Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / The Life That Belongs To You. The Author speaks.

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The Life That Belongs To You. The Author speaks. · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, welcome back.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist, and now I can say author, which is a very strange way to view myself.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: People say everybody has a book inside them.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe that's true.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: I've been planning to write for a long, long time, and I've written copious amounts of materials for professional um functions of one kind or another.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: But to actually translate something which is rooted entirely in experience is an altogether different task because it it's you know knowing what I want to say, but trying to say it in a way that helps other people to understand the message and the intention is a skill that I've not, I think, had to use before.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And my hope is that this is this is being accomplished through this first book.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: The initial feedback I've had since publishing on Sunday has been very complimentary, and that that's that's nice to hear.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I thought it would help to introduce different aspects of the book and to give you some samples that start to give you a flavour of of how this is put together.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now at the moment, it's available on my website, thechildren's consultancy.com.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's also available in Kindle uh or on Kindle through Amazon, and the paperback version will be available to purchase later this week, just finishing off some design work, and then it will be available.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'll announce when that happens.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: But in the meantime, I think I'm more interested in trying to give listeners a flavor of what this is about because a book cover can't do that.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: This book is a culmination of years of slowly learning about harmful relationships in a way which is often in the consulting room, it's very much the sort of one-to-one experience of listening to a person, trying to help a person make sense of their experiences, and to get beyond the enormous pain that they carry.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's very humbling work because it requires no judgment, it requires a preparedness to listen and to hear, to really hear what's being said.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: One of the one of the, I don't know whether it's a gift or a curse, but one of the things that happens with me is when I'm when I'm working with someone, I see what they tell me.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when I say I see what they tell me, I visualize it.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it's almost as if I'm in that situation with them, seeing it happen as an observer.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that that's enormously powerful, and obviously it's highly subjective, and it's not something that I've been taught to do, and I'm not really I I think it is a skill, but I I I also think it's uh incredibly hard.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: But what it does is it gives a real sense of what it might have been or must have been like for that person.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now it is subjective, it's not scientific.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: However, it fits what we call attunement in psychotherapy.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And attunement is no different to how a mother reads her infant, how she knows, how she feels, how she experiences the infant's internal world.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose for those of us who do this for a living, those skills, functions become sharper, deeper, and they are enormously powerful.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, you know, we're touched by this, but our task is is to is to hold that because it's not our session, it's the patient's session.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: So let me just say a little about the introductory aspect of the book.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: There are some areas of psychological work that never become ordinary, and throughout my professional life, I have had the privilege of sitting alongside children, young people, parents, and adults as they've tried to understand experiences that have left them frightened, confused, diminished, or uncertain of themselves.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the circumstances have been immediately recognizable as harmful, but at other times what's happened has emerged much more slowly through the gradual recognition of patterns that were extraordinarily difficult to see while they were being lived.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: And relational abuse belongs particularly to this second category.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we tend to imagine abuse through events.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: We look for the incident, the threat, the act, or the moment at which something unmistakably crossed the line.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now these things matter enormously, particularly where physical safety or safeguarding is concerned.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yet some of the most psychologically damaging relational experiences develop incrementally and people adapt.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now that capacity is one of the reasons human beings can survive difficult circumstances, but it's also one of the reasons those circumstances can become difficult to recognize.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes that initially shocks us, becomes something which we adapt to, we learn to manage it, it can become normalized.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: A behavior that once provoked protest may become something we anticipate, and we learn when to speak, when to remain silent, when to explain, when to apologize, and when it seems easier simply to let something go.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Only later, sometimes with sufficient distance, do we begin to see the pattern, these adaptations formed.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: This observation lies really close to the heart of this book.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've worked therapeutically for more than four decades, and during that time I've repeatedly encountered the consequences of relationships in which one person's psychological world has gradually acquired too much authority over another's.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen this in adults who no longer trust their own judgment, in parents whose emotional resources have become consumed by managing another person's behavior, and in children living with the consequences of relationships over which they possess little or no control.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Working with children in these circumstances has had a particularly powerful influence upon me.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Children do not need to be the direct target of abusive behavior in order to experience its consequences.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: They live within emotional environments.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: They notice fear, tension, withdrawal, unpredictability, and changes in the adults upon whom they depend.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: They may become watchful, accommodating, or protective.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: They may carry responsibility that they really doesn't belong to them, or attempt to make psychological sense of circumstances for which they possess neither the language nor the developmental capacity.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: To be entrusted with these experiences as a clinician is a profound responsibility, and it's a privilege.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I use that word carefully.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing privileged about the suffering itself.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: The privilege lies in being allowed to accompany another human being whilst something begins to change.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: I will come back with a little more information about chapter one.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.