Episode #16 Healthy Striving and Thriving with Diana Hill
Hi, this is Welcome to Self ™ Caring for the Human in the Therapist Chair, and I’m your host, Dr. Hayley D Quinn, fellow human, clinical psychologist, supervisor and trainer. Welcome to Self ™ is a place where you can come and learn ways to elevate your own care and compassion. A place to rest, be soothed, and at times maybe gently challenged to think about yourself and your practice. A place to remember that you are human first, choose the helping profession is just one of the roles in your life. My aim is that this is a place of soothing, comfort, nourishment, growth and nurture. A place where you can also welcome your self.
Hayley:
Hi, and welcome to another episode. I’d like to take a moment of gratitude for Rebecca at Learn, Play, Grow Consulting, who gave feedback on the podcast. She said about Episode Seven with Dr. Jai Yang.
“What a powerful conversation on responsibility boundaries and self compassion. This podcast is helping me grow as a person and a practitioner”.
Thank you so much, Rebecca for taking the time to send feedback and I’m so pleased you’re finding it helpful. I’m excited to introduce my next guest Dr. Diana Hill. Diana is a clinical psychologist and co author of Act Daily Journal: Get Unstuck and Live Fully with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Through her online teachings, executive coaching, clinical supervision and private therapy practice, Diana encourages clients to build psychological flexibility so that they can live more meaningful and fulfilling lives. She is the founder and host of the new podcast show Your Life in Process, and a co founder of the Psychologist of the Clock podcast. Diana blogs for Psychology Today and offers regular workshops in compassion and act for clinicians and the general public. Diana has a knack for unpacking complex science based concepts and making them applicable to daily life in work, parenting, relationships and health. Diana completed her undergraduate work at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in bio psychology, followed by a PhD in Clinical Psychology at CU Boulder, where she collaborated with Stanford University to research mindfulness and acceptance based approaches for eating disorders. Diana completed her pre doctoral internship in the eating disorder emphasis area at UC Davis and her postdoctoral fellowship at La luna centre intensive outpatient programme for eating disorders. She went on to serve as the clinic director of La luna centre, where she helped develop an act based group programme. Diana practices what she preaches as a mom of two, a homesteader and yoga teacher. I’ve been a follower of psychologists off the clock for a long time. So I was excited to have the opportunity to interview Diana, it is my great pleasure to welcome Diana to the podcast. And I hope you find this episode, both enjoyable and helpful.
Hayley:
So hi, Diana, and welcome to the podcast. I’m absolutely thrilled to have you on this. I’ve been a follower of you on psychologists on the clock for a long time. So thank you for joining me and welcome.
Diana:
Thank you for having me on. This is gonna be a fun conversation, because I don’t usually have conversations with therapists about therapy, per se. So it’ll be a nice discussion between us.
Hayley:
Fantastic. So could we start by you telling us a little bit about yourself and what it was that drew you to the helping professions?
Diana:
Well, that’s always a bit of a loaded question, right? Because, therapists we can like which story do you want? You want the real story or the cover story that I told when I was applying for graduate school? Um, well, I guess I’ll just start by saying I’m a clinical psychologist, and I’m in private practice in Santa Barbara and I also am a podcaster. I lead workshops. I am an author, I wrote a book on act and I came to becoming a clinical psychologist Just really for personal reasons, and I think that’s the case for a lot of therapists. I had my own recovery is my own recovery history with an eating disorder. And I really wanted to go into research and explore that when I was in my 20s, you know, that’s when I entered into becoming a therapist, but it’s never really a direct route, right? California to New York, the aeroplane doesn’t goes straight, it goes ups and downs and sideways and, and so my path has been really, you know, ups and downs and twisty and turny. When I was in graduate school, I took time off and I thought I was gonna be a yoga teacher and then went back and changed my research direction. So but it’s always been from a place of wanting to help people who are stuck and who who struggle and maybe find a different path for themselves.
Hayley:
Yeah, fantastic. I totally relate to that. That sort of twisty turny, I would say, I took the scenic route in life. It’s never a one way to another as it were, we want to go. So you have a strong interest in healthy striving and thriving. Can you tell us more about this, including how you came to be passionate about the topic?
Diana:
Well, it sort of relates to that, that history there, right, if you think about somebody with an eating disorder, they are extreme strivers. I interviewed Rhonda Merwin, who’s a eating disorder specialist at Duke. And one of the things that she said is that folks with anorexia in particular, are doing everything society has told them to do, to be, you know, either a good girl or a good boy or whatever, it’s almost they’ve taken they’re striving to an extreme. And for a long time, I struggled with my own striving originally in that realm, right. But then it is sort of transformed and transmuted as I as I grew up. And it really became my frienemy in a lot of ways where striving was very helpful for me to get a PhD and be successful and achieve things. But it always had that sort of underbelly of depletion, or getting me into an ego based state where I was striving for things that didn’t really matter. Yeah. And I’ve seen that a lot in my work as a clinician. So I work with not only folks that have eating disorders, but I also work with a lot of high achieving individuals, people that are high achieving parents that are, you know, want to be the best parent they can possibly be, but can caught get caught up in unhealthy striving there right keeping up with the Joneses, or working with executives that are running companies, and you can see the, this sort of dark side of their striving. And so I’ve come up with sort of some ideas around especially looking at process based approaches is what’s happening when we get caught in unhealthy striving. And how can we orient ourselves more towards a compassionate, skillful, and values based type of striving? Yeah,
Hayley:
Yeah, fantastic. I know for me, in my experience with chronic illness, I think a lot of that, well multiple factors, but some of that was striving. I was a single parent whilst I did my degree and PhD and was working numerous jobs and, you know, and that constant having to do, having to do, having to be good at what I do. And I think you’re right, once we can kind of come back to values and certainly for me, self compassion has been an absolute life changer. It makes such a difference, doesn’t it? Because we don’t want to necessarily give up striving do we. We don’t want to say well, I’m not going to strive for anything anymore.
Diana:
No. And that’s often what we’re told to do as strivers, or as perfectionist, like you need to just stop being such being such a perfectionist or you know. But actually, what we’re being perfectionistic about, or what we’re often striving for maybe linked to something that’s really important to us. It’s more a question of what’s driving it? Is it driven by avoidance of feelings of not good enough? Is it driven by attachment, you know, sort of creating and holding on to things needing to be a certain way or praise from others? Or, you know, whatever the thing is that we get attached to, or is it driven by an intrinsic sense of this is what really matters to me this this type of person, I want to be in the world. And so when we can unhook from sort of that, the striving that’s driven by attachment or avoidance, and hook into I really like in Buddhism, the concept of wise effort, right? So sort of a sort of a deeper wisdom of how we want to be in the world, what we want to put out in the world, then we’re a little bit more flexible with it. We’re less rigid about what it needs to look like. And we also can start to see it as part of sort of a bigger network of of ourselves that we have, you know, lots of different ways that we could engage in that type of, in our values. And sometimes that means taking rests. Sometimes that means going hard, much more seasonal than maybe we allow ourselves to be.
Hayley:
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a lovely way to think about it life in seasons. Sometimes it’s for planting, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s for, for sitting back and waiting, and having some patience. And other times it’s about harvesting, and doing the things that we need to do and like, say, maybe pushing a bit harder than normal. But being mindful about what’s motivating what we’re doing. Yeah. So how has the work you do in this area helped you manage to navigate life with all the different roles you have? Because you you’ve have many different roles, as we often do.
Diana:
Yeah, you know, too many roles sometimes. And I’m often questioning this, you know, intentional use of time. And you know, I had a conversation with Patricia and one of the things that came out of it was her talking about, sometimes we need to say no, in the service of our values, even if we’re saying no to good things. Yeah. And it really landed, you know, personally, for me of this saying no to things is part of being a skillful striver. And saying no, because it’s in the service of me being able to say yes to this other thing that really, really matters to me. And what I keep hearing out is that some of these things that really, really matter to me, don’t always map on to what society tells me should matter to me. Things like, I’ve really learned that taking a midday break, to go for a little walk, or do a little yoga practice, changes the course of my therapy practice, if I go back in the afternoon, and what I should be doing is writing my notes, or putting another client in, or, you know, writing that newsletter that it should we all need to be writing newsletters, or you know, whatever those shoulds. But when I do it, when I actually listen in to what I really need, and what my values are, then it guides me to a direction that is more fulfilling. And so that’s one way that I’ve been navigating it is trying to really practice more of a sort of listening into what I need, and letting go of some of the expectations of what it’s supposed to look like. And then the flip side of that is also kind of throwing some stuff at the wall and seeing what and my dad was, whenever we made spaghetti, he would always take a strand of spaghetti and throw it against the wall to see if it sticks and that’s how you know, it’s done. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not. But that’s what my dad used to do. And I feel like as I’ve gotten further along in my career, I’m more willing to just throw some stuff at the wall and sticks and let go of you know, the outcomes are really the process of things.
Hayley:
Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, seeing what fits for you. And tuning in, I’ll often talk with supervisees, and clients around who you say no to, because I noticed people are very quick to say I’m not good at saying no, I say well you are. But you just keep saying it to yourself. When you’re saying yes to other people. And when you were saying before, if you can say no to something, it means you can say yes to yourself in service of something that is meaningful to you and that matters. I think that’s really important. And you were talking about, you know, living a life that perhaps society doesn’t recognise as how we should be living and I came across a quote recently, which I just love that is ‘it’s okay to live a life that nobody else understands’. You know, it’s okay for us to actually tune in to what we want our life to look like. So I really resonate with what you’re saying in that stuff. I think it’s really important that we, we do tune in to ourselves and listen to that.
Diana:
Sometimes it’s for me, sometimes it’s tuning into the the uncomfortable parts within myself. Feelings like sadness or regret. Like, if I look back over the past few years, what are some of the things I actually regret about them? Yeah, Daniel Pink has a new book out called The Power of Regret and he talks about this large research study he did with over 4000 people where he looked at what are the common areas that people have regrets in. And there are areas like regret around not being as bold as they wish they would have been, regrets around connection. Foundational regrets, like I wish I wore more sunscreen and maybe less meat. And then also moral regrets. And I think that part of this sort of unhooking from our unhealthy striving cycles and hooking into more skillful ones, is also being willing to enter into some of this discomfort of things like regret, or sadness, or longing, and use that as information to guide our behaviour here now. So the regret of like, I wish I spent a little more time with my partner in the morning, you know, because now, I don’t have that as an option. Maybe he passed or something like that, that could inform me into how I’m going to spend my time with a friend, or with the child?
Hayley:
Yeah, absolutely. I think really, it’s like tuning into the whole of ourselves isn’t it, not just the bits that are easy to be with. And again, you know, based on whatever your family of origin experiences, might be messages of like, well, don’t be sad, don’t pay attention to being sad. And I think that can be a learning can’t it and a practice of how do we start to recognise and acknowledge some of those feelings that perhaps we’ve not paid attention to? Because they are important guides, aren’t they?
Diana:
It’s like this middle path, because sometimes we can get so caught up in our regrets. We don’t move forward. Yeah, yeah. Like, we’re stuck in the rumination of it all, or the separation of it all before, we’re just like, put our blinders on. But we’re like moving forward, but we don’t know what’s around us, right. So there’s this middle path of like, touching it, and using it as information and then not getting stuck in it, but using it as like information to keep that water flowing. You know, it’s got to go around some rocks and but it’s gonna keep moving. And but there’s a lot of information, I think, in our, in our emotions in our body and information that we’ve been trained up to discount, or numb out from.
Hayley:
Yeah, absolutely. I know that for myself. Now that I have a very different relationship with myself, and I tune in and listen, my life is very different, I make decisions very differently. You talk a lot about values in your work. And in your in your book, ACT daily journal. How has connecting to your own values helped you in your decision making? And what are some of your favourite ways to work with values both for yourself and with your clients?
Diana:
I’m going to answer the second part of that question first and then the first one. You know, I, I think about values with clients, oftentimes in two different ways. One is I look where I see myself as like a values highlighter of looking at where where’s my client lighting up. Yeah. And you start to see them telling a story. And you can feel the sort of energy rising and the momentum and the excitement and the expansiveness and the vitality that your client is telling. And it could be a story about them walking their dog on the beach, or could be story about a presentation that they’re making. It doesn’t really matter what the content of the story is. But I pay attention to what’s happening for a client there, there’s something they care about, that they’ve been able to catch this wave of momentum. I think of values as being like energy, motivation. So motivational quality. Yeah. And we can see that motivation rise within our clients. And then I’d go there, you know, like, what is it about that? But then we can also see our value show up for our clients around sort of like what I mentioned before, like work with regret, yeah, what is painful for them. And what where are they really feeling that sort of that like longing space, that maybe they’re not making contact with something that’s important to them, or it’s painful, and because it’s painful, they’re avoiding it, but they’re also avoiding their values in the process. So I think that both vitality and pain within the clinical realm can be a way to access values. And to not shy away from either of those as a therapist. But you know, how that applies to me in my own life is I turn that arrow in and I look at that for myself, like what’s painful for me right now. And what does that say about what I care about and how I want to spend my time and energy? I told a story, I did a podcast on acceptance recently. And I told a story that I haven’t been telling much. But it’s been very much part of my life for the past year and a half, which is, you know, sort of this my partner and I both have been working from home during COVID. And he loves red tail Hawks. And we live in this canyon here, if you look behind me, you’ll see like these oak trees and this canyon of Santa Barbara, that’s really lovely place to be and then red tail hawks, they come out and they circle around half the time looking for my chickens. But so, my husband will say come on up, you got to see the red tail hawk, honey. And half the time I’m like in the middle of a treatment note, or I’m doing something that’s way more important than my husband’s red tail hawk. Yeah, and I’ll get up there, it’ll be too late, and it’s gone. But about a year and a half ago, my husband said, you know, Diane come up look at the red tail hawk. And, you know, he just said, come on up. And I came up. And when I was with him, he said he couldn’t see part of my face. And so fast forward a lot of trips to UCLA later on, we found out that he has this progressive vision loss that he’s never going to get back. And it’s going to continue. So when my husband says, come look at a red tail hawk, yeah. There’s nothing that’s more important. There is nothing that is more important than that moment. Yeah. And that is where I think we can start to look at where our pain points to our values, and then our values, motivate our behaviour. Whatever that pain is, for you, that’s just my personal pain right now. But everyone listening has their own personal pain spots that they can turn to, to guide their behaviour. And that’s what’s guided, you know, some career changes that I’ve made in terms of leading a very successful podcast to starting my own. And part of that is because my husband’s my producer on my new podcast, and so I get to spend time with him and he’s the person that I want to spend more time with. So that’s a long winded answer to your question.
Hayley:
But that’s beautiful. And I’m sorry to hear that for your husband. But I think it’s so true isn’t it, that we, it’s things like that, that really highlight for us what is important. I know I’d recently a few months ago had a loss in my life. And I’d been spending a fair bit away at home sort of coming up the coast and working on my own up here. And since that loss, I have chosen not to do that as much. It’s become really more more obvious to me that I really want to be sort of closer to my husband and my son, my son’s left home, but we still kind of connect and see each other. And it was that experience for me that was like, well hang on a minute. No, this is how I want things to be. Yeah, so important. So what are the areas I think can be challenging for us, that brings up lots of uncertainty and array of different feelings, is making changes in our careers and in our personal lives. And yet, I think it’s an important area of growth for both personal and career growth. So you just touched on before an example for your for you is that you left your role as host of psychologists off the clock, and you started your own podcast your life in process. I wonder if you could talk about how you navigated that for yourself, and what you found most helpful, because I think for many people who are working as helping professionals, there comes a point where there’s a realisation that things have to change, or that people want things to change. I know for me, it came from chronic illness, and I had to leave a workplace that I loved and there was lots of challenges in that. But making that decision for myself was the best thing I did for my health and my life. So what, how was that for you? And how did you navigate that?
Diana:
Well, it’s been really challenging to be honest. If we go back to those sort of cycles of avoidance and attachment, I would say both of those showed up for me really big time in this decision. Avoidance being, avoiding, I’ve known that I needed to leave for about a year. And some of the subtle ways in which I avoided that knowing were advice seeking. Chronic advice seeking like every single expert I can consult, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? And everyone’s giving, you know, giving giving me their advice based on their experience of themselves, which is not their, that’s not my experience. Right? So that’s actually an experiential avoidance strategy. I’m kind of learning, which is invite chronic advice seeking, there’s nothing wrong with seeking advice and feedback. But when it comes as a way to avoid, yeah. And then avoidance of feelings, like loss, avoidance of feelings, like what will people think? Avoidance of pain and discomfort of making a transition and change? Right, so, yeah, I will say that anytime we’re kind of faced with sort of making a career shift, there’s gonna be a lot of discomfort that shows up in making a career shift like that and if we take left turns, every single time we face discomfort, we’ll find ourselves in a circle of indecision. Yeah. Which is what I was in for like a year a circle of indecision. Even though there was sort of like this inkling and knowing that was very values based for me, I couldn’t even put words to it but I just kind of knew I needed to do something different. And I didn’t know what that path exactly was gonna look like. So the attachment part is another interesting one. And I’m, I’ve gotten more interested in this concept of attachment, both through its lineage of Buddhist principles of attachment as a source of our suffering, but also through some of the teachings of people like Joseph Sorachi, that’s talking about ego and attachment. And, um, you know, with, with attachment, it’s the griffon, it’s, you know, there’s a, there’s sort of the Buddhist story about the monkey with a hand in the jar, my dad was telling me the story, my dad said, he’s a Buddhist teacher, so he always told me like, the hands of the jar, so the hand of the jar holding on to the banana, or whatever it is, that is, and it has to let go of the banana and the hand of the jar, you won’t let go of it. And so I found myself like, what’s my banana? You know, like, what am I holding on to? And it was very ego based, it was holding on to things like, well, we have this many downloads, or wow I found it this thing, so it’s mine. Right? And, and that attachment caused so much like suffering in me. Because the gripping is exhausting, honestly, it drains you to grip so hard. So I guess what’s the path out of not doing those is? A lot of willingness. Yeah. A lot of letting go. A lot of compassion, like, oh, this is hard honey. This is a thing to let go of, like this is going to be you know, bumpy road. And support from people that really know the why behind it for me. Yeah. And then doing it, yeah. Jumping in the water.
Hayley:
Yeah, taking action.
Diana:
I love to ocean swim. And there’s just this feeling of I don’t want to every single time and I go. And then once you’re in and you actually get your head under the water and you come back out. It’s like, oh, yeah, this is what it feels like. It’s actually much better that I put my head under the water. So I’m on the other side of that now, if you talk to me a number of months ago, I might have answered something a little bit different.
Hayley:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think you touched on something there. around identity. It’s like I founded this, it’s mine. And I think we can get very caught in what our identity is particularly as helping professionals as well. I know when I made the choice to leave the practice I was at, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know if my health was going to hold up. And I had to get to a point of saying to myself, it’s okay if I’m never a psychologist. And that had been a hell of a road for me as a single mom to get to be a psychologist. So there was a lot of distress around that. But it was really important for me, for me to get to this place of sort of saying I can take off the coat that says I’m a psychologist, because I need to be Hayley and take care of Hayley. So I think,
Diana:
And coming right up against this thing of like, if I’m not this, then who am I? Yeah. And then we got to make friends with that. Yeah. Because I think, you know, I go to like a party or an event. Like, oh, hi, who are you? What do you do? Yeah. And we put on this, this facade of like, this is who I am and therefore it gives me value. What if that thing goes away? Then what’s under there and making peace with that relationship of what’s underneath there. One of the things that I will start I do a lot of experiential workshops with focus. And the very, when I’m doing like a longer retreat or a longer full day workshop, one of the very things that I’ll start with is this milling exercise where I play music and I have people mill around the space as if they were like at a cocktail party or a conference or you know, whatever, mill, walk around, and there’s this discomfort of like walking around. We haven’t met each other yet at all. I haven’t done any introductions. And then I pause the music, like it’s musical chairs, and whoever you are closest to, you have to turn to, and you ask them, what do you care about? Yeah. And they answer just one or two lines, I care about my bees, I care about my kids, you know, few things. And then I play the music and musical chairs walk around the room. Pause. Yeah. And by the end of that, you know, whatever, 5, 10 minute exercise of what do you care about, we’ve gotten more connection, and recognition of what’s behind the facade than we would if we sat down and said, I’m a psychologist that does blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And has had this many clients and, you know, whatever it is that we live behind.
Hayley:
Yeah, I love that. I love that. When I’m meeting new people now I try and remind myself, don’t ask them what they do. Maybe down the track, maybe down the track, but don’t meet somebody and ask because I think that’s the thing. It’s reinforced constantly, isn’t it? Yeah, you know,
Diana:
Well, it’s so here’s the funny thing. I work in Santa Barbara. And I don’t know what you know about Santa Barbara. But we are like the mecca of Hollywood stars and famous people. So like Prince Harry lives here. Oprah lives here, Ellen lives here. It is like the mecca of like, really famous people that have high profiles. And I’m not, I like actually don’t follow up on any of that. I don’t think I have read People Magazine since I was in my 20s, or whatever it is, you’re supposed to read it to find out. So I don’t ask that question. Yeah, I don’t. And I have had the experience of being three, four or five sessions into therapy with somebody. Yeah. And folks that are really famous, they actually don’t show their they don’t they’re like, so used to hiding that themselves. I’ll be so far along in therapy and have gotten such like a sense of who this person is. And then they’ll mention something like they are like the producer of this crazy movie. Yeah. Or you know, whatever. And it’s so lovely for them to have had this experience of connecting and have it not be about their ego state. And just have it be about like, really, what are they coming into the therapy for? So it’s a wonderful way to be seen if we allow ourselves to be seen that way. And that requires us also stepping into that.
Hayley:
That’s fantastic. We should all practice not asking people what they do.
Diana:
And not leading with that ourselves. Yeah.
Hayley:
And then yeah, leading with what we care about. Not what we do. Human beings, not human doings, right. So you’ve named your podcast and I’d heard you talk about this saying your your life is not a work in progress, which I think is a very common phrase we’ve all heard for a long time. You know, I’m a work in progress, but a life in process. So can you explain to listeners what you mean by this? And what are your tips for people to live their life in process?
Diana:
Well, first, I just want to say thank you Hayley, for being such a fantastic interviewer. You really, you really, like, you know, are thinking about what would be meaningful for me to share about and that’s like a really meaningful thing for me to share about. So I appreciate you for asking that question.
Hayley:
Oh thank you, that’s lovely.
Diana:
Yeah. I have to acknowledge each other in the interview, you know, talking to these listeners, but we’re also talking to each other. And I’m like, wow, you’re doing a really good job. So life and life and process. I mean, I have so many times we have clients come in to therapy, they come in as, like, here are my problems and solve them. And part of my problem list is me. Like, like, I’m a self improvement project. Actually, early on in my in my parenting. I read this book by Alison Gopnik called the carpenter and the gardener. And Alison talks about like if we’re parents, oftentimes we treat our kids like they’re like a piece of wood that we’re trying to sculpt into something. We act as carpenters. And what we need to do is be more gardeners, where we’re just creating fertile soil and see what will grow, like really nourishing good compost, good soil. And so the work in progress model is the carpenter model. And we are sort of these self improvement projects that we need to carve away at and, you know, get somewhere. But a life in process model is much more of a gardeners model of like, I’m a gardener and some years like I had a really amazing tomato crop and some years it’s the zucchini and it’s doing well, it doesn’t, I don’t have as much control over that but I do have control over what I put in the soil and how I take care of it and how I water it and all those things. So that’s one part of it is seeing our you know, sort of our lives as twisty and turny and changing and that we’re not problems to be saw that we’re really going gardens to cultivate and take care of, attend to. And then the other part of it, which is more like the science nerdy part of it all, for me is this chant that I have for sort of where psychology is going in terms of process based therapy. And the reason why I’m so enamoured to process based therapy is that, finally we have an integrative approach. Yeah, like, finally, we have an integrated approach that is no longer in the therapy wars of psychodynamic is better, CBT is better, no, now ACT is the best that we actually have an approach that says, wow, what are the processes, yeah, that are underlying human flourishing. And you will find them in psychodynamic therapy, and you will find them in nature therapy, and you will find them in movement therapy, and you will find them in CBT. And looking at the underlying processes that are involved in creating a rich and meaningful life. And so a life in process is all about that as well. How to engage with those processes, how to help our clients engage with those processes, and some of those have been boiled down through research. And, you know, they include things like compassion and self compassion, being mindful and present. Things like efficacy and belief, hope. And, and those can really when we start cognitive diffusion, when we start to work with those processes with ourselves, clients that are, you know, really kind of, that’s sort of the nutrients of that garden that grow.
Hayley:
I think, you know, if we, if we allow ourselves to, I guess, I don’t know if this is the right way to say it, but treat ourselves as our own clients, when we have this knowledge and skills as helping professionals, it can make such a difference to our own lives as well. We really kind of practice what we preach, so to speak, and immerse ourselves in the things that we know and apply them to our own lives so that our lives are a life in process as well. I love that sense of like how we cultivating the soil. That’s beautiful.
Diana:
Yeah, I often tell my, my husband I’m taking myself on as a client. I’m the hardest client I’ve ever met, but I can do it. Because and at the same time, I also have to recognise that clients that will walk in my door are in different bodies in different contexts have different biochemistry have different life experiences, have different experiences of oppression, like all you know, there’s a lot of things that are that are very different between, you can’t just say, oh, this worked for me, so it’s gonna work for you. Yeah, that is like that’s a dead end. But the humility as a therapist of saying like, yeah, I get I get stuck in vicious cycles. Totally understand that. I completely demoralised, and I was kind of moralised this morning. I think it can help our work in terms of seeing the common humanity.
Hayley:
Absolutely. So on that what do you find are the biggest challenges that you face in terms of taking care of yourself as a practitioner, a mum, a partner, a friend, a human being? Becase I think people can think as helping professionals that you know, we’ve got it all together, particularly if we’ve been doing this for a long time. I think some new practitioners coming through can sometimes get stuck in that thought that oh, they’ve been doing this a long time, they probably don’t get stuck like this or
Diana:
The reason why I pause is like, where do I even begin with that question?
Hayley:
Like, how long have you got?
Diana:
How long have you got and do I, how basic do I make it or how complex. Okay, so I think I have a hard time sometimes disentangling the need to take care of myself with the value of caring for others. And you know, that just to kind of make it more like I’ll be in a session with a client, it’s 15 minutes past the hour, I know that if I were to stop at 15 minutes past the hour, I would get 10 minutes to rest my eyes, go for a walk, get a drink of water, go to the bathroom, write that email that’s been on my mind, like, half the time with this client that I used to get off my mind, you know, whatever it is that I need to do. And the client is struggling. And I can tell that they could use seven more minutes. And so in that moment, it’s such a, it’s such a hard thing, like, because it that’s the moment with the client, but I had the same moment with my kid this morning, when I’m trying to get down to see a client, and he’s asking you to look at his spelling words. Yeah. You know, like, how do we show up in these in these places of caring for ourselves and caring for the people, we are caretakers that, you know, we are people that have chosen this profession, because we deeply deeply care for others well being? Yeah. And I guess my only answer to that is like, the saying that my mom used to say is like, it all comes out in the wash. Like sometimes that means choosing to stay seven minutes with that client. And then making the commitment to myself that on the next one, I’m really going to be there 15 minutes after the hour, and I’m that take those 10 minutes for myself. And then sometimes it’s saying like, you know, this is really important. And what you’re saying is really important and we need to pause here and I know and trust that some of the things that we talked about in this session, you can apply in the next to help you out with this neck. You know, sometimes it’s like also recognising that concept of like, if we do 90% of the work for the client then they’ll only do 10%, right, of passing the ball and giving them some, you know, some room to fumble. Yeah, but that’s always a hard thing. And it’s really moment to moment for me, sometimes, you know, sometimes I do it well and sometimes I lose myself.
Hayley:
I think you’ve touched on a really important one, because I know a lot of people I talked to in supervision, struggle with the 50 minute sessions. We tend to have the 50 Minute clinical hour in Australia as it sounds like you do there as well. And I think like you say it’s this, i don’t even know if balance is the right word. But it’s finding that you’re not always giving that time to the clients. It doesn’t become your default of well, no, the client needs me I need to give more, more, more, more, more. And going back to what you said, right at the beginning is what is motivating that? Are you staying in the session for the extra time, because part of you is feeling like you’re not good enough therapist, and you need to give your client more, more, more, more, more? Or is it because this particular client in this context on this particular day has a need that they don’t normally have at that point? And that it’s okay to stay with that. So I think again, it’s but it’s bringing mindfulness back in, isn’t it, being mindful about what’s happening in the moment. What’s motivating our decision, and that we’re not always just defaulting to giving to the other person, whether that’s a client, whether that’s your child, whether that’s your partner, whoever it might be, whether it’s the emails that keep bombarding you, so that we can keep an eye on ourselves and be taking care of ourselves.
Diana:
That’s brilliant. Yes, you said it so well. And so, so, so beautifully. And and what you’re demonstrating there is also sort of this functional analysis of it all. What is the function of this behaviour? And, and being an observer of that. Another thing about sort of this process based therapy model that I’m, you know, digging right now is this idea of variation, selection and retention. So variability being that we have a lot of different ways that we could respond. We’re not always doing this one way. Yeah. Because there’s also the flip side of things. You could be the rigid 50 Minitor. Yeah, where like, You are always like, No, I have to go for my walk. If I don’t go for my walk them my day is just totally screwed. I can’t ever, you know, I need my 10 minutes. I mean, that can be its own form of attachment, right? Yeah. But we need to sort of practice and be playful and flexible. With the variability of behaviour, as we’re asking our clients to do try it out, see what happens. And then the selection part is selecting which things worked for you. Yeah. And what was the result? What was the impact and then the retention is, okay, let’s try that again. It kind of works for you can you know, how do we practice that that deliberate practice? So and then it becomes, you know, sort of having some kind of framework. But it’s a flexible, that’s a flexible one.
Hayley:
Yeah, flexibility in all things, hey, in all things, which totally random just made me think about the fact that you had mentioned to me that you have an interest in physical movement for therapists, as well and I was thinking flexibility in all things, including our bodies, we need to take care of our physical selves, as well. That’s an area you mentioned that you thought one point might be a yoga teacher, how do you incorporate that for yourself, say, in a workday, because I’ll talk to people about, you know, give yourself some time between session maybe do some stretching? I’m not trained in yoga, I used to do yoga, I haven’t done it for a long time. But what, how do you incorporate that? In terms of kind of taking care?
Diana:
You’re talking about all my favourite things. Thank you, I feel like I’m in an ice cream shop. And I get to sample my favourite flavours, because movement is one of them. And yes, I withdrew from graduate school and went to a yoga ashram before deciding to go back. And since then, and actually, very much part of my own healing from recovery was was making friends with my body again. And I, you know, I actually have something called scoliosis, which is a crooked spine. And the worst thing you can do for scoliosis is sit for a lot of hours.
Hayley:
Which is tricky as a therapist.
Diana:
And so I’ve had to look at, okay, if I, if I actually were going to work with clients and not completely deplete and destroy myself in my work. So that the end of the day, I feel like crap, but they feel better. That’s actually kind of like that model, there’s something messed up about that. Yeah. How, how could I do that? What would that look like? And that is that includes everything from I will sit on the floor for a portion of my sessions I am, what I have found, for me functional movement, different types of sitting positions is really wonderful for my body that our bodies are sort of like, you can imagine if you put a couch on a carpet for 10 years, and you lift up that couch after 10 years what you’d see on the carpet. Yeah, but what if you put the couch on the carpet and you move it every three minutes for 10 years? Just subtle little movements around the carpet? You lifted up after 10 years, what are you gonna see? Right? So the same is true for our bodies, were meant to be moving and repositioning and not be, you know, stagnant. Everything from like our blood flow to, you know, just our, the health of our bodies. And what we know also about taking care of our bodies is that it impacts our mental health, right, so. So that’s one thing is that I designed my office space so that I have space in it for yoga, stretching, meditation, I sit in different positions with clients throughout the day, I will move with clients, I’ll ask them to move with me to demonstrate a particular exercise. So like a really typical one that I’ll do with clients that you and I can do right now is we can move our eyes by looking out at the horizon, looking at it a window, or if you can, if there’s something that sort of far away relaxes your eyes. And by looking at the horizon, you also activate in parts of your brain that are more als centric. It’s really resting for the eyes and also resting for each other. And then we can come back to looking at each other again, and just notice the difference of how it feels of having looked away. So that would be a movement for our audience for our eyes. And we have to be really careful when we talk about movement and bodies that we’re including all forms of bodies all forms of abilities. It doesn’t doing yoga or going for a walk for some people. Yeah, for some people that’s taking an eye rest. For some people that’s noticing how we’re holding our breaths and sucking our bellies in. Yeah, can we move our bodies by letting our bellies go right now? And slowing our breath down? That’s a movement. Yeah, that’s a letting go. And so I’ll incorporate lots of different types of movement and body based practices into the work that I do.
Hayley:
That’s beautiful. And I think that’s a really important point that not all bodies are the same. I live with chronic illness and movement can be difficult for me and I’ll talk with people around reframing what movement means. And sometimes for me that is just sitting in a chair lifting my arms or rolling my shoulders. Sometimes it’s doing some interpretive dance to the music in my own head in my kitchen. Sometimes it’s going for a walk. But sometimes it’s the tiniest movement. You know, if it’s a day where movement is tricky, I come back to like, like with life, what’s the smallest next step? You know, is it just like opening and closing your hands, just to give your fingers a stretch. So I think they’re really important points you make, and I love that you, you incorporate that. But also, you said you’ll sometimes sit on the floor, I think people can get really stuck in, we have to be in an office, in a particular chair, sitting a particular way, doing a particular thing for a therapist. And that’s just not how it is.
Diana:
No, you know what the one of the best things we can do is come into the room, and you always sit in one chair, and the client always sits in the couch, have them sit in your chair and you sit on the couch. Notice what happens to the dynamics of the room just by doing that. Yeah, I mean, I love all the Gestalt work I love. I did a stint of psychodrama training when I was in graduate school, I used to run these groups. And I got put with this CO therapist who was a master of psychodramatist. And it was so powerful to just be moving around, you know, having clients like, you know, position your body in the position that, like when you when you stood up, and you, you know, you won that award, and you felt so great, like expand your arms, whatever that position was in. Yeah. And embody that, right? Because, actually, I’m reading this fantastic book by Anna Murphy-Paul, about the extended mind. And in it, she talks about how, you know, we think about our minds as existing in our brains, but our minds exist in our gesturing. Yeah. All the different cultural gestures that are so unique to that culture, like improve, we kiss on the left side of the cheek, but when I meet with my French sister in law, she kisses both sides of the cheek, you know, like these like little subtle things, right? So we, our mind is in our gestures, our mind is in our bodies and our interoceptive awareness. Our mind is in our relationships with one another, how we’re communicating. And all of these different ways of accessing ourselves, when we’re with a client can be creative. Yeah. And also can be expansive of looking at different points of view.
Hayley:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. So what would be if you can pick one, this is always tricky. What would be one piece of advice that you would share with our listeners?
Diana:
Oh, gosh, I don’t know if I’m in a position to give advice on. I guess my piece of advice is to listen to your own advice.
Hayley:
Love that
Diana:
What does your inner-wisdom say? What does your body say that’s right for you? And, that subjective. You know, we’re taught to be so objective, as psychologists there is value in the subjective, your personal experience of the world matters. So listen to that.
Hayley:
I love that, when you said before you became like a chronic advice seeker. As a way of avoiding what you really knew already, but didn’t want to face I think that’s beautiful is Yeah, listen to your own wisdom. So if you could meet your 80 year old self, Diana, what do you think she’d say to you?
Diana:
Um, well, I personally start with what I’d say to her.
Hayley:
Absolutely. You can.
Diana:
I adore you. I adore my 80 year old self for making it to 80 And how, incredible it is to be you at 80 I love it, probably how many things you’ve let go of and are wise and all those things. So start by saying I adore you and nice to meet you, what an honour and then. And then I don’t know what she would say. I mean, I think she’d probably just say, you’re doing fine. You’re doing a good enough job. And you always have, you know. So she probably would say that.
Hayley:
It’s lovely. So can you tell us a little bit about any current projects that you’re currently working on?
Diana:
Ah too many, and they’re all exciting. You know, I am I’ve really gotten interested in, in teaching and that’s one of the reasons why I started your life in process is that I wanted to be able to teach more, not how to be such a like interview style. There was many reasons why I started but that’s another reason why and so I don’t know when this is going to be released. But I teach to therapists, I have some workshops that are both on demand and I think are recorded through pesi and practice on act and on act daily, how to bring it back into your daily life. And I have an online course that’s just for me that I love that, you know, I created. And then I’m also really excited about being on Insight Timer. So I, I love teaching meditations and kind of goes back to some of my yoga training. So I that’s sort of new for me is just offering some free meditations on Insight Timer. And eventually, you know, I want to be doing more in person retreats. So I’m leading a retreat to Costa Rica this spring, which is just for me really meaningful work of spending time together in a retreat environment where we really take on these, these ideas and really embodied body them. So I might be doing one with pesi in November, potentially in Sedona, but that we’re still ironing out the details of that, but hoping to return to Costa Rica again next year.
Hayley:
Oh, beautiful. Oh, well, when the world fully opens to travel again, I might have to come and join you on one of those. Yeah. Yeah, that’s something I’m looking forward to starting to be able to do here for people as well. Some more retreats and things. Lovely. So if people want to find out more about you, or get in touch, where can they find you and engage in your work? You mentioned in the pesi and practice,
Diana:
The best place to go is just my website, because I’ll list all of the events of everything that I’m offering there and I blog regularly and have a newsletter that people can sign up for and you know, all those things. And then the the podcasts, subscribe, it really helps me out if you subscribe remember, I’m starting from zero here. I got my mum as a listener, and hopefully you Hayley but,
Hayley:
Yes, you got me. Definitely. I’m subscribed. Yeah.
Diana:
So if you’re a podcast listener, just to let folks know, especially in thinking about this podcast, too. And listening to Hayley’s when you subscribe to the podcast, it really helps us out, as opposed to just listening to it. And then it also helps us out if you write a review on pod chaser, which has a little like a bits of steps to it. But that lets people know about the podcast. And when you write a review, it encourages other people to listen. So if you want to get back to Hayley in this podcast, go write a review on pod chaser and subscribe.
Hayley:
Oh, you’re such a darling. Thank you. I didn’t know about pod chaser. So you’re very experienced podcaster. I’m just about to launch in, I think we’re recording this on what are we, the fifth of February, the first episode of season two comes out next week. So I’m very new to all this. You’re very, very experienced. So thank you for that. That’s, that’s great. And if you, you’ll give me the links, and I’ll put that in the show notes so people will be able to access you and your work as well. But I could talk to you all day, Diana. This has been so lovely. And thank you again, so much for coming on. Welcome to Self ™ Caring for the Human in the Therapist Chair It’s been an absolute thrill for me.
Diana:
Thank you for having me. You’re a wonderful conversationalist. And it’s just wonderful to be in the space of you. So thank you.
Hayley:
Thank you so much. Bye.
Hayley: Thank you for sharing this time with me today. I hope your time here was helpful and supportive. If there has been something in this episode that you have found helpful, I invite you to share it with another person you think might benefit. I’d also love it if you’d like to leave a review wherever you tune in. Reviews really helped to increase awareness of podcasts, meaning I can spread helpful information more widely. All reviews are welcome and much appreciated. As I know they take time out of your day. If you’d like to be notified when the next episode airs, please use the link in the show notes to join my mailing list. Music and editing by Nyssa Ray. Thanks Nyssa. I wish you all well in your relationship with yourself. And may you go well and go gently.
Go to drdianahill.com or her channels on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (@drdianahill) to get tools to build psychological flexibility into your daily life.
ACT Daily Journal: Get unstuck and live fully with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
Diana’s new podcast show Your Life in Process
Diana’s blogs for Psychology Today
Diana’s research mindfulness and acceptance based approaches for eating disorders
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Disclaimer
This transcript may not be an exact representation of the audio
