Louise
Private practice is an amazing place to be able to create a way of working that works for you. I couldn’t go back to working for somebody else. I wouldn’t want to. I have never had such a good work life balance. I don’t think I’ve been back in burnout for any sustained period of time since I started in private practice because I I gave myself permission to find the practice that works for me.
I sat down with a – I like structure and routine. Totally won’t work for all neurodivergence, but I sat down with pen and paper and went, I wanna see clients at these times. I wanna see supervises at these times. I want these days off. I’ve created, by pricing and everything, is structured to make that a sustainable business model for me.
So it’s, again, it’s permission to do it in the way that is sustainable and works for you, whatever that looks like.
Josephine
So, today I’m really delighted to be joined by my friends and colleague, I’d like to describe you as a friend as well as a colleague, Louise Brown who is a therapist and supervisor and the reason I’ve invited her on the show is Louise has been in my Therapy Growth Group now for a little while and I just love her story of how she has grown as a therapist and how she’s now growing even beyond therapy and moving into other areas, and as you’ll hear her story unfold you’ll hear that actually Louisa’s being quite courageous in embracing who she really is in order to, help other people, help her clients, and as a result of that, as a result of that courage, Louise’s practice has really grown which is why I was really, really keen to get her on the podcast. So thanks Louise for coming on. So, tell us a little bit about yourself and where you’re based and what sort of work you do.
Louise
I’m not sure how I live up to that introduction. Don’t think I’ve ever been described as courageous before. So I’m based in Crewe in Cheshire, and I I work full time in private practice online. So I work out of an attic office. Was out of the spare bedroom.
I guess it all started pre lockdown. So I trained as a therapist, didn’t wanna be a therapist, absolutely knew that I didn’t wanna be a therapist. But I was working as a disability adviser in HE, and I was just seeing more and more students coming through where mental health was what they were presenting with, whereas we’d always been quite heavy on kind of dyslexia and things like that. And I just thought I need to do a course. I’m gonna do some harm to these students if I don’t learn some more.
So I thought I’ll just go and do a little counselling course. And 5 years later, I finished with a master’s and, yeah, a whole new career and had really fallen in love with therapy and had grown so much personally during the process. So I stayed working in HE for a while, but I moved into more mental health support. And then, eventually, I moved into working as a therapist for a local charity. So I did a stint in the NHS in an IAP service, which I said I would do for a year, and I did for a year.
And I worked with some children and young people, which I discovered I could do, but it wasn’t my passion. And I did some time in a 6th form college, and then I started doing some training for the mental health charity, which I really loved. It’s kind of mental awareness, suicide prevention sort of stuff, which I’d I’d done bits of training previously but but never in that kind of mental health world. It was all going okay, kind of as much as it is when you’re raising teenagers, until I hit what I now know was autistic burnout. I didn’t know I was autistic, had no idea, despite when I was a disability adviser, having what some might call a special interest in Neurodivergence.
I’d been to loads of conferences, I’d supported loads of students, I suspected I was dyslexic, but when I had my dyslexia assessment, I’d been told I I had traits, but not enough to get a diagnosis. And I suspect that I’m dyspraxic, because if you’ve ever seen me run or try to listen to me give you directions, then you would know that I, yeah, my brain doesn’t work like that. I come from a really neurodiverse family, so there’s a lot of dyslexia and dyspraxia in our family that have been diagnosed and stuff going on personally, and I thought I need to get back into therapy, which been a lot of stuff going on personally, and I thought I need to dip back into therapy, which is what I do. And I thought I need a therapist that’s really gonna challenge me because I’m not a very good client. I’m quite bratty as a client.
I I need someone that’s going to pull me up, and I am a guy that had worked in the same charity as me that I kind of vaguely knew, and I really respected him, and I knew that he would challenge me, and he was autistic, and openly I was autistic, and I thought, that’s great. I know that he’s not gonna let me run rings around him. And in our first session, I was kind of telling him about a lot of these feelings of not being good enough and just not quite knowing what was going on and struggling with kind of work relationships, and he kind of said to me, do you think you’re autistic? I went absolutely not. I cannot possibly be.
I would know because I’ve worked in this profession. I’d had 10 years kind of working in disability support and had even been the director of a company that offered support to families with neurodivergent children. It was something I knew a lot about. Someone would have told me or I would have realised it. He said okay, there’s just this little quiz that you could do if you’re interested, but yeah yeah alright whatever and of course went away and did the quiz and went oh and then went away and did the quiz again because we never do it once.
Yeah. How do you know you’re autistic? Well, if you’ve done all of the screening tools at different times of day and with slightly different answers and you still keep coming back saying you’re autistic. That’s a good chance. And that really started everything shifting for me.
It was terrifying. It pulled everything I thought I knew about myself, kind of dissolved in that moment as I realised the extent of my masking. I’d been a really, really high masker. I was gosh, how old was I? I would have been 38 at this point.
So I’d had decades of thinking my life was one way, and all of a sudden it was like everything I knew about myself was wrong, and I went on this really deep dive, hyperfocus. I must have listened to every memoir by a middle aged woman that had been late diagnosed that was available at the time, and podcasts and books. And then lockdown hit, and my contracted work ended. So I was still doing a couple of days of training, but everything else just went. And it was like, right, well, I’m gonna have to give private practice a go because I need to make an income, and I retrained to work online.
And it was kind of my practice developed at the same time as my sense of self started developing. So I was discovering this about me, and then it was like, okay, well, what does this mean for my work? If I’m not the same person I thought I was, how is my practice going to be the same as I thought it
Josephine
was going
Louise
to be?
Josephine
So I had a look back to see, sort of, when you joined Therapy Growth Group and it was back in April 2021. So I don’t know if you remember that. So that would have been sort of after you trained to work online. We were through most of the pandemic at that point weren’t we? So I mean, casting your mind back, can you think about why you wanted to join us and what you were hoping to get out of it?
Louise
Yeah. I remember feeling really lonely as a therapist, so I was still working in a training job, but that was all online delivery. So I was the only people I was seeing was my wife and my daughter in her occasional stints back living with us. There was kind of yeah. And just no professional connection, and I was really, really missing that and wanting to talk to other therapists.
There was so much of what I was doing that was new, kind of going self employed and kind of learning how to do all the other stuff, all of the marketing and how do you write a profile, and I just yeah, really wanted some some connection, and I I’m a lurker on Facebook groups because it’s yeah. I live in fear of posting the wrong things. So there was something about a closed group that felt really safe, and I, you know, liked what I’d seen. And I thought, well, it’s
Josephine
worth it. Give it a go. It’s
Louise
worth it in
Josephine
the window. And of course, you know, with the coaching calls we get that chance to to sort of talk and, you know, it’s not the same is it because we’re talking real time as as being on Facebook.
Louise
So, yeah, no, it’s been lovely and I made some really good connections and friends
Josephine
through it. So, how would you say that your practice has sort of developed? So, I sort of met you when you were growing it, that’s when you sort of came into the group and how has it developed over the last few years?
Louise
So it’s yeah. It’s shifted completely. So when I I was first setting up, I was determined I wasn’t going to be an autistic therapist. I wasn’t gonna be out. I had lots of messages about self disclosure from my own training, and a lot of therapists have very strong feelings about not self disclosing.
I’d already talked about my queerness and had mixed responses, particularly from other therapists, about whether or not that’s something I should be doing or something that was helpful to clients. And my belief very strongly was clients knowing I was queer was something that would help to make it a safe space. It doesn’t mean I know about their experience if they’re queer, but it means that they didn’t have to do as much educating. And I knew from my own experience of therapy the difference it made to me from working with a queer therapist as opposed to a straight therapist, or at least a therapist who was very strongly allied and had done a lot of the learning. And it smoothed so much of the difficulties.
So I knew I kind of wanted to do that around being neurodivergent as well. I knew how powerful it was, but it was really vulnerable at the time. I wasn’t out to everybody I knew. It was because of the pandemic, I literally hadn’t seen lots of people to share the kind of these big things that were going on in my life.
Josephine
Can I just interrupt you for a moment? Because I realised that I’m I’m I’ve missed out part of the story because, so you had your therapist who, who sort of like, said to you, can you oh, here’s a quiz. Didn’t say go away and do it, just said you might be interested. You realised that this actually applied to you and did you actually go and get a formal diagnosis?
Louise
I did. I ummed and ahed about it for a long time, and I was convinced if I knew what I knew now that I would choose to do it in terms of some of the difficulties that can come from having a diagnosis. And because of where I am in my life, there isn’t really additional support that I get from it. But at the time, it felt really important to have the external validation of someone to say, no, you are different. There is this thing because my narrative had been, I’m broken, I’m a bad person, there’s something wrong with me.
I really needed someone else to say that’s not true. The diagnostic processes were horrible and it wasn’t a pleasant thing to go through, and almost as soon as I’ve done it and got the bit of paper I’ve never really thought about it again, so it’s a complicated relationship that I have with it.
Josephine
Which is really useful for when you are supporting people who are thinking about it and, you know, maybe looking at the pros and cons. Is it something that you understand about because you’ve been there and you’ve, sort of, almost in a sense know some of them, perhaps, the pitfalls of it, as well as begin the validation. Perhaps we’ll go on to talk about some of those things. I know, sort of talking to others, what it can be like. So that and that was sort of like so during the pandemic was it?
Or
Louise
Yeah. So that was, I wanna say, in June or July. It was during the 1st lockdown in 2020. So at exactly the same time as I was setting up my private practice and suddenly having to be visible and kind of write profiles and have a website, and at a time when I didn’t really want to be visible because I didn’t really know who I was. I was in that process of unmasking and figuring myself out.
Josephine
So tell us about what you decided to do, where you got to. Could say you interrupted you because you were at the point of telling us that you were, hadn’t actually told all your or everybody didn’t know that you weren’t completely out as autistic at that point.
Louise
Yeah. So I started very gently, and I always think about it’s coming out. It was the same as coming out as queer. You start in the safe places. And sometimes the safe places are the more public places in a strange way, in the same way that it’s easier to come out in a gay club than it is to necessarily come out to close friends and family.
So I talked to most of the important people. And I started blogging at that point, which was the place that I felt most comfortable kind of marketing myself, such as blogs on my website and on my Facebook page. And I started putting the occasional reference to neurodivergence in there. And the language was really important to me. So language is really important to me.
I’m a word person. It’s part of my autistic profile. I’m hyperlexic. I really, really love words. And so I started with neurodivergent, felt more comfortable, and it felt more comfortable for lots of reasons.
Partly because it’s the right word, because I’m mostly neurodivergent. I, you know, identify as dyslexic and dyspraxic, and now there’s a hefty chunk of ADHD in there, which has been a recent kind of revelation. But also there was something about it that felt safer. It felt there was less stigma than just saying autistic. So it was a way of dipping my toe in the pond and saying, how does this flow and how does this sit, and what’s that like?
And I published the first blog where I mentioned it, and the world didn’t end. And everybody I know didn’t stop speaking to me, and clients didn’t stop coming to me. And so gradually I added more in, and then I started owning being autistic. And for a while I was only referring to myself as autistic, which was part of my process of figuring out my identity. More and more clients came to me because they recognized what I was writing about.
So I was writing about my experiences of of beginning to understand what my neurodivergent identity was, of that discovery of it, of those feelings of grief that lots of of late realising people experience, of the the grief of having not known this, the grief of the life that I could have had if somebody had told me this, of the grief for what wasn’t but what might have been, it’s a very abstract grief, but it can be a huge part of
Josephine
the process. Understand that. It’s that sort of looking back over the past and just thinking, if I’d known then how I might When you and I have talked about this because I have a neurodivergent child and certainly, you know, the more I’ve spoken to people who are neurodivergent and they’ve explained about things, I’ve had these penny dropping moments where you’ve spoken to me and said something and I’ve just thought, ‘Ah, that explains it. Oh, if only I’d known. You know, so I mean, you know, for me there’s some grief around not knowing as a parent, so I can imagine the grief of not knowing is the actual person who is actually experiencing it.
Must be quite intense.
Louise
The best explanation I’ve ever heard is someone saying it’s like watching a really complicated TV series, and you get to that final episode where they start explaining it. And then you go back and you re-watch the first one and suddenly you’re like, oh, that’s why that happened and that’s what that meant and that’s what they were doing there, but you’re doing that with your whole life. You’re reprocessing all of those memories with this new lens that suddenly brings things into focus in a way they weren’t. It’s a huge piece of work that people do.
Josephine
And that, to a certain extent, is some of the work that you do now, isn’t it, with your neurodivergent clients? Yeah.
Louise
Yeah. Yeah. I work with a lot of late realising, late diagnosed, all people that did realise and identify earlier in life, but maybe haven’t processed it or haven’t thought about what it meant and are kind of really kind of finding their own identity and what that means for them. And that’s the bulk of my client work and I Yeah. Yeah.
It’s been the bulk of my client work since I started being open about it. I was I really worried, as so many people do, that I’m gonna niche down, and then no one will come and work with me, and there won’t be enough people. But, actually, what I found is there are, despite the fact that there are lots of neurodivergent therapists out there, there are not that many who are out and talking about it for their own reasons and, you know, it’s got to be right for everyone and it was a long journey. It probably took me 2 years before I was really comfortable being out and talking about it in the way that I am now. And it was my own search, my own therapist at a later point, and it was like, why can’t I find someone?
I want someone who has lived experience of neurodivergence, preferably I also want someone who’s got lived experience of kind of a queer life, and I just couldn’t find anyone. And I thought, gosh, how many other clients are out there desperately looking for this? And it was actually something that you’ve said many, many times is who are you to not let these people know that you’re out there and offering it because there are people out there who need that support. And that really resonated with me . What if I could really help those people that are 12 months, 18 months, 2 years behind where I am now? What would it have meant to me if I’d had this version of me then, and what could it mean to them?
Josephine
I’m gonna use that. It’s really important, what you’ve just said. Do you think that helped you with the courage?
Louise
Massively. Because it wasn’t about me. It was about other people, and it was other people that I knew that I could see were were coming to as happens when you start talking about being neurodivergent, you find out that everybody that you know, who you’ve ever connected with, is probably neurodivergent too because we find each other even when we don’t know that’s what we’re doing. We recognize each other, and it’s something I’ve seen ripple through, kind of family and friends.
And it was that, what do I want them to do? And what difference would it have made to a 16 year old me to have this knowledge? And that I can really, by being open in the same way that I believed being open about being queer and that part of my identity, for me, it’s that the personal is political, that just by being seen and being visible, we make changes. I can’t do loud activism, I can’t go to protests, I’m no good at letter writing, but I can stand up and say, this is who I am, and who I am is okay, even when I don’t always believe it all the way through. But I can believe it for other people because that’s what I want them to believe, and that’s that’s really what drives me with all of this, is yeah, wanting to, gosh, make the world a better place, it sounds like.
That sounds very trite, but
Josephine
it’s really that. Important, and it’s a mission, isn’t it?
Louise
Yeah. It’s being the change.
Josephine
Be the change. Yeah. Absolutely. And I guess, sort of going back to your story of how you gradually began to talk about it, It’s what really struck me is you did it in a way that you could, sort of, in a sense your nervous system could cope with. So you started off with neurodivergence, you know, and and just sort of gradually and I just think that’s, you know, it says baby steps isn’t it?
Because it would have been too much to just leap in straight away and and have just said it, but you just, sort of, tested the water out and then you found the place that felt, you know, now it’s sort of like you are out as, you know, neurodivergent, autistic, queer, but, you know, you took it in those little steps so to as to help you and just to explore. Do you think, sort of, like, I don’t know, have you had any judgement from anybody else about being so open about it?
Louise
Not to my face, but I know because I lurk on lots of Facebook groups. I know there are people that have very strong opinions about self disclosure. I also know that the thing I am most often told by clients that is helpful for them is that they know that I’m safe and that I share my experiences and that knowing that somebody else has been there goes through it. There’s a reason why the books that I read when I was exploring my own neurodivergence weren’t the academic texts, which I like academia. It’s my safe space.
It’s the place where you would have thought I would have gone, but I read memoirs. I wanted lived experience because that was incredibly powerful for me.
Josephine
You know, one of the questions that comes up a lot in groups is can neurotypical people help neurodivergent people? And, it’s been quite a journey for me to sort of listen and learn and and find out. I don’t know if you’ve got an opinion on that or, you know, whether you want to comment on it or what are your thoughts about it?
Louise
It’s complicated. And to say no neurotypical people can help no neurodivergent people is I’m not into absolutes. I think regardless of your neurotype, having done the work, it’s, you know, just my experience of neurodivergence is not the same as anybody else’s experience of neurodivergence. The amount of co occurrence, the way spiky profiles work, the huge number of different experiences that come under the neurodivergent umbrella.
No one person is gonna have all of those. So you have to have done all of the exploring. You have to have done the unlearning of internalized ableism and neuronormative thinking. I absolutely believe that you’ve got to be an ally when it comes to LGBTQI plus all of the letters because the overlaps in those communities are so huge. And I I think anybody that goes into this work without having done that work and that unlearning and who doesn’t know the ideas they’re carrying with them probably needs to have a think about that because we don’t know what we don’t know.
If we haven’t done the work and we haven’t looked at it, we don’t know what harm we could be doing.
Josephine
Yeah. I think that’s the really important thing and it just sort of leads us on really nicely to, to what you’ve been doing recently really because you’ve sort of moved on. I mean, you haven’t said anything yet about supervisions, tell us a bit about that. So, did you train as a supervisor recently or were you already a supervisor pre-pandemic?
Louise
No. So that was pre pandemic and again I didn’t train to supervise therapists. I trained when I was working at the university to supervise the specialist mentors that worked with students with either mental health or or neurodivergence, And I, for a while, kind of managed that that function in the university I was in and offered supervision to the the mentors and didn’t really plan to go into supervision for therapists. I was probably fairly newly qualified at that time, and I didn’t feel like I had enough experience. But then, kind of into the pandemic, and it was my supervisor, who’s amazing, I was like, why are you not supervising other people?’ So I kept a few mentors when I’d moved into private work who’d wanted to stay with me as a supervisor.
And it was like, why aren’t you? You’re working with other people. So I thought, okay, I’ll give it a go. And I love supervision. I love supervising.
I I love the mixture of clients and supervisees. They both take different types of energy. And and, again, what I found in the same way that I found with my client work is the more open I became about my identity, the more people wanted to come and work with me because, again, therapists who were when you were a divergent, who were queer, who were exploring that identity, who were figuring out what that meant for their practice, and wanting someone who’d who’d got that shared experience and and could kind of go on that journey with them in the same way that, yeah, when I’d gone looking for my supervisor in my head, I’d go, I want someone that’s 2 years ahead of me. I want someone who’s walked this path or walked a path that can kind of trail break for me and help guide me through. And I don’t exclusively get neuro consultations as well.
So people that maybe have a client that they wanna come and talk to, who wanna tap into my knowledge about neurodivergence, who’ll come for one offs or every now and again, or a lot of people come for additional supervision. So they’ll have a main supervisor, but they’ll come and see me around specific things to do with neurodivergence, which is also lovely. I feel like I get to do the fun bits of supervision and somebody else gets to do all the admin.
Josephine
So that’s sort of one one sort of extra stream sort of, you’ve added to your therapy and then there’s another really important part that you’ve been developing recently and again it’s all connected back to your diagnosis and learning about yourself and and and again this is where I feel I’ve learned quite a lot just by, you know, our conversations when we’ve been together about well, you you you tell people what what you do and what you’ve been developing.
Louise
Yeah. So I’ve through my own explorations, my work with my clients, through, all of my previous experience and academic knowledge, I’ve been trying to pull together a what is it that I do with my clients that works? Because there are lots of times that I think I’m with a client and I think if one of my tutors was sat in this room and it was a triad, they would probably look at this and say, is this really therapy? Because we’re trained predominantly to do neurotypical to neurotypical therapy, and neurodivergent to neurodivergent therapy can look very different. It doesn’t always, but it can do.
And that’s one of the things I had to really learn in my practice was to to shift what I thought of as as proper therapy, to learn to make space for relationships that might take longer to form, people who might need longer to feel safe, kind of different ways of allowing people to ground into the the space and to feel secure. And so the part of me that’s an academic and wants this is how it’s supposed to be, started looking for a course. Can I go and do a master’s on this, which is my refrain which drives my wife to distraction because I’ve got too many qualifications and I no longer work at university so I now have to pay for them, which is the barrier? I could find academic stuff and I could find neurodivergence 101, but at the time I was struggling to find anything in between, and what I wanted was some really practical ‘what do you do’, and I couldn’t find it. And I was complaining about this to anyone that was listening at the time because I was frustrated, and I BACP accreditation, and what would I write if I was going to write down my modality.
And so I went away and thought about it, and I thought about actually the common things that come up with my clients and the way they work and this, this model of kind of neurodivergent well-being that I had drawn out countless times in sessions for clients. And it’s these kind of 2 spirals, kind of and it’s all about how we become dysregulated. And once we’re dysregulated, we have less capacity to do the things we want to or need to do because we’re having to spend more energy just on managing our spiky profiles, which get spikier when we’re dysregulated. And so because we’re not doing the things we want or need to do, often that negative inner voice comes in, the self critic. What’s wrong with you?
Why can’t you do this? Everyone else can do it. A lot of narratives, which for many neurodivergence are things that we’ve heard since we were really young. Why are you being difficult? What’s wrong with you?
And so because we’re feeling bad about ourselves, we don’t take care of ourselves. We’re not deserving of care or the things that help us to regulate. So we get more dysregulated, so we are less able to do things, and we kind of go round and round, and most of us end up in burnout. But what I I know from the work that I do and what I know from my own experience is that so many of us try to force change at the point of, I’ll just push through. If I just do this thing, we think by force of will we can conjure up more executive function and more energy.
And, of course, we can’t. It just becomes more frustrating. But the place where we can exact change is in the negative self talk and in how we take care of ourselves, and that actually if we can respond to ourselves with compassion and kindness, we disrupt that downward spiral. If we’re able to say, it’s okay that I find this hard, I can do this a different way, if we allow ourselves to do the things that build capacity. So things like playing with our special when I say playing, I play with my special interest because one of them is Lego, And so that’s something that is really soothing for me.
But whatever it might be, spending time with special interests, finding our joy, then actually what happens is we become more more regulated, so we have more capacity, and suddenly more things open up. And it’s not a magic bullet, it doesn’t fix everything. There are some things in my life I am always going to find hard. I’m never going to be cleaning the bathroom. It’s just a sensory nightmare.
Just the thought of it just feels icky, and that’s okay. Actually, I spent years beating myself up about it, but it’s fine. I don’t have to clean the bathroom. I’m really lucky that I have a wife that does, and she’s really lucky that she has a wife that will cook dinner, and we have a very nice division of Labour, And I guess it’s kind of that model kind of grew, and from there grew the well, we have to put it in context, which is all about the the stuff about privilege and kind of knowing where our resources are and what’s possible for our clients and how that might be different to us. And that grew into a training course, which I piloted last year, and the first one is running in February, has run-in February, and hopefully will run again, which is really about kind of practically working with neurodivergent clients.
So it’s based on the model, but it’s full of resources. It’s full of things that I sit and do with my clients in sessions. So things like mapping out what your spiky profile looks like, really normalising talking about what our needs are, learning how to respond to ourselves with compassion, and there’s there’s kind of 3 strands to the work. There’s the knowledge part, which I find I can do a lot of psychoeducation, certainly in the beginning of therapy, of what is neurodivergence, what is your specific neurodivergence, and what is your context you’re living in? And that then moves on to an understanding.
So, okay, if I know this about my brain and how it works, what does that mean for me? How does that help me to navigate through my life? What are my needs that I might not be attending to? What might be helpful? And then the acceptance, which is that if I accept that this is true about me and it is okay, then can I give myself permission to live the life that is right for me?
Which sounds like a really lovely linear process that’s really straightforward. And it is messy and lumpy and bumpy, but it weaves together.
Josephine
And it it must be sort of like enabling people to to, sort of, like, look at different different situations where perhaps something’s come up for them and I’m thinking about myself, you know, sort of flown off the handle or something like that, and then you realise that that was a situation of being dysregulated and, you know, have the compassion towards yourself towards that. But also, it’s just understanding, isn’t it?
Louise
Once we know, we can understand, and once we understand, we can accept, and that’s when change becomes possible.
Josephine
Yeah. I have to say I’ve had another of my penny drop moments when you said about cleaning a My poor daughter. I remember, we went camping 1 year and we made her do the washing up and it was just hell. I just realized why.
Louise
As a parent, the things I wish I had known 20 years ago that I would have changed.
Josephine
Yeah, it would have changed that particular interaction.
Louise
Oh, so much. Yeah.
Josephine
Bless her.
Louise
We can change from where we are now.
Josephine
That’s it, you have to say that don’t you? Yes. So I guess what I’d be really interested in doing is just going back a bit, because you said that it’s sort of like moving away from sort of like neurotypical type therapy to neurodivergent therapy. And again, you know, when I talked about courage that’s another thing isn’t it? Because, essentially, you’re moving away from this model about how we’ve been taught.
Because, I mean, it’s a simple thing. So when I was on your course recently you mentioned about not necessarily sitting opposite each
Louise
other in a
Josephine
room and it’s something that’s so you know, when you say it you think, oh yes, I could get why that would be difficult, but until you hear someone say it you you don’t really think of it, do you? But I guess for you, was there, was it hard to move away from what we’ve been told and moving out of this framework of this is what therapy is, this is what you’re supposed to do? Because that’s another sort of like, that’s quite scary I should think.
Louise
Terrifying. I’m a good girl. I follow rules. Hi masker, I survive with routine and structure and tell me what I need to do and I will do it, if there is a rule I will follow it, Well, no. That’s not true.
If it’s a good rule, I will follow it. If I think it’s a stupid rule, if it doesn’t make sense, if I can’t see the logic, then I’ll challenge it. And I guess that’s what allowed me to make the change. So it was really scary, but I also knew that what I had been taught to do didn’t work with these clients. I knew that it didn’t work for me.
I once had a lovely therapist, really, really lovely, person centred. It just wasn’t the right thing for me, and I remember really internalising why isn’t this working for me? This works for everybody else. This is what you’re supposed to do. I guess there’s something about that.
We can, you know, we have our modalities, and I I believe we’re drawn to the modalities that are the ones that work for us. I know, certainly for me, I don’t work in any way that I haven’t found to be personally helpful, and I haven’t done anything experientially. And it’s something about that permission to just step outside. Okay. This works for me.
Would it work for somebody else? And that’s been a learning curve. I’ve learned as much from my clients about that as anyone else. And just from opening up the space, what does feel good for you? What doesn’t feel good for you, what would help you feel more comfortable in this space, what wouldn’t.
And sometimes that’s practical stuff, and sometimes it’s about actually less challenge, more challenge. I can’t have a direct challenge. You know, it can be I can’t. I don’t like silence. I usually start my sessions with a what would where would you like to start today? What would you like to bring today?
Some of my clients, that’s too much of a demand. It’s not the right opening. So it’s that when I start to work with someone, we have that it’s a collaboration, and that’s how I always talk about it. We’re looking at the Venn diagram of the different ways I can work and what they find useful, and it’s finding that space in the middle. And for me, there’s something about that that does follow the rules of therapy because for me, that’s what being person centred is.
It’s my client and I’m putting them at the centre of my work, and I’m going to allow the space for whatever that looks like. There are certain things that I won’t do, there are certain things that I can’t do that don’t meet my needs, that kind of will be in conflict with my spiky profile, but it’s when I say no to something I know why I’m saying no to it. I’m not saying no because I was told you shouldn’t or you can’t. And it’s the more you break the rules, the easier they get to break.
Josephine
But, yeah, that it’s having that rationale behind it. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? You’ve got a rationale that you’re working towards. Yeah. So, have you got any advice that you would give?
I mean, I suppose, sort of, in 2 areas, really. Any advice to neurodivergent therapists, and then any advice on private practice?
Louise
For private practice, find the way that works for you, which I guess is also for neurodivergent therapists. It’s, I remember my first 6 months, I went on every free webinar, and this was during the first lockdown. There were a lot of free webinars going on. You could, like, days. I spent in front of my computer watching everyone who’d ever done a marketing course or anything kind of trying to figure this out, and it was so easy to get caught up in, oh, well, I should do this and I should do this and I should do that.
And actually, what really worked for me was finding out what’s the what’s the thing that works for me. So I’ve I’ve never been a prolific poster on social media, but I love writing blog posts, I’m better at long form, I don’t do short and pithy, I like an info dump and that, yeah, that doesn’t come in under 200 characters or however many it is you get. And kind of giving myself permission, it’s the same thing that I say to my clients and my supervisees and in my training. It’s all about permission, permission to do what works for you to not there’s lots of really great information, and there’s lots of people that know really good things, and go and listen to them, but you don’t have to do it that way if it doesn’t feel right for you. And it’s the thing my clients tell me is that they feel like they get a sense of me, and I have a really good conversion rate.
There aren’t many people that I have an initial conversation with who don’t come for therapy, and I’m sure that’s because what I’m putting out into the world is me. It’s They already It’s authentic. Know you
Josephine
in a sense, don’t they? If they’ve done any sort of, you know, reading of your blogs or anything around, well, what you’re putting out there, then they do know you. Yeah. So anything to add for neurodivergent therapists.
Louise
Private practice is an amazing place to be able to create a way of working that works for you. I couldn’t go back to working for somebody else. I wouldn’t want to. I have never had such a good work life balance. I’ve never I was on a cycle of about every 2 years I was going into burnout.
I can now see it kind of retrospectively. I don’t think I’ve been back in burnout for any sustained period of time since I started in private practice because I I gave myself permission to find the practice that works for me. I sat down with a structure and routine. It totally won’t work for all neurodivergence. But I sat down with pen and paper and went, I want to see clients at these times.
I want to see supervises at these times. I want these days off. I have at least a week off every 8 weeks because I know that’s what I need. And I’ve created my pricing and everything is structured to make that a sustainable business model for me. So it’s, again, it’s permission to do it in the way that is sustainable and works for you, whatever that looks like.
Josephine
I’m just sort of thinking about younger Louise and and and Louise who had that revelation and and and the grief really of finding out who she was, and had, you know, obviously had to do all that processing compared to the Louise now, really, and there’s quite a it’s quite a turnaround, isn’t it?
Louise
Yeah. I, as much as kind of being presented with that, are you autistic? Question was horrifying at the time and kind of all the grief that followed, it is the single most healing thing that has ever happened to me. I couldn’t have conceived of being where I am now, working in the way that I do now, being as happy as I am now. Before that, it yeah.
It’s been a revelation.
Josephine
Yeah. That’s a really great place, I think, to to stop with just knowing that what was actually a really difficult experience, you know, you’ve you’ve been able to use it and use it to help other people. And, sort of, what you were talking about with your model about that kindness and compassion towards yourself and the idea of, you know, there’s nothing wrong with me. This is who I am and this is what I need to be able to move through the world, to be able to do my work, and being able to, you know, in a sense you’ve designed that around yourself, haven’t you? And it’s really making a difference to other people’s lives, which I think is amazing.
You know, it’s a really encouraging thing, I think, for people to hear. To know that the difference that you felt is something that actually you forged into making connections with other people in that sense. Yeah. So thank you for that. So thanks very much for sharing all of that, Louise.
Thank you. And just before we end, can you just remind people where we can find you online?
Louise
So you can find pretty much everything is on my website which is curiosityspot.co.uk. I’m also on Facebook. If you search for Curiosity Spot, it will be on there. There’s an Instagram account but I can’t promise it’s updated. And I’ve got a substack which gets updated about twice a month, where I talk about neurodivergence and well-being.
And you can sign up to have that delivered into your inbox if you want to hear more of my info dumps. They tend to be a little bit more concise and edited. Oh, and I’ve got a mailing list as well if you’re interested in knowing about courses, which if you sign up to, then you will be first to know. And there are usually discount codes, so it’s worth doing for that. And the details for that are on
Josephine
the website. Brilliant. And I’ll make sure they put in the show notes as well so people can find them. Brilliant. Well, thank you very much, Louise, for coming.
Thank you. Thanks for listening. Do come and join my Facebook community, Good Enough Counsellors. And for more information about how I can help you develop your private practice, please visit my website, josephinehughes.com. If you found this episode helpful, I’d love it if you could share it with a fellow therapist or leave a review on your podcast app.
And in closing, I’d love to remind you that every single step you make gets you closer to your dream. I really believe you can do it.