and there's different speakers. So I think it's just a library of wealth of knowledge to me. But I do love, Gabe or Mattai. I do love his stuff. I do have a couple of his books and his stuff resonates with me very well. Well, Kelly, I guess just to wrap things up as much as I'd love to keep chatting about all your amazing

experience, I guess just to go back to the beginning even around your passion for human rights and bringing that interest that you had originally in psychology and behavior and criminology, but making it more socially minded, as you were saying. And there's obviously a clear need for social work in Centrelink. And you felt as though you were able to make a real difference in that space. But you were able to also, while you were there, build on the experience of other workers and these great role models that you had and recognizing other workers in your network that had a common goal and a collective energy that you could help harness towards your own work. And then that next step in terms of making it into the private practice space and making use of your marketing and your accounting background, while also keeping those connections.

So networking with your community and other social workers, which has brought you to this place where you are diversifying your skill set and really making this private practice into something that will hopefully be beneficial to your community and to others. So it sounds like a really amazing career so far, and you've definitely got a lot of interests and a lot more work that you can do to hopefully make some real change for social work going forward as a profession, but also make real change for people that you support. So it all sounds wonderful. And I guess I just want to ask whether you've got anything else that you wanted to mention, anything that we haven't covered that you're really keen to raise before we finish. measure. No, I think just in closing, I would have to say I feel very blessed to be able to do the

work that I do. I feel very fortunate to be able to come alongside people to assist them through difficult circumstances and experiences. I feel very fortunate that I can do that from my own space, my own business, my own practice and I can navigate that forward the way I'd like. to do that and be the kind of practitioner that I want to be. I confess that I don't have anybody putting parameters on me around that. I can navigate my learning. I can navigate how I want to be, who I want to be. And that is just awesome. What an ability to do that. Just coming out of a bureaucracy where I'm told, this is what you do and this is how you do it and this is how much you can do and this is where you finish up with that.

I now have an opportunity to go deeper with people and do some of that long-term, more intense work and to continue to invest in myself as a practitioner in my learning and my training. So, yeah, that's what I would say. I would say that it's a good life. Social work is a mighty fine profession, shall I say, and it's exciting, and it offers lots and lots of opportunity

and it's fulfilling and I love it. I just love it. So, yeah, I'm living my best life. Yeah, it sounds like it. And also, what an amazing career, what an amazing profession that you can work it around your life. You know, you've made this change to a regional, rural area and still being able to do stuff that's really interesting and worthwhile and fulfilling.

So having that flexibility to be where you need to be. and to be supporting the people that you support still from a personal and a professional perspective. You don't have to give up part of yourself, basically. You can continue doing what you need to do and still feeling that you're making a difference. Yeah. So again, Kelly, just really so grateful for your time, grateful that you could share your story. Thank you.

You know, we're not done yet. This is to be continued. I feel like you've got potentially the mental health accredited social work coming up, and you've got more work that you want to do in your private practice and continuing to expand your realm, your expertise, and I really look forward to seeing where it takes you. Thank you. It's a good journey, so thank you very much. Thanks for joining me this week.

If you would like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Kelly, please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm. slash social Xpotlight. 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 Eileen, who has over 30 years of experience in child abuse, family violence, mental health and trauma, and is passionate about the safety of children and ensuring the voices of children are hurt. In 2022, Eileen launched her own company as a way of promoting primary prevention

in the areas of child abuse and family violence. I release a new episode every two weeks. Please subscribe to my podcast so you'll notify it when this next episode is available. See you next time.