The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Coping with trauma personally and professionally with ex-Paralympian Dr Yvonne Waft

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode 106: Coping with trauma – personally and professionally – with ex-Paralympian Dr Yvonne WaftThank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. In today’s episode of the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast, we have an inspiring, resilient guest who is an ex-Paralympian, author and a successful clinical psychologist. Join Dr Yvonne Waft as we unravel trauma, and explore the bumps in the journey from an able-bodied 19-year-old, to an Paralympian, author and clinical psychologist. We explore the need for diversity, post-traumatic growth and the challenges of disability. We hope you find it so useful.I’d love any feedback you might have, and I’d love to know what your offers are and to be connected with you on socials so I can help you to celebrate your wins!The Highlights: (00:00): Summary (00:57): Introduction and resources (01:54): Exploring grief and trauma – a process(03:05): Introducing ex-Paralympian De Yvonne Waft(05:06): Losing limbs – processing grief and trauma (07:18): Yvonne’s route to psychology(08:37): The isolation of exclusion and ableism (10:47): Reflecting on multiple identities – parent, disabled, incoming psychologist (14:41): The freedom of post-qualification (17:23): Finding your people(20:17): Battling the barriers as a trainee (21:22): The change in the way disability is viewed from the 1990s to post-covid (24:39): Being disabled and parenting a child with disability (26:42): The daily struggles of a disabled person(31:43): Connect with Yvonne!(32:44): The need for diversity in professions (36:55): Publishing Yvonne’s story (40:36): Finding my people – through academia and sports(42:19): In loving memory of a dear friend (44:25): Unravelling traumas (49:09): You can't go over it, you can't go under it, oh no, you've got to go through it (51:59): Windows of tolerance(53:18): Reflecting on post-traumatic growth (55:46): Summary & closeLinks:📚 Check out Dr Yvonne's great new book here: https://amzn.to/47PTZgb and connect with her on socials: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dryvonnewaft/ 🖥️ Check out my brand new short courses for aspiring psychologists and mental health professionals here: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/short-courses🫶 To support me by donating to help cover my costs for the free resources I provide click here: https://the-aspiring-psychologist.captivate.fm/support📚 To check out The Clinical Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3jOplx0 📖 To check out The Aspiring Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3CP2N97 💡 To check out or join the aspiring psychologist membership for just £30 per month head to: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/membership-interested✍️ Get your Supervision Shaping Tool now:

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. Coming up in today's episode, we are looking at trauma. We are looking at how you can

experience personal trauma and then begin to make it your clinical specialty. It is a fascinating episode. It's not every day we can say the podcast has featured a Paralympian. So it's a very special episode and I hope you'll find it useful. I had to be on your way to being qualified. It's the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast with Dr. Marianne Trent. Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent and I am a qualified clinical psychologist. Hope that you are well wherever you are listening to this in the country, in the UK, or indeed the world. Please do come and let me know a little bit about yourself by coming along to the free Facebook group, The Aspiring Psychologist Community with Dr. Marianne Trent. And do come and follow me on socials. If you're watching on YouTube, you can do that by scanning the QR code on screen now. If you're not watching on YouTube,

please do just search for Dr. Marianne Trent on whichever social platform you're on. And I should appear as if by magic. One of the things that I have done in my professional career over the last few years is to get a little bit more confident in talking about myself publicly. That is something that I started to do in the Grief Collective book. It's something I continued in the Clinical Psychologist Collective book, and also something that I've continued in the membership and for that matter in these podcast episodes too but it does take confidence and it takes time and we need to make sure that we're not just talking about ourselves all the time because that's not that useful for our clients What we need to do is strike a balance and to know why we're sharing

our personal story to really make sure that it's of benefit to what we're talking about with the client. Now, I sort of stumbled into working with trauma as my clinical specialty because that's what was being delivered in the service I was working in and it just really resonated with me. But we all start in our journey for clinical specialties with different reasons, different motivations. And today's guest has a very interesting reason for why trauma was right for her clinically and how it all unfolded. It is a fascinating episode. It does feature an ex-Paralympian athlete and it was just such a pleasure to speak with Dr. Yvonne. I hope you'll find it really, really interesting for a variety of reasons and I would love to know

what you think of the episode. Please do come and let me know and I'll look forward to catching up with you on the other side once you've been introduced to Yvonne. Hope you find it useful. Just want to welcome along our guest today Dr Yvonne Woff is a clinical psychologist. She's also an author of a really lovely new book which is out now and it's called Coping with Trauma. But more than that, she's also a retired Paralympian. It's not every day that we can say that we've got an Olympian on the podcast. Welcome along, Yvonne. Thank you very much, Marianne. It's lovely to be here. Thank you for having me on. Oh, thank you for coming. And, you know, this is a case of us having known each other and known about each other for a while. We're Facebook friends. We've been in the same Facebook groups probably quite a few years now, but we've never actually met in person.

So it's really nice to have you here. And you had approached me because of your passion for working with trauma and because of your new book and we will come on to talk a little bit about your book in good time but yeah I really want to get a flavor introduce our audience to to who you are what your journey with psychology has been and I know some of that might tread on some territory of your book as well but something else I didn't say about you in your intro is that you're a wheelchair user yeah absolutely that kind of weaves in some of your trauma story um and also your psychology story as well can I let you um guide us through a little bit about that, if that's okay, Yvonne? Yeah, absolutely. So it's all in the book. There's no big secrets here. So I became a

wheelchair user at the age of 19. I had a very nasty run-in with meningitis and septicemia. So I lost both legs, actually, which was pretty traumatic for a 19 year old girl back in the mid 1980s. I thought I knew which way my life was going at that point. And then all of a sudden I had to do a complete rethink about life and everything. I think, as you say, I got into sport. I played wheelchair basketball for many years to international level. And it was really through doing that that I started to see role models, people, other people who were further along that journey of being disabled adults, really,

that enabled me to see a future for myself, really, through coming out of trauma and into life as a disabled adult. And yeah, gradually through that process, I got myself back to university, studied psychology. I think there was an unconscious process in that happening, in that having not probably had as much psychological support as I needed adjusting to my new circumstances at 19 I really felt the lack of that and I wanted to understand myself better I had also had quite a tricky childhood prior to that with you know not the most compassionate empathic parenting and so so, you know, emotionally, things have been quite difficult for me, I think growing up and then adjusting to disability,

I didn't really have the tools. So sport was the first way that I started to adjust to things and started to see the possibilities. As you say, I then eventually went to the Atlanta Paralympics in 1996 as a wheelchair basketball player for the GB women's team and that was an amazing experience. And I suppose that that sort of journey started me to have real confidence in myself and my abilities and alongside that I then got back into education. So I was doing my psychology degree. I was becoming more and more fascinated. The more I learned about psychology, the more I, I suppose, learned about myself, applying what I was learning to myself. And I really wanted to go into clinical psychology at that point.

And then, of course, that journey sort of unfolded. So I was a mature student at undergrad. I was, I think, 27 or 28 when I started my undergrad, because obviously I'd had this interruption previously. So I came out of my undergrad at just just about 30 or so and was getting married around that time and then went on to have my daughter so sport kind of got put on hold. And I had my daughter and then kind of started focusing on the clinical psychology career and came up against quite a few hurdles with that I think. You know, accessibility to roles, being turned down at interview because, well, home visits are needed in this role, so you won't be able to do that, so sorry, but no. There were a lot of things that came up along that journey. I had an assistant psychologist post in a department where the weekly psychology meeting

was in a room upstairs and I had no access to that so I was just excluded from the psychology meeting um so yeah there were there were lots of things along that journey that that were difficult and kind of sucked it up I think I sucked up a lot of ableism on that journey um because I really wanted to be a clinical psychologist, but it really shouldn't have been as hard as it was at times. So then I did eventually get onto the clinical doctorate, and again, faced quite a lot of ableism there as well. So I experienced a lot of ableism along the journey, and I, you know, I don't really know what the answer to that is, other than, you know, that needs thinking of thinking about at a systemic level at, you know, the sort of level of the trainers in clinical psychology. Because, I mean, for example, the course I attended, the clinical doctorate that I attended at Leeds, when I attended it, the course office was in a building that I couldn't access

easily, if at all, and parking at the teaching venue was very very difficult but I couldn't physically get a train into Leeds at that time to attend training. So there was a lot that I had to deal with and then moving from placement to placement every six months, you know, when you've had to argue for some reasonable adjustments in your workplace, and then you move to another workplace six months later, and you've got to start again, trying to get, you know, just basic access requirements in place and finding out where the accessible loos are. you know sometimes that's not in the department that you're based in and yeah just so many so many challenges along the way

and also as I as I said not only was the disability stuff which I kind of took on myself to deal with a lot I really did have a lot of internalized ableism going on and you know kind of took it as my responsibility to sort that sort of stuff out. I also had a two year old toddler when I started training. And that was really hard to being a parent, being the only parent in my cohort, being older than most of my cohort and trying to juggle childcare needs, you know, getting back from placements that could be all over the place in time for nursery shutting. I had a big argument at one point with the course placements officer because they wanted to place me, so I was living near to Wakefield at the time in West

Yorkshire. And they wanted to give me a placement in Huddersfield, which would be over an hour's drive away, because it was the other side of Huddersfield from where I was. And so the travel would take me over an hour. Now my nursery time, my child was in nursery in Wakefield at the time, near to the main mental health hospital in Wakefield. So what I would have to do is drive from my village near Wakefield to Wakefield, drop my daughter off and then drive over an hour to the other side of Huddersfield. And I said, I literally can't do it because the hours don't allow, you know, I can drop her off at 8am, I can pick her up no later than 6pm. If you want me to work nine to five in

this placement, it doesn't add up. And what they wanted to do was to get someone who lived in Huddersfield to travel to Fieldhead Hospital in Wakefield for a placement at that same time. And I had a conversation with that person and said, you live like five minutes from St Luke's Hospital in Huddersfield. I'm dropping my child off less than five minutes away from Fieldhead Hospital in Wakefield. Can we not just swap placements? And we spoke to the placement supervisor and they said, no, you can't.

And I said, well, I can't do that placement, end of. I said, I have to pick my child up by 6 p.m. I started quoting all sorts of like, have you heard of attachment theory? You know, these are very senior psychologists, you know, have you not heard of attachment theory? You know, I have to pick my child up, I can't leave her at nursery. So yeah, there was there were all sorts of wrangles like that about, well, both childcare and disability. So I really had a double whammy of challenges um going on through my training journey you know both as before training and

through training um and then post-training really as a clinical psychologist working in the NHS where there wasn't that much flexibility in terms of working hours. Yeah, you could go part-time, but you were still expected to be in the department nine till five on the days you were working. And as a parent, you'll know yourself, you've got kids, you know, it's hard to do that nine to five because it forces you into doing all the child wrangling sort of early in the morning, get them to school, get yourself to work. It's really tough, isn't it? And then the same wrangling sort of early in the morning get them to school get yourself to work it's really tough isn't it and then the same at the other end of the day um it was really hard to get that flexibility and add into that that not only am I disabled but my daughter actually has

disabilities as well she has um a perinatal brain injury sadly um that's caused her a lot of difficulties she's 22 now and she's doing great um but you know there were times you know at those early stages in her life where it was really challenging it was a lot to kind of deal with and you know I was dealing with that as a disabled person myself um so the levels of stress on top of stress that I was dealing with and then you know doing a really stressful job. Clinical training, as you know, is incredibly stressful. And working as a psychologist in the NHS post-training is really stressful. It's a hard job. And really, the answer to all of that came

much later on, around about, I mean, I trained 2003 to 2006. I went, I started doing a little bit of private work around 2013. So about, you know, sort of six, eight years after, after finishing training, I went into a bit of private practice and very rapidly thought this is where I belong. And there was a bit of a transition period of a couple of years but by 2016 I was fully in private practice and can pick and choose my hours now pretty much you know I have so much more freedom now and so much more freedom to choose what work I do as well and to develop in the directions I want to develop which is just amazing it's an amazing luxury I went through a lot of hardship early on

in the career but i've got to a place where i have so much freedom and you know ability to earn and yeah it's it's just so so freeing now being in private practice and being a supervisor and being a an emdr facilitator on training um I've just got so much freedom now compared to what I had back then so I would say the struggle was worth it but it was very hard at times it was way harder than it needed to be at times wow Yvonne like what a lot you know to go from being able-bodied 19 living you know living your life independently um to then sort of almost waking up and having to experience that you are now going to be a wheelchair user you know not have the chance to even say goodbye to your

legs you know you didn't know that was happening um that's a lot that's a lot and then you know it sounds like there's so many experiences of being othered you know and almost you were othering yourself as well because you yeah you know probably had your own preconceptions about what wheelchair users were like and you know because you experience you know what you experience and you know that's been our norm that's been your norm and then suddenly you're having to enter this whole realm of other stuff you know um and I I had myself kind of imagining and thinking actually when you were joining and you know spending time with all of the other women in the basketball team that must have been incredibly liberating you

must have learned so much about them about how to be confident as a wheelchair user and some of those might have been wheelchair users from birth and others might have been from accident or illness as well um yeah I feel like that's a really great learning zone to to really learn absolutely I mean one of the things I talk about a little bit in my book coping with trauma is the importance of finding your people you know um finding the people who you can connect with who can be supportive of you who can show you the way even you know um I think there's so much more available now in terms of social media um which can be a blessing and a curse i think um but back in the mid 80s there was very little access to information and actually for me you know going into wheelchair basketball um

and finding people who were working i didn't know that was an option at first. People who had careers, people who had married and had families. I mean, I was 19. I didn't know, you know, I thought I might want to get married and have children at some point, but I didn't know, you know, when something dramatic like that happens, you don't know if that's still an option for you. You know, ever love me that was probably a question on my mind at some points back at that stage um and then to get into wheelchair basketball and see people that were married and parenting or you know sort of um just living their lives in whatever way they wanted to you know um that was just so liberating to see that you know I didn't have to have my options limited just because I was now a wheelchair

user um yeah it was it was it was finding my people and making those connections and then you know the friendships that grew out of that you know some of those people um that I was connected with then you know I may have gone big chunks of time in my life without speaking to them but then you know we'll meet up at you know because I coach wheelchair basketball now I don't still play but I do still coach and I'll bump into people that I've not seen for 20 or 30 years who I used to play with or against back then. And it's just like, you know, it's like we spoke yesterday. You know, we just pick up conversations and just catch up.

And it's just lovely to have those those sort of connections. But that's that's been such a powerful healing part of my journey to have those connections absolutely. I'm so pleased that you you know had a go at wheelchair basketball and then that that ended up happening for you because that sounds like you got just what you needed when you didn't even maybe really know that you needed it and it's been transformational for you um and it just it sounds wonderful I'm so pleased that you had that and had that experience um and also when you were talking about your experiences of being an assistant psychologist and then your experiences of being a trainee just sounds horrendous and being a parent you know so I trained shortly after you um after you finished I started in 2008 and there

were parents on the cohort um I would say that largely there was a more sensitive you know shift to making sure their placements were going to be doable especially because one of the parents was a was a single parent and so you know it really is them or or nobody that's going to be picking those children up but um you know you've really described having to battle many many things but having now been a few decades into being wheelchair user and you know the changes that have happened really probably since the pandemic you know about neurodiversity about inclusivity about disability about inclusion for all of our individual quirks and differences do you think there's differences for being a wheelchair user currently 2023 than there was when you were coming up through the system and

when you were learning to be disabled yourself? It's really interesting you ask that. And I think when I became a wheelchair user, it was pre the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. But there was already kind of a movement towards that. And I think the Americans with Disabilities Act came out in, I think, 1990. And, you know, that set a template really for the DDA in this country and so there was a real sort of positive movement towards rights for disabled people and anti-discrimination legislation and it was a battle you know to get that in place

and I think there was a period of huge hope after that for disability inclusion and real positivity and growth. And I think, you know, public buildings changed, shopping centres changed, the built environment generally changed, people's access to work changed. You know, you could go to an employer and say, this isn't actually good enough, you know, you can't discriminate against me in this way. And so things had moved on massively. So by the time I was entering clinical training in 2003, things were feeling very, very hopeful and positive. And I felt like I could, you know, I could go in there and say, actually, this isn't good enough, can you do this? And can you make this reasonable adjustment? And can you do that? And I saw things changing over a period of time and improving. And then I don't know what happened around 13, 14 years ago,

but I would say that things have gone massively downhill. I do know what happened 13 or 14 years ago, there was a change of government. And I would say that politically, the will has changed massively. And where you are noticing that maybe there's more understanding of neurodiversity and inclusion since the pandemic, I would say the opposite, actually. I would say that the pandemic highlighted the disposability of disabled people actually in certain quarters, you know, it's coming out in the little bit in the Covid inquiry now. This government were very happy to throw disabled people, older people, sick people under the Covid bus and you know, I was really alarmed at the beginning right at the beginning

of the first lockdown I was just preparing to do my teaching session to the second year Leeds trainees on disability and literally we'd locked down a week and a half before I was due to deliver this training and I was having to quickly rejiggle my slides and everything into a format that I could deliver somehow and I didn't even know how online whether that was going to be me doing it live online or sending a presentation it was all so up in the air at that point and while I was prepping my presentation to do that there was literally a debate going on in Parliament about the COVID Act and they were discussing things like if two people turned up in A&E needing a ventilator and one was disabled and one wasn't then obviously the able-bodied one would have to have the ventilator and the

disabled one would have to die and that was literally being discussed in parliament and you know here i am a disabled person very healthy doing very valuable work in the community you know as a psychologist and as a wheelchair basketball coach and also parenting a young person who at that point would have been 18 19 i think um who has a learning disability, cerebral palsy and autism. And hearing that she also would be thrown under the bus now, you know, that was so complicated to get my head around, you know, as a carer of a young person like that. If I get thrown under the bus and, you know, I don't get the ventilator, then who's going to look after her? Well, obviously, my husband would. But he was also clinically vulnerable, because he was on immunosuppressants at the time for asthma and eczema. So he was going to be vulnerable, he wasn't going to get

the ventilator either. And who was going to advocate for my daughter and support her through all of that. So we had this whole sort of anxiety around that. And I think more and more, you know, just reading Twitter, I shouldn't read it but at the moment I keep seeing psychologists on there and other people on their disability news service and so on talking about the new moves that the government are making on DWP and benefits and how people who are too sick to work are going to be forced to do work placements to kind of earn their benefits. You know, you've either got to do a work placement or kind of die in the process of trying to get that. And, you know, they're just trying to get everyone back to work, even though many, many people are not able to work.

My daughter, unfortunately she she tried doing a work placement as part of a college course and it was so stressful to her with her learning disability and autism but she she stopped sleeping and almost became psychotic with the pressure and we had to pull her out of it um you know and that's the kind of level of you know to look at her she looks like someone who could possibly try a bit of work but actually you know the reality is if if the government you know if the dwp kind of forced her into doing some sort of a workplace and the stress would be too much and i don't think people have enough understanding at those kind of policy making levels of the impact of health conditions,

neurodiversity, learning impairments, you know, just the extra stuff that disabled people have to deal with. I mean, just to give you another example, as a family, well, I went to a conference in London a week ago on Friday, and we decided in advance of that that we would make it a family trip to London and have the weekend there. So we did that. I went to my conference on the Friday. We did the lift was out of order and they were hoping it would be back in order by the time we returned because we'd be returning on the opposite platform and we'd need the lift to get over the footbridge. Anyway, Sunday evening came and we were at King's Cross station and we said you know we're here for the assistance people can you get us on the train please and by the way they mentioned about the lift can you check that that's sorted please and they phoned ahead and they said no the lift's still out at

Wakefield what you'll probably have to do is either get off at Doncaster and get a taxi well my daughter's a wheelchair user as well as I am so there wasn't going to be a taxi that could take both of us from Doncaster to somewhere in between Wakefield and Huddersfield so we said that would probably be a challenge. And they said the other option is you take the train past Wakefield, you go to Leeds, you get another train, you come back from Leeds to Wakefield and you come in on the correct platform then. Well, that's what we ended up having to do.

That added an hour to our journey home. I can see you shaking your head there. It's ridiculous, isn't it? It's just madness, isn't it? it you know it's not all right it's not it's not I mean we plumbed the time we were coming home with the thought that you know I had a full day's clinic supervision clinics on the Monday so arriving home at a time where we could relax and chill and watch a bit of telly and all of that that was all factored in you know to me being able to be up and ready for work the next day and as it was we ended up not getting home till sort of after 10 o'clock at night because we'd had to do this extra hour on on the train um to get in on the right platform and you know some

people talk about you know um how services and government and and people just don't recognize the extra time and energy that that sort of thing takes from disabled people and when the government is saying we're going to force disabled people into work through these benefit sanctions what they don't realize is that those are the things we're dealing with an extra hour on your journey imagine if I was commuting from Wakefield to somewhere south of here um every day and having to do that as part of my commute every day you know does that time not matter does it does it not matter that for example then I might not be able to pick my kids up from nursery and get them fed at a sensible time you know the extra energy and effort involved in that is just crazy

yeah yeah and you know I get I'm sorry that my questioning about you know improvements perhaps now seems quite naive but that's been enlightening for me how would you questioning about, you know, improvements perhaps now seems quite naive, but that's been enlightening for me. How would you know? How would you know? Yeah, I guess for me as a non-wheelchair user, what I see is the rise of the ramps. You know, there's been many, many more ramps created. And so I guess that just made me think that it was better you know and that because people are better at advocating and kind of knowing about disability discrimination I hoped

I was a home carer for a number of years and so I did used to hang around with lots of people with wheelchairs and what I used to find is because I was pushing them people would talk to me rather than the client themselves. And it's like, oh, no, no, no, no. You know, this is the person you want to be speaking to. But since that time, I haven't really spent much time with people in wheelchairs other than grandparents here and there, fleeting moments. So thank you for illuminating my knowledge, updating my knowledge. And, you know, I hope I hope that changes and I hope that anybody listening to this who might well be a wheelchair user themselves who've written written off this

career for themselves begins to believe that actually with the right tenacity the right determination the right ability and confidence to assert yourself this can happen this is a viable career for you yeah and if anyone was in that position and wanted to reach out to me personally I'm on all the main socials you know I'm on Twitter I'm on LinkedIn I'm on Facebook so you know if anyone was in that position of thinking is this career even viable and how on earth do I do it then you know they could absolutely reach out to me and I'd happily mentor them through the process if needed because we need more you know we need more visibility we need more people with all the diversities in the career because otherwise what we end up with is an act well what we have at the moment

is is lots and lots of able-bodied white middle-class women you know a few men um you know a few people from more working class backgrounds well i just say this this able-bodied white middle-class woman is trying to do her bit to make the absolutely absolutely you are and and don't we all you know we all try to make it more inclusive however it is very um you know sort of um i can't think of the word is it homogenic or i can't remember the word now but but kind of um you know, there's not much variety in the profession. There is some, you know, we have people of different races, different colours, different religions, we have people of different backgrounds and origins and class,

and we have people with disability amongst our number, but probably not enough. And I think, you know, we need to be sort of giving those people a metaphorical leg up, helping to increase the diversity, really, you know, we just need to increase that diversity in the profession, because we're here to help the whole range of people out there. If we don't represent the populations that we're trying to help, then we can't fully understand what they're dealing with. And I'm not saying every psychologist has to understand every aspect of diversity,

but we do need to be curious about it. And I don't think there's any problem with, you know, a white psychologist helping someone from, you know, a Muslim community or a black community. I think, you know, as long as we stay open and curious and, you know, ask, you know, am I getting this? Am I understanding it right? You know, you put one idea to me and I said, well, actually, that's not my experience. My experience is different to that. You didn't put it in an offensive way. You were just curious. And

that's what we can model, isn't it? We can model that curiosity. But I think as a profession, we don't really represent the communities that we're trying to help fully enough yet. And I think there are, of diversity, even the LGBTQ communities, you know, I don't think they're fully represented within our numbers in the profession yet. And I think, you know, for people who want specific support around certain issues of difference and diversity, then it can can be really really helpful if they can find someone with those experiences who can then you know sort of help them to see a way forward yeah absolutely and as a very recent on the ground update someone I worked with when I was in

Birmingham had recently shared on Facebook that when she was training in Birmingham she'd been the only person of colour on the cohort and then when she was teaching this week looking out a sea of faces of people from different diversities different backgrounds she said just was so lovely to see how that change has been happening. And I've definitely seen and been experienced to more people from certainly neurodiversity kind of coming through training. And I know there are people from the LGBTQ community who are qualified psychologists. But I think it's potentially more difficult to be out there yeah in your role and in your job I've been trying to get someone to come on the podcast

who is comfortable kind of talking about some of that and their experiences but I haven't yet managed that so if you know of anyone or if anyone listening knows of any qualified psychologists from the lgbtq i might have added an extra word i have a suggestion for you there yeah i have a suggestion for you there great yeah perfect yeah um but yeah you know it's it's being able to see what we want to be isn't it um that can be so inspiring and transformational absolutely absolutely yeah yeah so when did you first see what you wanted to be which was an author as well yeah um I think I think even as early as when I was recovering in hospital from my illness people kept saying to me oh you

should write a book about this and I was kind of thinking well I haven't really got much to write yet and I don't I didn't think anyone very interested in that aspect of it so I suppose there was always the seed of an idea there that maybe there was something in my story and I suppose as my story then unfolded over the decades since, you know, the sort of sports story that kind of fleshes it out a bit. Maybe there's stuff in that to kind of add in. But really my psychology journey. And then probably over the last sort of, I don't know, half a dozen years or so, we've had some very lively Facebook communities where psychologists have really got together. And over the last few, several years, really, we've had some very vibrant Facebook groups where psychologists have got together and shared ideas. And, you know, there's been many of us doing all different sorts of things, different sorts of work, particularly in the private practice field.

The psychologist group for private practice is very lively and has many, many very capable, competent, inspiring people in it. And, you know, you start to see, you know, I saw that you'd written a book about grief and then about aspiring psychologists. And then there was Michaela Thomas had written her couples therapy book. And I'm trying to think who else. Various people had written books. And it started to feel like, actually, you know, I've got quite a lot of knowledge now I've been a psychologist for nearly 20 years I've been working in the mental health field for well over 20 years now going on for 30 years so you know I started to think that maybe I have some stuff to share here and it happened almost by accident that I received an email from the Association for Clinical Psychologists from Sarah Swan, who had just written a book on coping with breast cancer from the perspective of someone who'd lived the journey, but that this could be a series of books. You know, psychologists are

human too, they live experiences, they have, they all, you know, we've all got stuff to bring, we all experience the things that everyone experiences in life. And so they sent out an email saying, you know, has anyone else got a story in them about this? And I responded to that email, despite my imposter syndrome popping up its naughty head and saying, no, no, no, no, no, you couldn't possibly. I actually thought, no, actually, yes, I could. And I quietened my imposter and pinged an email straight back and said, I could do coping with trauma. I've lived it, it's my area of expertise work-wise and I have that book in me, I just need to put it down on paper and I ended up doing a book proposal, being accepted and spending three years writing Cop coping with trauma, which has a fair amount of self-disclosure about

my own trauma journey, probably, to be fair, heavily filtered in places, you know, just to protect the innocent, or the not so innocent. But yeah, then applying how I got through that journey, and the lessons that I've learned through being a psychologist and applying those lessons retrospectively I suppose to my journey and thinking about you know how did I cope actually in many ways I coped using a sort of ACT model but ACT hadn't really been invented then that's acceptance and commitment therapy which was kind of written in, I suppose, the 90s and early 2000s. It became very popular. Steve Hayes, Russ Harris, various other names, Robin Walsh is very big in the ACT community. So, yeah, I think I was kind of applying some of those lessons, not always properly, but, you know, some of those things of, okay,

so I'm disabled now, can't do much about that. So that's the acceptance part. But then, you know, what matters? What do I want to do? How am I going to live my life now? I'm only 19. What am I going to do with my time? You know, I could just give up and live on benefits or I could live my life. How am I going to do that? And I found my way into various sporting endeavours and then back into education. And I found my people through academia and sport. And yeah, the rest is history. It's all in the book.

Oh, so the first thing that struck me was your really wonderfully heartfelt dedication at the start of the book to your colleague and friend who died. She was so young. She died from leukemia. And I think it's really lovely that you've dedicated it to her. Yeah, I mean, she didn't work in psychology. She was a friend who I'd met through wheelchair basketball, in fact. And yeah, it wasn't actually in the end the leukaemia that killed her. It was the treatment. She'd actually gone into remission from the leukaemia after two bone marrow transplants but it was the second bone marrow transplant and what that took out of her that ultimately killed her so she died of graft versus host disease or in fact she actually died of you know chest infection sepsis kind of um situation as a result but yeah she was such a close friend she was so inspiring and and supportive and she so wanted me to get this book written and finished and you know she was so supportive with that but she just didn't make it she died earlier this summer and she just didn't make it to see the book published so yeah yeah I'm so sorry for your

loss and for the the loss of those who loved her as well but you know I was starting to read the book um when I was on a train and I was like oh that's really touching really touching yeah um I loved that the so I use a fair amount of self-disclosure in what I do either in my books or in the podcast because I know from my own experience when you've got a case study in mind it helps you so much and I love that this is actually your book is part of a series of psychologists who have those personal case studies but that you also use case studies in your book as well to kind of illuminate um and allow people to really get that tangible feel so that was something I really liked and you know it feels like um for me trauma felt proper you know big scary like I needed to be a

proper human um a very established psychologist to to even consider getting to grips with it and I wish I'd picked up books on trauma before I did um you know I really believe that as a society we should be trauma informed and I think your book would be an excellent place to start for anybody who may be like me is thinking oh that's much further down my career because what we know and what you illuminate us with the book as well is that so much of what we might see as physical health is actually kind of complications from trauma and so much about what we see about so many mental health presentations might well have started with trauma um yeah and it might be as you as you talk about in your book it might be type one trauma it might be type true trauma so it might

be something that's been around all someone's life or it might be you know a very big crater a very big bump in the road um that's caused that but you know we've got to know and help people de-shame themselves. It's not their fault. And I think that's what your book really does really well. So well done to you. Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's really good to get feedback. Obviously, it's very early days because it's not. Well, as we're speaking now, it's not actually quite out. By the time this goes out it will be out in the public domain obviously its publication date is early December so we're recording this

slightly before that so I haven't I haven't had huge numbers of people read it and feedback yet so that's obviously you know every little bit of feedback that I get that suggests I hit the mark is really reassuring. Yeah, so thank you for that. Yeah. So one of the things I think is that, you know, one of my audiences is people who are experiencing the after effects of trauma themselves, and, you know, the sort of self help, helping them to maybe start that journey towards healing themselves. But the other major audience I see is, as you said, people who are at the beginning of maybe their mental health professional journey, who maybe think, oh, trauma sounds big and scary. But having it broken down into a way that, you know, there's all that psycho education, as we call it at the beginning part of the book. You know, what is trauma? How does it impact us? What do we typically see clinically?

And then kind of all the self-help, the strategies that I've used and that I've learned over the course of my career to help people start that healing journey. You know, exercises that you can do, things that you can do to really help manage. And for someone, when I was an assistant psychologist at the beginning of my journey, and I was thrown into a room with a person who had problems, and I didn't really know what I was supposed to do with them. And so you'd have a conversation with them and you'd maybe validate what they were saying but you know having some actual things to do in the room and some actual things to say to them that were like well this is kind of normal for trauma you know it sounds like you've been

through some stuff and this is what we expect to see what you're telling me is what we expect to see and this is something you can do about it I would have so valued a book that did that for me way back when I was at that early part of my career so I think you know your audience of aspiring psychologists and many many other I don't know trainee counsellors trainee mental health nurses even educators you know people in all sorts of different domains of life could really benefit from understanding what trauma is and having some ideas of things you can help people with just at that sort of almost self-help sort of level and that's that's where this book's targeted really yeah and I echo some of that I think think earlier in my career, it was like, gosh, you've been through so much, you know.

You can't really change that. I can't really alter that. And I really liked something I've not actually thought about but makes a lot of sense was one of my children's favourite books was We're Going on a Bear Hunt. And you mentioned that in your book, you know, and people can want to avoid their distress avoid that yeah because understandably but you know you you really beautifully talk about you know not going around it not going past it oh and then they realize oh no we're gonna have to go through it but what we do in trauma treatment is we do that stabilization we help them know that it's going to be okay that it's it's safe

to do that and that it's only ever going to be done in a manageable humane way and i think what i've experienced i'm sure what you have is sometimes repairing some of the damage that's been done by less sensitive hands um yeah from previous therapists is is that you have to begin to get them to trust you to know that you know yeah what they can you know cope with and you're not going to plunge them into despair so that you know people say you know I know it often gets better before it gets worse and they might come along thinking that the first session I'm just going to totally take them to bits and that's just not ethical that doesn't happen it should always feel like it so I do personal training as well if my personal trainer had stacked out my weights to begin with it would have damaged me you know like wouldn't I wouldn't

have come back and so I think we need to do make sure we do I know you do do this anyway yeah yeah we need to allow the patient allow the client the human to grow in their confidence of us and and in their ability to tolerate and manage their own thoughts feelings and their distress of course absolutely absolutely I think you know that idea of you can't go over it, you can't go under it. Oh, no, you've got to go through it. That is true of trauma therapy, you do need to go back and have a proper look at what happened. But you don't just do it from the off, you put things in place. And I think one of the things that my book will do is it will give people some of that what we in for example EMDR for trauma therapy we would talk about the preparation phase and the stabilization phase wouldn't we and I think my book kind of addresses a lot of the stuff that goes on in that before we get into the trauma how are we going to manage ourselves and contain ourselves and how are we going to manage ourselves and contain ourselves? And how are we going to, you know, stay in the moment, stay conscious, stay, you know, in the room when, you know, the overwhelming trauma might cause us to dissociate, to cut off from reality, to destabilise, to decompensate. So, yeah, I think that's all really, really important, isn't it? And I think, you know, for people coming into working with trauma, having some skills to be able to do that and to recognise what's happening,

even if the patient is becoming or the client is becoming overwhelmed and out of I talk about the window of tolerance, which comes from Dan Siegel's work, you know, that zone where you can actually do some useful therapy and processing and thinking um where you're not hyper aroused and in total fight flight panic mode but not so hypo aroused that you're almost asleep and catatonic as well so it's keeping you in that window where you can actually do the work so yeah my main intervention where i start with everybody is a window of tolerance and it's so illuminating you can see people going oh oh yeah I spent all my time up there all my time down there but I think what we forget about trauma and what clients forget is that there can be post-traumatic growth and I've worn this necklace um purposely today you can't really see on here

but um perhaps I'll put a close-up photo of it it was actually a whole other issue but it was a gift from a client I'd been seeing for some trauma work and what it is is it's a piece of Clarice Cliff pottery that got broken that has been made into a beautiful piece of jewellery so the client wanted to kind of help me know in tangible ways actually something beautiful can come from trauma and you know you can absolutely get post-traumatic growth um and you can kind of polish up the jagged edges so that they're smooth so that they that they don't feel so spiky and so that they're easier to look at and so I love that analogy yeah it's just the best work in the world isn't it working with people with trauma because you get to meet them in the most

vulnerable states and then you get to see where they get to and they oh it's just wonderful I just love it yeah likewise and I think you know my thesis was about post-traumatic growth, you know, on my doctorate. And it was something that resonated with me. I heard something in one of the teaching sessions on the doctorate about post-traumatic growth. And it struck a chord with me and I thought I need to go and at my life and thinking, yeah, I've definitely, I can definitely relate to the idea of post-traumatic growth, you know, both through my sport and my education and my career. I definitely have taken something really, really dramatic and traumatic, and I have used it as a platform for growth. And, you know, I'm still growing from it now you know and this book is another example of how i'm growing from that and your little analogy there with your necklace that made me think of the japanese art of kintsugi which um you know is where they take a broken

vessel of some sort and they repair it with gold and you know so you have this um pot that may have just been an earthenware pot for example and it's been dropped and you take all the pieces and you glue it back together and then you mark all the seams with with gold with liquid gold and you know you create something of beauty from something that's been broken and i think that is what you know that is my hopeful message for everybody you know however broken you've been there is hope that you can repair and you could even make something better from the pieces when you put them back together. What an absolutely wonderful note to end on that's so powerful could you tell us more about your social media links where where people can find and connect to you if they'd like to yes absolutely so uh my business name is catalyst

clinical psychology and so on i think facebook and twitter i think if you do at catalyst clin psi you will find me but i think you can also find me by my name so if you put Dr Yvonne Waft in I think you'll find my business Facebook page my business Twitter my LinkedIn and I'm also just dabbling with Instagram I've never been a big fan of Instagram but I've just kind of got back in there and started trying to use that and I think I'm Woff Devon on there at Woff Devon um lovely yeah I will make sure that I get all those links from you they'll be on screen for anyone watching on YouTube and I will make sure that in the show notes for anyone listening on mp3 and on any of my emails that that your details are there they will also be in the show notes a link for how you can get your hands on a copy of

Dr Yvonne's new book brand new book baby and when I first published my first book a friend of mine likened it to a bird and said you know may it really soar high for you may it reach the people it needs to and may you be really proud of it as you watch it um and I really really love that so I wanted to just share that extend that to you as well but um you know coping with trauma it's available now and I absolutely recommend it thank you so much for your time thank you for pitching this idea of a podcast to me um and yeah please do let me know if there's anything I can help with in future if you've got any future ideas for podcast episodes as well. That's fabulous. Thank you so much for having me on. This has been so much fun.

It's just so great to have an opportunity to talk about me and what I do. It's not something I do very often. I'm often talking about other people and what they're struggling with. It's lovely to talk about me for a change. Well, thank you very much much how incredibly lovely to speak with dr yvonne and to hear more about her story i hope you found it interesting if you would like to check out her new book which is available now please do check out the description with this post or the show notes or any of the links on my socials and you'll be able to grab a copy of it yourself there. If you're watching on YouTube you might well have caught some photos of Dr. Ravon in her Paralympian days and also

more recently as she's been playing basketball you may even have caught the little video where she received a package of books from her publisher and she held a copy of that book in her hands for the very first time, which is an utterly magical moment. And if you ever go on to publish a book, I hope it's one that you absolutely revel in. So let me know what content you would like producing for podcast episodes that are coming up. Pitch me your idea. Absolutely. Please do come and get in contact with me, Dr. Marianne Trent, pretty much everywhere on socials. And if the membership would be right for you in advancing your goals for progressing your career in psychology, please do check that out. I will look forward to coming along with the next episode of the podcast

which will be with you from 6 a.m on monday thank you so much take care of yourselves and i'll see you very soon bye if you're looking to become a psychologist Thank you. 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 definitely recommend this just to put yourself at ease and everything will be OK. But trust me, you will not put the book down once you start.