Transcript
Intro: Welcome to A Bunch of Therapists, the podcast that goes behind the doors of the therapy room. Our guests will be sharing their experiences of counselling and psychotherapy, and all the lessons they’ve learned on the journey through life. This episode is hosted by Dipti Solanki and me, Michaela McCarthy. Our guest this week is Bonny Allyson.
Michaela McCarthy: So welcome, Bonny…
Bonny Allyson: Thank you.
Michaela McCarthy: …to our podcast. Tell us, you know, what drew you to the world of therapy?
Bonny Allyson: I was an accountant at the time.
Michaela McCarthy: Okay.
Bonny Allyson: Working in a portacabin in Canary Wharf when it was all being built. So a very long time ago, 1999, watching the Millennium Dome being built. And I had a relative that had a long-standing history with substance misuse and the breaking point was there’d been a lot of money, kind of emotional blackmail and it got to the point where they had given me a call and they’d actually said like you know if you don’t help me I’m gonna attempt on my life and you know this had been a long-standing situation and it got to the point for myself where it was just, like, really hard decision, but I finally decided to say, well, let me know where you are, because I’ll call an ambulance and they can collect you.
Michaela McCarthy: Mm-hm.
Bonny Allyson: Had no idea of what state they was going to be in.
Michaela McCarthy: Mm-hm.
Bonny Allyson: And they disappeared. Didn’t hear from them again for months. Yeah, it was like really nerve-wracking, like it’s a very close relative.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, not knowing.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, the not knowing, you know, are they dead or alive? Yeah, it was, you know, it was that extreme. And then I got a call from a rehab in Hove.
Michaela McCarthy: Oh, okay.
Bonny Allyson: And they’d been doing a programme. And they wanted to just do their work, take a space from it all, focus on themselves. It was a stepped-based program. So there was a, I think it was…
Michaela McCarthy: And you say 12 steps?
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, 12 steps, sorry. 12 steps, yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: So it’s part of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, so they got to the repentance stage. And it was my turn for them to speak to me and apologise for everything that they’d been through. From that point forward, I visited them every Sunday. It became almost like a religion. Just support. And over the journey, there was a lady there called Jenny, who was my relative’s counsellor, and she got to know me, and she said to me that you’d make a really good therapist. My initial response was, ‘You must be absolutely bloody crazy!’. Like having a lifetime of this experience, there’s no way, you know, that I could go into a profession with this. And over the course of 18 months she just wore me down. And by the end of the treatment for my relative she said look you’ve got nothing to lose, back then there used to be a 10-week course at Lambeth.
Michaela McCarthy: Lambeth College.
Bonny Allyson: It was ten pounds. That’s how much it cost back then. It was ten pounds. It was a Saturday and I was like, ‘Alright then!’. You know, she’d really kind of hounded me, kind of really kind of instilled in my brain that, you know, give this a go. And I did and I loved it and I haven’t looked back. And I wish I could find this woman and actually show her what she’s created.
I qualified as an intercultural therapist in 2004. I then went, I was invited straight back to Lambeth College to become a tutor, because they just loved me. So I then went on to do my DTLLs training, which is a diploma in the lifelong learning sector, so I could teach.
So I started teaching straight away and then I also started supervising in 2007. And at the moment that’s what I do. I have a caseload of clients. I have a supervision caseload and I also teach as well.
Michaela McCarthy: You teach at The Awareness Centre and at another institute.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: So let’s go back to you growing up.
Bonny Allyson: All the way back.
Michaela McCarthy: All the way back.
Bonny Allyson: All the way back.
Michaela McCarthy: So growing up, what do you think your experience has taught you? Because not all sort of bad is negative.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: You know, I think coming into this profession, you have to have had something.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, I did.
Michaela McCarthy: And I always say the more colourful your life has been, I think it’s better.
Bonny Allyson: Mine was multiple rainbows.
Michaela McCarthy: Yes, there you go. So tell us about the rainbows.
Bonny Allyson: Well, so the reason I’m called Bonny is because I was named after Bonnie Parker, who’s the female person in Bonnie and Clyde.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah.
Bonny Allyson: My mum aspired to Bonnie Parker and you know they were both gangsters in their own right.
Michaela McCarthy: Your parents.
Bonny Allyson: Parents, yeah parents were both gangsters, mum and dad. And I was just, you know, I just witnessed a lot of, you know, what was normal to them, which was violence. There was a lot of violence. There was a lot of things that I saw that was just the norm, you know, things coming in and out the house. And there was an innate feeling that I knew that I didn’t like it. I just wasn’t comfortable with it. Sometimes I used to stand at the sitting room door and just like look at all of these gangsters including my parents and like ‘Who are these people?’ Like, ‘Why am I here? How did I get here?’ And I was three at the time. I had this vivid memory, really, really strong. And, you know, it’s a running joke now. My mum still laughs at it. You know, my dad’s passed.
But I used to, you know, kind of storm in, three-year-old, hand on my hip and actually say, you know, ‘God sent me to the wrong family!’. And, you know, this whole room would roar with laughter, but I was serious. Like, I can remember the visceral feelings of, like, really being angry with God.
Michaela McCarthy: In a way, it’s almost, you didn’t have the words, the language, but, you know, it was like a sense of belonging. I don’t belong to this family.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, yeah this is this is wrong.
Michaela McCarthy: This is not right for me.
Bonny Allyson: And you know I’ve had a really kind of strange kind of response to God because I don’t like the word God anymore, either, and I will use the universe or the cosmos and I still think that’s anger at God for sending me to this family. I didn’t want to live like this.
Even though it was the norm, it wasn’t only my parents that was like this. There’s a lot of people that I was aware of.
Michaela McCarthy: Well, sometimes people just follow generations, whether it would be in an environment of gangsters or politicians or actors, that’s their job.
Dipti Solanki: And it’s that path that’s been carved out and that’s all you know.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, but some people step out and do their own thing.
Bonny Allyson: Yes. It was always thought that I would follow that tradition. And then we moved from that location, so that location was Angel Town in Brixton. And you know, another side to that violence was living through the riots. You know, the riots was at the bottom of my street. You know, there was cars burning.
I remember being terrified, you know, because it was getting closer to home. So like, just more to be scared of, you know, scared of my parents, scared for my parents as well, seeing what was, you know, what they was engaged in. Always police at my house. My dad was known for being very violent. You know, when they came for him, like, there was a lot of police. And he would…
Michaela McCarthy: And your family background, their background.
Bonny Allyson: So, my dad is half Jewish yeah which we didn’t find out too much later on in life because it was hidden of you know obviously because of you know the Holocaust and things like that and then on my mum’s side my mum’s dad was Nigerian. The interesting thing though it wasn’t cool to be African back then. There was a lot of abuse.
And also there was a lot of abuse for the family because it was one of the first families of colour in Brixton. And that’s why my mum says where a lot of the violence came from because she was the protector of the family from racial abuse. She had three brothers and really horrible things would happen to them. She hasn’t told me the full stories, but some of the stories she’s told me are really horrible.
So she became the protector of her brothers, first and foremost, and then of her mum. So we moved from that location in Brixton, I was about six, and I thought at that time that my dad had put us out because he’d had enough of my mum. I thought that for years, decades. It wasn’t too much later on in life that my mum actually told me that she fled from my dad because his violence was getting worse. And I’ll give you an example of this. Back then we didn’t have all this social media that we have now. We had CBs. So you know, a lot of people used to talk over CBs. And my sister had a CB.
Dipti Solanki: What is a CB?
Bonny Allyson: A CB stands for Citizens Band Radio.
Dipti Solanki: I see.
Michaela McCarthy: I don’t think it was legal, the channel.
Bonny Allyson: No, no.
Michaela McCarthy: And, but what it is, people used to have all these names, because my friend had a CB and I used to go around to her house and I had a name, can’t even remember what it is. And you’d go on and then people go, ‘Oh, so and so’s on now’, and they’d just start talking about whatever.
Dipti Solanki: So speaking in a way that was undetected by the…
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah we’d just be chatting,
Bonny Allyson: It was like our mobile phone. Yeah. But you used channels, I think there was up to a hundred channels.
Michaela McCarthy: And so you could be on it for hours.
Bonny Allyson: I think we originally had the CB to listen in to the police.
Michaela McCarthy: Okay.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, I think that’s what it was for.
Michaela McCarthy: You could listen to quite a bit of stuff.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah. But then my sister had a CB. And my sister overheard on the CB my dad talking to another woman.
Michaela McCarthy: Ah.
Bonny Allyson: And I’ve had this conversation with her and she said she didn’t know whether to tell mummy because we knew like what would unfold. But she did. And the evening unfolded in a sense of my dad rushing back, my mum running out the house with me. Me being really little can’t keep up with my mum. My mum managed to beg, well plead with someone to let us in our house to hide. But I don’t know if someone told my dad where we were or we worked it out but back then there wasn’t security doors like one kick and the door would go. And so he found us. I remember looking up at my mum so you know being really little looking up at my mum, it was this way, yeah looking at my mum, my mum was here, I was behind the door and there was a lady here, standing on a few steps and my mum saying to her, ‘Do not open that door because he will go for you too because you’re hiding me’. And I remember, I can’t remember if she opened the door or the door got kicked in, I think the likelihood is the door got kicked in. And I don’t remember what happened after that. I would have witnessed what happened after that because I was there.
But I have many situations where I’ve completely suppressed them, blacked them out. But that was the day that my mum had her jaw broken. So you know, just these examples of kind of things that I…
Michaela McCarthy: But it’s like, it’s domestic violence.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah. But again, that, you know, they had that violent thing between each other. You normalise it.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, but you can normalise it as a child until you go to other homes.
Bonny Allyson: But that’s the thing, Michaela, I always knew it wasn’t right. It was like I had this sense…
Michaela McCarthy: Intuition, yeah.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, that it wasn’t right. It was like I had this sense that it wasn’t right.
Dipti Solanki: Bonny, can we just on that point you talked about when you witnessed that incredible violence and now as an adult you can’t really recall it. And I think a lot of people listening will have moments in their childhood where they know something terrible took place, something difficult took place and they can’t remember it. So maybe it’s gonna be helpful to our listeners just to kind of give some context behind that and why that happens, why we lose a whole chunk of memory, especially something that’s in childhood.
Bonny Allyson: It’s protection. It’s, you know, our biological aspects of us protecting ourselves, not remembering something so terrible.
Michaela McCarthy: If I can interject, you know, if you’ve come from an environment like that, sometimes, you know, when people are traumatised in that way, it’s like watching on TV.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: It’s like watching, well, probably now most young people watch Netflix or something, but it’s like watching it so you’re somewhat detached.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, because like how I just speak about it now, it was an experience, but you know, I think I most probably spoke about it a lot, done a lot of therapy, that it’s not a trigger anymore.
Dipti Solanki: Yeah, but in that moment it’s a protection mechanism for you to not remember.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, for sure. And you know, that was one of many. So we moved from there, we moved just around the corner to a place called Styles Gardens on Loughborough Road and that’s where the violence really acted out. I witnessed, so between the two of them, you know, this kind of what we would call ‘toxic love’ now. It’s like my mum found her courage with my dad, even though she was very courageous anyway in different ways. But she, so what I’d witnessed at that point, so she set his car on fire while he was in it. I wasn’t present, but she also stabbed him. He ran her over. And there was just these things, but I saw the aftermath of these things. So when he ran her over, not to be too gruesome, her legs were not very nice, but I was the person that nursed the wounds. And again, it’s that really strange thing of what the body does. I can remember the smell. Whenever I think about it, I can remember the smell. And, you know, again, I remember thinking, oh, God, you know, why am I having to do this?
I was the only person present, you know, everybody was terrified of my mum. To the point of not wanting to help either. And you know, even if you think of now like nowadays if a child’s going through this, social services will step in. Teachers was too terrified to report anything that was being witnessed. So I started running away but my mum would hunt me and she’d always bring me back and she’d be like you know you’re my special child, you know we stick together through this stuff. But it was just it was hard it was hard to stick together with her because it was just so much.
Michaela McCarthy: But that’s the thing isn’t it as well as well, about codependency. You don’t just have a codependency family. You know, it’s a family system. So no one gets in, but no one gets out. And if you do get in, you have to do it their way or the highway, no matter what culture. You have to fit in. And if you don’t fit in, you’re not quite accepted.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah. There was another situation where it was my seventh birthday. It’s really funny because when I used to wake up I used to listen before I used to get up and the listening was ‘What’s happened overnight?’.
Michaela McCarthy: It’s like the eggshells isn’t it, coming in from school, what’s it gonna be like, what’s gonna happen? It happens a lot in…
Bonny Allyson: What am I waking up to?
Michaela McCarthy: ..in lots of dysfunctional families. Yeah. And there’s dysfunction in many different ways. You know, it could be addiction, it could be criminality, it could be domestic violence, it could be many things.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: But there’s…there’s no structure to it. Doesn’t mean to say that couples don’t argue, people do argue, but there is a difference between violence to having an argument.
Bonny Allyson: Yes, for sure.
Michaela McCarthy: So it’s an eggshell walking.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah.
Dipti Solanki: It’s also a threat detection system.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, definitely, hypervigilance completely. Yeah. And I was like, OK, just want to go and watch Sesame Street. It’s my birthday.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bonny Allyson: Don’t know how the day’s going to unfold. And I went downstairs, and to watch Sesame Street, I had to clean blood off the TV. No idea what had happened overnight. Don’t know whose blood it was. It was just like, ‘OK, just want to watch’. Again it was like that desensitisation, okay well practically…
Michaela McCarthy: Well you have to desensitise to it and what it is because you just thought this is normal but is it, it’s my normal
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, yeah and I remember that day standing much later on cake and friends over and things like that, and that’s the thing it was very normal like we were very wealthy, so it was like quite normal. Like our life was grandiose in that sense. Back then when the ice cream man used to come, he used to park outside our house and my mom used to put £50 on the counter and the whole estate would get ice cream. £50 in that day, that’s a lot of money.
Michaela McCarthy: It’s a lot of money, a lot of ice creams.
Bonny Allyson: But I remember that night standing in the garden looking at the stars thinking do you know what when I grow up I’m going to work with children.
Michaela McCarthy: Okay.
Bonny Allyson: I’m going to work with children because I don’t want any child to be alone and suffer with what I’m having to contend with. And I remember looking up at the stars and making the promise to the stars.
Michaela McCarthy: Did you keep that promise?
Bonny Allyson: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: So tell me, tell us…
Dipti Solanki: I’ve got goosebumps!
Michaela McCarthy: … about you know how you’ve transferred your experience and your healing with your own personal therapy into working with others.
Bonny Allyson: So, went on the courses.
Michaela McCarthy: Yep.
Bonny Allyson: Back then the journey was four and a half years, had to be in therapy. And I very much believe when you’re training to be a therapist, you’re your own first client. Because, you know, as you’re working through all the theory and everything, it’s lightbulb moments, like, ‘Oh my God, that’s why I do these things. Oh my God, okay’. And getting a lot of understanding because you’re seeing it through your own lens.
So, I was looking for a placement. And, you know, placements are hard to find. They’re still hard to find in this day and age.
Dipti Solanki: They’re still hard to find.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, they’re still hard to find. And the only placement I could find was addictions. And I was like, oh, the one thing I don’t want to do. I didn’t want to do addictions. But it was the only placement I could find and it was just like, okay, like, this is it.
Dipti Solanki: It’s like that thing, you get the clients that you need and you get the placements that you need.
Bonny Allyson: Exactly. So I was there as a volunteer counsellor, you know, just kind of fumbling along as you do as you’re learning and during the process a vacancy come up for agroup therapist and I remember this guy Steve Riches again another Jenny. I’ve had many Jenny’s in my life.
Michaela McCarthy: Some people call them angels.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, for sure. Then Steve Riches is like, ‘You’d be great at this job’. And I’m like, ‘Steve, I don’t want this job! I don’t even want to be doing this work with the placement’. And then one week I went in on a Monday, and he’d cancelled all my clients. He said, I’m going to interview you for the job, I was like ‘Steve, I don’t want the job’ like I’m not doing the interview. Week later, going off to see my relative in rehab. He calls me and he says ‘You got the job’ and I’m like ‘I don’t want the job’.
Michaela McCarthy: Mm-hmm
Bonny Allyson: And he was like, ‘Well, you got it!’ and then in that journey, I just thought to myself, driving to her, like, there’s something in this, I’m just going to go with it. Just going to go with it. So went with it, evolved, ended up being a senior manager at Turning Point. Had a huge patch from Garrett Lane all the way down to the Isle of Sheppey.
So there was something in this of just learning and applying and because of, you know, working in addictions we’ve turned point mental health, addictions, homelessness. It was about that time where I was really going through the process. One of the therapists mentioned to me that I was seeing at the time that she thinks there’s some PTSD triggers, that there’s some, I have night terrors and things like that. So I went off and I had an assessment and it came out that I do have PTSD, obviously based on what I’d experienced. Yeah, it’s just like another learning, you know, another aspect of myself that I need to learn about.
Michaela McCarthy: Because it’s not short-term work.
Bonny Allyson: No it’s not.
Dipti Solanki: Also did you find that that diagnosis helped you to make more sense of yourself?
Bonny Allyson: Yeah for sure. Right. Yeah for sure. Yeah. I know, I think so I’ve done lots of therapy because I had to but I think the thing that I found the most useful is Spirituality,
Michaela McCarthy: Mm-hmm,
Bonny Allyson: but also EMDR, you know real kind of deep trauma work. So for me, it’s just like, you know becoming a therapist actually got me really in touch with what I had experienced, helped me to look at what I needed to address for myself. It just so happens that the trauma didn’t stop there. There was a few more things that had happened.
10 years ago, I was on a plane where the left-hand engine blew up. That was honestly out of this world in terms of the experience of that. I can laugh now, but the bit that was the hardest was when the pilot started screaming over the tannoy. I’m thinking if this pilot’s screaming like we’re kind of done for here.
Michaela McCarthy: I always say, if you’re on a plane and you hear, you see chaos and you hear and then the stewardess you know, they see chaos and you hear, and then the stewardess, you know, they start running around, you know you’re in trouble.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, and that’s, well, the plane rolled, so some of the stewardess was like, absolutely on the side of the plane. So yeah, there’s kind of been more things like, you know, life evolves and, you know, even if you’ve had trauma in your childhood, you know, it sometimes just doesn’t stop there. There’s still more experiences.
Michaela McCarthy: Can I ask you, do you think, you know, with trauma, I mean, I’ve experienced trauma and I’ve had lots of therapy, you know, do you think it ever really fully goes away?
Bonny Allyson: Well, I think what I’ve tended to learn now and how I work now is I don’t think our things ever go away it’s just that we learn how to manage them and you know I get a lot of clients that come along with anxiety you know depression and particularly with anxiety which you know I have experienced and you know the situation after the plane gave me a newfound respect for anxiety. You know I thought I understood anxiety but having that experience like I was like you know I didn’t know nothing about anxiety. But for me like the way when I’m working with these certain things it’s like well how does anxiety show up in your life and how does it serve you? You know, anxiety is a protection mechanism and if you don’t listen to the language about anxiety it I believe that it does get worse it’s like an annoying friend you know it’s turning up to look after you it’s just that sometimes the way it looks after you is not that healthy.
Dipti Solanki: Yeah I mean anxiety is the most inconvenient thing because it will come up in your in the moments where you just don’t need it to show up and then you’re having to internally navigate that and I’m sure so many people listening to this sometimes they experience anxiety and I know that people want to make sense of it and sometimes it’s difficult.
Bonny Allyson: Very. Yeah. For sure.
Dipti Solanki: I mean in your case you had this horrific thing that happened on the aeroplane
Bonny Allyson: Yeah
Dipti Solanki: And it sounds like that caused anxiety. But there’s so many people and other things I’m sure, for so many people when they experience anxiety they desperately want to make sense of it and they just can’t.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, and I feel like, you know, my upbringing has given me the capacity to be able to sit with a lot, to not be shocked by anything. I’ve done tough parts of what we would say the work is in counselling, you know, I’ve worked in prisons, I’ve worked with gang culture, I’ve worked with postcode wars, you know, I’ve worked with, you know, I’ve had a chair thrown at me, you know, because, you know.
Michaela McCarthy: Did you deserve it?
Bonny Allyson: Well, I was poking the bear, so possibly!
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah yeah
Bonny Allyson: But again it’s like the not being shocked. I remember you know unfortunately I worked with a client who had been subjected to gang rape you know really painful stuff. Really, really painful. What was really challenging when she was talking it through, some of the people that she named as involved, I knew. I went to school with them. So really difficult stuff. But my experience, it’s made me be able to work with the not nice things that have happened in life. And I do find, like you said, the clients that you attract, they are ones that are more traumatised, there’s more childhood stuff that have gone on, and it’s how it’s still impacting on the here and now for them.
Dipti Solanki: What I’m really hearing there is that that sense of inner stillness, that’s what it brings up for me. And for someone who has experienced, you know, the external chaos, which is the internal chaos and the feelings of not being safe and not being able to make sense of the world and belonging is such a huge part of that, to be able to have access to something like therapy and all the other things that we can do that can lead to a sense of perhaps not stillness all the time, but even moments of it is so freeing. But Bonny, I’m really curious about the clients that you work with and you continue to work with.
Do you still find after all the years of doing all the amazing work that I’m sure you’ve done, that working with clients still uncovers different layers of your experience?
Bonny Allyson: Oh for sure, yeah for sure. When I went back to work in my primary school, you know, I’d always had that echo in my mind of that seven-year-old and the promise that I made to the children of the world and I finally got back to work as a counsellor in my primary school. It was quite a profound experience because I didn’t realise that they was actually knocking down my old primary school to rebuild it. So it’s almost like, again it felt very spiritual, it’s like okay I’m going back to where I’ve had a lot of trauma happen to help other children, but then I became part of the new school. And I know this is gonna sound maybe a bit far out there, the one thing they didn’t completely change was the the brick wall around the school. So they had some bricks that were really old, but they had amalgamated new bricks. They’d put new bricks in, and it was almost like I stood there one day and looked at this wall, and it felt like I was looking at myself of the past and the present, and how it had integrated. And you know that, for me, that real sense of just looking at my primary school, thinking of that seven-year-old that had made that promise and just you know just smiling to myself of you know ‘You’ve done it like, you’ve said. You have survived.’. And yes, I still have up and down days but you know I teach in this room sometimes I’m here and I’m teaching and I’m talking to students and you know these kind of this this wisdom is falling out of me and I kind of catch myself and I will have a glimpse of you know that that child that was running with her mom or you know nursing her mum or these different things and I’m like now I’m sitting here teaching like I can’t explain the feeling it’s like a warm feeling that comes over me and just like, ‘Wow, Bonny!’ like ‘You did it!’. You knew it was always wrong. And you know, you’ve actually, you know, I can say it now, I’m literally saying this on the spot – I have excelled my own expectations because now for me, it’s like, I’m just one person that’s, you know, trying to bring healing to the world. And I can’t reach everyone, but now I’m helping supervisors.
Michaela McCarthy: You might with the podcast.
Bonny Allyson: Possibly, yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: I mean, the thing is, when you speak in that manner, that’s where compassion comes in.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: I think that’s where you can feel compassion for yourself, for others, for the younger part of you, for the people that you’re teaching, because you’re not sharing all the detail but there is a wisdom to that, because you’re not kind of stuck back there.
Dipti Solanki: But I also think that there’s something innately within us that has to be very, very brave to listen and to notice, and I just want to take a moment just to acknowledge that and to acknowledge that about you, that it takes so much courage, doesn’t it? When you’ve been through so much, to even start to trust or dare to and say, could I, is it possible, can I trust this person? Could this possibly be a path for me? And you did that.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: I think you’ve got to move out of your comfort zone. You’ve got to move out of your comfort zone. Seek the opportunity, see the opportunity and just grab it. Just grab it because if you don’t you just stay stuck.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: You know coming to sort of a natural close, what message would you give to the viewers and listeners out there? So people watching, people listening.
Dipti Solanki: Those who are therapy curious.
Bonny Allyson: Do you know what, I would say the most important relationship you’re ever going to have is the one with yourself.
Michaela McCarthy: Absolutely.
Bonny Allyson: And it’s really important how you talk to yourself, how you treat yourself. And sometimes, you know, if we externalised how we spoke to ourself, it’d actually be verbal abuse. So really kind of tune into how you talk to yourself, how you treat yourself, and how you relate to yourself. You know, just echo the most important relationship we ever have is the one with ourselves.
Dipti Solanki: Bonny, thank you so much for joining us today. Honestly, I’m sure our viewers and listeners will agree as well, it was a fascinating conversation. You shared so many amazing parts of your life and your journey. And yeah, it was a privilege to listen to you. Thank you so much.
Michaela McCarthy: Thank you.
Bonny Allyson: Yeah, thank you. Thank you.
Outro: You’ve been listening to A Bunch of Therapists with me Michaela McCarthy and Dipti Solanki.
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