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 Neil Bennett.
Dipti Solanki: Really good to see you, Neil. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Could you tell us a little bit about what led you into the world of therapy?
Neil Bennett: My interest in human behaviour and I’ve worked for a number of years in the health and social care, so it seemed like a natural progression. So I’ve worked for a couple… numerous homeless people’s charities, I won’t say the names, but I’ve worked in hostel settings. I’ve done street outreach. Currently working in supported housing. I trained in health and social care, so I have a diploma in Health and Social Care, and how I kind of got into it was through maybe going through my own journey.
Michaela McCarthy: Do you want to share a little bit about your journey?
Neil Bennett: Yeah sure. So I ended up in a place where I needed help. I grew up in Lambeth. I needed help through services, through my own kind of struggles with addiction. And I always thought, and I know this might sound a bit arrogant, that I could do a better job.
Michaela McCarthy: In seeing the people within different services?
Neil Bennett: Yeah, I kind of got involved through asking to almost do like an internship or volunteer for one of the services I was a service user for. And it’s kind of like a natural way of getting service users inclusion, to get involved. I think it’s a good, it’s an aspect of kind of… social inclusion, really important. Finding out what service users want and how they shape the service and that was my kind of inclusion.
Dipti Solanki: So Neil, what was it that you felt you didn’t get as a service user when you said you felt it could be better?
Neil Bennett: I used that word arrogance. I did use that word because being on the other side of the jump, so to say, yeah, I can understand the difficulties and struggles that services would face.
Michaela McCarthy: And you mentioned addiction, and have you gone through the 12-step?
Neil Bennett: Yeah, I mentioned addiction and this is part of my story. And it kind of touches on to the human behaviour bit. I got to understand through my addiction that it was a symptom of something more deeper. And it was up to a point where I became quite frustrated, I suppose, not just with services, but a bit with services that just kind of dealt with a surface level kind of treatment, support they could provide. And I suppose, unless you’re ready to explore and go deeper, you’re not going to find an answer. And I got to a place where I was wanting to explore much deeper. I also came from a community and I… what I saw from a lot of people, a lot of my peers and the people in my community, it felt quite dysfunctional. And that’s also been part of my journey as well. And knowing why they were so dysfunctional and why we, as a community, we weren’t able to fit in or assimilate or find it a struggle to use services. We would stigmatise each other. Yeah. And that’s always been my thing as well. That’s always been a thing, you know. How do I fit in? Where do I fit in? Not quite feeling a part of my parents’ culture and not quite fitting in part of British English culture.
Michaela McCarthy: Yes, tell me a little bit more about that because obviously you’re saying, okay, your parents’ culture. So where did your parents grow up?
Neil Bennett: So my parents are Jamaican.
Michaela McCarhty: Okay They came over when?
Neil Bennett: Windrush generation.
Michaela McCarthy: So, you know for you growing up as a black man in Lambeth? Okay, so how is it different for you? You know, they would have been brought up in Jamaica, coming here, finding a new life.
Neil Bennett: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: And then you’re the next generation.
Neil Bennett: Yeah, yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: So what was it like for you?
Neil Bennett: I’m not quite from my parents’ culture. And I think growing up in it, and there’s a lot of what kind of shaped me as well was a lot of civil unrest when I grew up. There was a lot of… still, just kind of navigating and finding their way, my parents as well. Expectations would be different.
Michaela McCarthy: For who, for you?
Neil Bennett: For my parents, I would say, coming to this country. I was just thinking about this today, it almost felt like to me… my parents had this vision of coming to the mother country as they like to call it and being disowned by their mother and I and I kind of align it like that.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah.
Neil Bennett: And what that causes.
Dipti Solanki: It’s very powerful.
Neil Bennett: Yeah, and what that causes. And especially for the generation, the next generation.
Michaela McCarthy: Because they were invited to come over.
Neil Bennett: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: You know, to help this country after the second world war. Yeah. So I imagine being over-promised and under-delivered.
Neil Bennett: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: In that with their expectations.
Neil Bennett: Yeah. And what that does for the next generation, there was a lot of angry and bitter people. Remembering their passport would have been a British passport, so same like anyone who grew up in this country. So, and I think a lot of that, a lot of that angst, a lot of that anger, I carried, and that was part of my addiction, carrying this angst and anger.
Dipti Solanki: Can you tell me, and for the benefit of our viewers, that’s quite a powerful picture that you just painted there of, the gap between the expectation and the reality. What was that and how did that spill over and what was your experience of that?
Neil Bennett: So I always saw my parents, and looking back in hindsight after doing a bit of work on myself, and I was quite fearful living under that cloud of just being very unsettled. They lived, they made an effort to live under the radar and not being seen. And growing up, that’s where the conflict comes. Because I was born, gone, sorry.
Dipti Solanki: So under the radar, why?
Neil Bennett: Why? Because there still be this cloud. You’re not quite British. You’re not quite assimilated. You’re not quite one of us. It was, it’s a very unstable, it’s not a secure base. You know, but being born as a Londoner, my views, my culture is very different than my parents. You know, I do, today, identify myself as a Londoner. I would identify myself as a Londoner, which is, London’s very different from the rest of the country.
Michaela McCarthy: Well, it’s its own country.
Neil Bennett: Yeah, yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: Do you know what I mean? We’ve got all sorts of people here.
Neil Bennett: Yeah, very diverse communities. And I think a lot of my angst, a lot of my bitterness, a lot of my anger as a young black man was centred around that. You know, I tended to gravitate towards certain peers, certain elders and, you know, part of my story as well… I done… the way I got into health and social care was through some youth work… through youth work and working with gangs at that time. And that helped me, you know. The thing about doing health and social care, I think it is a vocation. And through doing this work, it helps me. It helps me heal as well. And there was a lot of angst. There was a lot of angst. Unable to self-regulate, unable to self-soothe, you know.
Michaela McCarthy: But that’s part of addiction.
Neil Bennett: And that’s where addiction comes in.
Michaela McCarthy: You know, addiction is, you know, you fall into it, you might think I’ll have a few drinks, I’ll take a few drugs, but actually it starts to soothe how you feel, and then you can’t find anything else to soothe the feelings, so you carry on doing it, then you need more and more, and then you get yourself into trouble.
Neil Bennett: Yeah, it’s complex when I look at addiction and part of my model, part of the thesis I done was on addiction. And I currently work… my nine to five is working in a treatment centre. And yeah, that’s an area I’m going to expand on as well.
Michaela McCarthy: What would you like to do in treament?
Neil Bennett: Well I’ve set up a service at the moment it’s called ARC, so Addiction Recovery Counselling. I think what addiction has done, it’s propelled me to look at myself. I can’t change my external circumstances. This may never change, but I can change the way I respond and react to it. And that’s where the work is. And what it’s gave me, it’s given me an insight into human behaviour. Hence, this is why I want to become a therapist and a counsellor.
Michaela McCarthy: Did you think there’s a kind of, well everyone’s an individual, and they all have their individual story, but do you think there’s a theme with people that kind of have addiction issues, you know, where it all starts from. You know, some people might be more anxious, some people might be more depressed, or there’s been a lot of trauma.
Neil Bennett: So, certain things will ring true, there’s certain themes. Yeah, being a counsellor, we work with patterns and themes. And so there’s certain themes, I think, codependency, for sure. Trauma, for sure. Unable to self-regulate. Unable to self-soothe. But if I’m hurt, I might be prone to outbursts. But really, I just want to say, look, I’m hurting here. I’m feeling hurt, but it will come out in some different way because I’m quite prideful, I’m a geezer. I don’t want to show any kind of vulnerabilities. So it will come out in different ways. So that’s part of self-regulating is knowing the language. I’m finding the space, finding an outlet as well. So these are kind of the fundamentals.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, I mean, if you think about a lot of people with addiction when they first go in for therapy, one thing they say, ‘Well, I’m in a lot of pain’. So when you talk about the language, the pain, the pain, and I can recognise that many moons ago, I struggled with my own addiction issues, but you feel pain, but you don’t know what, you can’t… you don’t know what the pain is. It’s all just one ball of pain. You don’t know that you’re sad, because it’s just all the same and because you’ve numbed your feelings for so long and so now it’s almost starting again like a child, you know, and then when you recognise, you know, feelings and feel them, I don’t mean the name of the feeling, but you actually feel them. There’s a memory there. Okay, because you would have felt those before you numbed yourself.
Neil Bennett: And that’s interesting when we think of things like the suicide rate for men, how high that is. And we look at that and that’s because probably not able to self-regulate, not able to find a language or the platform to speak about it.
Dipti Solanki: I also think that we talked about shame before, but shame is a big part of addiction.
Neil Bennett: Yes.
Dipti Solanki: You know, and just being able to reach out like you are able to and get that help. And also, you know, something that you said at the start which was so necessary to say is that addiction is a way of self-soothing through there’s a root cause and oftentimes people don’t allow themselves to even uncover that root cause because they don’t have the mechanisms to support networks.
Neil Bennett: So that’s part of the work that’s part of the work, that’s part of the work I’m going to be doing with ARC is working with local services, working with religious services, spiritual services, yeah, yeah, yeah, working with certain individuals in the communities, making it easier for people to access services, making it, making it easier for people to access services, making it easier if you are working in a services, making it easier to see the signs of addiction. If you are… if you’ve got a customer who comes in or a client or a service user, and making it easier to talk about it. Giving people an understanding and that’s where it kind of starts. But it’s always for that person to recognise and say okay there is a problem.
Michaela McCarthy: What made you then decide to go in and train as a therapist? Is it that you wanted to incorporate therapy into the work that you do? Do you think you needed more?
Neil Bennett: Growing up disadvantaged, blah blah blah, I never really settled when I was at school. So I’m at that stage in my life where I feel quite settled and able and just feel cognitively ready to digest and go on further my education. It felt like a natural progression. I’ll be able to work with individuals on a much deeper level.
Michaela McCarthy: Addiction, you know, it’s driven by something and if you are going to then go into trauma, that’s long-term work.
Neil Bennett: Yes, yes, yes.
Michaela McCarthy: And you’ve got to get a balance, maybe, you know, be in recovery to be able to then go deeper into the other work because your feelings, you’re numb, so it’s very hard to do that at the beginning.
Neil Bennett: Trauma work is hard. Trauma work is hard. And I kind of touched on this before when people say, ‘Oh, you know, you stop drinking, blah, blah, blah, you’ve got this under control’, but that’s when the real work starts. The work never stops. No. The work never stops. And I think that’s a good thing.
Dipti Solanki: On this journey of navigating your addiction, coming out the other side, and now going into here, what would you say has been the superpower that you’ve developed on that journey?
Neil Bennett: Oh, it’s intuition.
Dipti Solanki: Wow. Amazing.
Neil Bennett: Intuition. Intuition. Maybe picking up social cues from people. A deep understanding, a deep relational kind of connection with someone. That’s what my own journey has given me. So I feel quite blessed to be able to sit in a room with someone and they could be explaining some really deep trauma. And I’m able to connect with that on a level. And it’s quite weird how ordinarily, because the journey I’ve been on, because the journey I’ve been on. I can taste it, I can taste that. And…
Michaela McCarthy: But that’s true empathy, isn’t it, as well?
Neil Bennett: That’s true empathy, that’s intuition as well.
Michaela McCarthy: And compassion.
Neil Bennett: Yeah, and compassion, yeah.
Dipti Solanki: So, through that lens, and I know that no one can fix everything none of us can although we really want to and maybe isn’t about fixing, let’s change that phrase but…
Michaela McCarthy: Supporting
Dipti Solanki: What is the support, thank you Michaela, what is the support that we can offer through the work that we do as therapists to these communities that would make a difference. I mean you may not have an answer to that but it’s great to ask the question I think.
Neil Bennett: How can we reach someone on their level? You know it’s not about let’s meet each other in the middle, let’s talk about this kind of alliance and this kind of relationship and it probably needs reshaping. The way we deliver even counselling maybe needs reshaping. The kind of 50 minute model, you know, one person in the room, maybe that needs reshaping.
Michaela McCarthy: And I think the more difference we have within the profession, the more we can reach out for difference.
Neil Bennett: Definitely, definitely, definitely. It really makes a difference. As I say, you know, part of what we’re doing here is to de-stigmatise, it’s to put it out there. There are people who speak your language, who understand your language, who are in the profession and doing this. And that’s what inspires me. You know, I’m able to sit in a room and recognise and walk with you through that pain and be able to be a witness to your story, you know, and say ‘I understand, I heard you’ you know.
Dipti Solanki: And yeah and you’re not alone
Neil Bennett: And you’re not alone. And that’s where it starts.
Michaela McCarthy: We learn from it, we’re all strangers and then you learn from each other. We couldn’t all be the same, it’d be really dull.
Neil Bennett: Yeah every day’s a school day and that’s really exciting.
Michaela McCarthy: Well thank you for coming on the podcast, it’s been great actually listening to your story.
Neil Bennett: Thank you for having me.
Michaela McCarthy: And sharing you know what you’re achieving, where you’re going and even your own ambition.
Dipti Solanki: Good luck with all of that because I know that you’re going to do some really powerful work and yeah thank you for being here today.
Neil Bennett: Thank you.
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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