Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / How A Childhood Shaped A Child Psychotherapist

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How A Childhood Shaped A Child Psychotherapist · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: This is Kim Lee, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, and this is another one of those impromptu podcasts.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking quite carefully before I wrote this because unlike the podcasts which tend to focus upon specific subjects, I thought that it might be helpful for listeners to know a little about me.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: This is about how and why I became a child and adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a phrase that occasionally circulates within our profession, and that is that therapists are wounded healers.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's not a phrase I feel entirely comfortable with, because it risks implying that those who choose to help others are somehow broken in a way that remains unresolved.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think that's entirely accurate.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: It is true that for some that is the case, but for those of us who have undergone considerable training, I'm not so sure that it applies.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, we probably wouldn't have qualified.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the more meaningful question is not whether one has been wounded, the question is what one has done with it.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: When I completed my master's dissertation, I became absorbed in the lives of the early psychoanalytic thinkers.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: And these are the individuals whose ideas still shape our training and our clinical language today.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: The work of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Carl Jung, Beon, Winnickop, Balby.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: And here's something really incredible.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: With modern neuroscience, we now understand something quite remarkable that these pioneers intuited through careful observation and clinical depth processes of mind and development that we can now evidence neurologically.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Their constructs, things like attachment, containment, projection, internal objects, align closely with contemporary research into relational neurobiology.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: But what struck me most was not simply the brilliance of their ideas.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was that in almost every case, their theories bore the imprint of their own childhood experiences.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: So their thinking didn't emerge in a vacuum.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: It emerged from lived experience.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: They were not merely theorists, they were observers of pain, including their own.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm someone who didn't grow up in a stable environment.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: As a baby, I didn't live with my biological mother.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: I spent my earliest years in a children's home run by nuns.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: I sometimes refer to it with some humor as being raised by penguins.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: I suspect they would be rather amused by that description.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: At the age of two, I was returned to my mother, but the difficulty was not that she lacked intent, it was that she lacked stability.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: So my early childhood was characterized by unpredictability and psychological instability that no child could meaningfully process alone.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: At eleven, I was taken into care by social services, and here is something important.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: For me, that wasn't a traumatic event in the way many may imagine it.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: It was stabilizing, it provided structure, continuity, predictability, and the very things that development requires.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't undo what happened, but it I suppose prevented further harm.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Educationally I struggled, not because I lacked ability, but because I lacked belief.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: The internal working model I carried to borrow from Bobby was one of futility.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Worthlessness has a quiet sabotaging potential.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: But when I left care, I entered adulthood, although ill prepared, and it was very much a sink or swim kind of experience.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: But I had one asset.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: I could articulate, I could think, I could communicate.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: And through that something began to form.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Not ambition in the traditional sense, but the idea that perhaps I could be useful.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: At 18, I secured my first role in residential social work.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: Looking back, it was psychologically complex.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: I was still young, still emerging from institutional care, yet now positioned as a member of staff within an institution.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: I began to notice inconsistencies in how children were understood, how behavior was managed, but not always interpreted.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Distress was contained physically but not always emotionally.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: I read voraciously, I became captivated by psychoanalytic thinking because it offered something I had not previously encountered, a language for internal experience.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: Without a degree, the pathway to psychotherapy training appeared almost impossible.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I was told kindly but firmly that the likelihood of being accepted for or qualification in training was slim.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember thinking, you have no idea.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I also thought, neither do I, I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I will find a way.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the drive for that wasn't about status, and it wasn't about success, it was about becoming myself, becoming someone coherent, becoming someone useful, becoming someone who could walk into the distress of children and not turn away.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was about doing what I am.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: I trained intensively, I persuaded institutions to take me seriously despite my academic record.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: I overcompensated and I worked relentlessly.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: By twenty-four, I was qualified.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: By twenty-five, I was consulting nationally in training those who worked with children, and yet internally I still questioned whether I deserved to stand where I stood.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: But that of course was the residue of early experience.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: Achievement doesn't automatically revise internal narratives.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now, forty-five years later, I have worked with hundreds of children and families.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: And what's changed is not my commitment, that's just strengthens.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: What has changed is my understanding.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't believe therapists are wounded healers.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: I believe some of us have had early proximity to psychological pain, and if we have done our work rigorously and honestly, that proximity can become depth.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's a big difference between practicing from unprocessed injury and practicing from integrated experience.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: The former seeks catharsis and the latter offers containment.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: And containment, as Beyond described, is the capacity to receive distress, metabolize it, and return it in a tolerable form.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's the task, not rescue, not self-expression, but disciplined presence.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: If I speak occasionally about my own history, it is not to center myself, it's to make one thing clear.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: When I sit with a child who feels unwanted, unstable, frightened, or worthless, I'm not theorizing abstractly.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because I understand something of that internal landscape.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's precisely because of that understanding, tempered by training, supervision, and decades of clinical experience, that I can remain steady.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: This work isn't necessarily born of unresolved pain, it's born of conviction.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Children deserve adults who do not flinch.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that ultimately is why I became a child and adolescent psychotherapist.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.