Malcolm Stern: 0:46

Hi, I'm Malcolm Stern and welcome to my podcast, slay your Dragons With Compassion, which is done in conjunction with my friends at online events, john and Sandra Wilson. I'm getting a range of guests who are sharing their stories about how they've coped with adversity, how they've thrived through adversity, and today's guest is a really interesting one for me because I run as my main thing is to run psychotherapy groups, and often people come to psychotherapy groups expecting to have an enormous breakthrough and their lives will change. And the reality is that in psychotherapy groups, what usually happens is that there may be some insights and some practice that happens. That then sort of sets out the possibility of a new path. That then sort of sets out the possibility of a new path. But we did have one of those magical moments with my guest, helen McCarthy, this morning, and we're going to take a look at what happened for her and something of her story and where she's got to.

Helen McCarthy: 1:45

So welcome, helen, to the podcast.

Malcolm Stern: 1:47

Thank you, malcolm, it's lovely to be here and perhaps you could share a little bit of us about what. First of all, what took you to a psychotherapy group and what happened in that group, and how did it emerge?

Helen McCarthy: 1:59

Okay, well, I found my way to your group, malcolm, partly because I'd heard about it when I went to Skiros a couple of years before. So you know I'd heard about it when I went to Skiros a couple of years before. So you know, I'd heard about you and I've got a long history of mental health problems, right from very young childhood and I was treated for depression for a long time and then later on I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which was certainly the better diagnosis Not that we always think labels are the be all and end all of our mental and spiritual development, you know but I found my way to your group after my divorce because I was really broken hearted and really actually very suicidal. I mean, I've had, I've made a number of suicide attempts in my life and lived with suicidal thoughts really persistently and pretty constantly from probably the age of about 22 to the age I was when I went to your group, which would have been well, it was 2020, so I was 60.

Helen McCarthy: 3:15

There you are, I remember, because it was when the pandemic happened and, um, I went to your group because I wanted to heal. Really, I'd done a lot of one-to-one psychotherapy. I'd read every self-help book on the planet. I think, and I just really I really needed to find a way to heal and I hadn't stopped trying, although I was pretty close to it, I think, and when I went to your group, I mean, it is an amazing experience doing your group, malcolm. I feel very privileged.

Malcolm Stern: 3:47

I don't want to do too much of an advertising break.

Helen McCarthy: 3:49

I don't mean to advertise, but it really was life changing for me. So I talk about your group to everyone I meet pretty much if I'm having a deep conversation with them. But I decided it was really really hard for me to talk about my suicidal feelings and I left it quite a long time. I've been in the group for quite a long time before I was confident to raise those feelings and I found it really hard. In your group. The way you create the container with this sort of you know, the group of people you, it creates a situation where you can just kind of let me just try, you can kind of allow yourself to drop in to the feelings that make that are difficult for you. And you can't. It's very hard, I can't do that in, it's hard to do that in day-to-day life. But in that situation it was possible for me to think about and address my suicidal feelings and feel them there and feel them there. And we had. So I, you said just, you know, kind of find those, find those feelings. And you asked me a very important question which was how old are you, how old are you, where do these feelings come from? And I said two. And it was remarkable because I do. I know.

Helen McCarthy: 5:17

I was sure that I was two and I had a strong memory of being small, tiny in a cot, holding onto the bars of the cot, crying and just feeling completely, completely abandoned. And um, the weird, I mean what happened? Because I, when we did this piece of work, I didn't cry at all, I just shook. It was like terror. The experience, the memory and the experience of it was terror, was just complete terror of abandonment and utter complete vulnerability. Um, and I couldn't even speak because I guess, at two you can't really speak much and um, so I just sat.

Helen McCarthy: 6:00

I just sat on the floor in that workroom shaking, and you said to the group members I, I think you know the group members, I mean the sense of safety in that group was what made it possible, obviously, to go to that place within myself. And but you were very guiding as well. And you said to the, you said to the group members this is like an extra, this is a baby, this is a baby, it's a very, very vulnerable baby. And you sat next to me and you just put your arm around me and I leaned in and you said has anyone got anything they want to say to this very vulnerable, abandoned little baby.

Helen McCarthy: 6:42

And then, one by one, each member of our group came to me and, honestly, it feels like a religious experience to me Looking back. It feels like a religious experience. To me looking back, it feels like a religious experience. I know that sounds nuts, but hey, I've got a diagnosis. Um it, it. It was amazing. So, one after another, people in the group came over to support me, and the first one am I allowed to say names from the group?

Malcolm Stern: 7:11

I don't know if I'm really sure.

Helen McCarthy: 7:12

Give them a pseudonym, it would be good, okay the first one was um was I can't it's too hard to give them a pseudonym. But the first person a wonderful, strong feminist, who is a dear friend of mine to this day she came over and she took your place. She pushed, she almost pushed you away and she held me and she's like fierce and I felt very safe. I mean, I felt safe with you, but she, she didn't say anything, she just clasped me to her ample bosom and just made me feel so safe. And then, one by one, everyone in the group came over. One of the one of the group members came over and she was a social worker and she said she came over and she held my hands and she looked into my eyes and she said I'm a social worker and if I think you need to be taken away from this family, these people shouldn't be looking after you. None of this is your fault and I'm going and this family is your new family. And she pointed to everyone in the group and said this is your new family. And then another person came over who is like the age of my son, who has children, and he came over to me and he said if you were my daughter, I would be so proud of you and I would never leave you on your own. I would always make sure you were safe.

Helen McCarthy: 8:44

Another person came over and she didn't say a word. Very shy, very anxious person. She just came over to me as a baby and started playing with me as a baby. She started poking at me and making faces at me and we kind of played like two babies on the floor. It was amazing. There was just one after another. All the people in the group came to me and gave me comfort and it was the most strange feeling because it felt like they had time travelled to 1962 when I was a little baby in that lonely cot and they saved me. I felt I know it sounds extremely strange, but it felt like these time travellers came from 2020 and saved this little baby and brought her back to the present day. It was really remarkable. It was also exhausting. I can remember sleeping afterwards.

Helen McCarthy: 9:43

After we finished the session, everyone else went out for lunch and I just went to sleep because I was so tired. It was an exhausting experience, but it was completely life-changing for me. It was completely life-changing. I let me find a way to explain it, because I went home afterwards and I think what it was. I didn't realize it until that day, but I had inside me a deep loneliness, a really terrible, deep loneliness. From a very, very young age, even though I'm one of six children and I've got great siblings and stuff, there was this part of me that was deeply, deeply lonely and abandoned and had never been met. I think that's what it was. And in that group experience that lonely little girl was found and rescued. It feels like that lonely little girl, that lonely baby girl, was found and rescued.

Helen McCarthy: 10:48

And I've never. The next day I found I had a stash, a very big stash, of lots and lots of psychotropic drugs that I've been prescribed and stocked up on over the years so I could commit suicide if I ever wanted to, and I just threw them away. I just flushed them all down the loo. I made a video and showed it to everyone in the group so they knew that I'd done it as well. And, um, I've never really. I mean, I get, I'm not going to say, I never think, oh, suicide's an's an option. I think most people think that sometimes, but I never think of it as a real option to end my pain anymore, because I mean, life throws horrible things at you. So of course I do get unhappy sometimes, but I never I don't feel suicidal in that way. I don't feel fixated on suicide in the way I used to. So thank you, malcolm Stern, changed my life.

Malcolm Stern: 11:41

It was quite extraordinary. I just think it was.

Malcolm Stern: 11:45

It was that moment in time that that there was the capacity to meet you, and what you've described doesn't sound weird to me at all.

Malcolm Stern: 11:52

It sounds like in group process what happens is that we enter into an altered state of consciousness and Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote your body, keeps the score, talked about psychodrama, which is my main tool, as entering an altered state of consciousness and there's something about genuinely not talking as if you were two years old, but suddenly becoming two years old and in that place then undoing some of the damage that had been there and then being taken forward.

Malcolm Stern: 12:21

So I think what you're describing it was a very normal group process. However, I do want to say that this is extremely rare because often you'll get an insight and then you'll slip back, and I've seen you over the years that that insight has lasted and I'm pleased to hear you say not pleased to hear you say because I'm a sadist but sometimes you still get those ideas, but you're no longer trapped in that as an inevitable reality, and there is something about sort of trusting a group of people and you'd built a place of trust. It was an ongoing group over a fairly long period of time and because of the pandemic, I think that group lasted about two and a half years instead of a year.

Helen McCarthy: 13:02

It did yeah.

Malcolm Stern: 13:04

It became a much longer experience. Yeah, but actually it was a place of trust and in that place you were able to go back to the incredibly wounded part of you and retrieve the soul of that being who is you and you when you were two.

Helen McCarthy: 13:19

You know, I'm glad you interesting, because I think it is. It was a form of soul retrieval. I know that's a shamanic thing that people do, that shamans are capable of doing, but I think it was a soul retrieval. I think I got my soul back. I think I did actually.

Malcolm Stern: 13:37

And I don't practice soul retrieval as a sort of an art, I just I do. But I do think that something happened. That was a once in a blue moon. You know, maybe in in the 40 years I've been running groups something of this ilk has happened, maybe three times. But the strongest it ever happened was with you and it was almost sort of an endorsement for me that this work matters and to keep doing it. So now I'm in my mid-70s and I thought, oh, I'm getting a bit old, maybe I should retire. Actually, I can't afford to anyway.

Malcolm Stern: 14:12

But I actually, yeah, I don't want to retire. I want to bring what I, what I do, where it makes a difference to people and and I saw it made a difference to you and I am so um grateful for you to, for the, for the way you've been able to talk about it just now, because I didn't want to push you into a place of outing yourself as someone who was ready to take their own lives, um, someone who is in a terrible state. But actually it's funny because we look at mental illness and I don't like labels. We look at mental illness and then we sort of like, go well, that person is schizophrenic, that person's bipolar, this person's this or that, and then we put them in a nice neat container.

Malcolm Stern: 14:50

But I think I'm part of an organization called Compassionate Mental Health. I'm part of an organisation called Compassionate Mental Health. We run gatherings twice a year and in that organisation one of the things we say is not what's wrong with you, but what happened to you. And I think when we can trace what happened to you rather than labelling and saying you need to take these drugs I'm not against drugs, sometimes they're really valuable, but you need to take these drugs. I'm not against drugs. Sometimes they're they're really valuable, but you need to take these drugs to get you straight. I think that what happened to you was actually revisited, reclaimed and, and, and you found a new path forwards. And and mostly, uh, what I've seen of you over the years since then is that you have found quite a lot of happiness. Yeah, you were able to embark on a a very what I thought was a lovely relationship, and it didn't last, but you still were able to engage in quite a deep relationship as well.

Helen McCarthy: 15:44

Something shift something, something really did. I mean I still take medication. I've, you know, I do, I still have, I still have bipolar disorder, that's for sure. It did it didn't. I'm not that I'm not going to claim that it cured my bipolar, that would be dishonest, but, um, I think what I could. Because of that experience I accept myself I've got bipolar. Here I am and it's like my moods do go up and down, and your group and my own work have helped me to understand that I can manage it as long as I meditate every day, as long as I do exercise, as long as I eat sensibly, as long as I sleep properly. You talk about practices. You talk about them in your book, and you talk about them in your book, and you talk about them in the group, and I have learned to be pretty disciplined about those practices in order to preserve my mental well-being and now that's really important because actually what you've done is you've just set out quite a good layering of the whole process.

Malcolm Stern: 16:53

Number one you have a disorder that you need to take medication for. Yeah, absolutely fine, you are not that disorder. That's something that you have, that you that you work with. You've also named some of the practices by which you keep the worst of that disorder at bay. Yeah, and if you were to let it slide and sort of not meditate, not eat?

Helen McCarthy: 17:17

I do sometimes, but it all goes to shit and that's right.

Malcolm Stern: 17:20

And then you notice when it slides. You notice that things go pear-shaped. Yeah, what I think is so wonderful about what you're saying and I really appreciate you coming on this show and talking about it is that there's a depth of honesty in what you're sharing. You're not painting it as a rosy picture. Yes, I suddenly saw the light and now everything's fine. No work with a difficult set of circumstances that you will work with till the end of your days. Probably that's not a a damning either. It's just a statement.

Helen McCarthy: 17:51

But you're finding out how to do that can I just also, malcolm, tell you something which you perhaps don't know, but which was really transformational for me in terms of the experience I had with with the group and in terms of the learning that I did in that group as well. Um, you know, I work as a health practitioner. Um, I work as an advanced nurse practitioner in the NHS and I don't think I really began to see my patients as real people until I had that experience.

Malcolm Stern: 18:29

That's very touching. That's really beautiful. You are a fantastic practitioner. I know when I've had health issues, you've been a person that I've been able to approach and actually talk to about them. You know your stuff. But actually I think the humanizing of your patients is something that I would say that doctors, nurse practitioners and people who are caring for people need to be educated in humanizing their patients, because I know when I've gone to a doctor who I feel is cold and detached, I don't want to open up, I don't want to let them work with what's going on with me, whereas if I go to someone who is warm and kind and relational, that's part of the healing that happens as well and kind and relational.

Helen McCarthy: 19:18

That's part of the healing. That happens as well. Yeah, I mean it's. It is a difficult one working in health care, because you've your job is to try and figure out what's going on, what's wrong with the person, and give them appropriate treatment. And if you get too down with their feelings you can get distracted or you can misjudge the situation.

Helen McCarthy: 19:36

But I think through my life, historically, maintaining that distance was also a form of armor. It was a form of armor against their suffering, almost a fear of catching their suffering on top of what I was already dealing from from the group and I mean also you know some notions of compassion, um, self-compassion and compassionate, compassion-based meditation and so on. Um, I have learned to cross, cross the doorway between me and me, the health practitioner, and me, the human and, and hold their hand more. I feel like so now when I talk to people on the phone a lot because I work at night and often you get people. You often get old people who go um, who tell you that they've got all these symptoms and you realize they've had these symptoms for years and years and probably there's probably nothing terribly different, but they're scared and slowly you think, oh my God, this person's on their own at home.

Helen McCarthy: 20:51

They're 88. They're housebound, they can't get to the front door, they're scared, and so you talk to them. You just talk to them as a person rather than going. Well, I don't think there's anything seriously wrong here. I think you can just talk to your GP about this in the morning. Rather than that, you can go. God, it must be really scary being you sitting in that bed. How's it going? And you can actually have it. You can connect with people, but you need to be quite brave to do it and you need to trust your ability not to fall into their pain to do it, and I feel like I've learned to do that since the group that's balance.

Malcolm Stern: 21:25

It's interesting. You talk about bipolar and you don't, and that's like a balance being skewed. And you, what you're looking at here is balance between staying human, keeping your heart engaged in the process, and and so, um, being able to function quite well as someone who knows, who knows what what most things mean and can analyze people's conditions. So it's a very valuable gift and I think that, um, it's rare.

Malcolm Stern: 21:54

I think that a lot of doctors do feel like they're they're shut down. Interesting, a lot of doctors get heart attacks as well, and I think that's a closing down of the heart, but I think there's something about. I know that my, my gp, for example, is someone I feel utterly trustworthy, is someone I'll go to, and I know that he will meet me where I am. It may be something minor that I'm looking at or whatever it is, but but I know that I feel safe in the humanity of who he is as well as his expertise, and I think what you're looking at is humanity and expertise logged together yeah, hard balance to get right, but um, it's, it's more, it's more satisfying to work that way and I could.

Malcolm Stern: 22:36

I know I can feel that patients feel better cared for when you, when you, treat them that way well, it's true, and and I know that if I, if I look at myself as a psychotherapist, it's um, I used to go away from groups at the end of an evening and, sort of like, had nightmares about what was happening for people. I'd hear the most terrible stories of abuse and of loss and grief and death, and and it would shatter me, yeah, and I somehow found and I didn't I don't know if I had a, I had the formula, I could write a book about it, but I somehow found the place inside me that was able to not get caught in what was happening, just to keep my compassion alive, but not to get caught in the place where I was destroyed by the pain that someone else was in. And I think that is, that is the way forward for those who work with others is to find that healthy balance and to practice that healthy balance.

Malcolm Stern: 23:38

And that's what I'm hearing is that you're in a place of practice and that your work will improve, rather than you will get seen as more than sentimental. That your work will improve and I bet that's that has happened for you, has it?

Helen McCarthy: 23:51

well, oh god it's. The nhs is a hard place to work. So you know there are good days and bad days, but, um, I think I feel more resilient, I feel more able to deal with the storm and drang of of it all in the health service, you know yeah, and, and you know, it's like there will be people like you, who are sort of like, who are um, who are outliers, who are, who are sort of, who are able to sort of like to, to tread the, the balance between the human being, the practitioner, um, the open heart, and and that that does feel more challenging but, as you say, it's also more rewarding.

Malcolm Stern: 24:35

Yeah, and, and and definitely I feel like when I've met people in in the therapeutic space and and my heart has been melted. Sometimes, you know, you know, I'll have tears in my eyes and I remember when you were working, I had tears in my eyes at the pain of this little baby.

Malcolm Stern: 24:51

And it was also interesting that what happened was that I knew that you needed a mummy to sit with you. I didn't go right, we need a mummy, someone come and sit here and be a mummy. But at that moment, someone came and was with big bosoms, came and was the with big bosoms, came and was the mummy, which was exactly what you needed. So I just was the transition, that just to transition. I was the transition for you between the start of the group, embracing this little baby in its midst, in its midst and helping birth it back to well-being and health by the way, I'm going on holiday with that mummy next week, just for your information, which is such a dear friend to me now yeah, my love, yes I will, I will it's lovely, and I think that that's often the friendships that come out of deep engagement with people, where we are showing ourselves go far deeper than the families we can be born into as well, although you do have.

Malcolm Stern: 25:44

I know you. Your sister lives with you and you have a beautiful relationship. It seems like there's a really easy flow with you, so you have a family as well no, I mean, I'm able, I'm blessed, I feel very lucky.

Helen McCarthy: 25:58

I mean, it's so funny. I went into your group in 2020 feeling damned really, and I just feel so blessed now.

Malcolm Stern: 26:07

Yes, well, you've, you know, you're, you're doing the work, and I think that that's clear that you're doing the work and it's showing up in all areas of your life as well. So we're coming close to the, the, uh, the, the, the end of our, of our podcast oh really, yeah, really, that went flying by.

Malcolm Stern: 26:27

That's bye-bye. When you're having fun, I always ask the question we can allow this to unfold a little bit as well what's the particular dragon you've had to slay in order to be who you are? So that's that. What's the obstacle you've had to overcome? How have you got through it? What is a particular skill you've had?

Helen McCarthy: 26:46

um, for me there's two and one. The the most crucial one was to find a way to be on my own side, to become to love. You know, people talk about self-compassion, but it's like, until you can silence not conquer, but silence the voice of criticism that constantly berates you, which we've all got, and turn that into a voice that encourages and and loves you and forgives you and appreciates you and always, always gives you another chance. Um, that was that was my. That was the most important dragon for me to slay was to find that the part of myself that looks after me as a mother in a way, um, and then actually it's the same thing now I think about it once. Once I found that benevolent mother figure within myself. Then she had to make me do disciplined things, even though I didn't want to. So, um, so for me, self-love and discipline, those are the two and they both are the same.

Malcolm Stern: 28:10

They're both my internalized mother, actually yes, and I think what's really important is also that they aren't just something you go right. Well, I'm going to do that. It's a practice and presumably you've managed to refine it over the years. Um in, in the way that you're refining so many things, I think this is one of the benefits of aging is that we can see this, you know, this body starting to decay and not be so beautiful as it was, and blah, blah, blah. But I think what we also see with that is that we start to find more wisdom in the everyday and we realize that there are practices we can do that can make our lives different. So I hear that one of your major practices is to actually go.

Malcolm Stern: 28:50

You're okay, it's to find that internalized voice that says you're okay and you're doing great and you touch a lot of people's lives. You know, you are, as you say, a health practitioner who's working with people who are lonely, who are frightened, who are ill, and often probably you're going to have to be giving difficult news to people as well and and I think that sometimes, you know, one of my friends was was recently told um, I went to the doctor and had no idea that something was and said well, you know, unfortunately a terminal and it's like what you know it's like. Can we have a little bit of a sort of like a something that does that? So presumably you are having to sometimes let people know that they're going to die. Yeah, and actually does your compassion still stay alive in that place as well?

Helen McCarthy: 29:38

Most alive. Most alive I also mean quite a lot of the. I have to have conversations with family members of people who are dying. You know, quite often I get called in the night to somebody who's really at the end of their life and often it will be my responsibility to speak to a family member to say you need to come and to have those conversations where come and to have those conversations where, yeah, those conversations are difficult. They're difficult, um, but but it's also a privilege. You know, that's one of the things that I mean. I do quite a lot of palliative care and work with the dying and it's a real privilege to do that work and it makes you, in a way, weirdly thinking about it just as we're talking. It's like the antidote to being suicidal, because these people are dying, they haven't got a choice, they're dying, and it makes you value life, it makes them value life, malcolm, you know. I wanted to say one other thing.

Malcolm Stern: 30:44

Yes, go on, you know the internalized mother.

Helen McCarthy: 30:47

You know that internalized mother I was saying about, about loving yourself, um, because I had that was the hardest piece for me was to be loving and kind to myself, and I just wanted to um say that. The key, that a key practice for me, which I don't I don't do as often as I used to, but I used to do it every single day and I think it was like a louise l hay practice originally, but it's the one where you look in the mirror and you go good morning, my little sweetheart, I love you every single day. And, um, it's so hard to do and I've told loads of people to do it. I've told somebody you know very well that I'm dealing with, who's very depressed at the moment to do that, and they just can't do it. They just cannot do it.

Helen McCarthy: 31:34

And but, if and but if you do, and you feel completely stupid. You feel stupid and embarrassed to look in, look yourself in the eyes every day and go good morning, my little sweetheart, I love you. You are my favorite person. You're going to have a really good day and I'm going to look after you all day. That, right, if you do that every day for like three months. It changes you. I promise it changes you. I just want to say, because it's so important, that practice.

Malcolm Stern: 32:03

It's so and it's really hard to do, but it's ever so beneficial I think it is, and you've talked about someone who was depressed, who's not able to do that. Yeah, I think we need sometimes to get affirmation in the outside world before we can give ourselves affirmation, and I think that is truly what happened to you that you've got affirmation that you were a beautiful being from people who've been around you for a fair length of time yeah and now you're able to sort of do the self-care you're talking about.

Malcolm Stern: 32:32

Yeah, but I think it's not easy and I think we need to create environments for ourselves where we are nourished, in order to start healing the wounds of the past as well. Glory B, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing so honestly and openly and, as you know, I was deeply, deeply touched by your work and your story and I think the work we did with you took about two and a half hours. Normally, a piece of work I'll do in the middle is about an hour, but it was.

Helen McCarthy: 33:08

It was timeless yeah, I had no sense of time yeah, there was no sense.

Malcolm Stern: 33:12

There was like it was like it took what it took and and um, it was at some level miraculous, another at another level.

Malcolm Stern: 33:21

There is something about the ritual of being in a group and you, you undertook a ritual and that ritual has left you richer than you were before in 100 percent 100 percent so thank you me lucky the people who you work with as well that, actually, that they get to meet someone who can meet them with their heart open and with humanity, which makes it so much easier to handle difficult engagements with health and well-being oh, thank you thank you, helen, and uh look forward to seeing you soon take care, malcolm, lovely to see you okay, see you soon.