The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Formulation & The Power Threat Meaning Framework with Dr Lucy Johnstone

Starting point is 00:00:00 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,

Starting point is 00:00:32 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. Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast.

Starting point is 00:01:33 Thank you so much as ever for joining me. I am absolutely delighted that so many of you are finding this content useful. We very recently celebrated our 5,000th download, which means that 5,000 of the episodes have been listened to. And I am thrilled with that. You know, we launched Christmas Eve 2021. And so it's been four months, so 5000 downloads in four months for our really pretty niche market is just wonderful. So thank you again. If you do like what we do with this podcast, then please do take a moment just to drop in to the podcast app on Apple and rate it, rate the podcast. And you can do that by finding the podcast, the Aspiring Psychologist podcast in the podcast Apple app, scrolling to the bottom and then right below the trailer, right to the bottom,

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Starting point is 00:03:26 still recruiting people to write for the Aspiring Psychologist Collective and if you would like to write with your actual name that's okay, if you'd like us to give you a pseudonym that is also okay. You can find details of all of this stuff by heading to my Linktree account, which is probably most easily found by clicking on the show notes. But if you do follow me on any of my social media, then you can also click the link in my bio is also my Linktree. So, yeah, find me that way. But do come and connect. I love to help you celebrate on social media when you have significant milestones in your career, like new jobs, you know, graduating and just doing nice stuff in your life. So come and connect, come and follow me, interact with my content, and let's get to know each other better because that helps me know what you want me to create for you in this podcast too. I am very excited to bring to you today Dr. Lucy Johnston she is someone that when I was an aspiring psychologist I really looked up to

Starting point is 00:04:48 and was inspired by her work and so I honestly couldn't believe it when I reached out to her to invite her along to speak to us on the podcast and she was so happy to take part so I hope you'll find this useful her work is incredibly valid incredibly important to you as aspiring psychologists and even qualified psychologists too so I hope you'll find this a really inspiring really thought-provoking episode and as ever I would love any feedback or thoughts that you've got on it. Enjoy and I will catch you on the other side. So we are welcoming along Dr Lucy Johnston to us with the podcast today. Welcome along Lucy. Thank you, thank you for asking me. Oh thank you for saying yes. I feel like your work has been so important to me as an aspiring

Starting point is 00:05:46 psychologist, a trainee psychologist and a qualified psychologist as well. Good, I'm glad to hear that. Could you tell us a little bit about you and your work? Well, I've been a psychologist, a clinical psychologist for a very long time. I've always worked in adult mental health settings and I've worked partly in clinical settings but I've partly worked in training and for a while I worked at one of the local universities in Bristol so it's been quite a mixed career. I actually gave up clinical work at the end of 2016 and I'm currently describing myself as self-employed. I do writing and training. So this is a new and unexpected part of my career, in fact.

Starting point is 00:06:34 And the same themes have followed me throughout my work, really, which is thinking about alternatives to the diagnostic model of distress. And everything I've written or done has been a variation on that theme. Brilliant and yeah you first crossed my path when I was trying to get interviews on clinical training and talking about formulation. Could you tell us a little bit about yours and Rudy Dallas's book on formulation how that came to be? Okay so as we know formulation is a core skill of clinical psychologists um and i had always used it i was trained to use formulation as all psychologists are i hadn't think i probably hadn't thought a huge amount about the subject until i um took a post on a clinical psychology doctorate myself and then I was in a position of training other people in

Starting point is 00:07:25 using formulation and it seemed to me that there was a big gap in the market. There were a few books out there and a few articles but actually considering this is meant to be our core professional skill there wasn't a lot of really in-depth thoughtful look at what formulation is, what it isn't, what its uses are, what its drawbacks are, what the controversies are, what the different perspectives of formulation might look like depending on which model you start with. So Rudy was working on the Plymouth course which was closely linked to the Bristol one and we put on a workshop, lots of people came along, it seemed to be a subject people are interested in.

Starting point is 00:08:05 And out of that arose the book, which is now in its second edition. The first edition came out in 2000. The second edition came out in 2014. Well, I'm so thankful that you did. And for me, you were really one of the, you know, the trailblazers for clinical psychologists creating books as well. Certainly one of the first I was aware of and so you know you showed me that that we could and you know we've got something useful to say that we should so an extra thank you to that to you on that one as well but you know it's what I really like about the book and why our audience will find it particularly useful is that you you introduce you know vign't you, of case studies, and then

Starting point is 00:08:47 you formulate them from a variety of different perspectives throughout the book. So it's just really well done. Well, thank you. It was quite a lot of work. And there are a number of contributors. And as you say, the common thread of the book is we take two case histories which are based on real people. One is an adult man and the other is a child and her family. And the various chapters look at how we might formulate their difficulties from different perspectives. The standard ones, CBT, psychodynamic and so on, but also perhaps less common approaches like narrative therapy and

Starting point is 00:09:27 social equalities approaches and so on. At the end there's a chapter about controversies and debates which I hope kind of ties the whole book up and leaves us thinking well you know we should have a critical perspective on anything everything that's always been what I believe so of course I'm broadly in favour of formulation. I've done done a lot of training it as well as practicing but I don't think we should be doing anything without thinking very carefully about what we're doing why we're doing it how it could be helpful but also how perhaps sometimes it can be unhelpful because you know there's no simple perfect answer to anyone's difficulties yeah absolutely and you know when when we share formulations with people and when we share um diagnoses with people we're absolutely thinking

Starting point is 00:10:10 about it as being a way of understanding their difficulties but not necessarily defining them and you know them as a person yes although um as i've suggested in some cases i would hope we wouldn't be sharing diagnoses. And another theme of the book is really that psychologists have something much better to offer than the vast majority of psychiatric diagnoses. I mean, obviously, depending on which setting you work, there are valid diagnoses. If you're working in learning difficulties or in health settings, diagnoses may be appropriate and helpful. They are virtually never so in adult mental health settings. And so I very much want to promote formulation as something we can do instead

Starting point is 00:10:55 and something that offers what diagnosis claims but fails to offer us, which is an evidence-based hypothesis and a way forward that can lead people out of services, we hope, rather than, as much too often happens, trap them within services, possibly for many decades. My work is in adult mental health as well. And so much of the work I do around developmental trauma is people really finding it very difficult and very uncomfortable and very painful to have gone through, you know, complex trauma, and then find themselves with diagnoses, which feel like an added insult to their injuries. You know, if they end up with a

Starting point is 00:11:36 personality disorder diagnosis, they, you know, they Google that, and they feel like it doesn't describe me at all. And it Yeah, I think it's a useful conversation conversation to have I think it's an essential conversation to have and you know I absolutely think as psychologists we should routinely be having these conversations with people who will often come up along to us sort of pre-pre-labeled if you like they're told they have a diagnosis of some sort I mean a common diagnosis, as you say, particularly for women who may very frequently have a history of trauma is a so-called personality disorder of some sort. Now, I've always believed that people have the right to make up their own minds about how best to describe their difficulties, but I very strongly believe that that should be a kind of informed choice. And we should be letting

Starting point is 00:12:22 people know these are controversial labels they're not scientifically valid they you know even the people who draw up the diagnostic manuals are saying this these systems of categorization are neither safe nor scientifically sound that's a quote from the chair of the dsm4 committee you know it's it's not professionally acceptable for us not to inform people of that and of course they may need their diagnoses for some purposes they may actually feel it describes them quite well but very frequently people don't feel that and we can then obviously offer them a formulation based understanding instead but also as you suggest a trauma-informed understanding

Starting point is 00:13:02 so more recently you know I've become very interested in trauma-informed understanding so more recently you know I've become very interested in trauma-informed approaches and I think all formulations need to be trauma-informed which of course doesn't mean that every person we meet has experienced what we might classically describe as a trauma but it means we need to be very very aware of the fact that that may well be the case and we need to incorporate that in aware of the fact that that may well be the case and we need to incorporate that in our formulating certainly but i don't know what your experiences are lucy but working in adult mental health people often tell me i don't know why i feel like this you know i feel like i've had a good enough childhood and you know i don't know it's probably

Starting point is 00:13:41 just me and then you actually go through you know key you know the ACE scale for example or thinking about developmental experiences and you realize and you help them appreciate that actually their needs and their difficulties can be understood within a diagnosis or a framework of complex trauma and that can be incredibly you know validating and empowering for them but also you, takes away a lot that guilt and that shame and that responsibility that they've been carrying for being the problem and it being their fault. Indeed. I mean, the trouble with a diagnostic label, it sort of locates the problem within the person, doesn't it? And a lot of psychological explanations do as well to be honest I mean I'm not just opposed to unscientific diagnostic categories but also to narrowly individualizing psychological ways of categorizing people

Starting point is 00:14:32 essentially so as you say a lot of people will say and this may well be true I had a comfortable home and I had loving parents but things that can be experienced as traumatic can be a lot more subtle than that, of course. There can be more subtle forms of invalidation and emotional neglect, which we don't always identify as such. And also, we live in a difficult world, don't we? You know, I think there are many, many good reasons for really struggling, however fortunate we are in our families and our lives and young people I think particularly are facing horrendously difficult challenges nowadays I'm very glad I'm no longer young because I think it's a difficult world a very difficult world for young people to live in yeah I agree social media certainly adds new layers of difficulties and I found being a teenager

Starting point is 00:15:24 difficult enough it's bad enough anyway yes think how much worse it is if you're also being bullied on social media you know and being told you ought to look like this have these kind of friendships live this kind of lifestyle all those kind of things and you know mental health social media is not always helpful either there's a I think a rather regrettable tendency for people nowadays to be self-diagnosing not even waiting to see a professional to google or look at a tiktok video that tells them they have something called adhd or autism spectrum disorder or whatever and to kind of find a sense of identity through that, which I can see the attraction of, but actually, I don't think that's necessarily in the long term, helpful. And,

Starting point is 00:16:12 you know, we seem to be rapidly reaching the point where we're all going to be qualifying for a diagnosis of some sort. So that's one of the themes of the second edition of my book, A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Diagnosis, which came out just last week. First edition was 2014. And one of the trends that's increased very significantly since 2014 is the whole social media stuff. Both, I think, in terms of making all of us feel somehow less adequate and less okay about ourselves and in the form of offering kind of ways out in the terms of labeling ourselves which I think you know is a trend that we need to think about very carefully because I think it may well have more disadvantages than advantages. Yeah, absolutely. Congratulations on your newest book, Baby, for this year.

Starting point is 00:17:08 Very recent this week. And I think, yeah, absolutely. We need to be careful about diagnosing ourselves and looking at labels. But I think for the general public, it's also really important to think about who is labelling themselves as something they may not be. So I often see people who might have done a psychology degree or, you know, counselling, calling themselves a psychologist publicly, and that can be really damaging and really dangerous. And part of my most recent media work

Starting point is 00:17:36 is to try to encourage people to know what you might look for in a qualified therapist, a qualified psychologist. Well, there are plenty of bad psychologists and bad therapists out there I'm afraid yeah yeah I hear you um I have been asked a couple of questions from our aspiring psychologist audience for our formulation expert is there um a go-to formulation stance or approach that you'd recommend for people to kind of keep in their back pocket to pull out an interview or you know at any moment of pressure where they're asked for

Starting point is 00:18:11 formulation? It's interview season at the moment isn't it so there's going to be lots of people anxiously swatting up what is a formulation I mean you know if we want to be a bit strategic about it most courses are going to be looking for some kind of awareness of and competence in CBT. And I think CBT has strengths and I think it has some limitations. But I guess it probably be important in that situation to any particular model held on to too closely, if you like. So the book that we've just talked about, Formulation in Psychology and Psychotherapy, has a whole chapter on integrative approaches. And I personally think we're almost inevitably going to be missing something unless our approach is to some extent integrative. So what the particular ingredients are of your own

Starting point is 00:19:11 integrative approach will be up to you. But as I've already said, I think a trauma-informed perspective should be one of them. And I mean, I see myself as coming fundamentally from a psychodynamic perspective, I guess, but other people might have their own preferences. And in fact, in 2011, I was the leader author in a small group of people who dropped the Division of Clinical Psychology, good practice guidelines on the use of psychological formulation. It's a while ago now, and I think they're still very relevant. And one of the things we said in those guidelines was that psychologists really need to be starting from as broad a base as they can in terms of their formulations, even if any particular situation, they choose a narrower or more specific

Starting point is 00:19:57 formulation or model. And I still think that's very true. Let's think as widely as possible, then we'll be in a better position to think about, you know, which of our tools or approaches or perspectives is going to be more helpful for this particular person. Thank you. That's so interesting. And I really, really are speaking to the expert in this. I'm really honoured to have you here. I tend to start any assessment or formulation that I do with a family tree and trying to get an understanding of people's relationships, who's alive, who's not alive, you know, the context of relationships, it can be really, really powerful and really enlightening. And it's something I first learned in a CAMHS service, but I still do it now, you know, years and years and years later, it can be really enlightening. I think that's a very good place to start. You know, there are a number of good places to start. And the way the reason that sounds useful to me is because it's

Starting point is 00:20:50 immediately starting from the context, isn't it? It's going to be, you're going to be less likely to come up with something that's perhaps more individualising in an unhelpful way. Yeah. And the question why now is also... Why now, indeed. What started it, the trigger in the jargon terms triggers are nearly always significant because they nearly always stand for something much broader or much more complex about a person's life and their struggles so why now what understandings do you have what diagnostic understandings may have come across shall we talk about that what are your goals but i mean centrally formulation is about meaning it's about

Starting point is 00:21:27 co-constructing meaning so in the we've used this very much a thread in the dcp guidelines and formulation the idea that essentially what a formulation is is about co-constructing meaning and meaning is the thread that integrates whatever other aspects of the formulation you're going to be discussing which is why we have some reservations in the guidelines about some of the more popular types of formulation out the five p's i'm not a big fan of the five p's myself because the trouble is it can just end up the list of factors this happened this happened this happened and i think that's the stage before a formulation. I think an actual formulation is when you show how all these things hang together and the thread on which they hang

Starting point is 00:22:11 together is the meaning that you've made of them. And so one of my favourite definitions of formulation is an ongoing process of collaborative meaning making, which in a way describes therapy as a whole but it also describes a particular part of therapy which you might at some point choose to summarize or write down or share which is what we call a formulation yeah i think of your um longitudinal formulation which i think takes up a whole page in your book as being really gold standard and I can't tell you the hours I spent studying that and trying to replicate that and bolt that on for my clients during my own studies it's just honestly really useful and your triangles don't think that was mine personally that was some that was another author well it's really useful and your try your triangles as well you know they save me

Starting point is 00:23:07 yeah yeah triangles are good but i mean there are lots of ways of doing it and one of the other things i like to say is that i don't think we want to make this into too scary sounding a skill because actually we're all human beings this is something we do automatically we make meaning you know we try to make sense of our lives it's a particular way of doing things but i wouldn't want to think or to be giving the message that only psychologists can do this lots of professionals can do this and indeed formulation is finding its way into the core competencies of a number of different professions and human beings do it you know our mums or our friends or you know authors novelists may also be in a broader sense very skilled formulators so it's a particular take which has particular uses

Starting point is 00:23:58 in service I think on a general you know human skill absolutely and I think maybe the word scares people off I think one of the maybe the word scares people off i think one of the yeah it does scare people off yeah like here's something terribly fancy that i've got to be very good at but one of the most mortifying things that could happen to me um as an aspiring psychologist was when we were in ward round and the psychiatrist would turn to me and say well what's your formulation on this and then they're just like tumbleweed moment but you know if they've been able to say what's your understanding of why this is happening now and why well that's all it means really yeah and you know one of the things that i always say is that formulation isn't a thing that you have to

Starting point is 00:24:35 produce or perfectly worked out at any given moment in a ward round or in your notes or whatever it's an it's it's a process really we've discussed this in the guidelines the distinction between formulation as an event which is how you probably encounter on a course you write it down you submit it it comes back with scribbles all over it you resubmit it or perhaps you don't perhaps it was very good first time around and formulation as a process because really that event is only a snapshot of an ongoing discussion process really, and meetings are always evolving. And when I was in training, I would be encouraging the trainees to be formulating in a sense before you even meet the person, you will have some kind of information from the notes

Starting point is 00:25:19 or referral. And obviously, you have to hold that tentatively, it might be wrong. And quite often often it's way off the mark but nevertheless it's a starting point and your understandings and their understandings you know evolve and continue and are always open to kind of reflection and change definitely that's certainly something that I learned to do during my fifth placement actually was to come ready prepared to my first supervision session with my on almost on day one having read the files and come up with my own sort of idea of formulations which at the time felt a bit horrifying but actually is you know a real

Starting point is 00:26:00 useful way for us using that reading reading time um in a constructive way yeah and your first formulation is going to be very tentative and it might be a sentence you know it sounds like some difficult things happened earlier on in your life and recent events have brought some of those to the surface i mean that's that's a, nearly all-purpose formulation in mental health for when someone first presents. Or I sometimes say in training, you know, trauma in the context of attachment difficulties will cover vast numbers of mental health clients. Not all of them, but as a kind of, I wonder if this is a place to start formulation. That's not a bad place to start formulation that's that's not a bad place to start absolutely how i'm interested how are you finding having stepped away from more clinical work recently how are you

Starting point is 00:26:51 adjusting to that well it's it's kind of different i miss clinical work i do miss clinical work but the reason i stepped away is to do something rather different which was to um well first of all to finish the power threat meaning framework which is this very very ambitious project to outline a conceptual alternative the diagnostic model of distress uh i'm the one of the lead authors along with professor mary boyle who's another psychologist and it's co-produced by a group of psychologists and service users, survivors, all of whom have known each other for many years, funded by the Division of Clinical Psychology. And we were embarked on this ludicrously ambitious task to think about not just how can we use formulation instead of diagnosis, let's say, or how can we use trauma-informed

Starting point is 00:27:44 practice instead of medical model practice, but what would a complete conceptual alternative, the diagnostic model, look like? What would it look like to make the giant leap away from medical model understandings towards, well, towards what? That was the task we set ourselves. What would a very different way of identifying patterns of distress look like. So we, five years later, we emerged with this massive document. I think you're going to supply the links in the chat to the website. And the reason I gave up clinical work was because I and Mary both in the end had to spend virtually two years sitting in front of our computers and actually making sure this damn thing was reached a stage where it's ready to be published and since then it's quite unexpected to become my job so I do

Starting point is 00:28:30 a lot of training and writing and traveling and talking and podcasts and all sorts of things in relation to the power threat meaning framework so you know I've missed clinical work and I found something to replace it which is kind of related and equally important, actually. And in some ways, it summarises all the thinking I've done throughout my career. And the same is true, I think, of the other people who are involved in the project. It sounds like fascinating stuff. And absolutely, when this goes live, we'll pop any links in the show notes so that people can access this really um really useful and there's like seminal seminal stuff you know it's it's an exciting time um to be to be putting that out there um is there any other advice that you would offer for aspiring psychologists um

Starting point is 00:29:18 well first of all i mean you know clinical psychology isn't the be all and end all. It's hard to get on a course. If you don't, there are other options. You could end up working in a very similar way from some different career path. You know, I think it's a great career path, but I think people are very fixated on this is what I must do. And one of the paradoxical effects of that is when you get onto a course and find it's not perfect, it can feel quite frustrating and disappointing. You know, so realistic expectations. There are other options. I think I think the other thing I would say is, I mean, critical thinking is so important, which is, again, something I've always believed. So you will have to read and believe and study and say certain things in order to get onto a course, in order to do your psychology degree in the first place. A lot of it, in my

Starting point is 00:30:12 view, is completely wrong. Possibly most of it. I'd have fundamental disagreements with a lot of the core tenets of clinical psychology practice. So really, really, really don't necessarily believe what you're told. Think about it, explore alternatives, you know, develop your own style, your own beliefs, question everything you've been told. It's all up for grabs, really. We are at quite an exciting time, I think, in what we call mental health. It's not a term I like, actually, but the experiences we call mental health and how we understand them. We are at a point of very rapidly shifting understandings, which is great. But that means really being able to challenge ourselves and things that we've always thought and believe without question. So questioning everything is uncomfortable, but I think in the end it gets you to a better and more interesting place.

Starting point is 00:31:03 Yeah, and it certainly can facilitate more strategic conversations can't it which is yeah you know we're good at rattling cages um in the psychology profession well some of us are some of us are some of us a bit too happy not to rattle cages in my view i think what i see as as people are progressing through their routes towards becoming, you know, trainee psychologist or whatever, whatever type of psychologist they want to become is something alluding to what you've said there, is that they become more, yeah, more confident in their own way of seeing the world and are less, you know, less affected or less asking or less striving for input from others. And they just feel ready to hold their head up at interview and say well this is how I see the world this is how I understand it

Starting point is 00:31:49 using this that approaches but this is my take on it and I think that's really powerful yeah yeah it is it is and the framework I hope gives people quite a lot of leeway to think about how they might want to understand their work, you know, the assumptions behind their work, the difficulties people come up present with, because it's a set of ideas, it's really not a sort of how-to manual, it's about as far as the ways you can possibly get from let's say a stereotypical, you know, IAPT-based, really rigid manualised approach, which I have to say I'm not in favour of. Right. The other end of that spectrum is something like the framework. And the message really is look at these ideas and think about how they might make use to you, how they might be useful to you.

Starting point is 00:32:37 And one of the things we've done in the framework is to try and move beyond formulation as such. So formulation, I think, as I said, is an extraordinarily useful tool within services. We've deliberately used the term narrative in the Power Threat Meaning Framework because it is, broadly speaking, a narrative-based approach. The simple answer to what to do instead of diagnosis in framework terms is we use narrative-based understandings but if we broaden the narrative to include art, music, poetry, dance, you know community rituals, legends, understandings then we can include a whole range of ways of understanding a human distress which historically have always been around which cross-culturally still are around and validate all of those as well without needing to package in package it in you know actually very westernized narrow westernized way as psychology

Starting point is 00:33:31 or psychotherapy or psychiatry so that allows us i think to accommodate and learn from and work much more comfortably alongside non-westernized understandings of distress without feeling the need to colonize them with our own psychiatric categories or psychological categories. In both cases, those may be inappropriate. So when I presented the framework recently, actually to a group of third-year clinical psychologists and trainees, one of them said to me, so how would I use the framework in this setting that I'm hoping to work in? So I said, well, you can use it how you like. We don't have the answer. Try it out. Let us know. Write it up if it seems to work. This will contribute further

Starting point is 00:34:16 to the framework. So this trainee said, that's extraordinary. You mean I'm allowed to do how I like. I don't have to come up with, you know, some massively detailed according to the manual version. That's so refreshing. And I found that comment a little bit depressing, actually, because really, you know, to be steered into, you know, expert driven, narrow, manualised ways of thinking at quite an early stage of your career and being told you have to do it this way is not a helpful starting point I think. I think there's definitely some overlap there with you know what we're doing to our aspiring psychologists on the way up especially in services where there's high demand and lots and lots of client hours in an IAPT service for example you know our aspiring

Starting point is 00:35:03 psychologists are burning out. They're feeling disillusioned. They're not being well supported. And that's a separate conversation, but it's really important. Well, it's kind of it's kind of related because that comes out of a particular, I would say, ideological strand of clinical psychology, doesn't it? That these very narrow versions of CBT, you know, which is not CBD practice as a whole, are somehow more evidence-based, whatever that means, and we've deconstructed that term in the framework, what counts as evidence,

Starting point is 00:35:31 who decides, who benefits from it, whose voices are excluded and silenced by it, and so on. And actually, IAPT is not producing good outcomes. Well, I don't think that's surprising, and I think it can be as you say quite a damaging experience for those who are persuaded they need to they have to offer a kind of assembly line version of this intervention for this narrowly defined problem yeah people are saying to me and i'm sort of here now but i don't even know if I want to do this now. Yeah, that's a shame. I mean, and that's worrying. And it's part of a bigger and also very worrying trend.

Starting point is 00:36:10 Well, you know, I think it's about individualising distress, to be honest. People who turn up at IAP services have very good reasons to distress, which very often have much broader roots than their negative thinking, or whatever it is you're supposed to target. That's, you you know so actually we're missing the main point often absolutely have you got any advice that you wish you'd been told or that you'd give to your younger self lucy um don't work so hard it's too late for that i'm a bit of a workaholic and uh I mean this is a more personal thing you

Starting point is 00:36:47 know I I wish I'd gone half time when my kids were young and so on life was quite stressful but I mean otherwise I've always been very pleased I've had the career I've had I think it suited me really well and you know of course there are things I wish I'd learned sooner or done differently but I mean that's that's part of the process, isn't it? I think at any point of our lives, and especially when we're working with clients as well, doing a bit of a joy audit can be really useful. Looking at where we're getting joyful or enjoyable experiences. And, you know, that's certainly something that I hold on to. It's really important. You know, if we're all work and no play then it's not

Starting point is 00:37:25 it doesn't feel much fun indeed and you know i've had an awful lot of fun and joy through my work but actually i probably at times got that out of balance with the rest of my life is there anything that you wish i'd asked you that we haven't i think we've covered most things to be honest and i think we've covered most things and as you say there are we'll put some links for anyone who wants to follow up any of these thoughts or ideas i certainly will where can people get hold of copies of your books lucy um i've sent you some links so i mean they're available on the places, the rather unethical places that we tend to go to because they're just easy and cheap and quick. But several of my two most recent books, the one on the power threat meaning framework with Mary Boyle and the second edition of the book on diagnosis are available through PCCS books, actually more cheaply than on Amazon.

Starting point is 00:38:26 Very good advice. I'll make sure that I pop the links to that in in the show notes but honestly Marianne who was in her mid early to mid-20s meeting you today at 40 I just you know I feel incredibly lucky and to have held your book in my hands and it's shaped my career and now go on to shape other people's careers you know thank you from me to you for all the other aspiring and qualified psychologists across the land and the world um you know what you what you have done really matters and it's really helped us shape things with with our clients as well people you'll never meet but your work has touched them and benefited them. Well, that's lovely to hear. Thank you. Sorry, it's taken 15 years for us to meet. Thank you. And good luck to everyone watching.

Starting point is 00:39:11 I should have asked sooner. If you should. But thank you very much. And you're everything I hoped you would be. And, yeah, I will, you know, look forward to connecting with you in future. And I will definitely get hold of a copy of your book. Thank thank you so much for listening and thank you to our guest Dr Lucy Johnston for so generously giving us her time to think about these very important issues and I hope that you will find it thought-provoking and it will resonate with you as I record this there are spaces available on the aspiringpiring Psychologist membership.

Starting point is 00:39:47 If you'd like any information on how to join the membership and how to be part of my world, then please do check out my link tree, Dr. Marianne Trent, which you can grab in the show notes or via any of my socials. Depending on when you're listening to this, we have the final planned Compassionate Q&A to support people during this tricky application and interview season. So it is scheduled to take place on Monday the 9th of May at 7.30pm UK time. And that will be happening across all of my socials and streaming simultaneously. So if you have an interview or you know someone that does, then do direct them that way. You can also watch on replay. And you can also watch all of the previous Q&As that I have

Starting point is 00:40:49 done by heading to my link tree, there's a playlist there. Or alternately, you can go straight to the Good Thinking Psychological Services, YouTube page, and check out the playlist there, which is for Q&As for aspiring psychologists. All right, I think that is all of our bits and pieces covered for today. If you would like to leave any sort of audio testimonial for the podcast or any of the other content that I'm involved in, I would be thrilled to include it within the podcast episodes. Thank you for being part of my world. Stay kind to yourselves and I will catch you very soon. Take care. This podcast is not your side, you'll be on your way to being qualified. It's the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast with Dr. Marianne Trent. My name's Yana and I'm a trainee psychological well-being practitioner.

Starting point is 00:42:06 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 okay but trust me you will not put the book down once you start

The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Formulation & The Power Threat Meaning Framework with Dr Lucy Johnstone

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