Episode #4 – The Wisdom of Paul Gilbert
In this episode, I’m chatting with my dear friend, mentor and the founder of Compassion Focused Therapy, Professor Paul Gilbert OBE. I really hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.
Hi, welcome to another episode. Thanks for joining me. I’d like to thank ClareElizabeth42 for her lovely feedback.
Clare said “This is exactly what those of us in helping professions need … Thank you for noticing and meeting that need, Hayley. From the first episode, this offers a space of rest, self-nurturing and guidance from a wonderfully compassionate human.”
Hayley: Wow, thanks for taking the time to comment Clare, it really is appreciated.
Hayley: This episode is a longer one, I contemplated splitting it into two parts but figured you can pause it wherever you like and come back to it or listen to the whole episode in one go if that suits you.
Hayley: I really hope you enjoy this one as much as I did chatting with my dear friend, mentor and the founder of Compassion Focused Therapy, Professor Paul Gilbert OBE.
Hayley: Whilst he probably doesn’t need much introduction as many people will know of him and his many accomplishments, he certainly deserves a warm introduction.
Hayley: Paul Gilbert OBE is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Derby and honorary visiting Prof at the University of Queensland, here in Australia. Until his retirement from the NHS in 2016 he was a Consultant Clinical Psychologist for over 40 years.
Hayley: He has researched evolutionary approaches to psychopathology with a special focus on mood, shame and self-criticism in various mental health difficulties for which Compassion Focused Therapy was developed. He was made a Fellow of the British Psychological Society in 1993, president of the BABCP 2002-2004, and was a member of the first British Governments’ NICE guidelines for depression.
Hayley: In 2006 he established the Compassionate Mind Foundation as an international charity with the mission statement To promote wellbeing through the scientific understanding and application of compassion. There are now a number of sister foundations in other countries. Paul was awarded an OBE by the Queen in March 2011 for his services to mental health. He established and is the Director of the Centre for Compassion Research and Training at Derby University in the UK.
He has written/edited 21 books and over 250 papers and book chapters with many on compassion and his latest book is called Living Like Crazy.
Hayley: It is my great pleasure to welcome Professor Paul Gilbert to Welcome to Self.
Hayley: Hi Paul, well this is an absolute pleasure for me. You’ve been such an important influence in my work and my life for which I’m extremely grateful. And it’s really lovely to be chatting to you from the other side of the world. It would be much nicer if we could be
chatting with you and Jean, over here, and hopefully it won’t be too long before we can see you in Australia again. But can we start with perhaps you telling us a little bit about your life and work, and maybe what have been some of the highlights for you?
Paul: Oh, well, yes, in terms of my life. I was born in the Gambia, and then spent quite a lot of time in Africa. And then was sent back to boarding school in England which wasn’t such good fun. I got a degree in economics in 73 and learnt a lot about model building, and then decided oh that’s okay but I actually wanted to be a psychologist, so in those days it was really quite easy to transfer.
Paul: So in 1973, I was very lucky enough to get a position in Sussex. Now that’s kind of interesting because it was rather strange how it happened because Sussex did a change of record, which meant that they would take people who haven’t got a primary qualification in degree in psychology and mine was economics, they didn’t always take economics students because it was mainly for people like physiologists and biologists and zoologists as well – when I applied, I got rejected.
Paul: And then when I went to Arabia because my father was there, and then got a phone call saying oh, somebody dropped out, would you like to fly back for an interview, so I did. And strangely enough I got onto the MSc in statistics and that started my psychology career, and subsequently I discovered that the professor there was a bipolar and he had a slightly manic episode so they said look, it’s style setting, we should have a student, what do you think, and he said oh I don’t know, get an economist.
Paul: It was really kind of luck, you know. Anyway, so that was a very biological orientation into psychology. It was a lot of classical conditioning, animal learning, and a lot of physiology so that set me up with that sort of interest. So economics set me up with an interest in model building and then this introduction into psychology set me up with an interest in really understanding brain processes and how body and brain are changed by the environment. Classical conditioning is all about the way bodies and brains are changed by the environment.
Paul: And so then, from there I worked for – yeah, as a nightmare I was trying to pay for it – Psychiatric unit and that was interesting because it was in Brighton and Brighton’s the south coast, you know, hippie town and so we used to have in the summer, a lot of people come down from London.
Paul: Then get completely smashed on drugs on the beach, have psychotic breakdowns poor sods, and then we bring them into the acute unit so I saw some pretty difficult things. But it was great, it was a great introduction to understanding the pain and sometimes the terror of mental health.
Paul: And then from there, went to Edinburgh University and studied with Ivy Blackburn. Did a PhD on depression, looking at the psychophysiological and was looking at people’s physiological reactions to success and failure and finding that depressed people responded to threats in the same way that anxious people do but they didn’t respond to positive events that physiologically were sort of non responsive, and that sort of went on then. Other researchers have shown that depression is primarily a problem of anhedonia, the lack of positive effect can have very highly negative effect but positive effects are very tricky.
Paul: And that really set me up because Ivy Blackburn did the first, cognitive therapy training in the UK, and Tim Beck would come over to the UK to train us and I was lucky enough to be part of that because I was her PhD student. So we’d get down to Oxford and met Paul and David Clark and all that lot and that was sort of how a person shows various things and so that was a fantastic opportunity.
Paul: And then after, Edinburgh I was originally going to go to take a job in Stanford but that all fell through for reasons it wasn’t anything to do with me it was to do with the financial department there. So, I was left a bit high and dry so I managed to get onto a qualification doing clinical training in Northridge, which was in service training. So, in those days we were just used to going to different hospitals and we were literally taught on the job.
Paul: So very very clinically oriented as for a lot of time with clients, and incidentally when I was in Edinburgh, it was on a specialist medical research unit, which took all the really difficult cases from all over Scotland and Northern England, and I had an office on that Ward and the professor said look just spend a lot of time talking to people getting familiar with them, you know, the way in which individuals are, so I had a lot of time really as a three years I just literally spending time on the wardhaving coffee and talking to clients about their lives and everything and again that was a fantastic setup for trying to understand depression as a multi component multi difficult process and why we’ve always been interested in the body.
Paul: So my first book post-Edinburgh was a book called depression from psychology to brain state because of the MRC unit they were all into physiology, they were doing drug research and everything. And if you didn’t really understand neurochemistry you didn’t have anybody to talk to over lunch. So young psychiatrists my age are doing their stuff.
Paul: I draw these things out on napkins about how synapses work and everything but the point about it was that we would have discussions about whether these brain changes were the result of some underlying disease process or whether they were all psycho socially induced. And so that was a lot of the stuff I was interested in, but how do you change physiological processes with psychological, social processes and had that helped us to come out 75 was quite a lot of work on attachment theory attachment disruptions causes quite major shifts in brain state.
Paul: So that really was my grand theoretical grounding as a brain state theorists and to be honest with you I’ve always been a brain state theorist, I mean, people say, Oh, we’re a third wave cognitive behavioral therapy but we’ve never been that we’ve always been, and evolved by a psychosocial approach, but we use a lot of cognitive therapy because it’s so, it’s got a lot of evidence behind it, you know, so that’s my, my background and then from neuro spent 10 years in Norwich just basically, again, I had an office on an acute unit. And that’s a lot of very poorly people. And then we came to Derby and took over Head of Department of Mental Health here and then later I became head of the Derbyshire psychology department for a while, and then packed that in and dropped down a level and set up a research unit with the university here, and we ran an international Mental Health Research unit and published lots of stuff and so that was me really and then I retired when I was 65 which is 5 years ago.
Hayley: Wow, so you had a really varied and interesting career, and you seem to, you seem to have missed out one rather large bit that you are the founder of Compassion Focused Therapy.
Paul: Oh yeah. That was all the background so I was very lucky because when I was in Norwich, you could do different things so I did two years of psychodynamic group therapy training every Wednesday night and returned up to do all this stuff. And then I did four years in a Jungian day hospital and Jungian stuff, archetypal stuff has always been something I’ve been very interested in the concept of, you know the persona the heroes yeah so I had all that stuff which is, you don’t get that so much these days people don’t have an opportunity to have a range of ways of working and actually seeing a Jungian therapist at work, working with the group, working the group and working doing therapy and actually seeing what is no day in, day out, because of every day but yeah so what happened then was really working within the common work you know this, well of course but working within the cognitive model, and discovering that people could certainly generate alternative thoughts to the unhelpful ones you know. The depressed people typically see themselves as worthless, as failures and defeated, you know Tim Beck had talked about the negative triad negative view of the world, the self and the future.
Paul: So they could identify they would have negative thoughts around those things, and then you’d invite them to stand back and generate alternatives and clients could do that and it was really quite important, if they could do that because that would break up the loops because depressed people get into ruminative loops. But it didn’t always produce emotion change.
Paul: And so one day I asked this one person who had been on multiple suicide person was very poorly, who’d been adopted and thought she wasn’t lovable and wasn’t really wanted, but she had a good family and relationship with her husband, she had friends she had held down a job as a solicitor secretary and so on, so she could see all that. She said yes, this is true, it’s true that actually my husband loves me so but I just still feel really unloved. Well I shouldn’t really feel very bad.
Paul: She had bipolar illness, actually. So one day I said to her, how do you hear this in your mind and when you’re looking at these alternative thoughts. And you, you recognize that you have a husband who really cares about you, some lovely children have done this job, just speak them out as you hear them in your mind, as given in your mind this. She said she was really embarrassed actually, she said what as I actually hear them? Yeah, I said yeah she asked me, she said, Okay. She said, Go on, you’re doing cognitive therapy aren’t you. You got a husband and kids that love you, you’ve got children, you’ve held down a job.
Paul: Yeah, it was very much like that, and that was, that was my first shock in cognitive and CFT really is the recognition that actually the hostility and the criticism was being carried in the emotion, not in the cognitive content. So I started to ask other clients, just to speak it out and again some of them were kind of embarrassed but there was this real either coldness to it, or hostility to it.
Paul: So the obvious thing: Well, obviously it was just trying to warm it up. And so I wrote quite a lot of stuff on warming up coming to therapy in the early days, because you hadn’t called it, compassion and in the early days. And then the second shock was really discovering that a) clients wouldn’t do it. They didn’t want to do it.
Paul: They find it very difficult to do it. And the third shock was that when you did start to do it because you were opening up a motivational system and whatever toxic memories was in that system, they would be hit by that so they didn’t find compassion particularly helpful in the early days when you work with them. And in a way, I’ve felt a little bit sad because it meant I was quite naive because I was a classically conditioned therapist right I believed in body changes associated with stuff so we know that any motivational system where you have toxic memories will change the way that system works, if you go on holiday for example you love holidays, they are wonderful, and then one year you get badly beaten up. The next year you think about holidays, you’re not going to remember all the good times will hit you.
Paul: So if you’ve got toxic memories – abuse, neglect, or whatever in your caring system, then you start open up that caring system, you’re not going to be washed through. Well, isn’t this wonderful and I’m so kind to myself, actually, what would you get you get hit by remembering, fear, you become frightened, you remember, sadness, you feel lonely you’re trying to do compassionate as you feel more lonely, not less, feeling more frightened, not less. And it wasn’t till we wrote this that we realized that the fear blocks and resistance were the therapy because many of our clients’ caring systems were toxic, I mean, they were just full of this trauma and neglect and sadness memories. So that became the basis of them, understanding that crisis of his blocks and resistances, you have to work through that, if that system isn’t working right, it’s partly because it’s toxic. So you have to clean it up, you have to detoxify it and that can be quite tricky as you well know.
Hayley: Yeah, so I mean that a big part of compassion focus therapy isn’t it? And you’ve developed something which I think many, many people will be very grateful for as therapists and clients. I know it’s been life changing for me, literally, I don’t say that lightly at all, and fears, blocks and resistances are a big part of CFT.
Hayley: So I’m wondering how you manage not only the fears, blocks and resistances or FBRs, as we call them, of your clients at the time but also of your own. When it came to you working with compassion and self compassion.
Paul: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting you know because a couple of things when I wrote human nature and suffering in the 80s and wanted to get a really evolutionary approach to motivational systems and move, you know, the guy cup, there is important but human nature suffering was all about evolution and motivation and a lot of people said don’t do that because you ruin your career. So, that’s all reductionist. So okay, and then in the 90s when I started to start talking about compassion, so don’t do that around your career.
Hayley: I think they’re a little bit wrong there.
Paul: Instead of, we had papers going up and things and getting these horrible reviews back in it. Oh therapy is compassion wasn’t how do you talk about it, so that that was a little bit tricky in the early days, certainly of trying to get back going, and sort of holding firm to this thing, and constantly, you know, when we do, like we want to do workshops in businesses they say oh, don’t use the word compassion. You’ve got to stick to it, and gradually I think people now, over the years, sort of come around to this issue so that was an issue really, and I’d talk to Jean about it, you know, should we change it initially to make it some change making pro social for pro social therapist. So that was a that was kind of just holding firm to the belief that in the end, concept of compassion would be okay if we could root it in the scientific basis, which meant it was emotive, which meant that it had two components to it, which was the ability to engage, and the ability to respond, so that worked out okay. Yeah,
Hayley: I’m so glad that you did stick to it and keep pursuing with that because it’s absolutely worked out okay. So, when you were engaged in clinical practice. What did you find were the biggest challenges that you’ve faced in taking care of yourself as a practitioner, because I know, particularly at the moment, in the world, I think practitioners are struggling quite a lot. There’s high levels of burnout and there’s great demand because of the pandemic on services. So what were some of the things that you found most challenging?
Paul: I think everywhere I’ve been quite lucky because partly because of my background boys I’ve always been able to be actually honestly a little bit self reliant, for being slightly that way inclined. I remember Wendy Driver saying to me You’re a maverick you don’t like following the crowd. It was one of these times. I think you have a point about that. So I’ve never been a personal self critic. I mean I get this point but not really because are they really interested in that sort of thing. I think one of the things that undermines therapists is self criticism.
Paul: I mean self criticism, the therapist, the fear that you don’t know enough, you’re not doing it right now, what’s the right thing to be doing. Yeah, they’re trying to follow, you know, it’s almost painting by numbers, what are the numbers well numbers that really does burn you out. One of the great things when I train was doing counseling and stuff like that where you just became very curious when trying to fix people, and I love said CBT but CBT has become very formulaic, and that you know there’s a formula and you’ve got to follow the manual and all that stuff and that really I think puts a lot of pressure on therapy if you’re trained in that because a lot of pressure on therapists, you find that to do it right.
Paul: Whereas my view is that just get to understand your client right yeah just be interested in and be curious, you know, don’t try to fix them just be curious about that. So getting people off of trying to do it right. I think is really important so that that’s what I would say as a key thing the second thing is really is recognizing that, with compassion, you’ve probably heard about this into do sometimes it’s called compassion fatigue, sometimes it’s called burnout but if you only stick with being empathic to suffering all the time you will get burnt out, but you have to be able to touch it, in order then to move towards resolution and working out what is going to be helpful, that process of discussing what’s going to be helpful with your client and helping them work through their own process and you offering them some ideas about nature of the mind you’re offering them ideas about how they can use their body through breathing exercises is really important.
Paul: So, I think. And the other thing is how you yourself. Tolerate intense emotional pain, I mean, psychotherapy is a funny sort of profession because, day in, day out, listening to emotional pain. Yeah, really. I mean you could say the pieces are a bit the same, but you know they’ve got drugs and things they can do for quite miraculous stuff actually. So, so, how do you deal with hearing stories of emotion? How do you deal with stories of despair, how do you deal with stories of hopelessness, like with COVID Now how do you deal with stories of people coming to you say look, you know, I lost my father and I just loved him and I couldn’t say goodbye and I knew that he was dying and he wasn’t able to breathe.
Paul: Can you imagine what it’s like not being able to breathe? Can you imagine what that would be like? And the same with COVID workers, you know, I mean, they’ve gone through just horror really.
Paul: So how do you deal with that right and, and a number of things one is actually trying to make sure you have a peer group that you have people around you who are in the same profession that you can talk to about your cases, one of one of the ways which you can easily
get burnt out, is being isolated, you’re an isolated therapist in private practice, you don’t really have anybody to talk to you can’t really talk to your family because they’re not clinicians, they don’t quite understand in the depth that you do.
Paul: So, social support, I think has been and I’ve been very lucky in the sense that I’ve had a number of colleagues from different persuasions psychodynamic as, as well as cognitive and so I’ve been able to talk to just phone up and say, you know I’ve got this person, what do you think and was just, just is really in, you know, when I, when I’ve had people who suicided on me. And, of course, working with severe depression that happens, you know, people go to and cry on you know.
Paul: So that’s crucial so that’s a key thing, but be careful about the formula, always worried about are you doing the right thing. Or you can do as in therapy at any moment and try the best you can. That’s all you can do. And also, when you’re struggling. Remember, not even when you’re struggling but also as a professional, have people around you recognize that psychotherapy is a very special type of thing.
Paul: It’s not unusual, it’s abnormal, you’re incredibly abnormal, listening to the pain of strangers, day in and day out. Don’t take it like you’re kind of selling baked beans because you’re not, yeah. And the only way you’re going to support yourself is having people around you, you can chat to.
Hayley: I think one of the things you once said to me, and I hold this in mind all the time when I’m working with clients is, help your client understand themselves. It’s not about me understanding the client, it’s about me helping the client understand themselves, and I think for me that takes the pressure off, I’m not there to fix anything.
Hayley: I’m there to help the client understand themselves and that was always really helpful. And I think as well your point about connecting actually having a peer group, supervision, the different things to connect to is really really important especially for solo practitioners in private practice. But another thing you touched on, and it comes to another question I wanted to ask you which I think I know the short answer to that is, when you talk about being close to suffering.
Hayley: And I think both as a practitioner and as a human being. How important do you think it is that we are willing to tolerate the discomfort of connecting to the parts of ourselves that we find challenging the parts of ourselves that we don’t like or perhaps are ashamed of. And how do you do that for yourself?
Paul: Yeah I mean it’s a wonderful question. A couple of things I mean, you we were talking about fears got some resistance to compassion and I’ve always been. I’ve learned so much from my clients are just wonderful teachers if you let them teach you right yeah. So when we started this, but one of the first people when, when they begin to open the amount of suffering is, will just rock you. Okay then, when they really start to perhaps sob, for the love they never had a parent, they always wanted. And this is deep yearning to get get in touch with this deep yearning to be loved and connected. I mean it will move you.
Paul: Remember, one of our clients really just tearing up in the therapy and so on and so on. And also the fact that they went off for a while I was trying to catch up because because I’d become a stimulus for crying because, you know, I’d go and get it from the waiting room it’s
how are you doing? I’m doing ok and you’d sit down and you’d say two sentences and then these would. So learning to tolerate like that is very very important, and your ability to be okay with your own profound grief.
Paul: I find it’s important I think for me, one of the things that’s been very important is for me to be able to tolerate my own rage against life, because, and I know I’ve talked to you about this because I think when you step back from it you see the immense suffering of life, the whole Predator System the way or all life depends upon eating another life for one kind or another I mean you’re very plant based, but, you know not all creatures are, it is our, this pandemic, and it’s terrible diseases that are wracked through animals and humans. Give us a reason like wonderful, I’ve never found it like that I mean we can have wonderful experiences for sure. But the actual process of gene replication and the way it’s done.
Paul: So for me that’s always been a big issue and I’ve got to just be aware that part of what drives compassion is real anger at the suffering in life and that is seeing how people die seeing dementia, cancer, many people die in pain you think about how people used to die before anesthetics and so on and so on. When my father died, watching him die of cancer was. You think I thought to myself, god 100 years ago, this would have been a nightmare.
Paul: That’s my big issue in terms of my other issues. How do I get my, my other problem is that I overload myself and then get frustrated so take on too many things.
Hayley: Only Paul, I find that hard to believe.
Paul: I have an irritable side, that’s why I love coming to Australia because I can slow down a little bit and I’m with wonderful people like you that I love and everything, so I have a wonderful time, so that’s nice for me. So those are the things really dealing with my own deep sadness for stuff in my life, dealing with my raging about my life is, and the incomprehensibility of some people’s way of seeing the world, seeing the awful callousness that we have from our leaders actually. Yeah, that one but actually if we could only learn how to develop and cultivate a compassionate mind, the word we could actually address so much that right.
Paul: Yeah, you think about the fact that, you know, even, even 50 years ago or 20 years ago, this pandemic would have killed a lot of people, there’s no way that we would have been able to develop the virus vaccine so we’ve only done that because of human knowledge. Science is the crucial science is the answer to just about every problem there is, I think. But, as part of that science is understanding their minds, and how to bring out the best, rather than the worst in us
Hayley: What a different world. What a different world it would be, but uh but I often talk to my supervisees about the importance of us being willing, I wouldn’t say being okay with, but being willing, being willing to sit with our own discomfort, and shame, and whatever it is about ourselves that we don’t like or don’t like to necessarily go near.
Hayley: I remember that you know conversations with yourself about if we’re not willing to do that, how can we walk our clients to the places that they need to go to. We’ve got to be able to get in touch with our and tolerate our own distress, and have a way of looking after our own distress, so that we can do that for our clients.
Paul: Yeah, so there are two things about that. I mean, we’ve talked about this one is don’t judge it right. The concept of non judgment or acceptance because, look, all of us all living things are built right no animal, no elephant chose to be an elephant, giraffe lion. A lion or prey you know antelope is a prey chose to be the prey of lions didn’t really humans never chose to be human, so we’re all built, and we all got these things which are capable of doing good and bad you know we all got capacities for rage and vengeance and all that stuff and all kinds of strange fantasies because we’re built like that, you didn’t build it, I didn’t build it.
Paul: One of the reasons that people won’t tolerate their bad sides is because they over identify it, they think it’s like about them. No it’s not, it’s the way you’ve been built right. The thing that’s most important about you is your point of consciousness, but what you’re conscious of. That’s a creation, you didn’t do that. So, it becomes much easier to tolerate the dark side of the mind. When you realize, when you give up your narcissism and believe you have to be an angel.
Paul: Forget all that. You’re a human being. If you’d been born 2000 years ago in Rome, you’d be going to the games you’d have slaves right. That’s the way the culture was. There is no sense of this or that, you see this idea there’s an authentic self and a real self, that’s just an illusion. There isn’t none of that. We are a creation, we can become observing of the mind and action and then choose to try as best we can to bring out the good rather than the bad but we can’t blame ourselves and the bad. Yes, it’s silly. Yeah, I think, I think, over identify, yeah. That’s when I get into trouble. Yeah,
Hayley: I think like you say when we can, when we can accept our humanness that can be very freeing. It can lighten the load.
Paul: So every morning, or every day people have to go and have a shit right. Do you blame yourself for that, do you say, Oh my God, I’m such a shitty person because I need it. No, no you built that way to learn how to do it hygienically but I’m having these rage feelings that means I’m a raging horrible person. No no no you’re not, you have that potential inside of you, which has been triggered and now you have to think about what you want to do, but don’t label yourself as any more than you’d call yourself a shitty person because you have to use the loo, it doesn’t make any sense, but people do it because they all have this idea there’s an authentic self, but you know you and I talked about this many times you know if I’d been kidnapped as a three day old baby into a violent drug gang this Paul Gilbert wouldn’t exist a very different one with a different genetic epigenetic profile different brain.
Paul: So what’s the real one than this one or that there is no real one. There were just patterns in the mind and we become aware of those patterns and then we can begin to start to choose how we want to work those patterns, that’s the basis of what the Buddha coded Bement
Hayley: Really getting to know our tricky minds isn’t it because you know you touched on it before about you know therapists can become quite caught up in what do I do next and am I doing it right and am I good enough therapist. And I think when we can really get to know our tricky minds that can be helpful in that sense as well, that of course, these things are going to show up but it’s what we do with them when they do.
Paul: That’s exactly the point and learning to observe and the more you observe more you’re able to say actually I want to find the dark side, if I have rage, I want to have murderous rage I don’t want wimpy rage but who wants wimpy rage, I want to feel proper rage and then I can
be, you know, if I have a car I want to have a fast car they don’t want to go 20 miles an hour. So, if you take a different orientation to the dark side. You take the slightly more playful with playfulness is very important in CFT because playfulness is acceptance. When you play with it, if you’re fighting with it got troubles but if you learn to play with it, it’s easier. So, yes, of course, we have downsides, but don’t over identify with it but certainly try as best you can, not to act it out so we become harmful.
Hayley: So I think one of the things that can happen, isn’t it that, you know, the threat system gets activated, oh my gosh, I had this thought, this particular thought that doesn’t fit with how I think I should be as a therapist, so now I have to somehow prove that I am a good enough therapist now I’m a nice therapist, so you go into like threat based drive where you’re trying to, you know, do all the right things and be the best you can be, which doesn’t tend to be that helpful.
Hayley: But, but it’s what happens, isn’t it the way we function as humans so I think that awareness that’s certainly been the stuff for me in learning about CFT and then really embodying what that means is how I have been able to change the relationship I’ve got with myself and my thoughts on my tricky mind and, not saying I get it right all the time, but it’s, it’s made a huge difference. So thank you, I’ll take this opportunity Paul to say thank you so much, because not only has it changed how I operate as a therapist, but it’s changed who I am as a human being. So yeah, thank you.
Paul: What a wonderful thing for you to say that’s lovely, isn’t it. I’m so pleased. So then you get enthusiastic because then you want other people to kind of experience that too.
Hayley: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s certainly something for me that I don’t mind talking about.
Paul: Well as you know when I was in my 20s because of what happened, things in my early life and stuff like that, my poor dad was in the RAF and was quite badly traumatized so he could be a little bit tricky to say the least, at times, so I had a quite a bad depression in my 20s and, but that was also the basis for a lot of learnings, the sense of entrapment and worthlessness, and there was always a part of me that was able to say that this is ridiculous. What on earth is going on.
Paul: I used to have panic attacks I couldn’t get to work. They had to take a taxi to the hospital so there I would go having these panic attacks. So I had to take a taxi to the hospital and I received a text from patients having panic attackes and I’d say, I know what you mean. Yeah, and I caught taixs.
Paul: So it was quite, it was a little bit like that. So the key thing if you get this mindful observing aspect, right. Don’t over, identify, I think that has been a revelation within psychotherapy of taking, now I was lucky because of course, in the 60s and the 70s I was all into the Maharishi and Beatles based Transcendental Meditation I have to say the reason I liked to go to all these groups at University was because all the lovely women were there, I wasn’t really all that interested in transcendental meditation. I did learn a few things. One of them was the sense of just don’t over identify with the contents of your mind and to observe it, so that has.
Paul: That’s been really good and then of course people like Mark Williamson and John Teasdale came along and started to develop it into a therapy. But I think that is probably one of the key things of learning to observe your mind without owning it. I mean only in the sense of being in acting. You don’t want to bring bad stuff into the world but not sort of thinking that there’s something about you. It’s not really like that.
Hayley: Yeah, I think for me the more, the more mindful I have become and the more aware, has led me to be able to make choices, more effectively. I’m not just at the mercy of my threat system, which I think for a long time in my life I was and I was bouncing around a bit. But yeah, that sort of ability to increase your awareness and then that leads you to be able to make choices differently
Paul: In that awareness, there is a compassionate orientation to whatever is right so it’s not just, you know, cold awareness, it’s an awareness of compassion that you never chose any of this stuff. Yeah, human beings, you know, it tends to be men or women created for you. So, that is such an important element that we become aware without blaming or shaming. Yeah, definitely,
Hayley: Definitely my warmth towards myself is very different to what my critical self was like for a long long time. And I think that that piece in CFT where we would speak to clients around, you know you just find yourself here in the flow of life. And the tricky mind, I think, can be such a valuable piece in itself. And really not shaming and then you can’t unknow that it’s like, Oh, that’s right. I didn’t choose my experiences. I didn’t choose to be born as I am I didn’t choose a lot of the things that happened in my life and then even some of the things I did choose in my life are because of the experiences I had that I didn’t choose. So yeah, I think it’s a really beautiful framework for life.
Paul: I think so, you know, and the point about this is that people say oh yeah but I like this relationship. I did choose to marry that person or I could have chosen that one. But, again, what do you mean by that I mean, how much did you really understand your mind? How much did you understand that there were unconscious processes of work that made those choices how aware of you were you of what was driving your emotions. And of course when people sit down and think about that they realize, well, not really.
Paul: Well you can’t be until you learn how to observe your mind and understand your mind. And it’s like, you know, people with now, obesity, how much did they know that sugars and carbohydrates were the thing to avoid, but they didn’t know that so that they’re easy what they think is okay food you know they’re snacking, a lot on chocolates and stuff like that, not realizing he said that he didn’t realize what’s going on right. So, only if you know, and why do we have a profession called psychology, because it’s not easy to understand the mind.
Paul: Why do you have medicine because, although you have a body you don’t actually know how it works. Yeah, actually know how your heart works, how your liver works. You need science so that you don’t actually know how your mind works. We need science so that’s called psychology or psychotherapy, right, and science has shown us that it doesn’t work the way we think. So, these are profoundly important questions. I think that you’re putting Hayley, that, you know, even when people ah they did make that choice, well no not really. If I went to the Roman games when I was a Roman and said well I made that choice. Well not really, because when I made that choice today now I certainly wouldn’t know who’s making the choice. Interesting.
Hayley: So I want to change tack a little bit and just sort of ask about, obviously COVID over in the UK has been affecting you on a greater level than here, although a number of our states have been impacted badly by COVID. How has COVID impacted you managing your own well being? And what’s been your sort of favorite way of nurturing yourself, because you guys have been locked down for a long time and not really been able to do the things you might normally do. So what’s that been like for you?
Paul: Well, it’s a great question, because of course what we know is that middle class people survived it better than working class people in lots of different ways so you know I’m a privileged middle class white male, so it means I have a relatively pleasant house, and I have a job if you want to call it a job where I can just do online and I could still run courses. So, a lot of middle class people still do those things from their own homes, they’ve got gardens, and so on and so on.
Paul: So you know it’s been tricky, sad really but for people who don’t have that, it’s been terrible. It’s been absolutely terrible. I was talking to somebody the other day. His son saved up all this money to set up as a business, Cafe business that he was so proud of and just got it going two months later COVID hit that.
Paul: And he lost all his money and everything so I mean the tragedies out there, but you know I haven’t been hit by the tragedies. You know, I’ve known a few people that have died but not closely. I haven’t lost my, you know, so. So for me I just constantly remind myself of my privileged position and how lucky I am. But the side of me that struggles is my anger because it’s been a horrible thing you know and that, why do we have to live in a world where the viruses, and millions of the bloody things. We’re just living in a world of all these things that can just kill you and maim you and hurt you on a massive scale.
Paul: Think of what’s going on in poor countries like Brazil and India and Africa. It’s just awful. It’s just awful. I mean that’s for me, it says that my personality has been annoying and I can’t fly and I can’t come see all the wonderful people, yes of course I’ve had all that but the tragedy and the terrible suffering this has caused to people is just unbelievable. It’s just that it’s almost intolerable. If you sit and really think about it, it’s just awful.
Hayley: So I guess, how do you manage that for yourself with what sort of particular daily practices, I know when you are over here one time, you will do a breathing practice daily. What sort of things do you do so that it doesn’t overwhelm you?
Paul: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, we’re doing some series of practices which we’re hoping to be made available shortly and we’re going to do research on them which is what we call energizing practices, where it’s not so much focusing because you remember there’s two elements. The first one’s suffering and if you only focus on the desire to relieve suffering, and you get into trouble. I mean, as you know, Hayley, that basic Buddhist position isn’t loving kindness in the sense of the western view of loving.
Paul: It’s, may all beings be free of suffering and the causes of suffering so that is your motivational focus. May we find ways to relieve suffering, may we find ways to deal with suffering, may we find ways to bring more justice to the world, may we find ways to bring enlightenment to the world. So you’re focusing so these meditations are really on how to may we find a way to relieve, not just sitting I was a terrible is the terrible, I mean, it happens
right, so we’re doing energizing practices now where we teach people how to do breathing practices with music and you just imagine breathing out compassion into the world and you just focus on a friendly face and a real wish, may this end, wouldn’t this be great, may this and may we all come together to create a compassionate world all those wonderful, and of course there are many billions of people around the world who want greater fairness, that we can all come together and build a compassionate society so I think quite what’s quite important is that when you’re doing your meditations. And although it’s called loving kindness is really like benevolence, you’re focusing on this real wish for suffering to end the real wish to think about any ways you can do to be helpful, as opposed to if you just focus on Oh god isn’t it awful that it will burn you out. Yeah,
Hayley: So that’s new and stuff that you’re going to kind of bring it out. Yeah, launch into the world, that’s great.
Paul: We’re looking at using music now as soothing or energizing and I think I think partly we, the way we’ve all said we should take responsibility. I’ve talked about it because, in terms of the soothing system people got a little bit caught up in that compassion is all about soothing. Well, it can be and it is important to train that system like training fitness but how you use it is another matter.
Paul: So, I mean if you think about, you know, somebody running towards a fire to save you. To save somebody or running away from it, your nervous system is going to be pretty similar, your sympathetic reactions will be up you’re going to be breathing your heart rates up, but your motive will be very different so compassion is not always about soothing sometimes it’s about activation and actions and how we do that. So that’s why we talk a lot about compassion encourages know soothing will help you ground your course, it will help develop your mind and all kinds of stuff but it’s like getting fit will help you, but how you use your fitness was to kind of balance and run a marathon well that’s another matter.
Hayley: I look forward to hear more about that as well. So, can I ask what would be one piece of advice that you would share with our listeners, in terms of taking care of their own well being as helping professionals.
Paul: I think you yourself have done a lot of work on this, firstly, recognizing where your pressure points. So, what is it that pulls you away from your own well being, what is it’s pulling you away are you getting exhausted. Are you working too long? Are you feeling too responsible for your clients? Are you too much of a rescuer? Are you constantly worried you don’t know enough where you’re getting it wrong. Is it clients that get angry with you that kind of throw you a little bit.
Paul: Is it the clients that seem to fall into hopelessness get stuck in kind of like the walking in mud, so working out your own areas which put pressure on you and then making a decision about how you would like to deal with that right, see it as a issue, don’t over identify with it and say is interesting, okay so there we are, then these clients I find a little bit trickier. I wonder what would help me.
Paul: So always asking the question. Okay. I wonder what would help me with this one and try to be playful if you can, okay. You know sometimes people can have difficulties with clients that are very angry.
Paul: For example, right critical thinking as a therapist is interesting, right? So I wonder what would help me with that, then how could I maybe if I use some mentalizing questions about inviting them to think about how they’re impacting on the, whatever. So, yeah, there are techniques that we can learn that will help us with different things. And the other thing is, of course, as we all know clients will stir you up, and this is called countertransference and it’s really quite useful to view it.
Paul: This is why I think psychodynamic training is very helpful because you are not a neutral agent. When you go into that room. What’s going on in your patient’s mind will be setting off switches on your own. If there’s a lot of stuff you haven’t dealt with yourself, that can make life tricky for you. And that’s when psychodynamic therapy suggests therapists should have therapy. I’m not sure about that so much but certainly as you know you’ve been doing.
Paul: James Bennett Levy and others, practicing what you use, making sure you can use it on yourself right. If you can’t then maybe doing it with clients is not so good right! So, finding your own pressure points, finding the areas where you think you’re being pulled away. Finding the areas where you think actually you’re getting pulled in, you’re having emotional reactions that you find very stressful distressing standing back from that, not getting up, not shaming or blaming yourself but just take that as an opportunity for growth. That’s interesting. Okay, and then move on.
Paul: I mean, one of my big issues when I was young, I could never discharge patients. I said, I always worry, oh don’t worry I can never face the fact of saying no, no, I know at this we’re gonna finish the therapy Oh please, please don’t. So I had to work with that with my, my supervisors about what that was about my fear of not being good enough and disappointing them and letting them go and failing and all that stuff so this is why I think if you have colleagues around you or supervisors around you which will give you an opportunity to talk about what’s coming up for you in your therapy with your client. And to see that as an opportunity for growth, development and curiosity into your own mind.
Paul: That can be very helpful. So I remember my supervisor saying, oh we don’t want to give up your clients, because you were sent to boarding school you thought people gave up on you.
Hayley: So again, though it’s that willingness isn’t it to go close to our own stuff, is to go actually wow okay maybe that yeah, that’s, that’s fine stuff that’s getting in the way because we don’t get to leave our humanness at the door when we go and sit in the therapist chair like it all comes with us doesn’t everything we’ve experienced every, every conversation we’ve had every experience we’ve had everything we felt comes with us into the room. And like you say, clients can trigger that in you.
Paul: Right. And the key thing right and you’ve said this so many times is, don’t over identify with it stand back from, oh that’s interesting. So, you know, I was very lucky because the person that was supervising me was just lovely. She was very, very Freudian but she was just fantastic. And she would say in what I adopted from her, always a very friendly way.
Paul: Okay, so serious. Yeah, well of course, why not. You were like everybody else. It was very sad. It
Hayley: Makes sense we’re human beings, and I get really upset about that, you know, way over I shouldn’t be like that but I wanted to say oh
Paul: No, no it’s just the way it is just see it as a really fascinating thing that you’re responding, you can transference Miller therapy is not to do to other people that you felt were done to you, and so that’s bringing your stuff in, and that might not be so helpful to your clients right not to blame anybody or shame anybody, it’s just interesting so you might think about what you want to do and how you cope with the feelings when your clients are pushing back at that don’t want to leave them esteem.
Hayley: So again that awareness, curiosity, not over identifying and then asking yourself what would be helpful for me in this. What do I need and I always think of that in terms of what, what do I need, what would be Hayley: helpful in terms of my internal resources. And what would be helpful in terms of external resources, very much.
Hayley: Yeah, like Can I can I go connect with other people to talk about this, can I get supervision, what do I need, and, and then the internal stuff around how can I be with myself in a way that is gentle and compassionate and not shaming and blaming
Paul: I’m pushing this much more now. Be playful with yourself. It’s just to get this stuff inside of you. At the time it seems very intense but if you can just settle back a little bit think oh shit.
Paul: We can get that clay if you can get that it takes time maybe but just loosening up playfulness will loosen you up. But when you’re forcing and pushing, worrying tightens about. So we talk a lot now about loosening versus tightening around these processes. But when we’re in the track systems rec system is attacked the Titans narrows your attention and focuses you down, as opposed to opening up.
Hayley: Practice, practice, practice with all this isn’t it. And then practice more. Hayley: So, I wanted to ask you the question if you could meet the poor Gilbert’s of the
future. What do you think your future self would say to you.
Paul: What the f**k was that all about, what a wonderful question.
I’m hoping that it would just say, Well, you did the best you can and enjoy your retirement wherever that happens to be in the next slide so yeah I mean, it’s a great question, really. Yeah, I hope my just say is fine. You’ve done what you can and time to move on. That’s it.
Nice guy for you is walking stick and having gone board guy Paul Paul you.
Paul: Oh God, it’s sort of my friends. They like the idea of her. When you’re young, running around, then when you get older, getting out, even getting out of bed, she invented these things called the Talking set.
Hayley: So, so as we age and I’m getting older. I think bringing compassion to that is really important as well, isn’t it.
Paul: Yeah, I mean the thing is, look, you know, if you’re a union you’d say, well, all life is a narrative or life is a story. Every human being has written the book, but they haven’t written a
book but they’ve lived a book they’ve lived as a set of characters in the story there’s every life is a story and if you see it as every life is a story. It’s really kind of an interesting way, this is my story. And somebody else’s book story will be different and they’ll have different characters and different plots and subplots and different events. Absolutely. And so, you know, I’ve lived the story. This is the story of a poor guy, good and bad.
Hayley: I like as you’re saying that a video about my story and I’m like, plot twist. There were a few of those along the way. The theme of the book changed somewhat as it was written, which is, which is good.
Paul: It’s a fascinating story. It’s a story of a human being. DNA created you in this context craves you and this is a story that is unfounded. And it’s,
Hayley: Oh thank you Paul. This has just been a delight. It’s been really really lovely chatting with you, and I really hope that you know the world opens up a bit more. Sometime soon so that we can welcome you and Jane back to Australia. In the meantime, if people do want to get in touch with you. Where’s the best way for them to kind of engage with your work, I know there’s the compassionate mind foundation UK website that’s got some amazing resources on it. Where would be the best way for people to contact you?
Paul: Yes, you can do that through contact. So, under-found and be a little bit careful because you can imagine they can get requests for supervision of all kinds of things. So just on the website there’s a thing called contact and you just say, you know, can I get in contact with, or I’ve got to be a little bit careful. We get quite a lot of, which is lovely, of course, it’s better to be wanted than not.
Hayley: You’re a very busy man, very busy man. But so the compassionate mind foundation UK website is the best place to go and like I said, full of great resources so that’s great. Again, thank you so much, Paul. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for your generosity of time and again for developing compassion focused therapy.
Paul: Well Hayley and thank you for doing what you’re doing because this is wonderful work what you’re doing you know getting it out there and giving therapists an opportunity to hear it in a slightly different way perhaps. So that’s terrific. And as I say, you know that it’s gonna cost you, when we come. Hayley: Time with you is my pleasure, Paul, no worries, so thank you so much. Thank you so much
To find out more about Paul and his work, please go to www.compassionatemind.co.uk
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