Cognitive analytic therapy

So how it shaped me now, I guess, as a clinical psychologist and as a person and my reflections on that, as I think probably my experience growing up was like, I need to get on with people and I need to be able to do that.

through being brown and kind of probably feeling like a little bit on the outside i probably work quite hard um to try and build relationships with people and to try and be good at that maybe not always great but to try and understand other people's perspectives and that is absolutely something which i think is i could not separate from like my experience of i guess feeling more isolated when i was growing up you know how keen i am now to like maintain relationships and build relationships not in a not in a way that's really tricky but trying to understand different people's perspectives i think that that's woven through those early experiences how well clinical psychology would fit with that and how well different models could do doing some of the disentangling you know a five five piece isn't going to cut it is it like a five piece formulation isn't really going to be i don't think it would have the depth of feeling and of meaning probably to do some of that separation and I think that you maybe you know you could fit in bits around this it'll probably come down to like isolation and you know you're predisposing but actually in your predisposing fact that's going to be relatively brief um and how that relates to all of the other factors would then probably be quite tricky I would feel to to pull out in a meaningful way I think that I have done some sessions of cat previously and that felt like it was quite good so cognitive um analytic therapy and that felt like as part of that you're kind of doing your your timeline and your history at the start of the sessions like that is the the biggest priority is thinking about those early experiences in a lot more space i guess than you would usually have within a different kind of therapy And I think that that allows itself and lends itself more to thinking about the connections between lots of those different experiences and I guess who you are in your, I mean, they call it your reciprocal roles or relationship roles, you know, how you interact with others.

I think that that lends itself quite nicely but ultimately if I were to be in a position where I needed mental health support I think the likelihood is that unless I'd gone through making sense of this on my own I probably would not be asked and the clinician support in me would probably be very unlikely I would think to to tease a lot of those nuances out.

I think it's through the fortune of like my mum being very empathetic and very emotionally intelligent and aware and reflective that's meant that I have become more like that.

There's the differences between you and the other person within you know one social grace of you know ethnicity is what people usually think of isn't it um but there's also the differences within different social graces and that that's where i'm coming from and i guess my experience here that that we're talking about where actually you know two people might identify as working class but what means working class for one person can be very very different for another person um or what black means for one person could be very very different for another person um and i think that probably is one thing that's missed by the social graces in that sense of just because you know you could categorize people and it's useful to have that but just because you could categorize two people within relatively similar experiences making sure that you do some of that disentangling of where is my experience different to yours even if the assumption is that you have the same backgrounds

And I know it's not a sort of a, perhaps a directly linked point from what you just said necessarily, but it picked up when you mentioned that certain things might get missed if you were, for example, in a clinical setting and a psychologist was trying to formulate with you around your kind of background, your upbringing, some of the factors that we're talking about.

And I suppose sort of the thing that I'm left with from some of the conversation we've had this morning is you know, how we do formulate when there is information that might be missing about us, whether that's related to our childhood or our backgrounds or our kind of aspects of other aspects of our identity and being able to, I guess, acknowledge that and, um, be able to think about the impact that that might have had on that person developing or the kind of experience that they might still hold in relation to that even as an adult related to identity because we like to think that if we do just have I don't know a formulation document we've got particular factors that we're considering for example that we kind of are just adding bits in but maybe it's important to acknowledge that for for some of us we don't know what those bits are and that's shaped us as much perhaps as the bits that we are talking about or that we do know about.

So I don't have a sort of succinct conclusion point around that, but it's just in my mind related to some of the conversation that we've had this morning that that's actually likely to be a very common experience for for a lot of kind of the people we see and also perhaps for some of us within the profession and not missing that because i guess that word missing has kind of come up quite a lot in the conversation that we've had already and then the other point i was sort of thinking about that maybe leads us to the next question about how you came from that place in childhood and decided to move into clinical psychology.