Emotional labour (with James Clarke)

This is Mentorwork, the podcast unpacking the challenges faced by early career psychologists. And I'm your host, Dr. Brunner and Melkins. Hey, Mentorworkers, how do you manage your emotions in sessions? What about after sessions? And what about before sessions? Today we have a guest with us to discuss the very important topic of managing emotional labour. His name is James Clarke, he's a clinical psychologist and a PhD candidate, and I am very excited to have you with us, James. Very excited to be here. Thanks for having me. So, James, let's dive straight into it. I'm interested to know how you came into contact with this topic of emotional labour. How'd you get into it? Yeah, so part of it was my, so I finished my master's degree and then I went into private practice for the registration endorsement for a couple of years and I always knew that I wanted to get into your dual PhD based on what the topic was. So I used that time just to really kind of, I guess, explore what I wanted to look at. In that time, you know, with all the stresses and the strains of endorsement and full-time clinical work, I think I didn't know it at the time, but I started to experience burnout. And I have a, somebody that has sort of acted as a bit of a mentor for me, I'd be meeting with him quite regularly, just to kind of process just life in general, you know, but also future, future steps and things that I wanted to look at and he did his PhD in emotional labour. And even though he doesn't come from a clinical background, he sort of was pointing out a few things in my own experience and my own, you know, what was happening for me. And I guess that really sparked the interest, you know, in it. And then we started talking about how, you know, when the conversation turned towards research and what we wanted, what I wanted to look at, you know, it was interesting noting that there was very little research on this topic of emotional labour in psychologists and how it impacts people. And so from there, I guess it really just kind of grew from there and the interest grew from there. And the more I read about it, the more I realized, hey, this is something that we're not talking about and this is something that's really important. Yeah, because I found it staggering to see your article. So listen, as James has published an article, probably multiple articles on emotional labour, it's his focus of his PhD research. And I was being a little nerd and going through the psychology journals and I saw James's article on emotional labour and I thought, I have not seen anything on this before. And then when I read your article, James, I noted that you also said in the article that this is not mostly an explored area for psychologists. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. It's something that has had very little application to psychology. There's lots of application in other professions, you know, particularly like retail and the regional emotional labour text was written on airline hosts, but yeah, there's just, you know, very, very little application to psychologists. There's a little bit in the healthcare literature, like around nurses and what have you and other sort of healthcare professions, but very, very little on psychologists and actually very little that specifically focuses on even where psychologists have been researched. There's been conjunction with all kinds of other professions, not exclusively psychologists. It just strikes me so weird because as you're pointing out in your introduction there, you said that you noticed Bernat in yourself and you also had your mentor who had done their PhD on emotional labour. And so that led you down this path of investigating it, but it's such a central component of our work, like emotion is our bread and butter or psychologist. So it's just staggering, really. Don't you think? Absolutely. And I think we kind of talk about it a little bit in the frame of counter-transference, counter-transference management, but it's a distinct constructions and it is different to counter-transference. So we don't really get that, you know, while we might talk about the reactions that we have to clients and things like that, we don't talk about the next step, which is, how do we actively process this? Because how we actively process it determines the outcomes that we'll have from it. Yeah. So let's talk about it. Let's get some definitions out then. What is emotional labour, because I'm going to assume that it's different to a retail worker experiences or is it the same thing? Conceptually, it's the same, but the application on the ground is different. Okay. So conceptually, emotion labour refers to the process of regulating our emotions to be consistent with what's required from us, from our occupational role. So there's a couple of different components. There's the requirement's component. So it's the, what are the rules that govern what is okay to express emotionally and what isn't okay to express emotionally and that can be dynamic and change and be contextual and, you know, it's obviously very different for different professions. Then you've got the emotion regulation component. So when we're experiencing an emotion that is not consistent with those display rules and what we want to express, how do we actually regulate that internally? And it's thought that we can do that through two main mechanisms. One would be surface acting, which is where we might fake our emotions or suppress them. And the other is through depacting, which is using a strategy that actively changes what we're feeling to be consistent with what we want to express. And then the last component is just the emotion performance. So outside, you know, what are the publicly observable expressions of emotion that the person's engaging with. That's kind of like the concept of it, but you can see like how that translates to on the ground, you know, in practice is very different depending on different professions. So for example, an airline hostess might have to smile a nod when a airline passenger asks for a fifth packet of biscuits and they're feeling frustrated, but in psychotherapy, if a client tells us that their family member has just passed away and we notice an overwhelming emotion in ourselves, we have to decide how we're going to deal with that. So I can see how it's qualitatively different. One of the interesting things about emotional aid in the context of psychotherapy is that even though we might be experiencing an emotion that is inconsistent with what we want to express at times. So in the case of feeling frustrated with the client and not wanting to let that be expressed to the client, but sometimes even when the emotions that we want to express are congruent with what we end up expressing in terms of the domain of the content of the emotion. Like to say, if we're sharing sadness in the context of grief, you know, and that's totally appropriate and congruent with what's happening, there's still going to be a regulation or a modulation in terms of the intensity of what we might be expressing. So the example that you just go from and you know, if somebody, if you're having a real overwhelming reaction yourself, it's unlikely that we might express that entirely 100% authentically, you know, we might, we might be expressing it in a more contained way or a more cognitive way, maybe even. Yeah. No, I get that. I can see that even in my own practice hearing that if I've had clients who are sharing an overwhelming emotion, I noticed that in myself and they might be crying a lot, even in myself, I regulate that and I might say something like usually my extreme, like emotional connection with them is like my heart goes out to you. I'm really feeling that with you right now, but I won't cry with them. Yeah. And you're still holding that. That's still within you. Yeah. James, why do we actually care about this in psychotherapists? Well, emotionally, but really, you know, it links to a lot of important outcomes. So it has a really strong link with burnout in a lot of other professions and my research and also another researcher in Sydney, Anthony Jaffe has started to show that this is this connection between emotional labor and burnout is also relevant to psychologists and present in our profession. But there are other things as well like other outcomes like job turnover and physical well-being, physical illness, intention to turn over in your job. So there's lots of different, oh, and also just at the bottom line, our performance as well. Yeah. Our capacity to be more authentic has positive benefits or positive impacts on our actual performance in the role and also consumer satisfaction as well. So is the finding around that if we're more authentic in the therapy space, then clients are more satisfied with their therapy? Is that something that you're aware of that is correlated? That's found in other professions, so it hasn't been, hasn't been looked at in the context of psychotherapy, but I don't, yeah, I don't really see why that wouldn't be the case. I was looking at some research the other week and I was in an autism journal and there's a qualitative study that's been done with autistic clients and they say that they actually value therapist authenticity rather than detachment. Maybe there's some preliminary evidence from certain client groups perhaps. Definitely, definitely. And I think even if you just think about it for yourself, I think all of us have pretty good BS writers, you know what I mean? When you're sitting with somebody that you don't feel like as being genuine with you, for whatever reason that may be, there's like a little subconscious alarm that goes off that just sort of, there's a discomfort with that, you know, so yeah, in all our relationships authenticity is just such an important thing. Hmm. So what I'm hearing from you is that it does ask good in terms of our wellbeing to be more emotionally authentic and it does our clients good as well. Absolutely, absolutely. And that's, that's sort of my, I think often when we talk about ideas of self-care and emotional labour and you turn the lens on us as therapists, I think a lot of us, because of our self-sacrificing nature, might not pay as much attention to it as we perhaps should. So that's also my way of selling it to those people too, is that what's not only good for you, but it's also going to be good for your clients as well. Beautiful. Let's move on then to what emotional labour do psychologists actually carry? And this is, I hope this is going to be a validating minute or two for the self-sacrifices for the perfectionists, because I think we really need to understand how much we actually do. Tell us, James. Big question, really, really big question. I think, so part of the research that, or part of the interviews that I did that, that we didn't write out, just because it wasn't really quite relevant to the question, was just really mapping out, you know, the kinds of reactions that people have and the kinds of emotional labour that we experience. And it was, it, what stood out to me was quite surprising was, it was just the full gamut of emotions, you know, that we, we hold as a consequence of our work. So not only are we required to be able to experience and express, you know, the full range of emotions, but there's also so much there in terms of, you know, in session, we're so focused on meeting the clients needs, rightly so, because that's our role. But there's so much that we're holding as a result of that, and there's so much that we're exposed to, that if we're not finding ways outside of those sessions to really, to manage that better and to sit with it and to express it in appropriate ways or finding ways to put that emotion that we're carrying, then, then absolutely can have quite a detrimental impact on us. So there's not only just so many different kinds of reactions that we might have, but I think that there's so much stuff that goes on within our own selves, you know, in terms of, you know, counter-transferrence and those sorts of concepts, as well as everything that we might be holding outside of the counter-transferant space as well. So what's happening with us at home, you know, what's happening with our family and our personal relationships and just life in general and, you know, all these other factors that we're coming into the room with holding as a human being and, you know, having to sit with while being so focused on another person and what's happening for them. We're out when I hear you say that I definitely do feel validated in myself and I hope that listeners did too, because it really reflects how huge our task is. Even before clients walk in the door, it sounds like we're making complex decisions about the emotions that we're going to express, how we're going to regulate that in the session and what we're going to do after, is that right? Definitely. And from session to session as well, you know, we finish up with one client and say if we've done some trauma processing or something like that, it's had a really significant impact on us. And then we have maybe 10 minutes to write our notes, have a drink of water, go to the toilet, and then meet the next client. And we're almost trying to start that as a blank slate for the next client. And that's so incredibly challenging for any human to be able to do it, like we wouldn't expect that of any person on the street just to be able to have that sort of conversation and walk away and go into another really deep and meaningful, difficult conversation without having that lingering emotion sitting with them. This really gives valedity to quite often I might hear, maybe not quite often, but I've heard people say, "It's like a therapy is just talking." And I always notice an intense anger in myself when I hear that, and I think hearing you talk and know the reason why, because I'm like, "It's not just talking! You don't know!" Yeah, yeah. Actually, there was one of the participants in the qualitative interview said, "Look, this is not just teen biscuits." Yes. That's not what we're doing. I love that. Fantastic. So, yes, we do carry so much. And as you're talking, I was reflecting in my office, I do have, it's a very common emotion wheel and it's a resource and it has all the emotions and sometimes I get clients to, if I want them to label their emotions, I get them to identify from the emotion wheel. And here in your talk, I'm like, "I experience all of those emotions in the emotion wheel with my clients myself, but I'm only expressing a very narrow range of emotions or a dulled range of emotions that's appropriate to express." And managing that is a significant task as you've found through your research. Definitely. And I think even when you think about our psychological resources, so I guess we've got, or just our general resources that we bring to work with, we've got our cognitive resources, our emotional resources and our physical resources. Certain jobs will be heavy on one, but not the other, so there might be some jobs that are heavy on physical resources, but maybe not so much on the emotional side or vice versa. But our job is very cognitive and very emotionally demanding, and I think that often that gets overlooked as the, in terms of the emotional demands of the work that we have. Absolutely. I love that and I agree with that 100%. So, James, let's move on to how do we manage emotional labour? Yeah, good question. I would say that the literature sort of shows that depicting is preferred to surface acting and what that means is actively trying to use the strategy that aligns what we're feeling or sort of realigns what we're feeling with what we're expressing. So, in the article that we're referencing there, there were lots of different ways that people talked about trying to do that, but there was things like, basically it all came down to finding ways to realign that emotion or to get distance from it. So one way that people might talk about that is like using a formulation, so following back on, okay, this might be a challenging behaviour that I'm seeing right now, but what's behind that? So, a classic example of that might be, say, if you're working with a client that has strong narcissistic traits in your experience, experiencing that sort of devaluing that comes with that, that is likely to activate some frustration in some anger or some hurt within us, but if we take a moment to kind of see where that behaviour is coming from, so, you know, what's the traumatised young person that sits behind that narcissistic behaviour? That can help us activate maybe that compassion that we want to express to that person in the session. So we can say things like, we could do self-talk, for example, this person isn't trying to devalue me, I understand that this behaviour is coming from a place where they feel vulnerable and scared and they're just showing up the best they can today. Something like that? This is a coping behaviour that I'm seeing here. This isn't personal about me. Yeah. Yeah. So self-talk, definitely in terms of, I think, compassionate self-talk and self-compassionate self-talk is important because that's so aligned with what we're required to express, you know, with clients. Yes. But the other part to it as well, that something that other people may be found, found useful was using strategies to psychologically distance themselves from what they're experiencing as well. So, this is sort of more like the psychological flexibility, you know, acceptance and commitment there to be mindfulness skills where we're not necessarily trying to change what we're experiencing, but we're just trying to find a way to be able to sit with it in a more effective way and still act outwardly that in ways that are consistent with our values. To how that kind of connects with emotional labour concepts is that it's kind of like in a way we're maybe doing a little bit of surface acting by maybe expressing or engaging with emotional displays that might not be 100% consistent with what we're feeling at that time, but what the real key part is that we're not suppressing what we're feeling. When I'm trying to push that down and push it away, we're making room and expanding around that feeling. So that was something else that people talked about as being quite useful for them. That's really interesting, so I'm trying to think of an example with myself. Can you tell me if this is an example of distancing or if I'm off-track? So for example, when a client experiences an injustice, and I find that I am upset at that injustice as well, I don't go swearing about the person who has committed the injustice to my client, but I might say something like this anger is valid, I am so angry on your behalf, or I might tone that down a bit, depending on the client, because sometimes if I feel along with some with anger too much, then it can make the anger increase to them. But I am trying to be authentic and express that the anger is not the problem here. What happened was the injustice. Is that an example of emotional distancing? I think what that's also a really good example of is how it's possible to do this into personally as well, to share reactions to things and actually, but I think what you're doing there is expressing emotional authentically, you're kind of expressing the reaction that you're having in an appropriate way. That's another thing that's sort of shown up as the more that we can be authentic with our reactions, with clients, that better that's also going to be for us. I think this also comes down to process work as well, like when how do you express or find ways to express your counter-transferenced reactions to clients in ways that are going to be functional and helpful, and not actually about servicing our needs, but in the service of the therapy, but that's also something that people have found useful too, is not shying away from that emotion and actually using those moments of dissonance to inform the therapy or make a comment on the process side of things in therapy. Okay, so I just need to speak to the terrified therapist in myself that heard that, because I think that process comments is actually quite an advanced skill. What do you think? Yeah, definitely. I think that that comes down after you feel like you've mastered the basic process of what therapy is and maybe some of the basic therapeutic models and things like that, and then you're more free to then start to think about, once that becomes more automatic, you're more free to start to think about what's happening between you and the client. You have more mental space to dedicate to that and you can start looking at that. So, I think it is a difficult skill, but I think it's something that's important to develop and I think sort of provisions are really great space to be able to try to develop that skill. Yeah, let's talk about that because I agree with process comments being, it's not impossible listeners, you can develop it over time, but the supervisory space could be a great place to actually develop these process comments skill as well as other ways of regulating our emotions. Is that right? Yeah, for sure. And I think it helps you with good supervision, of course, is the qualifier here, but it gives you that safe space to actually try out or maybe even role play ways of making those process comments. It also can help you clarify within yourself what actually it is that you want to express at those times and maybe what actually is going on, what's your stuff, what's the client's stuff. So, yeah, and so I think that it can be helpful in developing the skill to make process comments, but also to help manage the emotional labor process as well. I think supervision is a great place to put these reactions, to unpack them and explore what's happening for you, but also maybe find practical ways that you can, as we're saying before, finding ways to be able to regulate that emotion so that we're more consistent with what we want to express. So, the example I gave about connecting with the vulnerable child that sits underneath a difficult behaviour in the room, that's something that we might not be able to do in the moment, first time, that's something that we might have to develop in supervision so that next time we're able and ready to deploy that cognitive style. Yeah, I'd say that. I've recently just come out of that stage, so I used to pick it up and then next session I would be like, I'm going to come back to this and address it, but now I can do it in the moment, but listen, that's after a few years, I've actually practising this and I had to deliberately practise it every session to try out a process comment, even if it was just like, I'm noticing this in the room or I wonder if this is happening. Did you find that skill jump for you as well? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I can certainly relate to the anxiety and doing that early on, but I think over time and I think working with particular client groups was helpful for that as well, where maybe attachment, so clinically I work in the AOD space and a lot of our clients have trauma histories and attachment difficulties and all of that is present in the room with you. So I think being exposed to that client group has meant that for me that's something that I've had more opportunity to kind of do and to reflect on and see as important as a mechanism of change in the therapeutic space. And just coming back to supervision, I think just talking about this is brought up a lot of other things to me as well. Firstly, what to do if your supervisor doesn't talk about emotions with you? I mentioned this to you off air, but sometimes I've had feedback from listeners that supervisors don't talk about emotions. They might be focused more on the process and that might be more appropriate to early career sites. But it sounds like from your research that we could also benefit from discussing our emotional reactions to clients in supervision, could that be an implication? Certainly, and it's a big implication, I think, of all the papers that it can be a peer supervision space, you know, if that's more appropriate, you know, but I think one-on-one supervision has enormous potential to help people with being able to reflect on the sorts of emotional experiences that we're having, really unpacking it, understanding it, and then being able to take that forward, you know, working with clients in more functional ways, more appropriate ways, or ways that are going to help us, you know, be more authentic in the room with clients, and it does depend supervisor to supervisor how comfortable they are talking about personal things, and I guess that line between supervision and therapy, you know, as well. But my perspective is that I think supervision is a really important space to provide support to clinicians, and sometimes that does mean having to explore maybe what's happening in the person's personal life, that might be contributing to things or personal reactions to clients, provided it's always done in a respectful way and, you know, within the supervise ease consent. No, I agree. I think that can be brought up, and probably should be brought up in supervision actually. So for example, if you're working with someone who has a trauma history and let's say the content of that much is something in your own history, and so you notice it brings up more emotion than you sure, I think it's good to acknowledge that, and then discuss ways that the supervisor might seek help to address that, so it no longer, I guess, perhaps triggers the same emotions with that client, or they can gain some emotional distance from it. Absolutely. And I think that, I think if you went back and looked at the tradition of supervision within psychology, I think in the early days, that's what it was all about. Oh, really? Oh, cool. And yeah, in terms of like, I think people practicing from more of a psychodynamic space. Yeah. You know, and, you know, there's earlier forms of models of therapy. I think supervision was all about that, and that's my understanding anyway, but I think maybe as we've gone, you know, as we've gone on and we've progressed, maybe we've lost a little bit of that. Yeah. I think there are still people that are very good at looking at the interpersonal process, but I think, yeah, sometimes it's easier perhaps to drop that. And I think other things come into it as well. Like, I think if supervisors have burnt out themselves, then I'm not sure they're going to have the emotional energy to be able to give that to their, to their supervisors, you know, and so maybe there's a, a functional avoidance for both, both parties there to avoid that, whether it's the supervisor, not, not feeling like they've got the emotional energy to be able to, you know, give that to their supervisor, when they've got a whole bunch of other clients and all the other things that are going on. But maybe the supervisor, as a result, not feeling safe to bring that up or, you know, being anxious about bringing it up, I'm not showing, not being sure if they should, certain there's, yeah, avoidance on both sides. Mmm. That's really interesting. I didn't consider that, but it just makes me feel angry again, I like the burnout. And it's just like, oh, it's a pandemic, it's for all of us. And yes, that actually can affect the support that the supervisors can give to supervisors. And just for listeners, I think a takeaway from this section is that if you would like to unpack your emotional reactions, but you haven't done so before in supervision, you could actually just say to them, hey, is it all right if I unpack my emotional reaction to this client and we can talk through it? And then see what they say, would that be a good recommendation? Yeah, certainly. I guess that's that concept of coaching people with what we need, you know? Yeah. Some people have talked about any interviews, did talk about seeking personal therapy as well at times, because I guess while there's, there can be a gray area between supervision and therapy, supervision is not therapy, you know? So there may be things that you might unpack or identify as supervision that does need individual therapy from somebody else. And so that's also a space that people can take those things to and I'll certainly highly encourage therapists themselves to be receiving therapy or at least have received therapy at some point. Yeah, no, I agree with that as well. And this episode will probably be coming out close to another episode that I've done with somebody else about therapists receiving therapy. And so we, yeah, we think it's really important that therapists receive therapy to just get some perspective on their own lives, but also it can create that empathy for clients as well. So if we're talking about emotional distancing, if you were in the client hot seat, you can see how hard it is to actually bring your vulnerable self to that therapy space and how hard it might be to actually change. So I found it massively beneficial just from that process. Yeah, I think that's a really, really good point. I couldn't have articulated that better. Thank you. James, I'm going to do maybe 360 and direct our attention to this idea of self-compassion. And I can hear collective groans from listeners about this because I always hear it from perfectionists and self-sacrifices as well. And they're like, oh, I've heard self-compassion before, but we're going to talk about it listeners deal with it. I can't tell us how self-compassion can assist with emotional labor. Yeah. And I think it's interesting. You met the little spiel there about that little internal cringe that we feel. You know, when we talk about self-compassion, like because I have it as well and I've had it, you know, when I first looked at it, but the more I looked at self-compassion, and particularly in this context, I realized just how important it is that we take this seriously. So there's a couple of different things. I think it's very common for clinicians in general to have unilenting standards. And as a result of that, to be very self-critical, that's more common in early career sites than it is in later career sites. So self-compassion is kind of, can be the antidote to a lot of those unnecessary self-criticism and extreme self-criticism. And then if you think about it in terms of what that means for you in the room with the client, you're taking out a whole load of anxiety and stress and all these other difficult emotions that we might be holding as a result of these self-critical thinking styles. So that's one thing that self-compassion can certainly help us with is be able to negotiate those thought patterns better. Self-compassion can also help us increase our compassion for others as well. And so maybe we might find it easier to contact compassionate points of view that allow us to express and to experience the emotions that we want to express with clients more authentically, more easily in the context of maybe really challenging clients or challenging moments with clients as well. So I think there's a number of different ways that self-compassion can be helpful. But I think it's such an essential antidote to the epidemic of self-criticism in clinicians in general, but also early career clinicians. Yeah, I noticed in your paper that you mentioned that early career clinicians could be more prone to self-criticism, so self-compassion could be even more important to them. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think there's a number of different factors. I mean, I guess you could probably look at the literature itself around early career sites and self-criticism and that sort of thing and why that's such a strong kind of association. But I think there are lots of, lots of factors, broad factors like systemic and cultural factors and things like that that really gets encouraged. I think psychologists and clinicians to develop that way of thinking. So I think it's just, it's something that's spread throughout our entire community. Yeah, I would agree with that. I would almost go as far to say that we're encouraged to be a little bit self-critical, controversial claim, but just reflecting on my own experiences with training, I didn't, I wouldn't say that my supervisors were critical, but they had specific feedback. And that was necessary at the early beginning stages of being a psychologist. You need that specific feedback to be like, say this, don't say that, look at this process, look at this treatment plan, what are the gaps here? What are you missing? What haven't you considered? And you almost internalise that voice for yourself. So I feel like for people who have perfectionistic tendencies, that self-critical voice can actually amplify. It's not a constructive feedback voice. It becomes a self-critical voice. What do you think of that? Totally. And I think that that would be also more relevant in the concept of your inclination that has maybe quite a high case load and your early in your career or the high case load. So you have lots of questions and you have lots of things to try to unpack. So you know, and you try to cram that into maybe one hour a week with a supervisor, it's not a lot of time to really get all those needs met. So you've got those needs to understand what I'm, you know, formulation, treatment planning, models of therapy. But then there's the you in that as well, and I'm not sure an hour a week is really enough space for that. How would it be? I think sometimes, well, this is, I would say, that peer supervision and peer support groups are just so essential. Yeah. And trying it back to the self-compassion. So I am a self-compassion convert, like everybody else, I did grow in when I heard self-compassion. And then I was trying to extend to my skills early this year and I was making lots of mistakes, like minor mistakes in therapy, but I was being quite harsh on myself. So then I got out Christian Ness book and I'm like, okay, I'm down with this. And I read the whole thing and I loved it. And when we talk about peer supervision, one component of self-compassion is called common humanity. When I hear peer supervision, it makes me feel so much better because I can hear that I'm not alone in this experience, so I'm not alone in these mistakes. Everybody struggles with these difficult things that we're doing in sessions, these complex skills that we are trying to implement. And it makes it feel so much better and it's so much easier for self-compassion. Totally. And I think that's another mechanism of action there in the emotional aid reprocess in that if we're having a reaction to clients and we're also able to understand that this is part of the work, these sorts of reactions are normal and commonly experienced by all clinicians and it's not me being a bad therapist or me being whatever. I think that's such an important perspective and attitude to bring to the work that's going to lower the emotional load and the emotional labor that we're experiencing. The other thing with self-compassion, I think, is quite cool as well, is the imagery stuff, I mean, I can think that, you know, particularly exercises where we're developing that compassionate image or whether it's, whether it's an abstract form or whether it's that person, you know, life that represents compassion. I think if you're bringing that to mind in session, it's that trigger that we might need to be able to whatever we're dealing with there, whatever emotional dissonance we're experiencing, we can bring, I think that imagery can help bring or realign our emotions because it helps us access maybe the compassion that we need. The way I think about that is that it activates our self-suiting system. I think that's how Krista Neff and others put it, but it's that we need that compassionate imagery of how we would treat someone else, sometimes that can be compassionate imagery and we imagine the gestures, the tone of voice, the words, what we would say to them and we do that in a compassionate way and then that can activate that self-suiting in ourselves. That can completely understand how that would reduce our emotional burden that we carry in sessions. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the other part is that you're activating a model there, a model of how we want to be into personally, but also how we want to be cognitively with the client. So we're activating that compassionate model, that compassionate part of ourselves in the session to help you realign what we're feeling and what we're experiencing. So listen as the takeaway from CSIs, don't delay, get on the self-compassion, I'll put a link in the show notes, I did put it off for a few years, but honestly when you're on board, it's good stuff. And I share that response as well, it took me a while to get around to the out here self-compassion, but yeah, and definitely a fully-fledged convert. No, awesome, okay. James, do you think there's anything that we've missed in talking about this topic of emotional labour, anything you haven't given a voice to today? Yeah, I think maybe the other aspect to managing emotional labour is not just what you're doing in the room. It's also how you're setting up your life outside of life. Of course. We've talked a lot about emotional labour as counter-transference or at least counter-transference being a component to emotional labour, but emotional labour is much broader construct than counter-transference is just one part of it. So I think there are all those other elements to our life that are going to either impact on the emotional labour that we're carrying or our capacity to restore and respond to emotional labour more effectively. So things like the cliche there is self-care, and I think self-care, just self-compassion can act about that little internal cringe, but it can't overstate how important it is. And so something that came up a lot was people talking about exercise or hobbies and interests as ways of discharging that kind of leftover emotional distance they might have had from the workday. So that's one thing that people do, that helps support their capacity to be in the space that they need to be in for their clients or to be more effective with their emotional labour. So I think taking a moment to make sure that we're reflecting on how we structure our broader life and how that helps us have the resources available to engage in this emotional labour process or how it can help us restore from at times where that emotional labour has resulted in us in feeling quite depleted. But also how do we structure our workday to help support our emotional labour as well? Do we just have six clients in a row back to back with those spaces to process and reflect and work out, attend to the emotional parts of ourselves or do we build in moments of reflection and connection throughout the day too? One thing that I think is really important for us to be doing is to make sure that just as simple as having lunch with our colleagues work and using that potentially as a peer supervision space if it's appropriate, because our work can be so incredibly isolating at times, finding ways to nurture that social need that we have or finding ways to nurture that emotional part of ourselves, building that into our actual workday is so essential too. Yeah, I love that and I do have the internal cringe when I hear self-care, but I absolutely see how essential it is because I'm just imagining this vicious cycle right where you don't take care of yourself and then you're stressed out so you're underperforming in sessions and not performing to your standard and then the self-critical voice comes up and then that causes even further stress, you continue to underperform, you get more tired and then you burn out. And so it sounds like just having that self-care outside of sessions, like you said, some way of discharging can be incredibly helpful and I'm sure you know that through yourself being a clinician, for me, I got out the 1,500 piece jigsaw this week and I'm almost finished, I just got the roof of the house to go, but it is very helpful in discharging those emotions and it's just numbing thing that I can do while I bring my stress levels down and I don't know what I would do, like I do the exercise and I do, and I do like jigsaw puzzles and knitting and guitar and yeah, I think those things are absolutely essential. What do you do out of curiosity? Yeah, so a couple of things like I play cricket, so that's a big thing for me and what I love about cricket is that it's it's it's a chance to get into my body, you know, because some of my joy workers in our heads, so that's an connection to nature a little bit as well, like being out to feel, you know, something and also social connection, you know, with the guys that I play with and it helps me kind of get stuck into a different role, so I'm not always therapist, you know, and you know, I can be maybe a different part of myself, which is also authentic, so that's a big part of it, music is a big part of it as well, play guitar as well, so that can be a way of, you know, expressing what I'm holding and what's going on for me, supportive relationships, I think that's really key, like I'm very blessed that I've got a really good supervision and peer supervision space and as well as really supportive colleagues at work as well, so there's all of that, what else would that be? I had something else that I wanted to say, it's okay, run away from my life. If it comes back to jump in and say it, I do stamp collecting, that's what you want to say. Yeah, so there's lots of stuff there that helps keep me, the train, that's what it was. You like trading or trains? The actual train, because I work in the city, I have a train trip that's about, door to door, it's about 45 minutes and actually that a lot of people hate the train, but I actually love it because I can sit there, I can read a book, you know, I can listen to music or whatever, but what it does is it creates this barrier, this buffer between a home and personal life and then there's this little transition period where I'm almost emotionally preparing myself for the day and then do the work and then on the way home, it gives me another 45 minutes or so to help, so have the space to kind of reflect, process, you know, do the other self-care things that read a book or listen to music, whatever it may be, that just helps me when I get home and I walk through the door, it takes the edge off that stuff, so I'm more able to invest, there's less work, family conflict and family work conflict, yeah, as a result of that. No, I love that. I'm so glad that you remembered that and brought that up because I totally get it. When I was training and I had my placement, after my placement, I would walk half a hour to my partner's place of work, so my placement was really close to my partner's place of work and I would walk half an hour there and I found a similar thing to what you're describing, I just found it was a great way to listen to music, to process what had happened and I remember once that my lovely partner, he thought that he would pick me up from work instead from the placement and I remember getting upset with him because I'm like, no, this is my processing time, I've got to walk for half an hour. So yeah, it's so essential just that that time between yeah, going into work and processing, so I'm really glad you brought that up. Thank you. Yeah, and it's great, in your example there, that you had that awareness that that's what you needed and you would articulate that, I think a lot of us in that situation just kind of go along with what's been asked of us without really thinking about, hang on a minute, I really like this walk, I really need this walk, so no, thank you, I'm going to make sure I keep that in my life and I articulate that. So I think another thing that's important is that we listen to what our needs are and we express that and we understand that the work that we do is very emotionally challenging and there is going to be an impact on our personal lives as a result of that. Now that doesn't mean that when we come home it's all about us, you know, that's not going to be helpful, but I think that finding a way to negotiate or understand that the work that we do is going to impact on our capacity to be present at home, so what are the things that we need to make sure that we can adequately and we can show up as we want to in our personal life with our family as well as, you know, at work as well. That's such a good point, thank you, you articulated that really well and I'm so glad we're able to talk about not only reducing emotional labour, but well, managing emotional labour during sessions, but how we support that by doing activities for ourselves outside of sessions. So it's not just therapist in therapy, it's that we need to create these deliberate actions to help us outside of therapy as well, so we can, I guess, have sustainable careers, really. Absolutely, it's a whole of life thing. I think it's the way that we live our life is going to show up in the room with our clients. James, thank you so much. I found myself nodding energetically with you along with you. You have so many good points to share and I'm so grateful that you could come on as a guest and share with us your research about emotional labour. I do want to wrap up and I mentioned this to you off air, but I'm interested to know just as a way of summarising everything, what would you say to a young James about emotional labour now that you've gone through all of this research? Big question. I think I would say young James, that it's okay to struggle, you know, and it's okay to classic thing is you don't have to be perfect, you know, and you don't have to be the perfect therapist, you don't have to have it all, all your peers and peers kind of organised in a row. It's okay to find things difficult at times, but what's really important is that you have a space where you can go to and actually share what's going on for you, whether that's supervision or whether it's with a peer support network or something, you know, just having the space to be able to be vulnerable and to be authentic because that's going to be career-sustaining and the more that young James tries to maybe hide that stuff or feel like if I express it and that means I'm not competent or I'm crap at my job or maybe I'm not cut out for the work, the more we hold on to that way of thinking that the more damaging it's going to be. Well, that was so beautiful. Can you debate imagery or scripted for me, like I just loved here and you don't have to be perfect. It really speaks to me. So thank you so much. I love hearing what you had to say to young James and I think that really summarises and encapsulates everything that we've been talking about today. James, if listeners want to learn more about you will get in touch. Where can they find you? Yeah, so that you can find me on Twitter, even that's an interesting place to be as well. What's your handle? So I'm at J.J. Clarke with an e-sike. That's my Twitter. You can get me on LinkedIn as well. I don't know what the heck you just said. That's right. I said sure. I'm not talking about the show notes. Yeah. And if you want to email me as well, you can at james.j. Clarke with an [email protected]. Great. I'll put that in the show notes as well. Guys, if you have any questions for James about his research, he sounds like he would be delighted to hear from you even though he's quite busy finishing up his PhD. But I'm sure it's a nice destruction, right? Absolutely. I'm always like, I just, I love talking about this topic. So if people want to reach out, then I'm more than happy to give it some time. Great. Thank you so much, James. Listeners, that's a wrap. Thank you for listening and catch you next time. Thanks for listening to Mental Work, the podcast for early career psychologists. As always, we need your help getting the word out about this podcast. The only way anyone will know about the show is if you tell them. Can you think of someone who might love the show? If so, let them know. You can find direct links to this show as well as all of the links I've mentioned in the show description. Thanks for listening. Have a good one and see you next time.