Am delighted to be sharing this interview with the fantabulous Dr Emma Bede. We met online when we were both presenting at Online Events’ Living and Working with Neurodivergence Conference last year and she is SUCH a joy.
Here are some of my favourite quotes from our conversation
“These are the structures I need to have in place. I think as someone with ADHD, I think if I think of that as like, “Come on, you’ve got to do this every day for the rest of your life,” I just get angry.” ~ Dr Emma Bede
“I’m not very good at forming habits. Things don’t become autopilot except for the really unhelpful things. I played Candy Crush once and I’m going to play it every day for the rest of my life. But for the helpful things, I’m never on autopilot, you know, I always need the reminders, the prompts, the visual cues, the apps, the habit trackers. But I’ve been gradually adding more and more things.” ~ Dr Emma Bede
“I can’t do all of those things every day, but they go in waves and I’m getting better over time at noticing, oh, I’ve skipped a few days of this actually. And I quite kind of miss it and I want to come back to it. I want to feel how I feel when I do that thing and that might mean that I give up on something else a little bit.” ~ Dr Emma Bede
“I’m saying to other people, “Well, that’s OK. That’s how your body works. That’s how your brain works. Let’s find a way to go with that. Let’s find a way to go with the rhythm of that.” And then to walk out of the room and swear at myself for doing the exact same thing? You can only sustain that for so long.” ~ Dr Emma Bede
“If you’re holding a screwdriver in your hand and everyone else is holding a spanner, you can sit there for years trying to use it as a spanner and it’s not going to work. But then you go, “Do you know what? This is a screwdriver. I cannot do the things that those people can do with their spanners, but screwdrivers can do amazing stuff. I’m going to go do some of those things!”” ~ Dr Emma Bede
JOURNAL PROMPTS
As you watch or listen to our interview, ask yourself:
· Who can you be that honest with in your life? Advocating for your sensory needs while also loving and accepting them?
· How can you be kinder to yourself when you meltdown? What will help you repair? Remember, the reparation allows deeper healing and connection than if you were to somehow magically become the perfect parent/partner/therapist etc.
Let me know in the comments or by email – eve@selfcarecoaching.net
le grá (with love),
Eve
CHAPTERS
0:00–1:54 Self-care without punishment: the paradox of acceptance and change
1:54–5:13 Welcome and introductions: Dr Emma Bede
5:13–13:02 Ideal vs actual self-care: ACT, gentleness, and finding a rhythm that works with ADHD/autism
13:02–20:06 Self-acceptance, perfectionism, and “acceptance permits change” (including the screwdriver metaphor and RSD moment)
20:06–28:21 Support systems and boundaries: co-regulation, humour, cats and spotting capacity before meltdown
28:21–33:06 Healing your Younger Self: reassurance, being more of you, and not being a “tribute band”
33:06–35:35 Where to find Emma, book mention and closing notes
LINKS
Watch or listen to more episodes and find out more here
Find out more…
for free resources (including Míle Buíochas Mondays), more information and to book a free telephone consultation for potential clients and supervisees (and for media enquiries or booking me for events).
#AcceptanceAndCommitmentTherapy
#selfcareforAuDHD
#selfcareforADHD
#selfcareforautism
#dremmabede
#newpodcastepisode
FULL TRANSCRIPT
That paradox between that second, the Love [part of your framework] of “You’re perfect as you are, you’re wonderful.” And also, “Right, what are you going to do today? How are you going to make today better? How are you going to fix yourself?” And to have those two parts alongside each other. But I think it connects to that very first thing you said. It’s not what you’re doing, it’s the attitude with which you’re doing it.
And to situate all this kind of self-care, not in a kind of punitive, come on, you’re malfunctioning, you’re not quite as good as other people. And if I just whip you hard enough, you might just about be up to scratch. Yeah.
But all that self-care, including the difficult stuff and the self-regulatory stuff and the boring stuff to come from that position of it’s because you’re wonderful and you’re lovely and you’re okay and you deserve to be here. It’s because of that that I actually think you should probably get a good night’s sleep. Yeah.
Welcome, Emma. Thank you so much for joining me. I met Dr. Emma Bede when we were both presenting at the Online Events Neurodivergence Conference last October.
And I so loved what you were saying, and the compassionate approach you had to your own needs with neurodivergence and trying to be loving towards, in the case I’m remembering, someone you were eating with, but the communication that, like, I know you do so much amazing work.
Can you tell people where they might find you and what you’re working on at the moment?
Yes, I absolutely can. And also, the feeling is mutual because I came to your presentation at the conference and used cats as a medium of explaining Polyvagal Theory, which I’ve never managed to grasp until someone put some cats in front of me and suddenly everything made sense, because that’s language I understand.
You’ve made my day.
Yes, so I do a mixture of different kinds of work. I’m a therapist, first and foremost. I work with neurodivergent neurotypical people. I do autism and ADHD assessments and kind of post-diagnostic support, but also support for people who don’t want to or aren’t currently ready to or choose not to, for whatever reason, go through a formal process before or after. And I do quite a lot of workshops and presentations and so on.
And I’ve just, I’ve got a book manuscript deadline in a couple of weeks, which is exciting as well. Yes, I’ll look like that after I’ve handed it in. But right now, I don’t quite look like that.
But yes, so I don’t do very well on social media because I’m not very good at being consistently doing the same thing every day. So I’m mainly at my website, which is willowpsychology.co.uk. And I do quite a lot through Online Events. I do quite a lot of teaching and workshops through there, but I try and post everything on the website.
In theory, I have a newsletter and people have signed up to it and I haven’t yet put an edition out. So if people sign up to a newsletter, if enough people sign up to it, I will have to actually write it at some point. So that’s also part of the plan.
So you could say quality, not quantity.
Yes. Led by the muse who shows up sometimes 30 times in one day and sometimes not for a month. So yes, it’s rather like that. Yeah. Wow.
Well, good luck with the book manuscript. I’ll definitely, I’ll add it to the show notes when it’s available. When it’s available to pre-order as well. I would love you to say a little bit about your ideal self-care and your actual self-care, particularly around neurodivergence trauma.
And I’ve briefly explained my framework where the Feel bit, Feel. Love. Heal, the Feel bit because in different moments, let alone different days, we have different bandwidths. We need different things.
The same activity or the same approach one day could be pure self-care. The next day it could be punitive. So, the Feel bit is that kind of lowercase hyphenated self-care, the regulatory, the things we can do to help ourselves feel better.
The Love bit is the kind of Love archetype in psychosynthesis, the acceptance, the there’s no need to change a thing. You’re part of nature, part of the divine already whole. And I’m aware this year it feels like there’s more people saying that around New Year, New You, forget that you’re already wonderful. But we also know when we accept ourselves, when we’re compassionate to ourselves, any kind of change we do want to make, it becomes much easier because we’re not in the Stress Response. That’s the love part. And then the Heal part is the co-regulation, the collective care.
I hope I’m not overwhelming you with all of this and continue to ask questions as needed. But what would you say would be your ideal self-care in terms of things you do to help yourself feel better?
And just to pick up on the way you frame that, I think one of the therapies I use quite a lot is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I find it’s a good fit for me personally and also for a lot of neurodivergent people who maybe haven’t got on with other well-known therapies.
That paradox between that second, the Love [part of your framework] of “You’re perfect as you are, you’re wonderful.” And also, “Right, what are you going to do today? How are you going to make today better? How are you going to fix yourself?” And to have those two parts alongside each other. But I think it connects to that very first thing you said. It’s not what you’re doing, it’s the attitude with which you’re doing it.
It’s the attitude with which you’re doing it. And to situate all this kind of self-care, not in a kind of punitive, come on, you’re malfunctioning. You’re not quite as good as other people.
And if I just whip you hard enough, you might just about be up to scratch. But all that self-care, including the difficult stuff and the self-regulatory stuff and the boring stuff to come from that position of it’s because you’re wonderful and you’re lovely and you’re OK and you deserve to be here. It’s because of that that I actually think you should probably get a good night’s sleep even if you don’t feel like going to bed right now.
And, you know, I know you want to eat that for breakfast, but maybe, Love, let’s try with this first and then we’ll try that later. But you know what you need right now, that all self-care as far as it can to come from that place of gentleness. And I think a lot of talk about self-care comes from that place of like, you know, all successful people do this one thing or, you know, you will never succeed if you don’t X, Y, Z. So I think one of the things I try to hold in mind with self-care is that allowing myself to have a kind of rhythm.
I think all human beings, we’re cyclical on tiny, tiny scales across the course of kind of hours of kind of exertion and rest, thinking and then playing, you know, waking and then sleeping and on bigger cycles across weeks and months and years.
To allow myself to have that rhythm and to think of it in those terms, I think a lot of the things where I’ve been gradually over the years trying to understand how my brain works, how my body works and build up this pattern of I do need a certain amount of sleep and I do need it realistically to happen within a certain window, even if that’s not when I’d really like it to happen.
These are the things I need to eat. These are the ways I need to move my body. These are the bits of work I need to get done. These are the structures I need to have in place. I think as someone with ADHD, I think if I think of that as like, “Come on, you’ve got to do this every day for the rest of your life,” I just get angry.
I get frustrated and I get that demand avoidance of like, “No, I shan’t, I’ll show you” you know, but to think of it in terms of a rhythm of, “Come on, we’re going to push a little bit now and then we can rest a little bit afterwards.” You know, if I put the effort in to kind of get up and then it makes actually the next bit of my day a little bit gentler and I don’t have to push so hard and then I have a little push to get this bit of work done. And then so I’ve really been kind of in the big picture over the last few years for me has been trying to kind of build in that balance of those things and the small details have been adding things in.
So the most recent thing is, I don’t know if you know Sarah Beth Hunt. She does quite a lot of breathwork teaching. She teaches us. Messy luminous beings, I think is her website [https://sarahbhunt.com/].
And I’ve been on, I’ve been taking part in a thing that she’s doing all through January of meeting very, very briefly at seven o’clock every Monday morning and doing some breathing and stretches and really sort of 10, 15 minutes. And I looked at this and I thought, oh, seven o’clock on a Monday morning. And I thought, I’m already up at that time.
I have to do a school. I’m already up. What if I just did this tiny bite size thing and actually sustained it myself in between the things and it’s been, it’s been a revelation for me.
Because I’m not a morning person. I don’t want to get up, but I have to. And I think I always end up in that in-between state where I’m not sleeping.
I’m not actually resting because I’m lying in bed knowing I need to get up, but I’m not up. But I’m not up. And actually it’s been really a revelation for me that I do not want this to be true.
I don’t want it to be true that I feel better if I hop out of bed at seven o’clock and do some stretches, but it turns out to be true. And I kind of resent that for being true, but it’s, it’s been really interesting. So I’ve been doing that at the moment and that’s, I told my children and my partner that I’ve been doing this and they genuinely said to me, “Are you OK? Are you well?” Because this is so much not like me, but it, my body responds really well to it.
I’m trying to kind of go with that and with curiosity and slight amusement, find out where that takes me. So that’s what I’m doing at the moment.
Wonderful. And would you say that’s your essential, like if you only manage one thing, like if you don’t get the sleep, if you don’t get the food or is it different?
I think that’s very new. So that bit is very new. There are lots of things. I’ve gradually been adding in more and more things. I’m not very good at forming habits. Things don’t become autopilot except for the really unhelpful things. I played Candy Crush once and I’m going to play it every day for the rest of my life. But for the helpful things, I’m never on autopilot, you know, I always need the reminders, the prompts, the visual cues, the apps, the habit trackers. But I’ve been gradually adding more and more things.
And I’m aware there’s quite a lot of it, there’s lots of things that really help to build this kind of scaffolding around me almost. And what I find works is if I let myself, I cannot do everything every day. And I actually, if I aim for every day and I miss one, I’m going to go, well, that’s it’s ruined.
I’m going to do that again. Yeah. I get frustrated. I feel trapped. I feel angry with it. I resent it.
Whereas if I let myself just push and ease off a little bit. So there’s lots and lots of things whereas long as most of them are mostly there most of the time. And so sleep is a really important one.
I get older and I can’t stay up all night without really paying for it for a number of days. Eating, I’m slowly working out like, what are the things that my body really needs to eat? When do I need to eat? And also writing. If I go too long without sort of creative writing or journaling or something like that, I just need a place to put my thoughts kind of on the page where they’re manageable and they’re sort of trapped in a book and I can shut them in there so they’re not running around in my head all the time.
And so I can’t do all of those things every day, but they go in waves and I’m getting better over time at noticing, oh, I’ve skipped a few days of this actually. And I quite kind of miss it and I want to come back to it. I want to feel how I feel when I do that thing.
And that might mean that I give up on something else a little bit. If I’m straight away going to my journal, I’m not straight away hopping out of bed to do yoga. And that might ease off for a little bit, but then my body will miss that and I’ll lean back into that, you know.
So there’s not one essential, but there’s more and more things I’m sort of adding to this structure.
It sounds like the essential is your attitude and even that approach most of the time. And I’m also aware with the kind of rotation, with the what are you craving, that’s supporting the ADHD, isn’t it? The novelty that it’s not completely the same every day. You’re going with what feels good.
And waiting until I’m excited to do something and missing it, yeah. But I think it’s important as well. I don’t want that to be true. I want there to be an end point where I am perfect and I’m doing all of these things every day. And how much of that is living in capitalism and how much of that is kind of a masked neurodivergent person for most of my life, trying really hard to be good enough so that one day I’ll learn how to be like everyone else.
And it will be easy for me like it’s easy for them. This combination of all the various things, I don’t want it to be true. I don’t.
When I hear you say back to me most of the things, most of the time, I’m like, well, that sounds kind of shabby, you know? Oh, my God. It’s not good enough. It’s not perfect.
So why even bother? But realistically, it’s the only way I can. To me, it’s like hearing you. It’s reminding me of stuff like my herbal medicine person says, or my acupuncturist or like the kind of 80, 20, the like 18 or 18.
I don’t know if I got that wrong. But listening to you, it’s like, “Oh, kitten, don’t!” but of course, and I also know when it comes to me, it’s very much like, come on, just try a little bit harder.
Come on, like, yeah. And I’m also struck as we move into the Love part of the framework, that acceptance that everyone is part of nature. That’s why I use the cats. No one looks at a cat and thinks you should be doing more. It’s like they’re just amazing. We’re all mammals and we’re all conditioned that we have to prove ourselves and like be productive and all of it.
But when we connect just with what our animal bodies need, our nervous system needs, our spirit, like it’s just everything gets easier. But because it’s so radical to do that, it’s sometimes really, really challenging to believe that we are enough, that we’re not too much, that we are worthy. We’re lovable, all of that.
And you were talking about like kind of self-care. And I’m thinking I wrote a book, self-care. My practice is selfcarecoaching.net. But the way you were talking about it and the care element of self-care and just thinking, wow, it really has been hijacked, hasn’t it? It really has become such a punitive stick for people.
It’s become self-discipline with a cloth thrown over it that’s got self-care written on it. Yeah, absolutely. But there’s so much harshness.
So what is your ideal, like in terms of connecting with that like highest, truest, wisest, that uppercase S Self, that most miraculous part of yourself? What would be your ideal and then your essential? When you were talking about the cat, Mary Oliver quote pops into my head. Probably, you know, I’ve got quotes for every occasion. But I was thinking of the Mary Oliver quote of let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
And it’s so easy to do that when you look at a cat just glorying in comfort or play or sleep or affection and to extend that to ourselves. I think that for me, thinking about that kind of community care, but that self-acceptance links into that collective care. I was thinking about how self-acceptance is so hard and we can look at animals, we can look at nature and just observe it and experience it.
But then also doing the kind of work that we do as therapists and I do a lot of supervision work and I’m also a parent. And I meet a lot of people who are brave in being vulnerable with me and telling me what they find difficult and what they’re ashamed of. And as a person standing outside of that, as a therapist, as a partner, as a friend, as a parent, as whoever it is, it’s far easier to access that part that goes, but that’s okay, I love you.
I think you’re wonderful. I don’t think you need to look different. I don’t think you need to get up earlier.
I don’t think you need to try hard if you want to. I’d love to help you to do the stuff you want to do. I don’t think you’re broken.
And I think the practice of both parenting and therapy and supervision over many, many years, the gift it’s given to me is to have that voice, that part that stands outside and says those things and sort of whispers in my ear, you’re a person too. And the privilege of not only working largely with neurodivergent people, but also of the things being the way they are. So all the people I love are neurodivergent one way or another, it turns out over the years.
Of the very things that I’m saying to other people, “Well, that’s OK. That’s how your body works. That’s how your brain works. Let’s find a way to go with that. Let’s find a way to go with the rhythm of that.” And then to walk out of the room and swear at myself for doing the exact same thing? You can only sustain that for so long before that bit starts sort of tapping you on the shoulder.
How would it be to say these things to yourself? So I think that self-acceptance is really rooted in that kind of internalised conversation. Yeah.
And the paradox of kind of the more you say, do you know what? This is how I am. This is how I am. This is how my brain works.
This is how my body works. I cannot make it by force, do a certain thing. Yeah.
That opens you up for change. And for doing more and for changing and for doing different things and for doing the things that’s important to you. Because if you’re holding a screwdriver in your hand and everyone else is holding a spanner, you can sit there for years trying to use it as a spanner and it’s not going to work. But the minute you go, do you know what? This is a screwdriver. I cannot do the things that those people can do with their spanners, but screwdrivers can do amazing stuff. I’m going to go do some of those things.
Yeah. It’s that paradox, which I love in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy of acceptance permits change. It’s in DBT.
It’s in lots of, it’s in person-centred therapies. It’s in lots of things, this understanding that we, by the radical acceptance, makes change possible.
And also the, I’m thinking, I am agreeing with every letter of every word you’re saying. And I’m also remembering just last week, I got quite tearful about something. And it was like, when I was explaining to the person, I was talking to, first of all, telling my partner about what has upset me. And then talking to the person who had upset me when they said you seemed upset. And I was just really like, oh, it’s so tiny. It’s so minor. It’s so, I shouldn’t be like this. I shouldn’t, like, it’s not your fault. Like, it’s not their fault. I know that. And it’s like, oh my God. It took me so long to realize Evei Cat. It’s the AuDHD. It’s the differently wired brain. It’s the RSD. It’s the everything.
And once it was like, oh my God, I’m asking still. I’m completely thinking I should be Hi, Mighty Meadbh! She wants to say hi.
Hello, beautiful Meadbh. And yeah, so what helps you when you’re struggling to access that for yourself? Like you mentioned already that you can only hear it for a certain amount before it does get through. And you’re like, Emma, you deserve as well.
Yeah, absolutely. Does anything else help you? Like, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. But yeah, I mean, I’m really aware, even if I ask what I was going to ask, it’s moving out of that love, that acceptance that has been.
So I’ll go into the Heal, the collective care. And that might actually lead into it. Like who potentially helps you? Like if before you get there for yourself, like do you have loved ones? Do you have like who in your community is able to reflect that back for you? That you are far from broken, that you’re perfect just the way you are.
Do you want to say a bit about that? I do, and I think it’s my partner and I are both neurodivergent. And I think for both of us to have that experience of looking at each other and being looked at through that lens of like, “Yeah, I think you’re wonderful. And everything you try to hide, to feel like these are the things that make you, you. And you are what I love. So show me you. Don’t show me this kind of version that you’ve trimmed the edges off to try and be someone else.”
And so to have those relationships in my life with my partner, with my children as well. And as they get into their kind of teenage years and into adulthood, they say back to me things I’ve said to them. And it’s kind of frustrating and wonderful at the same time of like, well, I didn’t mean me, did I? I don’t have to take a break.
And they’ll look at me and go, you seem a bit stressed. I’m not stressed. Okay, maybe I’m stressed.
Another thing I’d say, I think it’s like a sense of humour and playfulness. I think it’s always useful. I use it a lot in therapy.
I use it a lot with myself. Because you stand outside of things and whether that’s people around you being able to laugh at you, saying things in a silly voice when you’re getting wound up. I find I’ve got a lot of verbal, a lot of echolalias, a lot of phrases that just live in my head and pop out.
And there’s a lot of them that just, there’s a phrase from a children’s book that’s been in my head a lot as I’ve kind of gone back into work after taking a break over Christmas. I used to read a book again and again and again to one of my children. And there’s a character in there who’s always showing up saying, “I don’t have time for this. I’m a busy man.” And it’s like my echolalia has a sense of humour because when I’m getting very serious about it, about something, whatever it is, I know, yes, yes. All right, I’ll do it in a minute.
I’m busy. My echolalia will show up and go, “I don’t have time for this. I’m a busy man.” And it jolts me out of that, you know? And I think to be in those communities and I’ve got friends and colleagues and really lovely supervision and so on to have those people around me who I really, really trust. And yeah, and also I have four cats as well. And so actually they look at me sometimes, one of them in particular, as if like, “Oh, you’re amazing. Oh, you’re incredible. And so, yeah, there’s something in sort of being enough. Yeah.
And whether that’s being looked at by a partner, by a child, by a colleague, by a friend is like… I mean, the fact that you have a cat looking at you, that’s incredible. One of my cats in particular. I’ll be moving around the room and he’s just got these big eyes just following me like, oh, wow.
The others are a bit more disdainful and take that proper cat costume most of the time. But one of them in particular is a little bit. And I’m also really conscious, what you are saying is amazing and gorgeous.
But I’m also remembering what you were talking about in your presentation and it’s not that being in community is always easy. Sometimes other people are really annoying. And you were really wonderful because I know for me, “I’m like, I’m done. No more people-ing. I can’t do it.” Whereas you were describing really beautifully compassionate to yourself and to the other boundary setting and assertiveness.
And I wondered, like, what helps you with that? Like, can you say a little bit about that? I think, yes. And I think maybe two things. One of them is that the people I’m talking about, the people who I share a house with, the people who I see in my everyday life, we all, like, they are all people who I would love to set boundaries with me.
And so I can give myself permission almost to show them how to do the thing that I want them to learn how to do as they go out into the world. Yeah. And I can let myself do it on those terms.
It’s not for me, you understand. I’m not setting boundaries for me, but I’m setting boundaries because it makes me a good example. But yeah, to live within a neurodivergent community and neurodivergent extended family and social network where we can say, do you know what? I just can’t right now.
And to have those phrases that I can go to with my partner, with my children, with my closest friends to be able to say, “I just can’t people right now. Or like that noise, I just can’t. Either you’re going to need to make it somewhere else or I’m going to need to go somewhere else or the noise is going to need to stop. And it’s not because you’re not broken. I’m not broken. There’s just a mismatch of needs.”
And I think, again, being forced to kind of do that. The other thing is, I think, a thing I’ve really worked hard on is kind of keeping an eye on myself that we have these kind of rhythms, these kind of cycles. And especially being autistic and ADHD, I can have this kind of pendulum that sometimes keeps this beautiful balance between the ADHD that wants to go, let’s go do some things.
Let’s start some stuff. And the autism that’s like, let’s do the same thing every day forever. And neither of these is a sustainable position, but to have that pendulum that moves between the two.
But to notice when I’m getting to the edges of that and to start steering back before I get so far into it and so noticing, like to give people advance warning, to give myself advance warning of, I don’t have a lot of capacity for this right now. So I’m already going to start kind of steering back in the opposite direction.
I’m already going to say, “Actually, I can’t have music on at the dinner table today. I can’t do people and noise. If you all want noise, I’m fine to go eat somewhere else.
But this is where to be kind of to know those patterns. It’s happened enough times that I know where this is heading. Let’s start correcting it before we actually get so far into it that I’m stuck in it and I’m going to melt down. And I do also, it’s really easy to stand at a conference and go, yes, I think we should all be compassionate all the time.
Of course, we get it wrong all the time and yell at each other and come back and fix it. The repairs are stronger often than the bits that have never been broken. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s really helpful.
Remembering in therapy, as therapists or supervisors, as I’m not a parent, but in parenting, it is the repair that matters. So giving ourselves permission to be human and to, ah, and then okay. Yeah, absolutely.
I get that, yeah. Yeah, I adore what you’ve been saying and the struggle with it. And I’m thinking of so many examples.
And I live alone, like I have the cats, but I have way more peopleyness in my life than I used to. And before, I mean, understanding about the neurodivergence, it wasn’t just the trauma history that made me like, nope. And just listening to you now, it’s kind of like, I know, and I also hear that it’s not that you don’t shout and scream as well, you’re a human.
But just that, because I think I’ve learned so much. And again, with the alexithymia, that I didn’t used to understand my feelings. I’m so much better because self-care is my work.
But figuring out for myself is an advanced practice enough. Yes. So what you’re describing about with other humans, and like, you need this, you’re fine to do it this way, or if they want to do it that way, it gives them the choice.
But that, oh my God, that’s amazing. That’s like goalz with a zed. Yeah, absolutely.
And we don’t often get there. But I think that’s really important. Because when we’re looking at other people, we’re seeing from a distance.
It’s so easy to sort of see patterns and repetitions. But when it’s your own stuff, it’s right up here. You can’t see it.
You can’t see that it’s ever been different. You feel like when you’re in that state, you feel like it’s always been like this. It’s always going to be like this.
It’s harder to do this stuff for yourself. And you’re like, yeah, other people’s anxiety is just anxiety. And you can tolerate it.
But my anxiety, that’s proper anxiety. That’s genuinely the end of the world. You know, whatever it might be, my stress, my overwhelm.
Yeah. Oh, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you. Can I ask if you were able to go back to a younger you and share some love, some acceptance, some wisdom? Some compassion? What might you send her? And at what stage? I immediately think of myself as a teenager when you say, go back to your younger self.
But I also, you know, I’m parenting teenagers at the moment. And there’s part of me that’s living with, you know, you cannot, there are places you have to go on the journey in order to get there. And I would love to be able to go back to my sort of 14-year-old self and just give some kind of kindness and reassurance.
And there was that in my life as well. There were loving people around me. But the world’s message was very different from that.
You know, it’s a really acute sense of not being like other people, not being good at the things other people get at, being good at things other people thought were uninteresting or useless or whatever. You know, I’d love to be able to go back and offer that sense of you, go and be more of who you are. And you don’t actually care about this stuff.
Don’t work so hard to look like you’re good at things that you don’t want to be good at. Go lean into the things that make you you. Be a screwdriver.
Yes, exactly. Be a hundred percent, be a really good version of yourself rather than like a poor tribute band to someone else that’s never going to be as good as the original that you don’t even want to be. But I don’t know how much you could just kind of whisper that in someone’s ear at 14 and they go, all right, then good idea and get on with it.
You know. Bye bye angst. I’ll just not be self-conscious then.
Sounds like a good idea. Well, thank you again. Do you want to say your website again? Yes, I am at willowpsychology.co.uk and I’m Emma Bede, B-E-D-E, which is quite searchable because it’s an unusual name.
And yeah, I do a bunch of stuff and I try and keep my website updated and I put a load of stuff on online events and maybe one day I’ll write a newsletter. Maybe having said I’ve got a newsletter here, I’ll actually go and write a newsletter. Have you forgotten that you’ve almost written a book? I have, yes.
It’s a book on, there’s a series on, it’s actually really exciting in this context. It’s not about, it’s about miscarriage. There’s a series of books around coping with difficult experiences written by psychologists who have been through those experiences.
So doing that kind of dual personal and professional experience, which is actually a really interesting thing for me and it’s something I’m kind of grappling with professionally, how to kind of be in the water and in the lifeboat, you know, kind of to be both of those things. And so, yeah, that is probably another year till that comes out, but that’s coping with miscarriage is going to come out. And I’ve so much enjoyed writing it.
I am buzzing with like, what else could I write? Wonderful, wonderful. Well, thanks again. Absolute pleasure talking to you.
Yeah, lovely to talk to you too. Thank you for listening or watching the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. This episode, like all of them, was produced by me, your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham.
You can find full transcripts, links and more information in the show notes and also at selfcarecoaching.net as well as more information about the book, 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing and if you’re interested in those deeper dives, joining the Sole to Soul Circle, as well as lots of other free resources and information about other offerings. If this episode was helpful, please leave a five-star review in a world in which so much is coming up for healing and so many people are feeling unsafe. I want to do whatever I can to help as many people as possible heal from trauma, helping create a world in which everyone is safe, welcome and loved physiologically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally able to thrive.
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