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Psychological Reality, Plainly Stated · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Deviating from the facing psychological reality series, because I want to see if it's possible to summarize some of my thoughts and provide a context which helps the listener to understand the purposes of what I post, what I write, and I guess to some extent what I do.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's a phrase I return to repeatedly in my work, and it has to do with psychological reality.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not simply what has happened to us, it's what has been experienced internally, what's been defended against, what has been reshaped by memory, and what has been projected onto others, and what continues to live inside us long after the events have passed.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Across my podcasts and my books and my clinical work, one thing quietly underpins everything, and that is human beings develop and ravel in relationships.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing psychological occurs in isolation.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Development begins in relationship, and it's from the very beginning of life that the infant brain is not self-regulating, it's co-regulating.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: The right hemisphere, which is the right hemisphere of the brain, is very dominant in early years, but it's exquisitely sensitive to facial expressions, tones of voice, rhythm, proximity.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what we now understand through the work of thinkers such as Alan Shaw is that emotional regulation develops through repeated relational experiences of being soothed, seen, and metabolized.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, Daniel Siegel has written extensively about integration and the linking of different parts of the brain as a foundation of psychological health.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Through the lens of mentalization theory, and this was developed by Peter Fonege, we understand that the child's capacity to reflect on their own mind emerges from having their mind reflected back to them.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Before a child can think about a feeling, someone else must have thought about it first.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And beneath all of this sits the autonomic nervous system where safety, threat, collapse, and connection are experienced physiologically long before they are articulated cognitively.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we are shaped in relationship, but equally we defend in relationship.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: The themes I speak about are consistent with my beliefs and with my work.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And when I speak about behavior, I really speak about it alone.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: I speak about what behavior represents.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: I see behavior as a language, it's a communication.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: A child's anger may be defended hurt, control may be anxiety seeking containment, withdrawal may be shame, risk of exposure.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And across the series, I've spoken about emotional harm without bruises, deception and self-deception, anxiety as avoided psychological reality, shutdown and collapse, and the work of confrontation, not aggression, but clarity.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And each of these themes is relational.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a book that I began working on a long time ago is close to completion, and it's entitled Small People, Big Lives: Ten Accounts of Real Children with a Real Therapist in a Real Consulting Room.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And a book offers anonymized accounts, really, and from inside the consulting room.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't sensationalize children's distress, it examines it carefully, and it shows what happens when young minds asked to carry experiences beyond their developmental capacity where there is parental conflict, emotional inconsistency, role reversal, and a whole host of other things that then find expression through behaviors.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm reminded of the six-year-old whose eating became his only form of communication.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: But the eating was of the anorexic type, or the adolescent who withdraw so completely that silence, complete silence, became the protective armour.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: The child whose behavior was labeled as oppositional and difficult, when in fact, underneath all of that, it was simply protective.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: In each case, what is visible externally is really the full story.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the headline.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: In the consulting room, we see and attend to the story.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the book isn't simply about children, it's about the relational systems that shape them.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why the book in Relationship, Beyond Childhood, seemed a logical next step.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because development doesn't stop in childhood, the patterns formed become a template for adulthood.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And this is important because it provides a containing context in which to understand child development.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: In another book, Facing Psychological Reality, I move beyond the consulting room and into the broader terrain of adult psychology and adult psychological life.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: I guess in small people big lives, I ask what happened to this child.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Facing psychological reality asks, what happens when we refuse to see what is happening inside us?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: So it explores a whole host of themes: emotional deception, the difference between explanation and responsibility, how the mind constructs narratives to preserve identity, and clinically, it explores what happens in relationships when one person avoids psychological reality.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we enter a number of important themes that are to do with how relationships work and don't work.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when the internal and the external psychological reality are in some way incongruent?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the central question that I ask in the book in relationship, although really across many of the things I publish, can we remain, this is the central question or the central questions, can we remain psychologically present in relationship when discomfort arises?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Can we tolerate another person's distress without collapsing into rescue or attack?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And can we recognize our own defensive maneuvers without shame and without that overtaking reflection?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Maturity isn't about age, it's about integration.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: This matters because we live in a time where mental health language is widespread.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: So words such as trauma, triggered, toxic gaslighting are commonly used.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: But language without depth just means that it can become weaponized.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Psychological insight requires nuance, it requires the ability to hold complexity.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: In my work, I try to model some things that are not reactive, not sensational, not self-exposing for effect, but thoughtful, measured, grounded in developmental science and lived clinical experience.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because children deserve adults who can think.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: And adults deserve relationships that are grounded in reality rather than distortion.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: The podcasts aren't therapy, neither are the books.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: They're not substitutes for clinical work, but they're invitations, invitations to slow down, to reflect, to notice patterns, to be curious, and to understand that psychological reality isn't punishment, it's clarifying.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And once faced, it becomes the foundation upon which something more stable can be built.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Our mental health is something which is talked about in terms that I don't believe are fully understood.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: In many respects, there are themes of tokenism.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking as a clinician and someone who works in pediatric mental health every day, there is so much more that I believe parents can learn in ways that are compassionately educational, not judgmental, not you must do, not quick fixes or ten tips to become a perfect parent.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's all window dressing.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: It has no substance.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore I'm offering a range of things which I hope will be here's the word I use most, internalized helpfully by those who benefit from that most.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Parents.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening.