Hello, you gorgeous people and welcome to another Therapy Natters episode, the Mental Health and Psychotherapy Podcast that hopefully opens your eyes, opens your mind, but closes your fridge. Cuz if you left that open, your milk's gonna go off. So close that first and then open your mind to see what we might have for you today. Hello Fiona. Welcome to another episode. How are you?
Morning Richard. I'm absolutely fine. Thank you. It's lovely, sunny day.
It is, yes. It's April. Finally, when this comes out, it's gonna be uh, almost St. George's Day, which is great. I mean, slaying dragons and all that. That's, that's something to be proud about,
Always fun.
For a Wednesday, something to do. Keeps you off the streets. Not very compassionate though. He says shoehorning the topic of the episode into
That's not your most subtle.
no, that was quite a house brick subtle, wasn't it really? Absolutely. But we've got another guest to talk to today. We've got William, welcome William. I haven't spoken to you for months, I don't think. We've not had a C P D event. We need to do some, some group C P D events.
Yeah, it's been a long time.
We should do a few more of those. Oh, sorry. Fiona, you normally introduce our guests, don't
That's okay. I can, I, you haven't given his surname, so I can do that and say a little bit more about him. Yes. This is William Davies who lives and works in London, but online. So wherever you are in the world, within reason he is available. His areas of specialism include mindfulness, acceptance and commitment therapy, and what we're going to talk about today. Compassion?
Welcome, William.
Thank you. Thanks for inviting me on.
Nice. to have you here.
Yeah, I was thinking about you. I know I think about you a lot William. Um, It's lovely to think about you. But I was thinking about you in particular cuz a patron emailed in a couple of weeks ago. Patron Rachel. Hello Rachel. Long time no speak. We used to chat all the time and Rachel said, I love how you dip into examples of evolutionary psychology on the podcast. If there's more to explore in how we evolved to become who we are, I'd love to hear it. Rachel.
Well thank you for listening Rachel. I'm glad you're enjoying our little Natters once a week. And yeah, evolutionary psychology does crop up a lot nowadays. In the last well, actually, was the basics of Freud's stuff evolutionary psychology. Maybe he thought a lot of drives, cuz it was, it was all about Darwinism in those days, wasn't it? I think Freud was into evolution as a theory in natural selection and stuff. And was Freud interested in well it was all the drives to reproduce?
Because obviously Freud was very heavily interested in sex. He seems to talk and think about it a lot, but I mean, he needed to speak to his therapist about that by the sound of things. I'm going off on on, on the wrong path there.
Sex and death.
Sex and death. And that's, that's Freud in a nutshell. Is it? Wow.
I think Freud might have been influenced by uh, evolution, but I'm not sure about evolutionary psychology. I think that's probably evolved, if I can say that more recently. But it, it does, it's a big part of compassion focus therapy. In fact, psychological education is a big part of it. So, but it might, maybe we should actually explain what we mean by compassion. Because in my experience, a lot of people don't really get it, and it's very understandable why.
About 10 years ago I was writing something about compassion and I thought, what'd people actually get if they looked it up in the dictionary? So I did, and the dictionary just said, pity. Just one word. Yeah. And really pity is almost a bit of an opposite in many ways. So it's quite easy to see why people would get that. And in, in psychotherapy, probably what we're looking at more than anything else is self-compassion.
And if you conflate those two words and you think of self-pity, you know, if you are talking to a client about compassion and they're hearing pity and self pity, it's just never gonna work. So, It's good to maybe think about what we mean by it. And I like to give a definition really that it's made up of, of two things. So it's actually a little bit more complicated than a lot of concepts.
We've got a sensitivity to, and openness to suffering and a willingness and, and if you like, an action, doing something about it, reducing the suffering or the causes of suffering. And if you think of it that way, it's it's more of a behaviour than a feeling. And from the psychotherapy perspective, that's, that's really useful cuz we're actually thinking about, and looking at and working with behavior and behavioral change, not just feeling states.
But as we know from so many studies and experiences over the years, if somebody's gonna act in a particular way, Their behavior is gonna be influence the way that they feel. If they act compassionate towards themselves, they're going to feel more compassionate towards themselves. That's gonna raise their self-esteem as they begin to feel that they deserve. To be thought of kindly, I guess, for want of a better phrase, is kind the right word for it.
To me, compassion and kindness were associated to me, but of course, self-compassion is, well, it's still being kind. It's just being kind to
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it, it's a great thing you mentioned there that the um, the idea of self-esteem, because if you really want to increase self-esteem, the things to work on are actually self-acceptance and self-compassion. it's far more effective. If you treat, really try to just manipulate self-esteem. It often doesn't turn out very well. But if you're working on self-compassion and self-acceptance it, it's far more effective.
But in that definition, if we're talking about changing, you know, a behavior that sort of changes, reduces or eliminates suffering or its causes. Inherent in that really is this idea of wisdom. It's not really in the definition, but it's there. And this is quite important in terms of psychotherapy. If you think of what brings people to therapy, probably more than anything else, it's experiential avoidance.
So they're either trying to avoid the experience they're having by distraction or overt avoidance by not doing things, not asking for a pay rise, or not speaking in public or not getting on a plane, whatever it is, or thinking strategies like rumination or over worrying substance abuse. Self-harm. All these kinds of things are ways of avoiding experience. So if you take the example maybe of addiction is perhaps the most obvious.
If someone is addicted to a substance and they're craving it, you might think it would be compassionate to give them the substance cuz it reduces their suffering. But that's not really wise in the long-term. You are reinforcing and possibly deepening the addiction. So the compassionate behavior is really tackling the cause of the addiction. Okay. So that, that sense of wisdom is, is actually quite important in that definition.
So the kind of clients that would think I could do with a therapist who understands and maybe even specializes in compassion focused therapy could be, I mean, the way you talk there, it could be anybody
Well, pretty much, I mean, it's a funny thing if you think about it, the historical view of psychotherapy was probably, at least since Carl Rogers, is that the therapist is providing compassion. The unconditional positive regard, the acceptance, these things in the therapy room. But if you can cultivate greater self-compassion in the client, they become another source of compassion in the therapy room really and outside.
Hmm. So we are helping them to be their own therapist almost, or at least the part of the therapist that is creating a positive relationship. I mean, one of the reasons why therapy helps is that you create a relationship with somebody who is very interested in you and compassionate towards you. What compassion focused therapy is doing then is, is creating that for themselves.
A part of them will be somebody who does have compassion and kindness and acceptance in who they are and the problems that they've got.
Yeah. I mean, they're making a difference to their lives themselves in a way. If you like to think about self-compassion as a simple construction, you know, it's, it's important to know what we mean by the word compassion, but it's a bit long-winded. It's a bit complex. Self-compassion is really a very simple concept. It's acknowledging our suffering and responding to it with kindness. That really sums it up.
And is it just not acknowledging our suffering, but acknowledging our humanity and our failings and the fact that we may strive or sometimes don't, et cetera, et cetera. include that?
Yeah. Yeah. if you like, there's um, there's a really nice little intervention by Kristen Neff, who's one of the researchers in America that's published a lot on the subject. And she came up with a very simple little intervention called a self-compassion break. It kind of needs to be a bit informed by an understanding of, of compassion and maybe practicing things, but the structure of it's quite interesting because it's just three stages.
The first involves acknowledging this is a difficult moment. So it can be just, you know, I'm struggling here. This is difficult, this is tough. just acknowledging it rather than denying it or avoiding it. Connecting with common humanity, recognizing that everybody has these difficult moments in their life. Everybody struggles at times. So that's the common humanity. That's hugely de shaming as is the evolutionary psychology as part of psychoeducation.
And then the final step is acting with kindness. Which is doing something that makes a difference in that moment, whether it's a small thing like just making a cup of tea or going for a walk or calling a friend or possibly doing something much bigger, but taking some kind of kind action so you make a difference. So it's those three simple steps and that captures a lot of what's going on when we're talking about self compass.
Are there any crossovers with ACT acceptance and commitment therapy?
I think hugely, I mean, I, I, I worked with ACT probably, well, definitely before I, I trained in compassion focused therapy. There's a, there's a massive link. In fact, the origin of CFT is quite interesting. It was developed by Professor Paul Gilbert who worked with C B T. So ACT and CBT are essentially both behavioral therapies. C B T being a sort of an earlier like Mark two version. And ACT brings in mindfulness really to this.
So it has some quite big departures from traditional C B T. But he was working with people and you know, with C B T work, you tend to sort of replace thoughts and challenge thoughts and dispute thoughts and these kinds of things. And he noticed that sometimes when he was working with clients, this didn't work as well as expected. And he had the insight to ask a client about the positive thoughts, how they heard the positive thoughts in their mind.
So they got these kind of critical negative thoughts going on, and they, they wake up in the morning, they hear that, and they replace it with a positive thought. But when he said, how do you hear it, they, they sort of just shouted out in an aggressive way full of swear words. So even though it was a positive thought, it was expressed in a really aggressive way in their mind.
And that gave him the real insight that you don't just change the thought, you have to change the way it's being expressed. It needs to be expressed compassionately, not aggressively. So
Yeah, it, it's the meaning behind it.
Yeah, it's, it's the way it's spoken, you know, what you hear in your mind has the same effect on you as what you would hear with your ears, right? Anything that you imagine, you know, if you imagine, Well, let's say you are, you're hungry. It's a good example. If you're hungry and you smell your favorite food. What happens to your body? Is yet you salivate. Right?
you salivate? Yeah.
So if you're, if you're hungry and you think about your favorite meal, what happens? You salivate.
Ah, yes.
So what's going on in the body is influenced just as much by what's going on in our mind. As in the outside, there isn't really a difference. So therefore, if you're hearing a self-critical voice all day long pounding away at you, it's just like having someone walking behind you, shouting at you all day long. It triggers your threat system. So it's having the same impact on you. So that's the insight really, that he had there.
And he realized that one of the things you need to do in therapy is cultivate compassion when it's needed and self-compassion. And that was the, the origin of compassion focused therapy.
one thing with the internal critical voice that I, I've certainly found is that an awful lot of clients don't actually realize. They haven't identified it as such and have not put two and two together to realize that that voice is much harsher towards themselves than they would be to anybody else. So that leads to an awareness, and as we often said, you need the awareness before you can change it.
Yeah, absolutely. And that links in really to mindfulness. I often actually start out with compassion, work with mindfulness, rather than directly working on compassion. I think that the construct of mindfulness is quite hard to tease apart from. Compassion and self-compassion. They're so interrelated with each other. And that's something you see in the research now as well, some of the research into mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which is for relapsed and recurrence of depression.
Having established that it works and it works better than maintenance antidepressants. They were looking at the mechanisms of change, and some of the research has shown that the benefits that people get from the course are mediated equally by increases in mindfulness and increases in self-compassion. Even though it doesn't really have a compassion element. It's a mindfulness based course.
But I guess that's because taking some time to be mindful, learning about mindfulness has a side effect of the awareness of how you're feeling right now.
For sure. Yeah. Yeah. If you think about what we mean when we're talking about mindfulness, and obviously there are many, many different ways of defining it, but you could express it as an intentional or intentionally paying attention to your experience in the present moment with openness, curiosity, and kindness. That's a fairly, good kind of shorthand definition. And if you look at what's happening there, you're, you're paying attention with openness that's being open to suffering. Okay?
That's part of the, the definition of compassion, curiosity. If you're curious about something, then you are engaged with it and in a positive way. It's not like a cold, hard staring at something. There's a kind of positive quality to that and the kindness, as well of course, links in with compassion. So, the two things really inform each other. You can't really develop self-compassion, I would say, without developing mindfulness. Comes along with a ride and the same the other way around too.
So, The reason this popped into my mind when patron, Rachel, hello again Rachel, emailed in was because she was in, she's very interested in evolutionary psychology, and the reason you, and, and, and compassion therapy popped into my mind is just, is, is because of being compassionate towards others.
But of course what we are looking at is being compassionate with ourselves and, and that that, and that's the the tribal thing that goes back a million years, that the species that looks after each other is the one that's going to survive in the wild better than those that don't.
and it's a really important point that we are naturally, it's a kind of an innate quality that we're altruistic and, and kind and supportive of people within our tribe. I mean, it's, it's a very tribal thing in that way, but it's also within the family. You know, human baby just doesn't survive. If you look at an Antelope being born, it just gets up on its legs and can walk around immediately.
Human babies spend a long, long time completely dependent on their parents, and I think personally that they're not that much fun to be around, babies. Or parents as well sometimes.
they don't, they don't join in much, do They They don't
a lot of crying and stuff, so, you know, it takes quite a lot
quite demanding as well. They, they're quite entitled,
Yeah.
lovely. They're great,
It can take quite a
things to be around.
and uh, and kindness and supportiveness, those, those kinds of things, that sort of sense of being connected to another human and, and helping and supporting and nurturing them. It goes right back into parenting, of course. It's the survival of the species, but equally, if a hunter-gatherer was cast out from their, their group, their tribe, They wouldn't survive for long. So we, even as adults, we're actually really dependent in, in evolutionary terms.
Yeah, I was thinking the other week actually, I dunno how it came into a podcast episode and I can't remember where it was. Lots of other species will just kick somebody out of the nest and go, you're done. You might as well just go. And I expect we probably did elements of that. We, we know we're going back probably 3 million years more than just the homo heidelbergensis. But, you know, going back even further than that, we probably did for the greater good.
Get rid of the, that weak link and maybe our, our ancestral brain is fearing that that could happen.
Well, it used to be a, a form of punishment, didn't it? Think of Romeo and Juliet. Exile was the punishment for Romeo, for killing whoever it was he killed. Can't remember. And the Roman Catholic Church still uses it, excommunication. If you do something wrong, you are outta the tribe.
Hmm. People were banished.
just being, cut off from, from dialogue, you know, being sent to Coventry as it's called. You know, that's painful for us. So disconnection is actually painful.
I have several times in these episodes, William. I've mentioned my learning Bridge process, and I think this is probably relevant. This weekend I was at a course in London and it was far beyond the level I've got to. And I had intended to make sure I was at the right level or closer, but circumstances meant that I was very much outta my depth. But the people I was with were compassionate and I was compassionate to myself. If that hadn't happened, I would've been outta that tribe.
For those who don't know in bridge a lot of the time, it's pretty tough and quite cutthroat in the competitions. But clubs will have what they call gentle bridge sessions. Which are deliberately designed to be compassionate. They don't use that term, they use gentle, but that's what it means.
Well I think what, what you highlight there is the reason you learned something this weekend. Wasn't just because they were compassionate to you. It was you were compassionate to you. Cause it's one thing for somebody else to say, that's fine. But if you keep telling yourself, this isn't fine, I'm not fine, I'm useless. I can't do this, I don't even deserve to be part of this group, then you are not gonna learn a thing. Oh, well what you are gonna learn is how to hate yourself.
Which I, I wonder if that's a lot of
both both sides were important. Both sides of that equation were necessary. I dunno if I did learn anything. We'll have to see.
well, well, that, that, yeah, we have to play bridge and find out.
Yes.
So I think it's fair to say that a lot of the people that do seek out counseling and psychotherapy, there's a fair chance that most of those aren't good at being compassionate towards themselves.
Oh yeah.
It's very rare that somebody says, oh, notice I've got a little bit of a problem. I want to nip it in the bud. They're usually years down the line with, I've had this problem for
Yeah. One of the things that I find in therapy is that you are very much working on self-compassion. And it's quite an interesting distinction between the sort of traditional Buddhist approaches and what we have in the west because.
Well, perhaps if I just explain the model behind some of the practices in Buddhism this, this model actually goes back even before the life of the Buddha, so it's a very ancient principle, but the idea is, and I'll try and explain it very briefly, so apologies to any Buddhists that are listening and think I've missed something important. But you can think of four different attitudes if you like. So you've got loving kindness, equanimity even handiness, compassion and joy. Okay?
These are the four limitless contemplations. The basic of the model is that if you project loving kindness into the world, With equanimity, when it contacts suffering, compassion naturally arises, and when it contacts joy, sympathetic joy naturally arises. And just as a, a slight tangent here, sympathetic joy, people often sort of don't ask about it. They don't quite get it. They think of it as being a sort of like, like to express my greatest sympathy for your joy.
It doesn't really make any sense. But it really means that sympathetic, as in if you pluck a stringed instrument, if you pluck a string, the other strings ring out in sympathy. They're not plucked directly. It's that kind of sympathy. You could
look, an emotional contagion.
could call it vicarious joy, but that's even a bit more technical bit more sort of therapy language. The, the real shame is, we've actually got a word for this in English. We just don't use it anymore. Confelicity. It means taking pleasure in someone else's pleasure or taking happiness in someone else's happiness. It's a very old English word that's gone out of use, but strangely, we've taken on board a German word to express taking joy in someone else's misery. Yeah, exact
Schadenfreude
there's a lot about what we're talking about, doesn't it really? It's a shame, but confelicity that's, that's what that basically means. So in that model, in that model, you project loving kindness into the world. You contact suffering. Compassion arises. Now, one of the practices that the Buddhists have to cultivate love and kindness involves directing lovingkindness towards yourself, then to a dear friend or loved one, then to a neutral person, and then to the enemy.
Or as we, we tend to say in the west, in, in secular context, a person you have difficulty with. Now the idea of that order is that you work from the easiest to the most difficult, and it's the point where it starts to get difficult, that you're really doing the heavy lifting. This is the sort of equanimity, if you like, to be able to do this even handedly to project loving kindness with equanimity to everybody.
What's found in the west, particularly with clinical populations, is that actually that first point, directing loving kindness to yourself is the most difficult bit. That's the goal. That's the, the furthest you can kind of get to. That's the biggest challenge. So we tend to have to adapt those kinds of practices. I don't typically use these practices, not straight off, at least with clients. And sometimes not at all. There are so many other ways to work, but.
If you're directing loving kindness to yourself, and that's the biggest challenge, then you've really gotta go somewhere else. So we tend to start with a dear friend or loved one, and then if the self is still challenging, a dear friend and loved one and yourself. So you share the, the compassion towards, or the loving kindness towards both of you and so on. So you try and break it down to, to make it easier.
But it's interesting that we have this big difference between east and west, and I think that speaks really to the difference between collectivist and individualistic cultures, for example.
Wow. Okay. I think a lot of people listening could probably do with learning how to be more compassionate to themselves. And if they, if they don't want to, I haven't got the time to go and see a therapist and go, right, I need you to teach me some self-compassion. Is mindfulness the best place to start?
Yeah, it's a very good place. I think if, if you can really engage with it in an authentic way, I mean, the, the challenge with any of these things really is the way that you engage with it. So, unfortunately now I think a lot of people turn to mindfulness because they've heard it's very good for depression, anxiety, insomnia, pain, endless things. And they just think, okay, so I can fix whatever problem I've got with this.
And the first thing they experience perhaps is that they feel calmer and more relaxed and they think, oh great, it's working. And it becomes a sort of relaxation technique, which is, is not really what it is at all. That's more of a byproduct that sometimes comes up. So in other words, A relaxation technique, in a sense, is an experiential avoidance technique, which is what I started out talking about is what brings people to therapy, right? Experiential avoidance isn't necessarily bad.
You know, relaxation techniques are probably a good type of experiential avoidance. If you can avoid an a, a difficult or painful experience, then great, as long as it doesn't actually have consequences down the line. Relaxation techniques probably don't. But if you're simply trying to relax, then you're not really cultivating these qualities of mind, this openness, curiosity, and kindness towards your experience as it is. Instead you're trying to change it.
Yeah. But a sort of authentic engagement with mindfulness. Yes. Very much. That's really helpful as a starting point for compassion.
That sounds like the difference between hypnosis and hypnotherapy. You can teach somebody hypnosis. Yeah. They'll learn how to relax. They'll learn how to focus their thoughts, but it's not really therapy. It might be therapeutic, but it's not what you'd think of as therapy. And what they need to do is understand more about what's going on for them. Where do they want to be and what are the steps in between that take them to it? And self-compassion is a, is a big part of that.
By the sound of things, it really is.
Yeah.
Because it's all about change when it comes down to it, isn't it? You know, people don't tend to go to therapy without wanting or needing some sort of change, even if they're doing the, the type of therapy that I love, which is sort of philosophical discussions. It's still about changing perspective or understanding better
or accepting.
accepting,
Accepting that other people might have different views.
And that's another word you, you mentioned William, about the word compassion being misunderstood. I've often found acceptance is misunderstood because accepting doesn't mean it's okay, and people often think, oh, if I accept it, that means I'm saying it's okay.
Yeah, I like to to talk about acceptance in this way. Sometimes it's called radical acceptance, but talking about it as a starting point. So in English we tend to use this word acceptance as though it's an endpoint, you know, put up with it, make do with it. It's the end kind of thing. But this is acceptance in terms of a starting point. The acceptance word is so problematical in the therapy room sometimes that you just wanna use other words. And you can use three A's you can say acknowledging.
So this is that, not denying it, not avoiding it not hiding away from it .Acknowledging it, allowing it, and then accommodating. Okay. So tho those kind of words capture this quality of acceptance. But they don't have that sense that it's an end point. It's really a beginning rather than end.
Understanding what's going on that and accepting where you are and the problems that you have. That then allows you to see what are the steps I need to take.
Yeah, and that links into the wisdom, right? If you, if you're not seeing something clearly, it's very hard to act with it. But if you can actually see what's there, acknowledge it, allow it, accommodate it, get familiar with it, then you are gonna be in a much better position to work with it
Mm-hmm.
with. So that's a big part of it, really.
Wonderful stuff.
I think in terms of the psychoeducation, I think it's possibly one of the most valuable steps and an early step in, in developing compassion. If you imagine, for example, that you had a friend who's been ignoring your phone calls and messages and texts and emails and everything, lots of different things could happen, but it's quite likely that you might feel a bit annoyed or upset by that, and you might feel a bit rejected and that rejection might get masked by anger.
That's kind of a tougher emotion. So all these kind of things can be coming up for you. But if you then found out that the friend's partner had just left them and gone off with someone else, suddenly you'd feel very compassionate towards them, most likely. And all of that anger or resentment or rejection would go and you'd feel, well, you know, they must be really struggling. I wish I could help. That kind of thing. So you'd shift into compassion that comes from knowing more.
Being a bit wiser about it as well. So the same thing applies internally to us. If we can understand the nature of our experience, the evolved brains that we've got and the way that our brains and body interact with each other, the emotional systems that we have, all of this understanding our mind, and of course mindfulness can be part of that leads to wisdom and also de shaming. We understand that we are connected with humanity by the pain that we are experiencing.
It doesn't isolate us from it. You know, a lot of people coming to therapy are saying, why am I like this? I'm the only person that feels this way. Why can't I be like other people in handling this, you know? Those kinds of things. That's very shaming. But when you understand that this is the quality of being human, you know, in our pain we find our values. And in our values we find our pain, things matter to us, therefore we experience pain from it.
Was it I think The Queen in a speech said that grief was the price we pay for love. you know, it's that same sort of pattern. And the more we can bring kind of skill and humour to doing this the better it is. Compassion focused therapy in particular works on developing the soothing and affiliation system as it's called there. If you think about the body having different emotional systems, that's the key one in there. But there's also a play circuit that's very powerful.
too So if you're looking at things like reconsolidating memories, you want to do that with a soothing and affiliation system, the calm system, engaged. But actually the play system works just as well in this So if we can bring humour and a kind of a light touch to the work we do on ourselves, it's amazingly powerful.
Could you give an example of the play circuit?
Well, it's, really anytime we're feeling playful. But you know, if you're doing something like psychoeducation you don't wanna make it into a series of jokes, right? But you want to let it be kind of slightly funny. And so you ask someone, for example, you know, did you design your brain? Now you both kind of smiled and laughed when I say that, so you get that it's kind of a slightly silly question, so therefore it's slightly funny.
But unfortunately for some people that will trigger them off in a spiral, like, oh my goodness, he's asking me if I designed my brain. Well, obviously didn't, but he wouldn't ask me such an obvious question, so I must be missing something. Oh God, I'm such an idiot. Why can't I think of this? So you can't, you can't even drop that in there, really. You've got to sort of preload it and say, look, I'm gonna ask you a really silly question. Did you design your brain?
And that gives them the permission to kind of go, oh, well he isn't serious, so I haven't gotta worry about it, kind of thing. And, and have that playful thing, but they've also gotta reflect on it. And that's obviously an important part of it. If you say you didn't design your brain. Yeah, I know that. So what, you know, I'm paying for this. It doesn't work very well. But if you say, did you do, I'm asking you a really silly question of it. Did you design your brain?
Well, no, I didn't actually. Okay, so you're not really responsible for how it works then. Okay. And you can start to explore all these things. Did you choose your genes? Did you choose your parents? Did you choose the schools you'd go to? Did you choose the teachers that would be at the school, whether they'd be good at their subjects, and so on and so forth. You soon come to a point where, actually, there's all this stuff that has a huge impact.
Basically, anybody who had your genes and your life experience would be you. They'd be sitting in that chair in the therapy room. Doing something about it. Right? So this kind of psychoeducation is amazingly powerful. It can bring about really, really rapid shifts in how people are perceiving things. this is where I often integrate some of the ACT work in diffusion from thoughts, which is being able to unhook from thoughts rather than being the thought and believing in it and buying into it.
I often bring that in at the same sort of time at that stage, really. Very powerful stuff that.
It is, isn't it? And I urge anybody listening that is interested to have a little Google around. There are probably lots of articles, blogs, blog posts from therapists who work in a compassionate way writing all about this, soak it up, learn more. It'd be really, really good for everybody. Absolutely would. William, thank you ever so much for joining us on the Therapy Natters podcast
Yes. Thank you, William. It's been love.
Thank you for inviting me along. It's been great to natter with you.
Lovely.
love na once a week. it's a lot of fun. As always, if anybody's got any comments or questions. To follow on from the episode, do let us know. There's a link in the show notes, fill in a form on the website. Let us know what you're thinking. Let us know what you'd like us to talk about next, and we'll see what we can do about shoehorning in different topics into the Therapy Natters podcast series. Right? As always, love you and leave you, you know where we are, if you need anything.
I'll speak to you next time. Bye for now.
Bye.
Bye.