Healing Histories – Psychotherapy

Be inspired by a conversation exploring the healing power of psychotherapy and where it sits alongside Christian spirituality. 

In this second episode of the Healing Histories series we share a conversation with Susanne Hyde, Director of the St Marylebone HCC. 

In their conversation, Gillian and Susanne cover the following topics: 

• What is psychotherapy? 
• What powers psychotherapeutic healing and why is safety important in this approach to healing? 
• What governs why some people seem to make repeated bad choices? 
• What is trauma and how can therapy help? 
• How to engage in the process? 
• How do religion and spirituality relate to psychotherapy?
• Trauma and healing
• Do you have hope that healing is possible? 
• From the world of psychotherapy and faith, what one thing would you like people to know that might help them if listening today has raised questions.  

Links:
St Marylebone HCC
The GoHealth Everyday Healing Course
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Visit our website to get connected with the GoHealth Community.

Find us on our socials @GuildofHealth

Gillian Straine: Welcome to the GoHealth Podcast. I am Gillian Straine, I’m the chief exec of GoHealth, an organisation with a vision to enable churches and individuals to be a healing presence in the world. And right now we’re in the middle of our Healing History series, where we’re exploring the impact of our past on our present with a range of expert voices so that we can go on a journey through our own past, both individually and collectively, to find healing and flourishing. Now, the focus for this episode of Healing Histories is the ways that psychotherapy can offer healing. And I’ve got my friend and expert in psychotherapy, Susanne Hyde, who is director of the St Marylebone HCC. So welcome, Suzanne. Thank you so much. 

Susanne Hyde: A pleasure.

Gillian: for being on the GoHealth. Can you tell us what is St Marylebone HCC, let’s start there.

Susanne: Sure. Well, originally we were called St Marylebone Healing and Counselling Service and we’ve just in the last two years changed it to ST rather than HCC because we offer a professional psychotherapy service of up to two years of once weekly psychotherapy. And most of our team are actually psychotherapists. So being called Healing and Counselling Center, it had a historical meaning, but now it’s sort of evolved into trying to project and to accurately describe what we offer, which is psychotherapy.

Gillian: Thank you so much. You know, the word healing can raise so many red flags for people, and it’s what we explore all the time on the Go Health podcast. So, you know, we’re right there exploring it already simply in the title of the place you work. So yeah, thank you so much. So lets…I want to jump in with two feet first. What is psychotherapy? Because to so many people that is a scary word.

Susanne: Sure. I mean, of course, often people ask what’s the difference between Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Counselling? And of course, obviously psychiatry is the medical model with medication, and it’s somebody who’s actually a trained doctor who’s specialized in in treating the mind through medication and recommending therapies. But Psychotherapy, well, I’ll just say a bit about counselling first, counselling tends to be more here and now focused. So if you go and see a counsellor, there’ll be more there to help you deal with everyday difficulties, anxieties. There is an overlap. People who are psychotherapists tend to have done a much more intensive training, usually a minimum of four years. They’ve had their own therapy, psychotherapy in order to be a psychotherapist, you have to have at least a minimum of twice a week psychotherapy yourself for the duration of your training. So you’ve, so you’ve been in the hot seat too so you know what it’s like. And actually, the best way I understand psychotherapy, it’s about making the unconscious conscious. And what I mean by that is that often we’re doing things every day, we’re all bumbling along and we do things or we get attracted to certain relationships and we just do it. We just don’t think there’s any rhyme or reason. But psychotherapy offers the place to stand back and to think about why am I doing what I’m doing and what might be the meaning of that? 

Gillian: And it comes with a sort of a frameworks or schools of thought doesn’t it? Because I’m just thinking, I’m training to be a coach right now. So if somebody came, you know, somebody, for example, you know, “I don’t know what to do with my life”. You know, they can come to a coach and coach is trained to ask them a bunch of questions so they can figure it out for themselves. Counselling might be, you know, “I’m looking for, I’m at a juncture in my life, so I’ve got a problem to solve right now.” Psychotherapy slightly different isn’t it, sort of saying right, what what’s behind the reason you’re asking this question? 

Susanne: Yes, what’s unconsciously kind of, you know, driving you? And I think an example would be somebody who’s come out of a very destructive relationship and they’re thinking, phew, I’ve got out, and then they meet somebody else. And this same pattern repeats. They choose the same sort of person, maybe somebody who doesn’t treat them very well or whose very negligent or very judgmental. What psychotherapy would do is try and think about what is it that you’re being drawn to. And and of course, then what we do and people always make a joke of it about childhood that of course we do go back, we do try and understand a person’s history and the influences and the things that made them who they are and that maybe the stories they were told, the labels they were given about themselves, what they have unconsciously taken in from their early life, from teachers, parents, caregivers.

Gillian: And is that this sort of, I don’t know, you sort of flagged up, it’s not the word healing is not necessarily the most helpful to have on your sign outside the door. But if we’re looking backwards, it must be positive, there’s positive things that might have happened in our past that shaped who we are. But this is definitely looking for the negative. There’s a problem that’s arisen, isn’t there? 

Susanne: Yeah

Gillian: That people want to deal with.

Susanne: But you know, I don’t necessarily see it always as negative because sometimes we adopt in childhood defenses to help us through like say an example of somebody who’s had their mother died when they were nine or ten. They may then become the, the kind of, particularly if they’re the eldest child, they may then become the sort of adult in the household if they’ve got younger siblings. And so they might develop what we would call precocious. They become precociously grown up. We’ve all seen it with, with children that we often say that they’re old for their years. And what they’ve done in that situation is, is they’ve taken on a role of the mother or of the caregiver. And of course, that might work very well whilst they’re…because it might get the family through. But as they grow up, I think what happens is, is that they continue to to do that and then it might not be appropriate, you know, so it’s about becoming aware, when I was younger, I took on that role because it was really helpful. And that’s fantastic. It’s it’s not a bad thing. But of course, in adulthood it might start working against you. When you’re a person in every situation who ends up looking after everybody else and never being looked after yourself. And that, that person’s own needs will often be the last of the list. 

Gillian: And that sounds…what an incredibly painful process, perhaps in some way to go through to realise that the survival method you developed, through no fault of your own as a child, saw you fine in that situation, protected you in that situation, but now you’re a grown up. So there’s almost like uncovering some kind of layers of why, why it or why do I do that? What’s up with that? Oh my gosh, isn’t that what do I do now? Maybe it’s the question next. Once they discover this.

Susanne: Yeah, and you’re right, it is painful because of course, when you develop those behaviours and they become your identity. Another example is somebody who becomes the class clown that they maybe have some like I mean, I as a child, I had a very bad, bad stammer. And so I developed this really, you know, I was always joking around and I was always called Little Miss Sunshine, trying to compensate for my stammer. But obviously, as a child, that’s great and it was fun and it made meant I had friends and people liked being with me. But as an adult, if I carried on that behaviour all the time, it could be very inappropriate. And also it covers up the deep pain of certain situations. So it is. And you do I think most people that have psychotherapy, they get to a point in the therapy where they do feel, but who am I? Who am I without those behaviours? And it is, it is a scary time. But if they can hopefully stay with it, they can begin to play and with the help of the therapists, begin to think about other ways of being.

Gillian: It sounds…I mean, the process sounds like it’s a way of making the subconscious conscious. 

Susanne: Yes. 

Gillian: So it’s like awareness raising, isn’t it? And then some kind of putting back together. 

Susanne: Yes. Well Freud and Jung both said exactly the same quote, ‘that the purpose of psychotherapy is to make the unconscious conscious’. And, and of course Jung sort of put it in a slightly more clever way. He said that if we’re not conscious that we end up calling what happens to us fate. Whereas the more conscious we become, we then realise that we have choices and that we are choosing mostly what happens, of course there is an element of fate…

Gillian: Wow, that sound like a great… and you know, talking about healing history, that sounds like a great liberation from what’s…But what about I mean, you mentioned the tragic scenario of somebody losing a mother in early life or creating defenses to help you cope with things you’re aware of within peer groups. What about emotions like guilt and shame? How do they show up and how can psychotherapy come alongside in those situations? 

Susanne: Yes, that’s a great question, because actually I think that’s where psychotherapy can be really helpful because what psychotherapy also does is use the relationship with the therapist. So in a very active way. So often we, we often talk about in life about how we project onto people things. And I think in often in in psychotherapy that’s a very active place where projections can be witnessed. And so a client might feel very ashamed about having therapy, they may be very apologetic and therefore that gives the therapist an opportunity to really focus on that. And then that opens up a conversation where that can begin to be explored. ‘And I wondering what other circumstances have you felt shame?’ And then often a person will think, well, think about a memory where they were terribly ashamed. Maybe they wet the bed often, I mean, I worked I used to work as a bereavement therapist. I remember once working with somebody who’s in their fifties, who, actually his mother had died when she was a child. And this very highly intelligent woman told me, ‘well, of course it was my fault my mother died.’ And it turned out that as a child, her mother had told her to do her homework and she hadn’t and she’d gone out to play instead. And when she came back, her mother had passed away because she had an illness. And this, this child and you know, because a child thinks everything’s about them in a quite healthy way, this child had internalised that she had caused her mother’s death. And for over 50 years she had internalised this belief. And because she’d never verbalised it, she’d never questioned it or challenged it. And I said ‘but your mother had cancer. It wasn’t because you didn’t do your homework.’ And she just wept and wept because for all those years she’d had the shame and this secret that she had killed her mother.

Gillian: And as you’re talking there, as you’re talking, I’m just wondering, is it all about talking? You know, in what ways is the body part of this process or is it just two people in a room talking? 

Susanne: Well, that’s a very topical question because, of course, since COVID, of course, we had, particularly at the centre, we all we had to go completely onto Zoom for over a year and some of our therapists have continued. And there’s a question in psychoanalytic circles about, well, it’s not that much different, but actually, personally I think it is about the body as well. And I think the zoom, it does lose something. I very much work…I use my body to…it’s as we know from neuroscience and this is a conversation we’ve had before, you know, about the body, the body keeps across the score, that our body reacts before our mind. So if somebody was walking behind me, my body would register that, my my primitive brain is always looking out. And so I think to actually be in the room with somebody, in a bodied body in terms of what one picks up from body language, sometimes just being with somebody. And I think the feeling of another person, a bodily person being in the room is, I’m not saying that obviously Zoom can’t be helpful and sometimes we have to use Zoom. But I think the real having somebody witnessing and being with you in the room.

Gillian: What makes it work well? How much is it…okay so could AI, a robot do or is there something really important about the safety you create within the relationship to make it work?

Susanne: Interestingly, an ex-patient of mine, sent me. He’s working in the field of artificial intelligence and he sent me a sort of project he’s working on, he’s working in the software, and it was with an AI prototype of a therapist and he was, he was the client and he sent it to me and said, what do you think? I mean, it may be helpful for things like techniques for anxiety. It could be good potentially with cognitive behavioral therapy where you’re looking for solutions. But for me, psychotherapy is where it does go back to healing, that there is something healing about the presence of another to hold and contain and to hear and to bear witness as human to human. I, I don’t think AI will ever, well, I hope it never will, otherwise I’ll be out of a job. 

[LAUGHTER] 

But, but equally, I truly believe in the healing presence of another. That’s what changes. Our internal world is feeling loved. 

Gillian:I was listening to a beautiful description of the therapeutic process by Jim Finley, who’s an American psychotherapist, a former Trappist monk, a spiritual writer as well. And he talked about, if I understood him correctly, the process of therapy as going into deep water.

Susanne: Yeah. 

Gillian: And he had this lovely image of, I think, talking about the safety of the psychotherapeutic relationship of, first of all, going into the water and realising you can float in shallow water. And I love outdoor swimming, so this really spoke to me, so this…I can manage myself in the water, you float and if you get scared in shallow water it’s OK, you can put your foot down. But you know what? You can always float and and then you go into the deep water for the work needs to be done. But you remember, you can still float even in the deep water, even when you can’t touch the bottom. And I just thought, because I’ve been in psychotherapy for years, for me that really spoke to me about the nature of the relationship, and I wondered if that was something that, you know, that chimed with you in your understanding of your work.

Susanne: Yeah, I like that idea about starting in the shallows and then building confidence. And I think that’s why I mean, I think that’s why particularly at Marylebone, we haven’t gone down the route of we haven’t given up on our two years of psychotherapy, a lot of counselling centres, and because of the absolute pressure on them, have gone down to a year or one I work in, six months and or even 12 weeks and we are holding out everything for. I mean, even two years isn’t that long because we know it takes time to feel safe. And people that have had early trauma and very difficult and painful attachments, it takes a long time and to really trust that somebody is with you and can…Because as you were talking about the deep waters, I’m quite a visual person, I saw these sharks coming and actually to feel that there’s somebody there. And if, of course, if you’ve had trauma, you’re you’ve heightened anxiety that you, you notice things that you see a shadow and where somebody else might think, I wonder who that is. You might think that’s that’s somebody coming to attack me oh that’s a shark. And so to have a presence with you, to help you to begin retraining yourself, to not have that trauma response and to be able to begin to build a sense of internal safety, that I am safe, that it’s, I am okay. 

Gillian: You know, so looking at your work now, at the St Marylebone HCC, it takes, it’s in a church and I know as you, the history of the place, it was started very much as a place of holistic healing. You still are in the basement, refurbished basement of the church. In what ways does this spiritual aspects of being a human being come in to the psychotherapeutic process?

Susanne: Well, that’s as you say, the centre was started in the eighties by the, by the priest. We’ve got an NHS centre, we’ve got a counselling centre and of course the church. So, he wanted to bring the three areas together and we still do that, I mean, within the psychotherapy because we attract people from all faiths and none we, we don’t bill ourselves as a Christian counselling service. We’re a professional psychotherapy service where people can bring whatever they want. But on our website and in our literature, we do have a priest pastor that’s available for consultations. We do have a chapel down here just outside the the counselling centre where people often before their session will go and they can light a candle, sit quietly. But often people come to us even if they are religious or Christian or spiritual, have often experienced a lot of abuse and quite difficult experiences of the church. And so they need to feel it’s a safe place where they can say whatever they, they need to say, but also the fact that they often will, through the course of the psychotherapy, then maybe find their way back to some sort of spiritual connectedness.

Gillian: So talking about the services that are offered within St Marylebone, in psychotherapy with a church and people coming to you with difficult stories maybe around abuse, we hear the word trauma so often, all around us, but particularly around the church. But first of all, is that word trauma overused in your, or are we just more aware of the, all the different ways that we can be impacted by our past and what happens to us?

Susanne: I have to say that I’m beginning to feel that it’s being overused. I think it’s been brilliant that the media has started talking about mental health and giving permission for people. But as usual with these things, they tend to go a bit too far so that everybody starts talking about their trauma or their mental health without maybe really understanding the nuances of that. And we talk about trauma. There’s like a trauma with a capital T, and that’s trauma is something like sexual abuse, physical abuse, car crashes, things that are really hard hitting, 911 was a terrible trauma for so, so many people. But I think what psychotherapy tries to do is try to meet the person where they’re at, but then to help them to modify. So some people might sort of be over egging, they might have got to the point where they, they’re sort of…I can’t think of the right word, but they are almost a bit hypochondriacal about what’s happened in their life. And sometimes we have to bring a bit more of a normalising experience. I think I find a lot when I do assessments for people that I tried to help people to kind of think about things and to normalise it because and for other people, what’s interesting, people with a lot of trauma often normalise the trauma. So you get these two ends of people that have had terrible traumas who say, well, it wasn’t that bad, I had quite a messy childhood. 

Gillian: Yeah. 

Susanne: And then when they start telling stories. 

Gillian: Horrifying stories, yeah. 

Susanne: And equally there are people that start telling you about how terrible their life has been and you think, hang on a minute. And for them, it’s helping them maybe to find and discover some some of the good that they have experienced.

Gillian: That’sso interesting, Susie, that normalising voice. I’ve got a very clear kind of that use of language, trauma with a big T  – things like 911, you’ve already mentioned the things, but at the moment we’re all still getting over, I would say big T Covid. 

Susanne: Yes.

Gillian: Big T for us.

Susanne: I think that’s…

Gillian: Gaza and actually I’m also wondering about the uncertainty caused by the instability in Europe right now. There’s a trigger there. What helps in the psychotherapy process? People come with big T trauma perhaps, I mean you say you see a lot of people I know that are related that work somehow around the church or in the church or come out the other end of church with big T trauma. What helps them in the process? 

Susanne: Well, I think that it’s not, I think psychotherapy is really helpful, but I don’t think only psychotherapy. I think that often, you know, I know that everybody’s now reading this bestseller, Bessel Van de Kolk, you know, ‘The body keeps score’. But I mean, I think it has been such a helpful book because it is accessible to the layman. You know, you don’t have to be a psychotherapist to understand it. But I think what he really draws attention to is how trauma gets held in the body. And so I think that a holistic approach where, I mean, and I also don’t think psychotherapists can be all things to all people. So I don’t start doing body work with people because I’m not trained in that. But I might say to a client about maybe getting a bit of help, like through yoga or through massage or a bit of body work or just looking at one’s diet. Because often then people I mean, I think suddenly we don’t think about that when people have have got trauma or have been, who are disregulated we call it, you know, that haven’t been able to develop a good internal sense of self care. And we call that being disregulated, that to simple things like looking at their diet and how they’re love to be very drawn to eating a lot of sugary and fatty things because it’s comforting and and it’s rewarding. And they, you know, they may stay up really late, I’ve got clients. I had one patient once who talked about how he had terrible nightmares and then after a few months of working together, he started telling me that and him and his wife loved to watch horror movies… And I said to him, ‘do you think there could be a link?’ And he’d normalised and he’d had quite a lot of horror and terror in his childhood, and he’d sort of normalised it by almost being, overcoming it by exposure therapy, watching all of these terrible films. But actually, as I said, well, why don’t we do an experiment? Why not not watch them for a while? And lo and behold, after a while, you know, the nightmares decreased. So I think having a holistic thing about healing is not just in the mind or the body. It’s all three. I think the guy who started HCC was onto something really before, ahead of his time really.

Gillian: Yeah. So it’s a string to your bow or whatever metaphor. One of the, a suite of things that we can engage with the particular 

Susanne: Exactly.

Gillian: That can help us. I mean we’re whole people aren’t we. So it’s, it’d be a bit weird if…I mean we’re not robots are we. You know, fix that, fix that loose bolt. 

Susanne: Yes. 

Gillian: All these different approaches that we can take with people. So, Susie, anyone listening today, I wonder what one thing you might offer them from the world of psychotherapy and faith that would help them in their thinking about who they are and their history?

Susanne: Well, I think and maybe here I am going to bridge the gap between psychotherapy and spirituality or faith, because I think the thing that I have to say that’s been most liberating to me and actually it does come from the Bible, from the New Testament. And I hope I’m allowed…I’m sure. 

Gillian: Yes, definitely. This is a place.

Susanne:  Good good, because it’s something that I really…it helped me so much which is…and it’s after Jesus has risen from the dead and he’s talking to Peter and he’s giving him all of this sort of pep talk, really. And then Peter says, ‘Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what about this man?’ And he points, I think they think it’s to John and Jesus says to him, ‘What’s that to you?’ And there’s something about when I get a bit exercised by things, I remind myself if I get busy, I call it getting busy. I often say to my clients or patients, ‘You’re getting busy. You’re getting busy with what I should do, what somebody else is doing, what do you need?’ And so it’s to stay centred on what you need for your health, for your growth, not to apologise, not to feel ashamed, but to to actually keep thinking, ‘What do I need? What’s my, what’s my path?’ And not to get distracted by what everybody else is doing.

Gillian: Waow, that’s so beautiful. And you know what? You just you’ve just reminded me of my therapist, because my thing, I don’t I…if I’m overwhelmed or really doing too much, is I forget to look after my own needs. 

Susanne: Yeah. Yeah.

Gillian: To quite an extreme level actually. And anyway, this is not a therapy session, we’re not going to get into it. But my therapist has got a beautiful Southern Irish – I’m not going to do an impression of her, but she goes, ‘But what about Gillian?’ 

Susanne: Yes. 

Gillian: So there’s a theology around that we can talk about, but actually the long and the short of it is if you don’t look after yourself, you’re no use to anyone. 

Susanne: Exactly. And I think you’re right in the Christian tradition, I think we’re so used to putting other people’s needs first. But if we look after ourselves, then we are free and available to look after somebody else and we won’t burn out. We sometimes get that so badly wrong. I work with a lot of Christian leaders who come to me for therapy, and that’s and it’s often when things have gone wrong and they’ve really made a mess, you see. And actually we can usually trace it back to the fact that they neglected their own needs and they were vulnerable and they ended up, because of their vulnerability and exhaustion, that they didn’t have the strength to resist temptation or fall into difficult behaviours. And, you know, and I think so the more we can resource ourselves and give permission to other people to resource themselves as well, then I think that we could hopefully grow into a healthier church and a safer church and a safer, safer world.

Gillian: Suzanne, thank you so much for coming to chat to me in the GoHealth podcast. It’s been really nourishing. I don’t know if you can hear, but I’ve got a huge smile on my face, it’s lovely connecting with your world. And we’re going to connect up the conversation over in the GoHealth community throughout the Healing History series and where we take it through the series. The thread that runs through it is our own Wendy Lloyd, who’s helping us do some journaling, spiritual journaling around what we hear and our own histories. And anyone who joins a GoHealth Community during the Healing History, so during May, June and July in 2024 will receive a free, beautifully bespoke journal. So hop over onto the webpage to find out how you can get your journal and join in.

Please hit like and share to let others know about the work of the GoHealth community and the podcast, because together we’re seeking to help people flourish in the world and to be healing presences wherever they are. And the more people that hear, the more people we can engage with. A huge thank you to our producer, Rosie Dawson, and to Wendy Lloyd from the GoHealth team for all her work in the series and this podcast.

And of course, a huge thank you, Susanne, to you for giving us your time today. Thank you. 

Susanne: You’re very welcome. It’s been an absolute pleasure.