Transcript
Intro: Hello and 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.
Dipti Solanki: So, Michaela, who is our guest today?
Michaela McCarthy: We have Windy Dryden, Professor Windy Dryden. He has been in the industry for many years, well known. He really kind of developed Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy in this country and run this training at Goldsmiths University. He’s written loads of books, hundreds of books. He focuses very much on a ‘one session’ therapy where you don’t have to focus on the assessment, you can just focus on the issue.
Dipti Solanki: Go straight in.
Michaela McCarthy: Go straight in. So, yeah, I’m really looking forward to him coming on to hear what he has to say about, you know, his journey, really, of when it all started.
Dipti Solanki: Well, so much experience. I’m really looking forward to that conversation.
Michaela McCarthy: So, Windy, thanks for coming on our podcast.
Windy Dryden: My pleasure.
Michaela McCarthy: I mean, you’ve been writing books as long as I’ve been in the industry.
Windy Dryden: When did you join the industry?
Michaela McCarthy: Well, I probably went into therapy about 29 years ago.
Windy Dryden: Right, so my first book came out in 1984.
Michaela McCarthy: Okay, yes, it’s about right. So how did you get into psychology, you know, therapy or the world of therapy?
Windy Dryden: Well, how I got into psychology was I used to have a stammer.
Michaela McCarthy: Okay.
Windy Dryden: Well, I still have a stammer, but it was far more noticeable when I was a child and adolescent and you know going to an all-boys school you do get the, you know, the butt of jokes. So I kind of, I think that kind of led me to become into in feelings because not only was I quite familiar with anxiety, I was struck by the fact that somebody who could be quite nice to me one moment in a one-to-one interaction would join in a group and then take the mickey out of me. I found that quite hurtful and so I also got to know about the feeling of hurt. So being an only child, that’s a factor, as well, I think. And then my father was, we were talking about what I wanted to do, because I actually became quite interested in languages and studied languages at A-level, did Russian, French and Latin.
But of course, if you have a stammer, you know, you’re not going to be an interpreter. And I wasn’t good enough to be a translator. So, I was kind of looking around to see what was what. My father said, I want you to be a lawyer because there are only two kinds of lawyers, rich ones and millionaires. I said, well, that’s very interesting, father, but I’m not interested in the law. He says, well, it doesn’t matter. I mean, that was a reflection of his particular psychology.
Michaela McCarthy: So he was looking at how you could make money.
Windy Dryden: Yeah, I mean, because he struggled, you know, growing up and he had to leave school in order to kind of make money for the family. So being financially secure was very important to him. for himself and for me, but it was, you know, you’re kind of in your late teens, you’re not particularly interested in things like your pension at that point. So, I’m not quite sure, I think it was probably a careers fair looking around, and this psychology thing seemed interested, and I thought, well, okay, I’m not gonna do anything with finance, I’m not gonna do anything with languages, So this is something that I could imagine myself relating to. So I studied at university, dropped out after three weeks because I just wasn’t ready.
Michaela McCarthy: So were you not ready for uni or not ready for the subject?
Windy Dryden: I wasn’t ready to leave home, basically. That was a bit of a shock. I also became sort of homesick. So what I did was, like many young Jewish men and women at that point, went to Israel, went on a kibbutz, we went into the fields, I collected my fair share of chicken shit, picked my fair share of oranges, et cetera, et cetera. And then I was ready for university. So I became interested in helping people.
And there was something called Nightline, which universities had, which was like a university version of the Samaritans. And also I joined the Samaritans as well. So I got interested in counselling therapy that way. But after my degree, first degree, I did a PhD on something called self-disclosure. Self-disclosure is basically what we disclose ourselves to another person, which although I didn’t realise at the time, later had quite an interesting link with psychotherapy and counselling. So what happened then was I was reading all these academic papers about self-disclosure, came across articles about counselling, psychotherapy, didn’t realise there was an opportunity at that point to actually really pursue that as a career, which I did. Was lucky enough to get a grant. to study at a one-year postgraduate Diploma in Counselling in educational settings in 1975.
Michaela McCarthy: Was that unusual then with the counselling then? I reckon it was because it was much more driven by psychoanalysis, wasn’t it, in the early days?
Windy Dryden: Yeah, very unusual. Counselling when it existed was either through the Marriage Guidance Council, or in school counselling. There was school counselling at that point. And student counselling was a fairly new area. And the Aston course, as I call it, started in about 1971. And I did the course in 1974/75.
Happened to be in the right place. They had these Fulbright scholars that were staffing it with a course tutor, a man called Richard Nelson Jones, who became quite well known. And then I actually joined the staff because the Fulbright Fellowship scheme stopped and they needed to appoint somebody who had an interest in counselling, who was an academically minded person. So I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. And that was the start. And I date my career when I got appointed at Aston on the 1st of September 1975. My 50th year in the field will be on the 1st of September.
Michaela McCarthy: And around that time there wouldn’t have been many courses like for psychotherapy?
Windy Dryden: No, there was courses at Keele for school counselling, courses at Swansea for school counselling and Aston and that was about it. The courses were, as you said, apart from the psychoanalytic training, far and few between.
Michaela McCarthy: And so with the courses out there, the psychoanalytic, did they ever interest you, the psychoanalytic?
Windy Dryden: No, no. I mean, the Aston course was quite heavily oriented towards, at that point, client-centred therapy, person-centred therapy, as a term hadn’t been brought into the public domain until later. And I kind of resonated with a theory of client-centred therapy, but not the practice. And so I kind of experimented with psychoanalytic therapy. There was a course, a two-year course up in Birmingham, which I did part-time course. I didn’t really resonate to it either.
But I did resonate to something called Rational Emotive Therapy. There was an American called Maxi Maltzby, was a Rational Emotive therapist, came over and did some training on a US air base in Suffolk, which a few of us that were interested in RET went to. I always remember that because he was wearing a large pink and white check suit. I don’t know how these things kind of stay in your mind. So I then went to study with Ellis in 1978 for the summer. I went to the Institute for the Advanced Study of Rational Psychotherapy, as it was called then, studied with Ellis, did their training, was his co-therapist for the month of August, which was really quite an experience.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, that would have been an experience.
Windy Dryden: So yeah, so I thought the person-centred training was a good ground in the relationship aspect of psychotherapy. The REBT was a good grounding in the more technical aspects of actually helping people, you know, in a more specific way. So, you know, looking back, I think it wasn’t planned that way. I mean, nothing about my career has been planned to that extent. But, you know, I took advantage of opportunities that came my way.
Michaela McCarthy: So how did you progress then?
Windy Dryden: So I worked at the University of Aston from 1975 till about 1983. And Richard Nelson-Jones and I also staffed the counselling service. Our trainees, because I actually went from being a trainee to a tutor, so then I was in charge of trainees, was able to place people there. And I also started up a private practice. Got a placement in a local GP service and the head GP wouldn’t allow me to actually go into the surgery but I could see people in my own home, if you like, at that point. So I started up a small private practice almost immediately.
Michaela McCarthy: And so your private practice, do you still run today?
Windy Dryden: Oh yeah, I mean, I think I would say looking back over my career, I’ve never done anything full-time but I’ve done a lot of things part-time. So, if you’re an academic in the field of counselling psychotherapy, you’ve got to do research, you’ve got to do teaching, you’ve got to do the supervision, you’ve got to do lecturing, but you’ve also got to see clients. And, you know, as I said, I have my private practice, which, you know, it’s never been large, but I’ve never wanted it to be large.
Michaela McCarthy: So then when did you, obviously you were teaching and then, you know, you went to Goldsmiths. How did that happen at Goldsmiths?
Windy Dryden: Well, the Aston course was going quite well. But in 1981, there were quite horrific university cuts, which is path for the course these days. But I mean, these were really quite swinging. So Aston suffered a 31 % cut to the budget. And so they offered a voluntary redundancy scheme, a few people took it, they upped it a bit, a few more people took it, and then they really kind of whacked it up and a lot of people took it, including myself. So I, at that point, the course that I was running, it was called the Diploma in Counselling in Educational Settings, was transferred to the Business Centre in a part of the business centre called Manpower Management and Legal Studies.
Now, really? And so the writing was on the wall. So, you know, I decided to take the voluntary redundancy. So then I embarked on a period of trying to get a job. And so I got the job at Goldsmiths on my 55th application. So I’d applied for and got rejected for 54 jobs in the field of counselling, psychology.
Michaela McCarthy: Was it mainly focused down in London?
Windy Dryden: No, no, no.
Michaela McCarthy: All over.
Windy Dryden: Including Papua New Guinea. I have the distinction, Michaela, of being rejected for a job in Papua New Guinea.
Michaela McCarthy: Wow, everywhere.
Dipti Solanki: What were the roles that you were applying for?
Windy Dryden: Lecturer in counselling, interestingly enough, up at university.
Michaela McCarthy: So, just out of interest, you were going through all these applications to be a lecturer, to teach.
Windy Dryden: Not only a lecturer, to be a practitioner as well and also to be
Michaela McCarthy: In the therapy world. And they were turning you down because?
Windy Dryden: Who knows.
Michaela McCarthy: They wouldn’t tell you.
Windy Dryden: One never knows. I mean the interesting thing was I finally got some feedback that I was coming across what I thought it was in a confident way, which was seen as to be arrogant. So the next job I applied for, which happened to be Goldsmiths, I deliberately stammered more. and got the job.
Dipti Solanki: That’s really interesting.
Michaela McCarthy:To show more of a vulnerability.
Dipti Solanki: Yeah. But do you find then that because of your stammer there’s a certain way that you need to speak and present yourself to…
Windy Dryden: No, no, because at that point I’m, you know, I was about as fluent then as I am now.
Dipti Solanki: OK.
Windy Dryden: So I didn’t, I mean, I’ve never regarded myself as a stammerer.
Dipti Solanki: OK.
Windy Dryden: But a person who stammers under certain conditions and not under other conditions. So, no, It actually wasn’t to do with that.
Dipti Solanki: So what did you adapt to make yourself more vulnerable in that interview?
Windy Dryden: Deliberately stammering more.
Dipti Solanki: Stammer, I see.
Windy Dryden: Yeah. So I’d say things, they’d ask me a question, I’d go, you know, I’d put it on. I’m not proud of that, but I’m not ashamed of it either.
Michaela McCarthy: Sure, well after 50 applications.
Windy Dryden: So, yeah, so I got the job at Goldsmiths and that was to start a master’s in counselling. And so I had an opportunity to come back to London. I got married in 1981. I went to America straight afterwards on a six-month sabbatical, trained at the Center for Cognitive Therapy with Aaron Beck. I probably think it was the of the first people from Britain who did an extended training in cognitive therapy in 1981.
But the course that I was appointed to run was a more generic course and it was a three-year course. So I ran that for a while and then had an opportunity to actually segue the Master’s, well, I actually did a Master’s in Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, which was the first course, Master’s course, I think. I think there may have been one elsewhere, but in South America. But I think this was the first one in Europe on REBT, which we started in 1993.
Dipti Solanki: Windy, for people listening who might not be aware of the difference between cognitive behavioural therapy and rational emotive therapy, can you just
Windy Dryden: Well, first of all, I see Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as an umbrella term. So, you know, there’s no just one approach. Basically, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a field where, you know, the emphasis is on, you know, how people think and behave, you know, as a way of explaining, you know, how they feel and, you know, in terms of explaining, you know, why they have the problems and what they and the therapies need to do to address it. Rational Emotive Behavioural therapy is a specific approach within that. And its major goal is to help people to change their rigid and extreme attitudes to flexible and non-extreme attitudes when they’re facing life adversities. And it’s also got a particular sort of take on actually promoted self-acceptance rather than self-esteem.
Windy Dryden: What’s the difference between self-acceptance and self-esteem? Well, one’s you can argue you can rate yourself. Self-esteem is based on an estimation. You can esteem yourself, you give yourself a rating and a judgment. Whereas self-acceptance is really saying, actually don’t do that, you’re far too complex. Just accept yourself as a fallible, complex, fluid human being.
Sure, there are certain things you may not like, certain things you may not like, but don’t give the whole of you a rating.
So therefore, the idea of, I want to improve my self-esteem, might not be problematic for other forms of cognitive behavioural therapy, but it would be particularly problematic in REBT because we argue that if we help you to improve your self-esteem, we’re helping you to buy into a way of thinking that say, yes, I can rate myself and I am worthwhile if things are going well, but I’m not worthwhile if things are going poorly.
Dipti Solanki: Yeah, absolutely.
Michaela McCarthy: So can I ask, If we go into the world we are in now, today, the NHS is very focused on CBT and the psychology. Where does Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy…
Windy Dryden: Well, Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy has almost been written out of…
Michaela McCarthy: Because?
Windy Dryden: I don’t know. That’s the honest answer. I don’t know. So if you look at probably one of the most well, certainly it’s a best-selling book on CBT in Britain. It’s called Introduction to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. And you look in the index. you won’t find any reference to Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy. It’s as if Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy has just been wiped out of British psychotherapy. And people who are trained in CBT, and it’s a kind of like a generic manualised type of training that you get, they don’t know anything about Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy. They’re not introduced to it.
Michaela McCarthy: So professionally, why do you think it was kind of, you know, it was like one minute was there, next minute it doesn’t exist in this country?
Windy Dryden: You know, I mean, you know, quite frankly, one of the things that I don’t get involved in, because it doesn’t really suit my temperament, is professional organisations. So, I’m not really party to that. I just say, well, OK, it is what it is. I’m not a political. I’m not going to fight for the politics of getting REBT back into you know, who knows where. I’m just going to do what I enjoy and what I’m good at. Practice, training, writing books and off I go.
Dipti Solanki: So you have written near on 250 books. Is that right?
Windy Dryden: Well, if we’re being pedantic.
Dipti Solanki: We are. Let’s be pedantic.
Windy Dryden: 290.
Dipti Solanki: Wow. 290! That’s rather incredible.
Windy Dryden: Yeah.
Michaela McCarthy: Where do you find the time to write all these books?
Windy Dryden: There’s a Windy Dryden that is down at the cafe writing them.
Michaela McCarthy: OK, right. Yeah.
Windy Dryden: No, I write 500 words a day. I’ve written my 500 words a day today and I’ll go home and I’ll probably write another 500 words. So I like to stay ahead of myself.
Dipti Solanki: And do you do that first thing in the morning? I’m asking completely out of personal interest.
Windy Dryden: I tell you what, I get up about six, make myself a cup of tea, go into the computer room, write 500 words, come back, do my exercises and go out and do my 50 minute jog walk. And I am then ready for the day.
Dipti Solanki: I love that. So tell me what you write about most.
Windy Dryden: I write about most now about Single Session Therapy.
Dipti Solanki: OK.That’s your baby.
Michaela McCarthy: So how did how did that start? How did it come up with a single session?
Windy Dryden: Well, I had well, if we I mean, again, this is all kind of retrospective, but one of the things that I was really influenced by when I was at Aston was the Gloria films. Now, what are the Gloria films?
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, for the viewers and listeners, if you could tell them what the Gloria films are.
Windy Dryden: Technically speaking, the series of films were called Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, which was released in 1965. First time there were films of therapy and they’re known as the Gloria tapes or the Gloria films because the client was known as Gloria.
And there were three therapists who actually were originators of the approaches that they developed. Carl Rogers representing client-centered therapy, Fritz Perls representing Gestalt and Albert Ellis representing our Rational Emotive therapy.
And they are examples of single session therapy in a sense that nobody of the therapists knew anything about Gloria. She was apparently supposed to bring up the same issues with all three of them but didn’t. I don’t know.
Michaela McCarthy: I remember watching and they were sort of a little bit different. I think it was because of her interaction with the different therapists.
Windy Dryden: Well, exactly. I mean, so interestingly enough, there was a British Gloria made many years later with a guy called Mike, I think. But he had therapy with seven therapists. And I I was invited but turned down the opportunity to do that because he was going to bring up the same issue with all seven. Well, my point is that, you know, if I was number six, he may have been cured after number three. So I didn’t like that. But that was something which stayed with me because it’s the first time I actually seen therapy.
I mean, otherwise, the only time you see it is when you’re a client back in those days. You can’t really afford to have divided attention, being a client and then being a student at the same time. So I got interested in that. It was always my practice that when I did training courses to do a live demonstration. So I would do a training course on REBT, say do one or two live demonstrations with people volunteering from the audience who had a genuine problem. And I got interested in that.
Again, it didn’t twig that this was single session therapy because, again, it is. And so I read a book in 19, that was published in 1990 by an Israeli psychologist called Marsha Taumann, which was on single session therapy, which I read in 2001. Interested but it didn’t really grab me. Came back to it round about 2013, because I was looking, I knew I was going to retire at 2014, and I was far from done. You know, I wasn’t going to kind of, I’m not interested in gardening or anything.
So, I still wanted to be active in the field, but yeah, what did I want to do? So, I have an interest in procrastination.
Michaela McCarthy: An interest in yours or an interest in others?
Windy Dryden: Oh, interest in helping others, yeah. Yeah, I’m an anti-crastinator.
Michaela McCarthy: Oh, are you?
Windy Dryden: Yeah, I kind of do things early. So, or I was going to, you know, because I was interested in, you know, in, he was asking us about all these waiting lists in the National Health Service that you could, so I thought, well, we have to be able to do something about this.
So, I kind of went back to single session therapy, reread the book by Marsha Taumann, this time really resonated with it, decided that, it was more interesting than procrastination. And of course, people who procrastinate, you have to spend a lot of time chasing them up to get paid. So…
Dipti Solanki: That wouldn’t have been a lucrative practice.
Windy Dryden: It would not have been, unless you were going to charge them in advance, which I think you can do. Well, some people do that. Yeah. And then, of course, you’d be quits because they would have paid you for 10 sessions, but probably only turned up to one.
Dipti Solanki: Yeah.
Windy Dryden: I didn’t like that whole kind of, you know, financial bit. So I got interested in single-session therapy.
I did some training at The Bouverie Centre in Australia online at that point, and then started to, you know, sort of see people for this thing called single-session therapy. Started to train people in it.
Michaela McCarthy: So tell me what types of people, what issues would they come with for a single session therapy?
Windy Dryden: Anything.
Michaela McCarthy: Okay.
Windy Dryden: People, I mean, so actually, I mean, I read a book on it that was published in 2018 and called Very Brief Therapeutic Conversations. And I did an analysis. These were largely of the live demonstrations that I did. Largely, interestingly enough, the most popular subject was actually procrastination.
Michaela McCarthy: Oh really!
Windy Dryden: And then anxiety, and not so much depression. Or maybe it cropped up under different headings. But you get a lot of probably guilt, shame and changing habits and things like that.
Michaela McCarthy: So kind of putting off change somehow that they would procrastinate.
Windy Dryden: Yeah. So there’s a lot of people who actually… I mean, two things about single session therapy that I want to make clear to your listeners. First of all, it’s not about one session and one session only. It’s about, let’s see if we can help you in one, but if not, go away, implement what you’ve learned, reflect on it, and then see if you want some more help. That’s fine. We can give you some more help later.
So it’s about offering people who don’t want to commit to longer term therapy. It’s not to replace anything. I think that’s the important thing. And, you know, we do know, in fact, in agencies that a lot of people who go to therapy agencies only, you know, only go once. They don’t seem to have this idea that a lot of therapists believe that clients should have, that we’re signing you up for a long time.
Michaela McCarthy: 20 years.
Windy Dryden: Yeah. Or at least months. And so I got interested in that because people seemed to resonate with it. And I’m often asked, you know, are there anybody that you wouldn’t offer single session therapy to? And I said, yes, people don’t want it.
If you want it, you can have it. If not, you can’t. And they go, well, what about this disorder? No, it’s about, we don’t think in terms of disorder.
We think in terms of there’s a particular person in front of you who’s come for a particular reason. Let’s help them. And if they want something that you can’t do, you’re honest enough and transparent enough to say, I can’t help you to do that, but I might be able to help you to do this little bit of that if you’re interested. So I really got interested and I think it kind of revitalised my career. I sort of felt around about 2012, 2013, as I was coming to the end of my time at Goldsmiths, that I was getting a bit stale and I really needed a new challenge, and so single session therapy…
Michaela McCarthy: So tell me the one therapy session, the single session and you’ve written loads of books and you wake up at six and start writing 500 words. Yeah. Is it that there’s just new thoughts around it or some reflection around the single session and then you’re able to put something else together?
Windy Dryden: Oh yeah, I mean I think that, so I will be doing, a lot of my books are transcripts of actual sessions that I’ve done with people and they agreed to take part. And they agreed to send, to do an evaluation, complete evaluations. I’m actually, the book I’m writing at the moment is a book called The Single Session Therapy Mindset, which I think we believe in the field is really the core of the work, because, you know, if you have a conventional psychotherapy mindset, you kind of think in terms of, well, it’s going to take us quite a while to make a case history and do an assessment and this, that and the other.
And then, you know, we’ll start and then, you know, it will take us quite a while to develop the relationship. And then we’re going to go for relational depth. And so that’s all in the conventional therapy mindset. And we say in single session therapy, fine, that’s great. Don’t try to do any of that in single session therapy because you haven’t got time to take a history or anything like that. You’ve got to get down to work straight away.
Dipti Solanki: So, Windy, on that note, I’m sure everyone understands this, whether you’re a therapist or someone receiving therapy, the relationship is important, whether it’s in single session or, and you mentioned relational depth there. Do you think it’s possible to build a relationship very quickly with a client in single session therapy, or is that the part that becomes compromised?
Windy Dryden: Well, I think you can, you can, I mean, I tend to think when I’m answering that question more in terms of the concept of the working alliance. So the working alliance is saying, look, yeah, there are bonds between a therapist and client. There’s the goals about, you know, are we working towards the same thing or different things? The views, do we kind of have a, you know, a shared understanding of what we’re doing or not? And there’s what we’re doing, the tasks.
And so certainly in single session therapy, we believe that we can develop a good enough relationship in terms of the bonds and the goals. Check out that there is a shared understanding that we’re doing the same thing. In other words, for example, I often start off my therapy saying to the person, what’s your understanding of the purpose of our conversation today? And if they say, oh, it’s for me to give you my history, and then this will be the beginning of a six year, you know, I say, no, no, no, no, that’s not my understanding. So you have to get it on the, you know, on the same wavelength.
Now, my experience, and because one of the things that I do ask for in this evaluation is, you know, for them to describe their relationship with me. And I think looking at that, what people say is that, you know, that it’s more of a conversation and it’s really, it’s focused and it helps them to work toward their goal for the session. And they like my relaxed, humorous style, which people tend to tend to reference. So, I think, I would say that, in my answer to your question, that is good enough to do the work.
Dipti Solanki: Sure.
Michaela McCarthy: So, tell me, with your one-session therapy, are you teaching that now?
Windy Dryden: Yes, although we don’t call it one-session therapy. I call it one-plus therapy. One-plus therapy. And I call it one-plus because we’re still trying to help you with the one, but the plus is part of the deal, whereas single session therapy, if you take what we call a Ronseal approach, you know, Ronseal wood stain, it does exactly what it says on the tin. Single-session therapy is the therapy that lasts for one session. But it’s not, although it can be.
Michaela McCarthy: But if you look at the single-session work, wouldn’t it be sort of someone saying, okay, I’ll go into therapy, I’ve got this issue, I have a single session to make sense of what this issue is and then make a decision afterwards.
Dipti Solanki: It opens the door, doesn’t it?
Windy Dryden: Yeah. Well, it can open the door. And, you know, one of the most neglected areas, I think, of work is what people call either a chemistry session or a taster session.
You know, people say that we’ll offer you a free 15, 20, some instances half an hour, you know, call or online or something. to see how we get on, to see if you can work with me. And, you know, yeah, I mean, you can do that in single session therapy, but quite often it’s for people who want, actually, I don’t want to commit myself to finding, you know, and I think that we need as a field to be able to be open to people who want to come briefly, very briefly, moderately, and long term. You know, we can’t just you know, say therapy. I mean, there’s a guy on one of the social media channels, he says, therapy is this, it lasts, you know, for years and you have to see the same person every week at the same time. And if you don’t do that, it’s not therapy.
Michaela McCarthy: Okay.
Windy Dryden: Fine. That’s light years from where I see, you know, therapy. So, I think we do, my view is that we do need to be to be responsive and to actually offer people. help in the way that they want it. And that means going forward, we’re going to have to be a little bit more open to do things with phones, online, et cetera.
Michaela McCarthy:
And where do you do the training for the one session therapy?
Windy Dryden: I run a course, if I can advertise.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, of course you can.
Windy Dryden: I can advertise. I do a certificate in single session therapy with online events, which is eight three-hour sessions. And part of that is that, you know, they have to do single session therapy live in front of, you know, the audience and we kind of give them some feedback, you know, so we actually kind of see them doing it.
Michaela McCarthy: And do you want the training to evolve a bit more?
Windy Dryden: Yeah, yeah, I’d love the training to evolve a bit more. And so, yeah, I’d like it to be open, I’d like the NHS to do it, but I think the NHS is so addicted to the idea of the first contact has got to be an assessment one. I think that’s a major stumbling block. It doesn’t make sense to be triaged for one session. You might as well have the one session.
Dipti Solanki: Well, Windy, thank you so much. It’s been a lovely conversation.
Michaela McCarthy: It’s gone quick, huh?
Windy Dryden: It’s gone quick. I was just getting going.
Michaela McCarthy: We’ll have to get you on again.
Dipti Solanki: For sure.
Windy Dryden: I could do a live demonstration. Anyway, no problem.
Michaela McCarthy: Yeah, but that would be quite interesting.
Dipti Solanki: Why not? Yes, I agree. Let’s do that.
Michaela McCarthy: You can be the punter.
Dipti Solanki: No problem.
Windy Dryden: If you’ve only got a genuine problem that I can help you with.
Dipti Solanki: I have many genuine problems you can help me with, I’m sure.
Windy Dryden: There you are.
Dipti Solanki: We’re on.
Windy Dryden: Yeah.
Dipti Solanki: Before we finish, for our viewers and listeners, if there were to be one thing that they could take away from our conversation, what would you like that to be?
Windy Dryden: That’s a very good single session therapy question. Um… you have an issue, make it your priority to see somebody who can help you quickly rather than get caught up in a sort of a situation whereby help’s going to be delayed and delayed and delayed.
Michaela McCarthy: Just things will change, you will change if it’s delayed so many weeks.
Dipti Solanki: It’s been a real pleasure to meet you.
Windy Dryden: It’s been a pleasure to be delighted, to be invited. Be delighted? Be delighted and invited.
Dipti Solanki: We’ve delighted him as well.
Windy Dryden: You have.
Outro: You’ve been listening to A Bunch Of Therapists with me, Michaela McCarthy and Dipti Solanki. And if you 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.