 We demystify what goes on behind the therapy room door. Join us on this voyage of discovery and co-creative conversations. This is The Therapy Show behind closed doors podcast with Bob Cook and Jackie Jones. Welcome to this first ever episode of The Therapy Show behind closed doors with myself Jackie Jones and the wonderful Bob Cook. And in this first episode, amongst other things, we have a plan but we might veer off it because that's one of the wonderful things about Bob is he's full of words of wisdom and we might go off on a tangent. But our plan is to look at what brings people to therapy. Yeah, well, what a wonderful question. So over to you. Have you got some thoughts? I've got many, perhaps I'll start, actually Jackie. I've been a therapist for, well, I've just stopped working clinically 38 years. Wow. But before that, I was in therapy myself. Is that what brought you to being a therapist? What brought me to being a therapist was my own traumatic history. So what brought me to therapy is quite, I think it's an actual twist of fate. So I'm sure that's how I'm going to answer this for you. I think people come to therapy usually by twists of fate. I can give you many other reasons, but I think that's one of the reasons that they are comfortable because the discomfort becomes so high that they need somehow and the motivation is so high to have a less painful life. They come or enter into therapy. Now, they might get there by lots of different routes. In mine, I got there because somebody came to me and said, would you like, you know, a therapist came up to me and said, something like, do you want therapy? Basically, he wasn't quite like that. And then I went into therapy to deal with all my own traumas. So what brings the therapy? I suppose in a nutshell, my case, twist of fate perhaps, but basically because I needed or attempted to want to decrease the pain in my life is one of the reasons and perhaps the major reason why people want to come. There may have different motivations in terms they want to resolve things a second time round or getting a different outcome makes a lot of sense to me. But I think the external reason is they want to take away discomfort of living and get to have a survive in a different way. See, I think I'm going to really enjoy doing these podcasts with you, Bob, because I think I'm going to get to see not just behind the therapy room door, but behind the door of Bob Cook. I got into therapy or being a therapist through fostering. I was a foster carer and I was seeing second and third generation kids in care. And I wanted to do more than just meet their basic needs. That's what got me into it. And, you know, depending on where people are listening to this, I'm not sure whether the UK is one of the only if not one of the few countries were in order to train as a psychotherapist, you have to have your own personal therapy as part of that training. So I went into therapy thinking there was nothing wrong with me. Little did I know when I got into year two and three of my own personal therapy that there was a lot of baggage going on in there. Yeah, I mean, you're correct. The UK, especially the UK CP, the major regulating body for psychopurpose in the United Kingdom, demands that you have your own therapy if you train to be a psychotherapist at least once a week. Yeah. Psychoanalyst be a four times a week. Wow. Psychotherapy is one hour a week for four years. And many people, I think, do come in from the position you've just said, which was, well, it'd be nice to learn a little bit about myself as part of being on the course. And therefore let's go ahead. Yes, why not? Why not? It's kind of like addiction, you know, people that work with other people with addictions, they've usually had an addiction themselves and recovered and then kind of it's paying it forward somehow. So I think there's a lot of therapists that have had their own personal trauma and gone through the process and then trained to pass that on to other people. I would say I don't know if there's any research done on this. I bet there is somewhere, but I know it'd be a high number. I bet it's in this sort of 80%, 75, 80% of people who train to be psychotherapists come to heal their own pain or stroke and help cure other people from not having the same journey as themselves. What's your thoughts around the stigma of mental health? If you've been doing this job now for 38 years, have you seen a shift in people's mindset around therapy? Yes, it's become more popularized in the last decade. When I started having my own therapy in 84, it was far more hidden. In 2021, it's far more accessible. It's more popular. Mental health is talked about in ways that was never talked about 40 years ago. There's a long way to go in many different areas of mental health. When a mental health crisis, I think, men still don't come to therapy for many different reasons. One of them is because they've been programmed not to come to therapy. I was only reading yesterday and I was very surprised about it, that the highest rate of suicide in this country is from men under 50, stored only high. Yes, it's talked about more. It's more acceptable, I think. It's more popularized. Conversations on the radio, television, media, many more of them. Does that mean that there is services or resources made available to help the stem of the mental health tsunami? I don't think so. No, I 100% agree with you there. The amount of charities that are being set up to try and offer low cost therapy to people is phenomenal. Because my son's ex-military, I got connected with a charity that gives as much as they can to veterans that are suffering from PTSD and that has a knock-on effect for relationships, breakdowns, all sorts of things. One of the few in the north-east, I think, that can actually offer free therapy to veterans. But they fundraise so hard to be able to keep the doors open. Absolutely. And why do people come to therapy? So for people like that, they come to therapy, people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, having flashbacks, their lives are, how can I explain it, are really, really challenging because they're replaying and replaying over and over and going and knocking out the trauma. I think if somebody came through the door with that profile, they'd probably say to you, something like, I've come to therapy because if I don't come to therapy, my life isn't worth living. Yeah. Now, the step to how they have the courage to come to therapy is another story. The reason is to save their life. Yeah. Ultimately. Yeah. Now, no disrespect to you at all, what I want to say now, but that's a very different motivation to people that have to do as a requirement for psychotherapy training. Oh, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't mean you haven't got your own pain, it's that the motivation, I think, is different. Yeah. And again, looking at what brings people to therapy, for me, I often talk to clients who, they say, there's people worse off than me. I haven't been through a massive trauma. I don't know whether I should be sitting here talking to you. And it's kind of like low-level, continuous, systematic things happening in our early childhood can be just as detrimental to a big trauma. It's, you know, I don't know whether there's a sliding scale on who should be entitled to therapy and who shouldn't because we're all unique and what happens in our life impacts us all completely differently. Well, I used to think for many years that one dosage of poison is exactly the same outcome. In other words, in other words, the people's trauma, however deep it is, we're all unique. Yeah. However, well, that I still believe, by the way, however, I trained in integrative psychotherapy and I went on long psychotherapy marathons, well, five days, 10 days of psychotherapy where people bring their atomous soul spirit and devastation to. And I remember listening to somebody who was taken off the streets of Lebanon tortured and discarded for dead. Wow. I realized that some traumas actually are more devastating than others. Even though I understand that everybody has their own pain. Yeah. So in some ways, how do I hold those two, two, two contradictions? But I do believe them. Yeah. And I think as therapists, we're all unique as well. We, you know, yes, we kind of hold the same basic, you know, thoughts and everything around it. Like we were talking about earlier on the DSM-5, you know, that we've got a structure, but I think we all come to it from our own uniqueness as well. We've got our own baggage, our own upbringing, things that we've experienced, you know, and that plays a part in the therapy room. Yes, without a doubt. People's motivations to come, some motivations to ask the, you know, I picked, you know, I got an email from somebody the other day because I do the assessments of the psychotherapy centre, the Manchester Institute psychotherapy centre. And she said, it's taken me three months to type this email. Will you help me? So the motivation is the key here and we are uniquely different. Yeah. You know, how can I say this about the coverage to eventually get to a psychotherapy from that position is immense. And I think for all of us, we have to have courage to open ourselves up. Some people might say, well, it's not courage, it's just simply that I had to because I needed to survive. And if I didn't come to therapy and talk about it, I wouldn't be on this planet. I think that's a minimisation of their courage. Yeah, 100%. And there's something about courage and vulnerability as well. And you can't have one without the other. I think it was Benet Brown that did a brilliant TED talk around it that in order to be vulnerable, we have to be courageous. And it is, you know, in a therapy room, we're sharing deep and dark stuff in there. We need to be courageous in order to process that event. Yeah, we have to be certainly extraordinary sense of courage and bravery to bear our vulnerabilities. And oddly enough, the most traumatised people never see it that way. In my experience, they see it usually. As it's the only thing they could do to survive and have a different outcome, and they minimise the courageousness of that. But I'm with you on that one. Yeah. And the other thing, I'm not sure. Sometimes the universe throws me clients at the most inopportune moment. I can be going through something in my own personal life, and suddenly I seem to get a lot of people through the door that are experiencing similar things to what I am at that time. I don't know whether that's something to do with a bigger force than me or not. But I think it's true. And I also think something to do with the filter of the therapist. Yeah. So yes, I think I get that. Yeah. And also, how the therapist will filter out at that particular moment in time. I was thinking about as a subject about what brings the people to therapy. We have a policy to our institute, that if somebody phones for someone else, we will say we don't accept third party in any words, people have to phone themselves to take responsibility. That's an interesting one. You just read my mind because that was on my list of questions. What was in your list? Just have you ever had, you know, a telephone conversation with somebody saying, will you see my wife or will you see my son? And the first thing I say is, I would love to, if you can get them to give me a ring or to text me or message me, then I will be happy to talk to them. Yeah. And it's about responsibility. Because otherwise, how do we know that the other person needs or wants to come to therapy in the first place? Yeah. Yeah. And you've got to be on board with it. It's like when, you know, and again, you touched on, you know, the male of the species. I've had, you know, a gentleman sat in my therapy room that said, well, I'm only here because my wife told me I had to come. Right. There's no motivation, though, if they're coming just because they've been told that they need to do it. No, people have to be motivated to change. Yeah. Otherwise, they are setting themselves up to fail. Yeah. And in fact, I suspect repeat history. I certainly don't want to do part of that. No, I've also felt at times as well as a therapist that I've kind of been hoodwinked into, I don't know, being involved in something without my knowing that, you know, they said that they would stay in a relationship with me if I went to therapy. And it's kind of like, well, that's not going to help either one of us in that situation. You know, it's interesting, like you say, the paths that people take that bring them in into therapy. Oh, that's right. But as I said earlier on, besides the motivation, and there's different forces behind motivation, Jackie, I think. But one of them is, I think, is to have a second chance. And what I mean by that is, the desire unconsciously to get a different outcome. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think part of it is that we replay the same behavior, expecting a different outcome. You know, if we've had a bad relationship, we're going to another one, and it ends up the same. And then we kind of question, why has this happened to me again? You know, that's a lot of the people that I see. I can't understand why I've had another relationship breakdown, or I can't understand why my boss is treating me the same way that my boss two years ago was treating me. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So motivation is key. And I think uniquely key as well. Yeah. Yeah. What other questions have you got? You said you had a list of questions on your One of the other things that I think is quite interesting to say in age, you know, in 2021, is I have been criticised in the past, in the recent past for charging for my services. You've been criticised for charging for your services. Yes. And if I was a nice person, I wouldn't be charging people to come, you know, people, maybe NHS workers that have, you know, been through horrendous things. And I should be doing that for free. What are your thoughts around that? This is a topic about why people come to therapy. And on the back of that, well, you know, besides, besides we have to make an economic living, which is the practical answer to you. The other side is that if it's free, if therapy is free, then in a way, how do you have value on that? It's like, I think that people need to take some responsibility and value of putting something back. Otherwise, I'm not sure how we can judge the motivation. Yeah. And the investment in it as well, I think, you know, and there's an awful, I know you at the Manchester Institute of Psychotherapy do a low cost clinic. Yeah. You know, I myself have low cost clients, you know, for people that can't afford, so it's not that we don't do anything to facilitate it, but there has to be an investment and a motivation from the other person. Yeah. Otherwise, they'll sabotage any chance of success. I think, you know, they will enact history in some way. Yeah. And those are psychological reasons on a practical level, purpose up to make a living like anyone else. You know, it's like how in which we value our time is also a model in terms of self-esteem for the other anyway. Yeah. But no, any time I have done therapy free, it actually hasn't worked. And what I mean by worked is that the therapist or the sorry, the client who comes quite often just drifts away. Yeah. Yeah. Because there's no investment. Like you said, there's no motivation. It's, yeah. So, you know, I definitely need to be some, you know, mutual exchange. And I don't mean I'll come and do your garden. You will wash my car. I think, you know, there needs to be a proper medium of exchange, which represents level of motivation and commitment and investment. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. And it's not that we don't want to help everybody, but one, it's an impossibility. And two, like you say, you know, we've got mortgages to pay on children to, to bring up and everything else. So yeah, it's, it's, it's an interesting world being a therapist. I sometimes refer to it as like the matrix. When you're in a room with another person, there is so many levels of stuff that's going on. You know, there's not just me in that room. There's not just me here with you there now. I've got my different ego states. I've got my life scripts. I've got all my stuff in this room with us as well. And it's, you know, sometimes people think that therapy is just sitting and talking, which is. Yeah. It is. I was watching panorama yesterday all the day before. And they were talking about, is it Martin Beshear? Anyway, yes, the Diana interviews. Martin Beshear. Yeah. Yeah. And that interview, I watched myself in 1992. And in it is the famous words by Princess Diana. When I was looking back at this interview was on panorama. I was remembering myself watching the same real life interview all those years ago, when she said those famous phrase, which is, there's three of us in the relationship. Yeah. So in the therapy client relationship, there's certainly more than two. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's, we have to commit to the client in that therapy hour of 50 minutes as well, that we're not just passing the time of day, that, you know, the conversations and the interactions and things that go on in that room are for a reason. Hopefully we make it look relaxed and comfortable. But there's an awful lot of thought processes, an awful lot of observations and responses that go on in that 50 minute session. Yeah. So human encounter between two people with this huge levels of complexities. Yeah. And it's not an easy relationship to describe to people. When somebody says, oh, what, somebody said to me, have you enjoyed, did you, have you enjoyed your career as a therapist, Bob? I've said, yeah, I enjoyed it mentally. And I got a lot of passion, a lot of pleasure pleasure out of my career. Oh, well, what did you do then, Bob? And it's a very thing. It's a very, very hard process describing the relationship between the therapist and the client and what goes on in it. Yeah. Yeah. You can't put it into a succinct sentence or anything. It's, it, I kind of relate it to driving a car. When you're learning how to drive a car, there's so many things. And I can remember when I was going through my training, one of the things was that why do we never talk about things that have a happy ending? And why, why do, you know, after a weekend of training, I was exhausted. And it was pointed out to me, probably by you or somebody else in the Institute that people don't come to therapy when everything's going okay. So it's pointless us telling you about the happy endings and all the good stuff that happens in life, because it's not going to be of use to you when you're a practicing psychotherapist. But I can remember thinking, geez, this is, this is heavy stuff going on here. Well, that's true. That bit is true. And I was walking with a friend of mine who's a well-known therapist, perhaps not as long as me. But he was saying, you know, Bob, you're retiring, you retired now, you're retiring soon. And he was musing about the effects it has on the 70 year old therapist after a 38 year career in terms of the body and the spirit and the amount of energy that you take on from the other person and the amount of disturbance and the amount of trauma and the amount of anxiety that you actually contain. And he was saying, well, you know, it has to be a cost to that, Bob, for you and for me. And I don't know if the public think about that. No. Yeah, it is. It's interesting. Yeah, I put a quote up on my social media that was something about that, that, you know, were there to support and to help and, you know, to offer, you know, therapy to people. But we've been through the pandemic too. We felt anxious. We felt overwhelmed. We've been told to stay at home and, you know, lost family members to it. But we're still there doing our job throughout it all. And it is difficult sometimes. And sometimes, for me, clients really do impact on me. It takes me a while after some sessions to ground myself and to get back into my life after I've had quite a heavy session with somebody. Self care is really important to the therapist. Well, that's another podcast. But how do you think we've got on? I think we've got on sort of okay about answering that question about what people brings people to psychotherapy. But it's really interesting news and news about in the end of the day. Thank God they've come 100% because I would have been out of a job. But also, also, I hope I've really impacted people lives. Well, it's a lovely way to end this podcast. And after 38 years of doing it, I am sure you have helped hundreds of thousands of people along the way. Well, thank you. So we will be back next week for another episode of the therapy show Behind Closed Doors. Yeah. And it's about how we choose our therapists. Yes. And the assessment process involved in that, if there is one. If there is one, very interesting. That's a cliff anger. I shall see you next week. Bye bye. Take care.