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 Michaela McCarthy and me, Dipti Solanki. Today’s guest is therapist Claudine Van De Veyver.
Michaela McCarthy: Okay, welcome. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Claudine van der Veyver. I hope I pronounced that right.
Claudine Van De Veyver: You did.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, because I’ve been practicing all morning. So tell me, so what we’d like to start with is what made you first go into therapy? So a bit of a story about yourself and then your work, what you did and then what made you train to be a therapist?
Claudine Van De Veyver: I had postnatal depression after my first daughter, really severely, and I had a great trainee therapist, and I can still see her to this day, Maureen. A great person, a friend of mine who said to me I wasn’t sort of emotionally stable enough. A lot happened in that first year when I had Lee so, and so I went into therapy. I probably was in there for probably about 18 months, and then when I had my second daughter, I think you’re 50% likely that it comes back. So I kind of had the tactics, I knew what was happening. So it didn’t really happen so much.
And then I carried on through my thirties, was a makeup artist, I’d stopped working for BA. And I ended up volunteering in the Royal Marsden in Chelsea. And a standard joke between my family that I always love a stranger people come and find me and I found myself in a room with a lady whose brother was dying next door and she lived in South Africa and she wanted to get back for her son’s 21st and I can remember her looking at me and saying to me what should I do and I thought ‘I’m just not equipped for this. I need to upskill a bit. I just, it’s out of my remit.’
So, I tentatively dipped my toe back in the water and found an introduction to counselling and it started there. So I sort of did the little six week course because I looked at it, I was always terrified of like writing and bits and pieces and they said you had to write a self-awareness journal at the end. And I thought, I can do that. And then it sort of happened. And then I did the advanced one and then I applied for my level three, my Foundation year. Didn’t get in, always have to have a plan B and never pass anything first time. And that’s when I got put on the wait list and I finally got in and then I got diagnosed of being dyslexic, which I kind of knew at the same time. So it was a roller coaster of three years.
Michaela McCarthy: Having postnatal depression, how was it for you? Because there’s probably many viewers out there that are going to have experienced that.
Claudine Van De Veyver: It was crippling. And the clients, a lot of clients I’ve had in since, I think especially today… it’s really interesting because we’re what 24 years on now, you know we’ve got all the pressure of the socials now the social media, mum’s posting, it was the happiest time of my life, I mean my pregnancy was hard I had an emergency section, I nearly lost my daughter I was a little bit critical at one point, all in the space of 20 minutes. It went very, very quickly wrong. And I think the shock of that, my dad had got diagnosed with cancer a month before my daughter was born. My stepsister committed suicide two months after that. It was a lot. And there just wasn’t really any support. There wasn’t anywhere to go. And what I’ve noticed since, and actually funny enough, a couple of my clients that I’ve noticed now, I think this sort of shaming that goes on and the pressure of, ‘Oh, but it’s all right for you. I mean, look, you’ve got a lovely husband’, you’ve got, you know, almost like these pass-offs, ‘We all get tired’. I think that was what one of my friends said at the time.
Michaela McCarthy: And… Trying to normalise.
Claudine Van De Veyver: Trying to normalise it. And I can remember standing by the sink, especially after my second one, looking at them thinking, just tears pouring down my face, looking at these beautiful little girls and thinking, ‘I’m not sure how I’m going to get through the next minute’. And then just having to do that sort of, I think Ruby Wax called it, that smiling depression. And I would get there and think, ‘Oh it’s great, invite everybody over’. And then ten minutes beforehand I’d be in a complete panic thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’ Normal things like making a cup of tea, pouring someone a glass of wine. Literally I found so difficult. Yeah it was cruel.
Michaela McCarthy: So how did you move on from…
Claudine Van De Veyver: I had a really great doctor, a lovely doctor who… I had a good friend who said to me, I was due back at work with British Airways at the time, I was the first one, and she said I think you just need to go in and talk to your doctor and just say that you’re not emotionally stable enough to go back in and to get some help. And he said to me okay well we can do two things he said I can send you off to a gynecologist, I mean we wouldn’t say this now but he would say this 24 years ago and he said he’ll pump you full of drugs and it’ll mask it or alternatively alternatively, you can go and speak to a therapist. And I said, I’ll take the latter. And it’s interesting, you know, when people come out, because actually at the time, I think people, it was awkward. It was really awkward that I said, well, ‘I’m going into therapy, I’m not coping’. And they were very uncomfortable, lots of people.
Michaela McCarthy: So do you think that was because it was 24 years ago versus now?
Claudine Van De Veyver: It’s a great question. I genuinely couldn’t answer that. I don’t know. I mean, you know, for you and I and everybody who’s sort of having trained since, I think it’s the best mani pedi massage that everyone could have. I think that’s what we should be doing I don’t think we can change the world, I don’t think we can change the past but I think it gives us an opportunity to understand how we work and how we deal with things and how we can get reactive and how we can get activated I really like the trigger word because it’s a bit lazy vocabulary, you know it’s about being emotionally activated and understanding what that feeling is and where it comes from and why it comes from it.
Dipti Solanki: Claudine, so it sounds like you had an amazing GP first of all who offered you that choice so going into therapy what was your experience of it? What was your initial feeling?
Claudine Van De Veyver: Well my first day that I went in, I had to end up with my daughter, so all the rules that you know they tell you not to do because my husband forgot. It was so bad. I can still remember it now and I was like… and then after that it’s almost like I used that it was five o’clock every Friday and it was just… I mean I couldn’t wait I couldn’t wait to go in. But what was really interesting for me is that what I thought I was going in to talk about and what I thought I was going in to have issues with actually, which is you know we we know now as being therapists, but what one thinks they’re going in with actually always unravels a whole ton of other stuff. And it wasn’t that, that sort of disappeared quite quickly. So it was a masking, if anything, or like a roadblock, like I would associate with it today. What we think the buffer is, it often isn’t. It’s our projection onto holding that thing, thinking of this is definitely what I’ve got a problem with. And actually, when we start talking, or when I started talking, if I’m owning this, when I started talking, I realised that that actually wasn’t the case at all.
Dipti Solanki: Well, you know, it’s almost like we hold onto the one thing that helps us make sense of how we’re feeling, and I know it’s a conversation that we’d had.
Michaela McCarthy: Well you go in with one issue and like me I came out with 25 issues. I remember the first day I went into therapy and you just think that’s your issue and you’re going in to talk about this issue and actually when you start unravelling and talking about yourself so much more comes out. You mentioned something earlier on about being dyslexic. And we run a training school, as you know, and I’ve been very pro having support for people, whether they’re dyslexic, ADHD, or neurodiverse. And also, even if you are not, we all are different learners. I learn from experiential, and I’m a visual learner. So if people just keep talking from the blackboard, I’m probably not as good with that. But there’ll be a lot of people, and I have spoken to people over the years, that they stop themselves from training as a therapist because of all the essays, and they just thought, ‘Oh no, I can’t do all the essays’. And I just wondered for you finding out when you were dyslexic, thinking, ‘Oh, essays’.
Claudine Van De Veyver: I knew, I think that was the initial thing. It’s a great point, because that was initially, I was thinking, ‘Oh crap, I’m gonna have to go back in, I’m gonna have to get the books out again’, I couldn’t pass anything. And I think I was saying to you, Dipti, I mean, I think it took me till I was about 48 to actually confess to my husband that I didn’t pass my Maths ‘O’ Level, I’d sat it three times.
Dipti Solanki: So there was a big sense of…
Claudine Van De Veyver: Shame! Oh my gosh, awful, like utter failure. And I think one of his friends years ago turned around and sort of flippantly said to me, well, you know, you didn’t go to university and you look at you, you did okay. As if it was so crippling.
Dipti Solanki: So how did you build up that resilience needed to do that? Because so many people, don’t you think, would have given up after the first or second go?
Claudine Van De Veyver: Oh, I mean, I won’t lie. I mean, that last three months, I remember saying to my therapist, I don’t feel like I’m ever going to get through. I’ve been doing a placement for two years, I just don’t feel like I’m going to get through it. And she said, you’ve just got to hold your nerve.
Michaela McCarthy: Keep going.
Claudine Van De Veyver: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: When you trained and then you started working with real people, what was that like for you?
Claudine Van De Veyver: Well I can still remember my first client now. I can remember the room when I went for my interview and there was this woman and my goodness, I think I said to you Dipty, and I was like why are you I mean you’ve got a Masters, you’ve got this after your name, that after your name, I thought there’s not any more books that you can read, you just got to get in there, you’ve got to get your feet and your hands and everything dirty, you just got to get in there. You just got to jump in and listen because actually just holding that space, that’s enough sometimes for people.
I can remember I had one client when I finally qualified. She didn’t talk, bless her, for maybe the first four sessions for about 25 minutes. I knew how to hold that silence then. I didn’t feel intimidated by that. And I think once you get that trust in the therapy room, the idea is that you can then grieve and process and then you then start to reconnect with your internal self. And then once that happens that can overflow to your outside. But you sort of experiment with your therapist, don’t we? Like what’s actually going on for us and floating it before we then start taking it outside again. But that has to grow first, in there. That has to grow in the room first. And it’s not to be rushed, I think there’s still a little bit of that instant gratification where people think, ‘Oh, I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve done it’. Or they come in and…
Michaela McCarthy: I’ve got about four sessions and I know everything.
Claudine Van De Veyver: Yeah, I’ve said everything now.
Michaela McCarthy: It’s like going training in the gym, isn’t it? Oh, I’ve got my muscles and everything.
Claudine Van De Veyver: They’ve had a word vomit. They’ve told you everything, you’ve said it, but you definitely haven’t felt it and you haven’t processed it and nothing will change until you have.
Dipti Solanki: Claudia, something that we spoke about is balance and how balance is really important to you. And I know that Michaela and I, we were both talking about the other thing that you balance with your therapy career. So tell us a bit about that and why that’s important.
Claudine Van De Veyver: Oh what my my my my dual life. Right. So I think it was part of my post-natal depression actually, I had terrible body dysmorphia and I don’t know if any of you saw the Freddie Flintoff thing on bulimia where he was actually he was diagnosed
Michaela McCarthy: I think I did, yeah.
Claudine Van De Veyver: I think people always assume that bulimia is purging, like being sick and everything, and actually it’s not, it’s diet pills, it’s over excessive exercising and everything, and that was definitely something that I was. I mean, the amount of diet pills, I think I used to throw down my body in my 20s because of my body dysmorphia that was aligned with something much deeper which I then uncovered later in therapy. But my whole body and self-image was terrible.
My foundation year I trained to be a yoga teacher. It was my year, it was like the Catherine Tate sketch where she was like, I can do that, I can do that, I can do that.
Dipti Solanki: Was that therapy and the yoga training side by side?
Claudine Van De Veyver: Yeah.
Dipti Solanki: Wow.
Claudine Van De Veyver: And my learning support teacher was like, what have you done? And I was like, I don’t know. And she said, but you’ve got to do Sanskrit. And I was like, I know. And she was like, you’ve got to do a physiology exam. I was like, I don’t know what I’ve done, but I did it. And then I went on to train as a cycle instructor, and the gym that I was in, I ended up covering for my yoga teacher there, and the I ended up getting a class there, and then that sort of evolved. So I now teach and that’s been part of kind of my maintenance of my depression, my postnatal depression and my body dysmorphia and everything, because it never goes.
Dipti Solanki: I also imagine it, sorry Michaela, I imagine, you know, we all know how heavy it can feel to hold that space for other people, and our self-care often comes at the bottom of the pile. So I imagine having, you know, teaching those classes in the morning and then your therapy work in the afternoon, that’s such a healthy combination from where I’m standing. What’s your experience of that?
Claudine Van De Veyver: It is, yeah. I mean, I think you get a better reading. I mean I know I think when we were talking before you’re like what are you like with people and teaching? I mean you know people’s expectations are always interesting right like what they expect and actually what happens and I think people come in let’s say for the sake of the 6.45 on a Tuesday morning where I teach for a yoga session and whatever’s going on in their external worlds versus what they come in and expect to see. I think being a therapist it’s great insight I can sort of read people a little bit more, so there’s a definitely a bit more of an energy world to it and I do talk quite a lot about that.
Dipti Solanki: Because that’s the thing that people really struggle with because cognitively they know what’s happened and they’re trying to cope with it but it’s not, it’s having that kind of blockage of being able to feel into it in order to heal through it and release right?
Claudine Van De Veyver: Yeah and I think you know I’ll talk to them in in yoga and I might say you know… there’s a lovely girl who’ll say, you know, you put me in a right-legged pigeon and that’s it, the tears start coming. Or I will say to them sometimes, ‘You will get these emotions’. If I’m holding a lot I can be in a downward dog. If I’m not teaching and it’s I’m breathing and then it will come. But I think it was Philippa Perry who spoke about the five minutes of breath work, deep breathing a day that taps into that parasympathetic nervous system. It’s that relax and digest, it’s incredibly important. It’s listening to that feeling, holding the feeling, wait for it, where’s it trying to roadmap you to, stick with it, it will tell you something in the end. But often, what’s the first thing we do as soon as we feel any form of pain, whether it’s physical or mental, bang, distract. Like, okay, let’s do this, let’s change position, let’s pick up my phone, let’s, sorry, what did you say? Like changes anything to get rid of that initial millisecond of that, you know, feeling that’s come in.
Michaela McCarthy: So we probably need to come to an end. And so what’s your thoughts? Been on a bit of a journey with Claudine.
Dipti Solanki: I think it’s been such a fascinating conversation and I hope that when people listen to this they understand how important it is for us to embody what we’re feeling as well and I love that your journey into becoming a therapist has not been one that’s very straightforward and that’s okay because it’s going to look different for all of us, what do you think?
Michaela McCarthy: Well I mean look, if it was that easy everyone would train to be a therapist, wouldn’t they?
Claudine Van De Veyver: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: And it’s not because you’re actually training to be yourself. So the more you know about yourself the better you are.
Outro: You’ve been listening to A Bunch Of Therapists with me, Michaela McCarthy and Dipti Solanki. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and review.
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