Transcript
Intro: Hello, welcome to A Bunch of Therapists with me, Michaela McCarthy. And me, Dipti Solanki. We’ll be bringing you stories and insights from inside the therapy room.
Michaela McCarthy: So Dipti, who have we got on our podcast this week?
Dipti Solanki: Well, this week we have the lovely Julie Sale. Julie’s really interesting. She’s had a really long and illustrious career, which started off in corporate and through personal circumstance she went into therapy, trained as a therapist and has now set up the Institute of Clinical Sexology, she calls it KICS for short and, yeah, I think it’s going to be a really interesting conversation.
Michaela McCarthy: Great, look forward to hearing what she’s got to say. So Julie, welcome to our podcast. Thank you. And as you know, the podcast is a bit about why people get into therapy, how they get into therapy. So maybe you could start. Where do you want to start?
Julie Sale: Well, if we’re talking about that journey to becoming a therapist, then that’s such an interesting question because the background I come from, this isn’t a predictable pathway. Psychology wasn’t taught at school. When I was at school, this is ageing me now, and I don’t think I really knew what a counsellor was. But if I think about what I was like when I was a little girl, I was always really sensitive and really empathic. And my family used to laugh at me because I’d cry at the cartoons and I’d cry at Lassie and Skippy and anyone of a certain age would know about Lassie and Skippy. And if anything, where anyone got hurt or anything was sad, I’d be really, I’d be in in tears. And even on Tom and Jerry there’s a cartoon where a character they’re not letting them in the door and they’re knocking on the door going ‘Let me in!’ and I still remember crying at that.
Dipti Solanki: I really was it Jerry knocking at the door?
Julie Sale: I think so, let me in, oh they’re not letting him in. So I was notorious in the family for being sensitive and empathic. And I think that’s got to be part of what drew me to eventually training as a therapist.
Michaela McCarthy: So you mentioned about your background.
Julie Sale: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: I mean, we’re probably similar age. You know, we didn’t have socials or websites. We didn’t have anything. And so it was all word of mouth.
Julie Sale: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: You know, all the yellow pages.
Julie Sale: It feels like the old ages.
Michaela McCarthy: Look it up in the yellow pages.
Dipti Solanki: How was counselling viewed then, from the outside then?
Julie Sale: It was just not heard of.
Michaela McCarthy: What was it viewed in your family? So when you went into therapy, what did your family think about you going into it?
Julie Sale: We were a lot further on then. So at the time though, when I was young, working class people, it just wasn’t a thing. Nothing was a thing like that, you just didn’t know about it. But people didn’t talk about having anxiety or depression or mental illness. It just wasn’t talked about.
Michaela McCarthy: Mental illness really was in psychiatric hospitals, you would hear, because my mum was sectioned, so I kind of heard that. But the thing is, people would say they lack confidence or a something, or there’s something wrong, they’ve got a bit of depression. It’s over there sort of thing, everything was over there, or they’re an alcoholic, they drink too much or whatever.
Julie Sale: It just wasn’t known about really. I think people expected to just help one another and their families. My family was like that, we’re a big family. And everyone just did the collectivist, pull yourself together type of process when anyone was upset. So it was just completely off of everyone’s map in my family for anyone to go to university, even I was the first person to go to university.
Dipti Solanki: Where did your family, where in the country are your family from?
Julie Sale: From the Midlands. And my mum’s family are from Yorkshire so I think I have a stronger northern identity than I probably deserve because I actually didn’t grow up in the North North. We have a very strongly influenced Yorkshire heritage I’d say with the food that we ate, the way that we were. We spent a lot of time with my grandma. So no, I’m very proud of my working class heritage. I think that grafting hardworking value was really inbuilt in me. And I just was, I genuinely mean this without being deliberately immodest. It’s just a complete accident that I was bright enough to go to university. It was a total accident.
I wasn’t interested in school really, although compared to the rest of my family I looked like I was. I just completely scraped through it, what’s called GCSEs now, they were ‘O’ Levels in the olden days. And then something clicked in me which was actually, Julie you’re bright enough to do this and I worked really hard for my A-levels and really aced my A-levels, then went to university, which was the most anxiety provoking thing I’d done in my life to that point, because no one had been away like that. And that set me on a completely different path. But my goal then was about doing a job that earned money, because I was from a family with no money.
Michaela McCarthy: But I think that that’s, it’s quite common for some people from a working class background, if they do well, they’ll go, especially if they go into the corporate world or entrepreneurial or business, that it, the focus, okay, there is money, but it’s to, there’s a drive, there’s this inner drive, because you’ve been around poverty, you can see what that looks like. And actually, you think, actually, I don’t want to be like that. So I’m going to go and do something if you have the ability to be able to do that.
Julie Sale: Completely. I was really unusual at university and at the first year I was in the Career Centre at the university saying what jobs can I do with this degree? I was all about, straight away from the off, all about getting work. And that’s why I ended up in the corporate world because you just needed to earn money. And I had to be self-sufficient. No one was going to be able to support me, not through any kind of selfishness, but just didn’t have the money. So in our family, you would have been expected to be earning money from 16. So my mum did an incredible job to be able to help me get through uni. That was really unusual. So, you know, I owed her that. So that was the focus. And then as my career developed, it got closer and closer to being with people. It was always about people.
So I went into operations management, which was about managing factories full of people. And it’s a very people management related skill in manufacturing and from the manufacturing area of the country, well was, it’s all gone abroad now. And then moved into human resources, which appeared to be more about people, getting closer to looking after people, looking at policies, training and those kinds of things. And I say ‘appeared’ because in the corporate world, it’s not really about people.
Dipti Solanki: Yeah, interesting. What was your experience of that then?
Julie Sale: Well, disappointing. One of the problems I’ve experienced my whole life is that I’m prone to idealism. And I think if something can be done well and kindly and appropriately, then it should. And that that can connect to naivety really. So I think it’s a little bit naive thinking if I went into a people role, then I would be able to support and help people. Well, actually the more senior I became, the more my job was about helping the CEOs to get rid of people legally.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah. That is an issue. Just out of interest, being the first to go to uni in your family, what was it like for you? Did you sort of then live a sort of different life from your family? Because I think when, you know, coming from a working class family and then you move into a middle class lifestyle, let’s say, there is that, you moved over the track slightly.
Julie Sale: Yeah, that’s exactly my experience. Not unkindly, I’ve got a lovely family. There’s no criticism there at all. But the narrative growing up was, this is our Julie, she’s the clever one. Which can you imagine what that’d be like for my sister and my brothers?
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, yeah.
Julie Sale: Especially my sister.
Michaela McCarthy: You’ve got to live up to that, haven’t you really?
Julie Sale: Yeah, and I just feel awful for them. I’ve always felt awful for my sister. So I’m the second of four. And my sister is the third. So there’s my older brother and me, my sister and a younger brother. My older brother and younger brother both set themselves up in their own businesses. Trade-related. They’ve just been self-employed. But my sister has been mostly home-based, looking after her children, looking after grandchildren, and to be… we’re the two girls in the middle, and for her to grow up with this narrative of this bigger sister who is clever and has gone off to university that was annoying for her I think, although she’s really kind about it. Yeah, and I think what the narrative in the family was then, well, she might be clever, but she’s got no common sense. So that, I kind of played up to that a little bit to kind of balance it all out.
Michaela McCarthy: Sure.
Dipti Solanki: Was there a tendency for you to kind of shrink as a result of having that praise heaped upon you and all these expectations when you’re around your family?
Julie Sale: Well, I wouldn’t say shrink, I’d just say probably put a bit of a persona on, you know, a bit of a me being silly.
Dipti Solanki: Downplay things.
Julie Sale: Just to downplay it, yeah, downplay it. And that’s from me, it’s not them, that’s from me. The really pivotal thing, as well as being unusual and going to university, the really pivotal thing was I was very unwell when I was little and that also had a massive impact on myself, my parents.
Michaela McCarthy: And what happened?
Julie Sale: So when I was five, I developed appendicitis and it was believed to be colic by the doctor for five weeks. So by the time I actually was sent to hospital my appendix was perforated and gangrene, so at five years old I’m in an emergency situation, so that was really serious and my memories of life start there really.
Michaela McCarthy: And how long were you in hospital?
Julie Sale: So on and off for a whole year, I think. So I had appendicitis and a perforated burst appendix basically in emergency surgery, then peritonitis and then an adhesion of the bowel which is very dangerous.
Dipti Solanki: How has that affected you, that experience?
Julie Sale: Well, I think it really compounded this sensitive little girl really, because I learnt you could die very, very young. And then I grew up with the narrative, this is our Julie. I’ve got quite a few, this is our Julie’s, right? This is our Julie. Everyone says ‘our’ in front of your name when you’re from the Midlands or North. This is our Julie, she nearly died your know? This is our Julie…
Michaela McCarthy: This is the story.
Julie Sale: Yeah, this is the story. So that story fed in to the next pivotal thing in my life, which was experiencing infertility. And those two events, I think, really contribute to the pathway to becoming a psychotherapist. I didn’t have a narrative though of myself as having any issues at all. I was one of those therapists that go into training thinking ‘I’m here to help other people and I’ll go to therapy because I need to and that’d be lovely and really interesting, but I’ve got anything to talk about.’
Dipti Solanki: Just a requirement of the course.
Julie Sale: Yeah, and it wasn’t arrogance. I wasn’t like oh oh, I’ve got, you know, I’m not going to get anything out of it. It was, I’ve had a great, I’ve been all right. Nothing. I mean, what was I talking? What was I thinking? I’d had a near death experience two or three times, five to six, and really had a rotten time trying to conceive. And all this, all the stuff that happens in corporate land, I don’t think anyone gets out of corporate land without a tough memory or two. But here’s me tripping off to my therapy.
Michaela McCarthy: But do you think, you know, there’s a lot of people out there, a lot of viewers, listeners, you know, would say, O, I don’t need therapy, you know, I’ve had an okay life’. Because I think it’s the bit about when you start talking about your family and your parents, it’s almost you don’t want to say anything and clients do want to protect their families.
It takes a while for people to settle in. And it’s almost like you feel like you’re betraying them by saying something. But it’s actually your inner processes really, because you’ve got four, you know, there’s four of you in your family. I was listening to Gabor Mate where he said actually every child comes from a different family. They don’t come from the same family.
Julie Sale: That’s so true.
Michaela McCarthy: And it’s the experience of that child in relation to their family, that’s why it’s a different family.
Julie Sale: No, you’re right. You’re right. We’ve all had a different experience.
Michaela McCarthy: Exactly. And so I think when people start to warm up a little bit, they realise that it’s their process of themselves trying to make sense of them as a person. And it’s that bit that I think therapy’s about really.
Julie Sale: Oh, no, that really resonates with me, all of the points about loyalty and for me it was about, I developed a really strong core value of independence and personal responsibility and so going into therapy and making your parents responsible for whatever you were experiencing felt really lame and pathetic to me. I’m not blaming my parents, it’s not all about the parents. Can you imagine the attitude I went into therapy training with? Who says it’s all about the parents? What about peers? What about your own personality? And then of course there’s an aspect that’s about your parents.
Michaela McCarthy: Well I think sometimes you think about childhood, we’ve all had different childhoods right?? And especially what you say, coming from a working class background, I can relate to that where I just didn’t, it’s not I’m looking down on my family at all, you know, it’s not about that. But I used to ride my bike and look out to the sky and think there’s got to be other ways of living in this world.
Dipti Solanki: There’s got to be a different…
Michaela McCarthy: I was only about six or seven, not knowing. And so you either have that or you don’t. And some people are frightened to move out and go to uni if their family haven’t gone to uni or working, you know, I can imagine you, you know, working in the corporate world, you know, most people, and I am generalising, you know, have gone to good schools, pretty middle class, unless you’re working in certain levels within the corporate world.
Julie Sale: Yeah, I’ve spent most of my life frightened and reframing nervousness for excitement. I can actually remember the moment I decided to reframe my nervousness as excitement. I was going, I was in my third year at uni and I was going for an interview for this job that I’d been at university to get a leadership job, a job that would train you to be a leader in corporate land. I didn’t even know how to get a train because we didn’t have trains in our town. We had buses. I went everywhere on the bus. So my posher friend, Sophie, taught me how to catch a train. That was the first thing. I mean, can you believe it?
Dipti Solanki: But that reframing was something that came very innately to you.
Julie Sale: Yeah. I had to make that decision. I remember being in the accommodation at university and thinking I’m actually terrified, I’m always terrified, I’m going to have to rebrand this. I’m actually excited. And so nerve-cited was born, the nerve-cited, you know, I’m not terrified, I’m excited. And I’ve run on that for quite a number of years. I had to change because I wasn’t going to be low economic, I wasn’t going to be poor. So I had to get on with it.
Circling back to what you were saying earlier about people being concerned about going into therapy because they don’t want to blame their family. I think the important reframe on that is to think that therapy is about your relationship with yourself.
Dipti Solanki: Right.
Julie Sale: And you might tell stories and they might be very significant stories. And by that I don’t mean lies. You know, when you say tell stories, it sounds like lies. Tell your stories of your experiences. Yeah, your experiences. And it might be a lot about other people, but ultimately therapy is about your relationship with yourself.
Dipti Solanki: Yeah.
Julie Sale: And that’s important to engage in. So it’s not about…
Michaela McCarthy: But I think at the beginning that’s what you do. You talk about other people because you’re struggling to get to the self. So it’s like you talk about other people, how you relate to them. But it’s only through that you become more aware of yourself and having and looking at things in another way. Yeah.
Dipti Solanki: You start to make more sense of yourself through telling those stories. I love that. That’s a great way of explaining it.
Julie Sale: Yeah, rather than making more sense of what other people have done and why and how, which is an aspect of therapy, it all boils down to your own relationship. If we go existential, that’s the core relationship. And that influences all your other relationships. I’m still doing that work, you know, I’ve still got a lot of that to do still.
Michaela McCarthy: I just wondered for you, what was it like then later on going into therapy?
Julie Sale: As a client?
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, because you said, oh, you thought, you know, you were training, you thought there’s nothing wrong with me, you know.
Julie Sale: I know, it’s brilliant, isn’t it? Well, I had one bout of therapy before I trained to be a therapist. That was when I was experiencing unexplained infertility. And I was still in corporate world and I’d be at senior corporate meetings. And luckily I was at the level where you didn’t have to say where you were all the time. So I could be somewhere else and not have to account for myself. And where I’d be sometimes was at an IVF clinic, or where I’d be sometimes would be at therapy. So that I would be in an important meeting holding everything together and then be in bits in a therapy session and then, or be at an IVF clinic receiving IVF treatment and nobody knew at work. So I went to therapy to help me with that and that was before becoming a therapist but I had a long held ambition to become a therapist. By then it was really in my sights.
That was going to be what I did when I had my kids. The problem was, it was six years in and not having the kids. Cause they’re…
Michaela McCarthy: How did it all pan out for you with your IVF?
Julie Sale: With IVF, eventually worked out. So I have found two young people who I’m really delighted about, they’re gorgeous humans, so I’m really pleased about that.
Michaela McCarthy: Well you had to work hard to get them.
Julie Sale: I did. But you know, not everyone’s story ends like that, so I’m very sensitive to that.
Michaela McCarthy: I’ve worked with many women and it hasn’t…
Julie Sale: I had three rounds of IVF for our son, six years it took to create him and we say he’s very expensive. To pay for all that treatment, he was worth every last penny.
Dipti Solanki: And it takes its toll in so many different ways.
Michaela McCarthy: But even on your body as well.
Julie Sale: Yeah, but for me the minute I had him, none of that difficulty existed anymore. And then I fell pregnant straight away with our daughter.
Michaela McCarthy: It’s interesting, isn’t it?
Julie Sale: Yeah, the body knew what to do by then. But there’s a psychological component to that, which is why I went to therapy, because part of the narrative around having been ill when I was little was that it, because I was so little when all of that happened, the operations around the bowel, the appendix, are all in proximity to a little girl’s ovaries and uterus. So there was always a bit of a worry that I would have difficulty conceiving.
I grew up with that in the ether somehow. I kind of grew up with that in my awareness somehow. And so it wasn’t a surprise, I don’t think that I had unexplained infertility. And I also think part of my guilt about being cleverer, rerer, rerer, in academically and developing a more economically sustainable life than perhaps my sister. I had a concept in my head that this was only fair, that there was a system of fairness in the world and my sister got to have children and I got to have money. These are all awful beliefs that just coalesce in your mind.
Michaela McCarthy: But you know, but why can’t you have both?
Julie Sale: Of course, but these were these were the…
Michaela McCarthy: So it’s being punished. So you’re being punished for, you know, making a success of your life. Yeah. And actually, by the way, you can’t have kids now.
Julie Sale: Yeah. And that was just there. I was aware of those thoughts and aware that they were probably weren’t, you know, based on any form of reality, but they were affecting me. That’s why I went to counselling for the infertility.
Michaela McCarthy: And had you trained by that?
Julie Sale: No, that was just before. It wasn’t a great experience. I don’t think the therapist was very good. And it was about that particular therapist’s way of holding boundaries and with time in particular. So I’d be really distressed. I was so distressed. This was all contained in, you know, I was running this corporate life and the one thing I wanted in the world was children, and had always wanted and wasn’t able to have them. So much distress. And I’d be really distressed and at 45 minutes, this counsellor would say, and anyway, how are we doing?
Dipti Solanki: No matter what you were talking about.
Julie Sale: No matter what I was talking about, I would be sobbing. And I just thought, do you know what? That’s not okay. That’s not an okay way to hold a boundary. It was because the time was, you time was coming up.
Dipti Solanki: What did that feel like when those points when that happened?
Julie Sale: Violent, brutal, unkind. And I, at that point, promised myself that if I did become a therapist, my hour would be 60 minutes.
Dipti Solanki: Wow.
Julie Sale: I’m having none of this 50 minute hour thing. It was 60 minutes and they’ve always been 60 minutes. Then my clients paid for an hour. It’s partly working class values. Paying for an hour, you’re getting an hour, and no one’s gonna end in that.
Michaela McCarthy: But I think as you become more experienced, you find a way of that. I mean, I don’t sort of kind of say, we’ve got 10 minutes now and all that. You just sort of can change the tone a little bit or bring people up into their head a bit more and stuff, you find that skill set. So then you found a therapist.
Julie Sale: So I had that therapist and then I conceived, spent a number of years then focusing on my children and went back into corporate land for a couple of years and then thought, no, I’ve got to bite the bullet and started my psychotherapy training, then went into therapy because of the psychotherapy training. And that, again, wasn’t great. And I think the message is that different modalities suit different people at different times, depending on where you’re at. That’s why we’ve got so many different approaches and different therapists suit different people.
Dipti Solanki: I think the problem with that, Julie, is that when you’re in therapy land, if we’re using that kind of language, is that we know what we’re looking for when it comes to approaches. But if you are a lay person who’s new to the world of therapy, who’s looking at everything going ‘I need to find a therapist’, most people who will read the listings, they don’t know what they’re looking for. So how can somebody, like anyone listening to this, how can they be really discerning? How do you choose your therapist?
Julie Sale: Yeah, it’s tricky, isn’t it? It really is tricky and therapists find it hard to find therapists. Right. You know, we know all the lingo, really. I found it really hard, particularly the longer you go in your own career and the more established you are and if you’ve got anything like a profile, trusting someone with your vulnerability becomes harder, I think.
Dipti Solanki: Huge.
Julie Sale: I think it’s a good idea to read a little bit about modalities, as we call it, approaches, and as a client, and just read about a little bit, nothing in depth, but just Google counselling modalities and then it gives you a flavor of what the approach would be like. So person-centered approaches are focused entirely on the relationship and they might not be particularly directive, they’re very present focused. Some clients might really need that space and others might need something a little bit more interactive. Cognitive behavioral therapy is what it says on the tin. It’s looking at thoughts and feelings and behaviours and how they might relate to one another. Psychodynamic is inevitably gonna look at your past and consider the dynamics of your family in terms of the way that you’ve developed. They’re all valuable, but for some experiences, some presentations as we call it in therapy land, some concerns, some modalities fit better for others. It goes a long way to just look at people’s faces and think can I talk to that person and trust your instincts.
Michaela McCarthy: And even if you speak to someone whether through a friend or something and then you know you’re thinking about therapy, and they’ll say, oh, I know a therapist, I know someone who recommends this therapist, recommendations are really good too.
Julie Sale: They are. And trusting yourself. So when you go into therapy, if it feels off, don’t give it too long.
Dipti Solanki: This is so important. I watched TikTok the other day, and this lady on there was saying that she knew from the second session with this therapist that this therapist was being inappropriate and it was wrong but it took her eight years to leave him. Eight years.
Julie Sale: That’s because of power and decent trainings in psychotherapy and counseling and a proper engagement with our code of ethics highlights that power dynamic. But unfortunately the therapy profession is still an aspect, still has people in it with aspects of general society. So people will consciously or unconsciously develop power dynamics. And I absolutely resonate with that experience.
I stayed with my first training therapist for far longer than I should have done. It wasn’t working for me. It was making me feel more mentally than what I’d felt my whole life. And that again was, I think, because of a poor match between what I needed to bring and the way it was being interpreted. It just wasn’t right for me at that time.
Dipti Solanki: If we could encapsulate it in a different way other than power dynamics so that more people can recognise it in themselves, what is it that makes people stay in therapy with a particular therapist longer than they need to?
Julie Sale: I think it’s many things. For me, it was about that wide-eyed people pleasing, I’m supposed to be doing this. I was trained to be a therapist as well. And also worry about what it might be like for the training organisation if you changed your therapist.
I think rather than being able to explain that dynamic that keeps someone in therapy, because it’s going to be complicated, I’d say trust your body and your body, the body signs. So of course if you’ve got a difficult history you’re going to have uncomfortable feelings and therapy, therapy isn’t comfortable, nor should it be. We should be able, we’re going to talk about difficult things.
Michaela McCarthy: But if you still trust the person or not even the person, the situation, the… it’s okay, it feels okay to be there. Or be curious about the other person sitting there and about yourself. You think this is a different kind of setup, I’ve never done this. I don’t know anyone that’s done this, or I only know a few people that have, but it feels okay. If you feel okay in the room, then go for it. That’s what I say. So did you find someone that you felt comfortable with in your body?
Julie Sale: I did eventually, yes. So I would say that I’ve had a couple of therapeutic relationships that don’t work and I think that’s really important to say that they don’t always work. And I’ve had some that have been really helpful and I’ve had one or two that have been life saving. So it’s that range. And as a psychotherapist myself, who had some understanding of the profession I’ve still had that range of experiences. So therapy can be all of those things.
Outro: You’ve been listening to A Bunch of Therapists with me Michaela McCarthy and Dipti Solanki. And if you’ve enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to review, like and subscribe to wherever you listen to your podcasts and do follow us on our socials. Until next time, see you soon!