I’ve spent a huge proportion of my career delivering training to a wide range of audiences: Healthcare professionals, charities, small and large corporate organisations – I have trained them all on a variety of topics, dependent on my role at that time.
Some sessions have gone well, some less so. Every single one I learn something from. And thankfully feedback is generally constructive rather than critical beyond redemption.
A couple of months ago I was delivering some training to a group of healthcare professionals on loss. It’s a session I have run many times before with teams all over the country. Feedback has consistently been good. Obviously, there are always suggestions for changes, but they are gratefully received. There is no such thing as a perfect trainer or a perfect training session. And despite the topic and the fact that I share so much of myself, I am very keen to hear ideas for improvements.
But when this particular spreadsheet of feedback dropped in my inbox, I was pretty winded. Whereas 90% of the feedback was as hoped, a couple of people had left some very raw reflections, including:
“I took nothing at all from this session”
“I would never recommend this training to someone else”
Brutal.
Now, I think this feedback would sting whatever the training was about. But when you deliver sessions that are underpinned by your own lived experience – and that experience is the death of your baby – it lands differently.
Because if you allow it to, this type of feedback can be twisted within you. ‘I took nothing’ could easily become: ‘your story means shit to me. I’ve heard it all before and quite honestly, you and your baby just aren’t that special’.
And herein lies the risk of doing this work. It is so meaningful. So deep. So precious. That to have someone unceremoniously throw it back in your face feels pretty bloody awful.
It really shook me for days. I cried (more than once). I talked it over (a lot). I got angry (healthy). I took it to supervision (essential). And now I feel relatively at peace with it. Because I do believe that this is part of a bigger issue than me.
My initial thoughts included:
· Was it that terrible?
· Am I that terrible?
· Should I be doing this training? Am I good enough / qualified enough / experienced enough?
· Why would anyone say such things in an anonymous feedback form?
· If you felt that strongly, would you just not say anything at all?
· Was it so bad that it was impossible even to say ‘thank you for sharing your story’ – even if you did take nothing else at all from the session?
· What does it say about me that, if I had similar thoughts, I would probably choose to lie or avoid giving any feedback at all?
However, what it moved onto was this: Would they have said this to me if I wasn’t a psychologist?
And do you know what – I don’t think they would. Or at least, I sincerely hope not. I hope that if I had been there as someone with lived experience alone, that they would have had the foresight and the compassion to think about the impact of their words. But I wasn’t there with that one hat alone. I was there with many years of experience behind me as well as my expertise from the inside out.
Being othered
Which brings me onto a bigger issue that I have been grappling with for the last few years – where do I fit? Where do I belong? And how do I hold this dual role of healthcare professional alongside the deep and meaningful insight I bring from being part of the loss community for seven years.
I remember touching on this when I first starting blogging in 2016. Even then, in the deepest fog of my grief, I knew that I was walking a risky path on being so open about my personal experiences. I felt that it was potentially going to be career breaking. That I would be asked to leave my job, possibly even leave the profession under a cloud of shame.
Because boundaries are the number one rule when training as a therapist.
It’s not that I didn’t care back then – or now. I do. Deeply. But I also know that I have a lot to offer from both chairs in the therapy room, and I feel that my life’s work is looking at ways in which to safely integrate these. Safely for my clients as well as for myself.
To work with integrity.
Yet I am aware how deep the shame extends holding this dual role. I remember in the first period of therapy I had after Orla died, I did my best to conceal my writing and blog from my therapist. I didn’t want her to know because I felt that she would judge me. I believed that everyone in my profession was. I feared that she would tell me to stop. That it was perpetuating my pain, but more so, that it was highly inappropriate. That I was destroying my career. That I would regret it.
And so, I kept quiet.
Since leaving the NHS, this worry has quietened, but not completely disappeared. Free from the bureaucracy that comes with working for a huge organisation, I have felt my away around how to work in this area. How to protect my own heart when navigating new chapters of loss and grief. How to protect clients alongside this too. But that feeling of being othered in this work - that has remained. And on reflection, I can see how that has pushed me to work in increasingly isolated ways.
Where do I fit?
I often feel that I don’t quite fit anywhere in this work. I sit on the periphery of the psychologists who are experts in their field; those with huge and deserved success in their specialist areas. And I also feel that I sit on the edge of those who share their lived experience. Not quite able to feely share what is going on in my life, whilst I maintain the boundaries that sit comfortably for me personally and professionally.
Which is a very lonely to be. And also why the feedback stung that bit more. It tapped into what I probably fear the most in this work – that what I am doing is wrong.
I have explored this in my supervision, working out where healthcare sits alongside expertise by experience. The way that it is revered but also denigrated when it comes too close. How I am sitting firmly in that split and how this can (and likely will) play out in future work that I do.
But how can I navigate this as a human? A human with a tender heart and a deep fear of getting things wrong. Because it really is so much more complex than simply writing it off as ‘saying more about them than it does about me’.
My wonderful supervisor is helping me to work this out. To extrapolate what it is bringing up for me, but also what is going on systemically. And ultimately, to work out where is my community – my collective? How do I ensure that I am leaning on others as I so encourage others to do?
This. This is important work in progress.
Michelle, there is so much I want to say on this heartfelt, honest, vulnerable and beautifully written post. I too worry I will say it all wrong, expose myself in some way, that even after reading this post, I have the fear and shame that even you might think I’m doing things wrong. I am a clinical psychologist and my second daughter died. I think I was at the training you mention, if it wasn’t the same training it must have been one around the same time. My previous NHS trust supported me to attend. I know you don’t need me to say it as you’ve found your peace on this, but the training gave me so much. As a professional and as a bereaved parent, but also that I thought the training made incredibly brave links and such rich reflections on various forms of trauma and loss in the perinatal period. But most of all, in the training I just wanted to ask you (but couldn’t find a way to), how do you do this so gracefully, the personal, the professional, the boundaries that feel so human, but with upmost integrity to your profession and clients. I suppose I thought, how do I possibly do that. Not to be successful (what ever that may be in our profession!), but how do I take this relationship with my dead child that seems to be at the centre of everything, that I cannot help but write and speak about, and integrate it into my identity. All parts of my identity. As either I lose her again, or I don’t know who I am. And does that even mean I can be a psychologist anymore. I admired your writing and speaking before my daughter died as I thought you were doing something very important for our profession, and I couldn’t help but read words so beautifully articulated about love and loss and all the complexity. After my daughter died, your reflections have become a necessity for me, somewhere I can go to when I feel overwhelmed with doing life and my job now I am a bereaved parent. We don’t know each other, and yet I feel you have helped me in ways I cannot ever properly articulate and thank you for. I’ve wanted to reach out in some way but I didn’t know if it was a professional or personal need and I couldn’t shake the feeling of perhaps burdening you in some way. As this post shows so clearly, there is a need for self protection when you put yourself out there in this space, and for people to respect your boundaries. But I just wanted to say your writing and speaking is what it is to me because you hold both and allow me to look at it, this bit in the middle, this split, as you say, between the personal and professional. And to me, that makes you whole, and gives me hope maybe there’s still a place for me to carry my daughter with me and still be a psychologist, and maybe even a much better one. I feel so angry on your behalf, for Orla, for me and my daughter, that this brutal feedback happened, but I am so grateful for the writing that came from it. Your generosity with your vulnerability is a gift I will treasure from afar. Annie
Dear Michelle, Thank you so much for your curiosity, vulnerability and courage in your transparency. I have to say there have been a number of times in my life when I was the audience member who walked away from a presentation feeling angered that I got nothing at all from it. On 100% of those occasions, time/life showed me how what was presented was impinging on my defences and, in my immaturity (for lack of a better word), my defences won over my opportunity for growth. At times, the sophisticated subject matter was triggering and I mistook my internal complexity as a sign of annoyance; at other times, what was triggering was the person who reminded me of someone from my past with whom I have a complex relationship. "We see things not as they are but as we are." Perhaps the reason the feedback was not constructive is because it could be reflectively discussed elsewhere and it just happened to spill-over more socially. Your compassion is very clear.
With love, endless gratitude, and every best wish, Mary Grace.