I am a mental health nurse and systemic therapist for children and young people in the UK, working on the front line in the overstretched NHS. My practice doesn’t tend to offer room for reflection at depth, and I often feel as though I’m firefighting without making any profound changes. I think that this manner of working has led to a bit of burn out in myself and my colleagues, and I had noticed a real tuning out in myself and my passion for my job.
Remote working and providing therapy from my tiny kitchen, without the wider clinical team acting as a much needed tonic and buoyancy aid, I feel as though, through the past year, I have been blindly swimming (nay, drowning) against a tide of increased referrals, heightened acuity, and devastating risk events. Something in me had numbed, and I was seriously considering leaving this profession behind, and staring afresh. In part, this was an identity crisis- I was born for this job. Until I couldn’t do it anymore. Then what?
I found BFTA by chance, and have for the past 6 weeks, been working through each episode at a slow pace. Sometimes pausing to think, consider, make links to my personal and professional life. I have begun to reflect again, to align with my job again, to rekindle the love affair with healing, with connection and with suffering. Our profession is messy, it hurts, it takes courage and patience.
The guests on this podcast are all of these things. They are the human trial made stark and clear, and tell their stories with profound openness. To carry the task of living with such humility, humour and playfulness is a gift that I marvel at.
I have cried through many, been moved by most, and have been reunited with a part of me that I thought I had lost. Thank you BFTA, in a way, you have brought me back from my own.
