The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - But are you alive? Existential Psychotherapy with Eloise Skinner

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode: 71: But are you alive? Existential Psychotherapy with Eloise Skinner Thank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. One of my favourite things about the podcast is being able to introduce you to areas of psychology you may not have heard of before or may not know much about. Today is exactly that! I am joined by my guest, Eloise Skinner, a Trainee Existential Therapist. We hope you find it useful. I’d of course love any feedback you might have! The Highlights:(00:28): Welcome and intro to today’s episode (01:25): Welcome to Eloise Skinner(01:57): Eloise’s role and history (03:07): Eloise’s training (04:47): What does existential mean?(08:00): An element of presence(10:45):How to cope as an aspiring psychologist (13:19): Giving yourself permission to take up space(14:59): The frustration of therapy (16:17): The freedom and choices in life (19:00): How do you know when the time is right for existential psychotherapy?(21:10): The practical arrangements for training in psychotherapy(25:53): Eloise’s books including the brand new one (27:30):Connecting with Eloise(28:01):Summary and close Links: Check out Eloise’s brand-new book: But are you alive? Here: https://amzn.to/3mxEUgG  Connect with Eloise: https://www.eloiseskinner.com/ https://www.instagram.com/eloiseallexia/ To check out The Clinical Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3jOplx0  To check out The Aspiring Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3CP2N97  Get £40 off a remarkable tablet here: remarkable.com/referral/4LJU-DJD8  Get your Supervision Shaping Tool now: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/supervision Grab your copy of the new book: The Aspiring Psychologist Collective: https://amzn.to/3CP2N97  Connect socially with Marianne and check out ways to work with her, including the upcoming Aspiring Psychologist Book and The Aspiring Psychologist Membership on her Link tree: https://linktr.ee/drmariannetrent To join my free Facebook group and discuss your thoughts on this episode and more: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aspiringpsychologistcommunityLike, Comment, Subscribe & get involved:If you enjoy the podcast, please do subscribe and rate and review episodes. If you'd like to learn how to record and submit your own audio testimonial to be included in future shows head to: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/podcast and click the blue request info button at the top of the page. Hashtags: #aspiringpsychologist #dclinpsy #psychology #assistantpsychologist #psychologycareers...

Hi there, it's Marianne here. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to quickly let you know about something exciting that's happening right now. If you've ever wondered how to create income that works for you, rather than constantly trading your time for money, then you'll love the Race to Recurring Revenue Challenge with my business mentor, Lisa Johnson. This challenge is designed to help you build sustainable income streams. And whether you're an aspiring psychologist, a mental health professional, or in a completely different field,

the principles can work for you. There are also wonderful prizes to be won directly by Lisa herself. And if you join the challenge by my link, you can be in with a chance of winning a one-to-one hours coaching with me, Dr. Marianne Trent. Do you want to know more? Of course you do. Head to my link tree, Dr. Marianne Trent, or check out my social media channels, or send me a quick DM and I'll get you all the details. Right, let's get on with today's episode. If you're looking to become a psychologist, then let this be your guide. episode. with Dr. Marianne Trent.

Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. So I love introducing you guys to different areas where you potentially could work or gain experience along your route to wherever your ultimate career goal might be. And today's guest is going to talk with us about something you might not have heard of, as it wasn't something I'd heard of before. We're going to be talking about training in psychoanalysis and so I hope you find it a really useful episode. If you'd like to discuss any of the content in the podcast do come along to the Aspiring Psychologist Community free group on Facebook. I hope you find this useful and I look forward to catching up with you on the other side. Hi welcome to the podcast Eloise Skinner. Hi Eloise. Hi, thank you so much for

having me. Oh, you're more than welcome. Thank you for coming on. So we've been thinking a little bit of a little chat before about many things really, about you having changed careers and about what you're doing currently. So we should introduce the fact that you're here currently because we're kind of looking at alternative, you know, methods for working in kind of mental health therapy roles. And that's what you're doing now, isn't it? Do you want to tell us a little bit about what you're doing? Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, I had a bit of a career change over the last few years I started in corporate law so I trained as a lawyer um I went to law school so I studied law at uni and then qualified as a solicitor in the UK and or in England Wales and um and then I practiced law for about five

years and during the pandemic I had a bit of a moment where I was like this is the time to make a change because you know everything else was so uncertain. And it seemed like if there's any time to really uproot your life, it might be in the middle of everything that was already happening. So then I decided to take a break, actually. I sort of called it a break to myself so that I would have some ability to maybe come back if I wanted to and yeah in that break I started a business which is really around helping people find a sense of purpose and meaning and also working with like schools and young people around those topics and yes I was also doing my training to become a psychotherapist at the same time so that was the training sort of helped me re-pivot my career

from one to the other it was like a nice bridge between going from one thing and then sort of helped me re-pivot my career from one to the other it was like a nice bridge between going from one thing and then sort of helping me see that there was a different direction in the future. Brilliant thank you so yeah that is some pivot isn't it from from lawyer to psychotherapist um how does the training for for your psychotherapy work? So my training is part-time which means that it's kind of in terms of time commitment it's one or two sort of like big chunks of time per quarter let's say so like it will be three or four days every few months and then those are those were during the pandemic online so a lot of it was just on zoom to begin with and then it started becoming in-person meetings so we're back in person now which is really nice actually and you can imagine like a psychotherapy training is I'm sure yours was as well like really important to be with the rest of

your group and sort of get to know them so yeah we're back in person and yeah it's like these sort of long weekends slash like four or five day meetings and exams at the end of every module. And the way our training is structured in existential analysis is what they call the basic training, which is sort of an introduction to the topic and like the basic framework of the field. And you get assessed on that and then you move into the clinical side, which is sort how to apply it to different clinical situations and that's where I am at the moment right towards the end so I have um as we speak I have two more modules and then I will be done um but I did the basic training I think finished about last year. Brilliant so you're on on the countdown now yes almost there the end is sort of insight not quite yet but almost I see so I'm going to ask what feels might be a stupid question but my only real

understanding of the term existential comes from my upbringing where we used to watch something called Dawson's Creek I don't know if you've've ever watched it. And it was regarded as sort of an existential naval gazing series. And so that's really my only bolt on to that term, you know. And sometimes I still hear songs, and I think, oh, that would have made a great song for the soundtrack of Dawson's Creek. Like, oh, you know, woe is me.

Could you tell us a little bit more in a more up-to-date accurate reflection not involving Dawson's Creek what existential psychotherapy is Eloise? Yeah I love that that's a great reference um yes so it kind of is about all of those feelings and all of those emotions as well um it's a really broad field actually and it's still very much evolving so it's a field of psychotherapy that um has a lot of different sort of elements within it and a lot of different um ideas and theories within it um and it really stems from well a couple of places there's obviously existentialism as in like the branch of philosophy which um is sort of an inspiration for a lot of the work and theories.

Try to apply that in a more practical setting or like help people through some of those issues. And then one central piece of body of work or essential figure in the field is Viktor Frankl, the author of Man's Search for Meaning, where he kind of sets out logotherapy, which was his way of applying sort of more existential interpretations to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. And now it can be practiced in many, many different ways. I'm training in something called existential analysis, which is like a more specific part of existential therapy as a whole. But there are obviously lots of lots of other ways to practice it as well and really at the heart of it it's about um well it's about addressing the idea of the whole person and making sure that you're um sort of encompassing the entirety of the person so not just um your mind or your body or you know this kind of spiritual sense or you know the soul

as it was originally referred to but the entirety of the person so taking into account um all of our experiences and our backgrounds and our histories and what we feel and think about things and how we react and sort of working with that as a whole um and then another idea another central idea within the field is having this sense of um yes to life which was actually a title of one of victor frankl's books or a translated title which is the sense of being able to um have the sense of uh personal presence within your own life to be connected to your life to be in dialogue with the the way you live your life and the choices you make and being able to have this fundamental yes to like being here and doing the life that doing the life that you're doing um so those are some ideas but that's the field it's very it's much more much much more than

that of course so sort of the yes philosophy would be like ultimate mindfulness like really choosing to mindfully be where we're at right now yeah absolutely it's um an element of presence I think is really central to it like that um as you just described I think um you know one of the quotes that's often sort of given in terms of this field and this isn't necessarily from anyone in this field I think it's sort of a summary of some of Viktor Frankl's thoughts and interpretations but there's this idea that between like stimulus and response you could have a gap where you then decide what you're going to do or decide your choices or decide your reactions to life that quote's given around quite a lot often attributed to Frankl but it's sort of a summary of what he would have thought about the field um and yeah so it's this

idea that you have a sense of autonomy or like personal determination to craft your life in the way that you want you have the ability to choose your responses to the things that happen to you and so it's very much yeah mindfulness I'd say is a good way of describing it and it does um sort of associate itself with a lot of the more like yoga and meditation style choose your life be present in your life you know um be present in your body ideas as well um but just the different interpretation of that I see thank you I was listening to um radio to Jeremy Vine recently and um they were talking about whether it's ethical and whether it should be banned to bring cakes into shared offices. I don't know if you heard the programme.

And the theory was, you know, we've all been there, haven't we? You know, if people bring in cake, you weren't necessarily looking for cake. You weren't necessarily going to have cake that day. But when you see it, you know, you are more likely to eat it or, you know, it's interesting to hear about what you're saying. Actually, you know, you do still have choices. It's not just stimulus and response. There's something in between and you can hold on to your values and what is true to you. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a really central idea of the entire philosophy behind this field is that you do have in every situation you have a choice or you know you always have the ability to decide who you are and how you respond to certain things this is kind of the fundamental freedom of the human being of the

ability to decide how you're going to move through the world or how you're going to react to things and so yeah in a situation like that you you can see oh yeah it might be a bit more challenging but there's a huge space in which you can decide what you're going to do how you're going to respond and as you said a lot of it is about values and where you stand and what your opinion is about certain things and how you feel about your position to life um so knowing those fundamental values I think is a really important part of sort of laying the foundations to make that choice later on. Great and just thinking about our audience being aspiring psychologists it can be really quite tricky to get into qualified professional psychology routes and it can be really oh really frustrating really just full of dismay along the way sometimes can you give our audience some advice

from an existential perspective about how to cope with that uncertainty and how to cope with yeah whatever's going on for them in their life right now yeah wow um I think maybe one of the tools or one of the um steps that you can take within this field is this idea of safety and security in your own life or trying to cultivate a deeper sense of that. And there's a term that's used called fundamental trust, which is almost like your sense of trust or your sense of being present and safe and secure in the world um and I think that's one of the things that's always helped me through periods of anxiety is this knowledge that you know things change around you things come and go good and bad things happen like stressful things happen and you know the world sort of changes a lot but ultimately if you can cultivate this sense of I guess fundamental trust in your own self and in your presence in the world like you're the sense

that you're able to be here that you belong that you're able to take up space and that you're you know fundamentally quite grounded in the world I think that can be a really helpful um sort of perception to have of yourself as you kind of move through your life and there are lots of exercises that they have to cultivate this sense of trust um things like uh sort of body focused exercises can be quite helpful so there's an exercise called the armchair exercise um where the student or the practitioner would sit in a chair with your feet on the floor and then you would sort of go through these steps of um just bringing your awareness to the space bringing your awareness to your body and bringing your awareness to the sense of being like grounded and present and then you can even use phrases like um you know I am secure I'm grounded sort of um

almost like a mantra type phrase that you can just sort of like run through um focus on your breath um you know in the sense of being like fully present and within your body and within your life um so there are a few variations on that exercise but I guess the the intention of it is to really feel secure and to cultivate like a greater sense of security in in your life I think things like that as well as like other body focus practices can be a real like bridge into that sense of being really secure and trusting in the world yeah and so there's definitely some sort of affirmation work in there as well um which is something i've been finding quite useful lately actually and i love i love that idea of

giving yourself permission to take up space take up room um i think often as women specifically i speak as a woman um that's something that we're not necessarily you know and even when we're growing up we're told like you know i want to hear what you've got to say as a child you know and even when we're growing up we're told like you know don't want to hear what you've got to say as a child you know often it's the adults that get to speak first and we just we get used to to being small and not having opinions and that can be tricky it can be tricky in boardrooms it can be tricky in conference rooms it can be tricky in lecture theatres you know who am I to speak what have I got anything worth saying so I like that idea of empowerment yes you have absolutely and I guess coming back to that sense of being within your own life and having this yes to life or this position to life where you're committed to you know doing the things that you want to do making

your choices and finding your freedom um to craft and design your own life and respond to the things that happen to you these are all ideas that kind of feed through into like all of those situations that you were talking about it sort of starts with this really personal work where you might just be sitting in a chair being like focusing on your breath and your body and you know it doesn't seem like a huge step to take but over time that becomes sort of your position your attitude and the way you interpret the world and then you sort of feed that out into every single situation so that when you are in like a lecture hall or when you are you know advocating for yourself in certain situations

those positions those fundamental attitudes sort of feed back into your life um and it can be quite imperceptible I think sometimes psychotherapy can be a bit frustrating if you are you know someone who's undertaking psychotherapy because it's not always an immediate transformation and you can't see like as if you were going to the gym and like in two weeks you can do an extra press-up or whatever but with psychotherapy or these more like sort of personal focus practices, it's hard to see immediate sort of overnight transformations. And that can be a little frustrating. But, yeah, I would say as someone who's been practicing this stuff for a while, as a student of existential psychotherapy before I trained in it, it definitely does. You sort of see it feed through into the rest of your life in a really satisfying and fulfilling way. Great I was just thinking about some of the clients that we might

work with and some of the issues that we see and some of the diagnoses that we might see and with something like PTSD so post-traumatic stress disorder, that has happened as a result of something really awful happening to somebody. That's not their choice. But how do we work with them or kind of get them on board or formulate with them to help them think about their position and their choices? Yeah. And I think it's a really interesting example because there are a lot of times in life where our freedom, if we think, oh, you have freedom of choice, you can wake up tomorrow and go for a run or you can travel the world or whatever. Everyone's freedom is restricted and most people's freedom is restricted in some very, very practical ways. So you don't have the physical ability or you don't have the money or, you know, whatever. You don't have the circumstances that would allow for all of the choices that could be possible um so I guess when you're talking about a narrowed form of a narrowed field of freedom where you do have

choices still but they're drastically restricted in different ways or maybe you can't perceive all the choices or it seems like it feels like there isn't much choice um available I think Victor Frankel's work would really encourage um sort of just focusing in on the places that you do have freedom still. So obviously, a lot of his experience was formulated in the context of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. And, you know, people didn't really have any freedom or autonomy in those situations um but what he was observing was people were able to carve out little pieces of choice or you know the freedom to choose fundamentally your own responses to the things that happen to you is sort of the freedom of a human being the freedom to decide not the practical things that happen to you or the

things that come your way but the ability to respond to them in a certain way like your attitude towards the situation how you're going to deal with it that freedom still exists in any situation and I guess that is something to hold on to if you're someone who feels like they've been stripped away of a lot of practical choices and I mean existential therapy is just one tool to be used alongside other things of course so when you're talking about more complex clinical situations definitely other therapies are helpful as well but that perception of okay when we strip it right down what do you have if you don't have any other choices in the situation you still have the ability to decide how you're going to respond to the things that happen.

Yeah, okay, so we can respond right now, even if we couldn't respond to how we chose, or how we would want to have done at the time. Right, right. And, and there's a sense of sort of taking ownership of your choices in the moment. There's a lot of sort of biography type work where you're looking back at your past and seeing the things that have sort of formed you into who you are today and as you said even if you felt like there wasn't any choice in the past you did make choices that have sort of brought you to where you are so you can take ownership of that as a part of your freedom as well and then as you said making choices at the moment. Great thank you so who would be the ideal client for you and people in your cohort? And yeah, what problems and symptoms and kind of, yeah, difficulties might they be experiencing

in their life? How would they know that actually, you know, the thing they needed was existential psychotherapy? Yeah, it's a good question, especially because it's not that well known. So I think it takes a while for people to sort of come to the field or to find it, to stumble across it. I think, obviously, people, maybe this was my situation, who are just really searching for some kind of depth and feeling like a little bit lost in their own lives. There's this phrase that Viktor Frankl uses uses called the existential vacuum which is when people sort of get trapped in this place where they can't see a sense of meaning and purpose which is really my experience of like sort of being you know everything is okay but it doesn't have any depth to it so you're sort of just floating around thinking like what's the

point in anything and um that was where i was when i sort of sought out these this type of work and this has been really really helpful for me so people may be in that situation where they can't really see a greater sense of meaning or purpose um you can also use it in moments of more like like crisis type situations you know a drastic loss of meaning or a transitional event say like grief or um career change might be one as well or um physical changes to the body like illness or you know other restrictions on your freedom things like that where you're sort of trying to take back the presence in your life and reclaim it for yourself but really I think logotherapy especially the idea is that you don't have to be someone with a situation you don't

have to come with like oh I've been divorced or you know I'm going through this thing or you don't have to come with something that you're working through you can just come and explore your life because I guess the sense is like every single person on the planet has a sense has a sense of being present in their lives and making choices and so you can always explore this work even if your life is like going really great um but yeah it can be used in situations of more um trauma as well in clinical settings as well great thank you um a little bit of context is always useful and in terms of if people wanted to explore training um and you know how widespread is it and how do people access it is it self-funded could you tell us a little bit about the practical elements to it please absolutely so um for logotherapy

logotherapy there are a few trainings around um there's the victor frankel center in ireland um i think it's one of the main ones and they do courses that are like self-study um and also like a bigger diploma course as well um that I think is all part-time so I don't think any of it is like full-time on campus um and then from a more like academic background I think there are a few universities that do sort of existential analysis like degree type courses where you would actually go and study at a university level obviously then i think you would need to convert it into a practicing um qualifying course if you wanted to practice but that could be like a nice way to learn about the topics um and then existential analysis is really centered in vienna um so i'm training with

um yeah a center for existential analysis which Analysis, which is centred in Vienna, but has now spread out to other places. Canada has a lot of existential analysis work. It's funny to see where it spreads to, but Canada, the UK, Vienna, and also sort of places like Russia as well. There's quite a lot of work out there in this topic. But yeah, my course is self-fundedfunded so I'm actually not sure what the

situation would be if you took it as a second I don't know too much about how the UK I imagine there's not much funding around to be honest from what I know about the UK education system but um when I did my first degree that was obviously then I used student finance and then this I'm assuming there's some kind of support available but I thought maybe it would be a bit too tricky because I'm working as well part-time I thought okay let's just try and fund it myself um and it has been quite difficult actually um and I was saying to someone the other day like I cannot believe how expensive psychotherapy trainings are like it seems to cut a lot of people out of the

profession because you know you have to pay for like a practicing course and then obviously all of your hours as well as a trainee therapist um and yeah you're practicing uh all of the things that come along with practicing for the first time so yeah it's a lot I don't know whether you're I'm sure your listeners will have a much better sense of like how it can be done and if you need funding but um yeah for me it's just been working alongside and struggling thank you the struggle is real and there's um there's branches of professional qualified psychologists that also have to self-fund as well and it's just like it's just yeah it seems massively unethical um could you tell us what sort of settings existential

psychotherapists might find themselves working in or where you might where you might see or bump into them yeah i think um a lot of sort of more clinical psychotherapists who have had a basic training in other forms of therapy might have a little bit a sort of um an idea of these therapies so you might be introduced to it there through just a therapist that you're seeing or that you're working with so yes you can um see it alongside or you can see it in clinical practice in hospitals in clinics uh just one-to-one with a therapist and it is used in places like schools sometimes so there's a little bit of existential analysis that works with younger people especially in that transition from sort of

more like school level to adulthood can be a really difficult and very existential time to be reflecting on who you are where you are in the world um dorsal creep kind of vibes um so you're thinking about what you want to do and i think it could be really helpful that I actually wish I would have had something during that period to support me in this kind of work. But yes. And then other places where, like you were saying earlier, sort of where your freedom is restricted a bit. I think that's where you see might see these therapies come in a bit more. So things like prisons or, you know, sort of medical situations where you're dealing with a loss of physical freedom something like that um grief counselors um as well or yeah things like um losses that you're going through um and it can also be used in situations of like ptsd or other clinical

conditions say people are returning from like a traumatic situation or even people returning from well for victor branko's situation like the concentration camp so the idea of wartime or a really traumatic situation and that you're sort of kind of rebuilding your life and finding your freedom after that brilliant thank you it's been a really interesting whistle stop tour through stuff that i certainly hadn't considered and it's always nice to to shed some light on other areas of kind of mental health practice and things that are going on um in the wider world so thank you so much for that and I know that you've got a number of books under your belt and a new one coming out as well haven't you could you tell us a little bit about those thank you yes um so yeah my first couple of

books were sort of more like business focused books um in law and then um when I started the business and then this third one that is coming out um is called but are you alive question mark and it's all about it's kind of about these ideas actually so it's a good um little summary of some of the existential analysis ideas logotherapy a lot of Viktor Frankl's work in there, some practical exercises, but also some more sort of body-focused stuff. So some yoga and meditation,

mindfulness, as you were saying earlier, and trying to bring that together with some more spiritual things as well. So as part of my sort of journey to meaning and purpose, I did spend a year training with a monastic community so it's a lot of those practices and trying to sort of bring together the um existential therapy side and also the monastic side and sort of practices to help you live deeper in everyday life that's the idea amazing fly on the wall in the monastic community would be interesting I'm sure yeah yeah hopefully brilliant where can

people learn more about you or get hold of your books if they want to yeah most things are on my website so if you put my name into google it's just eloiseskinner.com and you should find my website and social media as well um on instagram I'm at eloisealelexia um and yeah that's kind of mostly where i'm at great we'll obviously um have your details in the show notes as well um thank you so much for your time and helping us learn a little bit more about this really interesting area eloise oh thank you so much for having me and i really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you. So there we go. My existential knowledge of Dawson's Creek, who knew that would come in useful one day. Thank you so much to our guest, Eloise. It was a pleasure to speak with her and very much looking forward to reading her new book, which sounds fascinating when that's available and what I will do is when

the book is released I will redistribute this podcast episode as well so that we can drum up some more support for her and her work she sounds like a very busy person who's very good at achieving things so hope you found that useful if you want any additional support or guidance to help you in your career as an aspiring psychologist do consider coming along and joining us in the aspiring psychologist membership if you've got any ideas for future podcast episodes do just get in contact with me come and connect and follow with me on socials where I am dr marianne trent everywhere if you're watching on youtube please do take a moment to like the video and comment.

And of course, subscribe to the channel. I will look forward to catching up with you very soon. Our next episode of the podcast is available from 6 a.m. on Mondays. Thank you for being part of my world and I will see you very soon. Take care. from so many things that you can try. The Aspiring Psychologist Collective. The Aspiring Psychologist Collective.

If you're looking to become a psychologist Then let this be your guide With this podcast at your side You'll be on your way to being qualified It's the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast With Dr. Marianne Turris. My name's Jana and I'm a trainee psychological well-being practitioner. I read the Clinical Psychologist Collective book. I found it really interesting about all the

different stories and how people got to become a clinical psychologist. It just amazed me how many different routes there are to get there and there's no perfect way to become one and this kind of filled me with confidence that no I'm not doing it wrong and put less pressure on myself. So if you're feeling a bit uneasy about becoming a clinical psychologist I'd definitely recommend this just to put yourself at ease and everything will be okay but trust me you will not put the book down once you start.