A day in the life of a Clinical Psychologist
Megan Cowles is a Clinical Psychologist for the Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership (AWP). In this blog, she gives us an insight into the day to day of her role.
No two days are the same, so let’s go for today!
I’ve just come out of our therapies team meeting where we talk about any issues coming up for us and the teams we support, as well as who is on our referrals list. I always leave feeling a mix of relief and pressure. Relief that my team are so understanding around each other’s struggles and can offer skillful suggestions. And pressure because each name on our referrals list is a person whose life we are having to make decisions about, desperately not wanting to get it wrong. We only have a handful of therapists for each community team, so it’s impossible to see everyone who could benefit from therapy. It weighs heavy to have to make these impossible decisions. Having my own supervision and using grounding practices really does help (you may find me sat in the toilets with eyes closed counting my breath or imagining my compassionate being holding me!)
Next up I am seeing two therapy clients.
The first is a trauma processing session and I am preparing my ‘tool kit’ of soft blankets, toys, scents, fidgety bits and art materials to take with me. This particular client has been oppressed by her life experiences and position in society for a long time. I notice I am feeling a quiet, bubbling rage at the injustices she has faced, as well as excitement for the shifts in her lift that are happening as she starts to re-find her power.
After that, I have a community therapy session where we have plans to roll down a hill, play in the park and talk to a stranger! It’s always a treat to be working out and about in Bristol and these types of sessions really allow us to challenge our fears and reclaim our lives. In this specific case we are finding out if it’s possible to feel joyful, to have a sense of our inner child being alive, and to see whether fears about strangers being hostile will come true. Not for the faint hearted! It takes a fantastic amount of courage to engage in therapy and I honour that by bringing as much creativity and presence as I can to every session. Never expert to patient, but rather human to human. I get so much from these sessions too.
To end the day, I have some time set aside to prepare for a training I am delivering. I will be talking about how to work with people who have experienced trauma. I guess the main message is that, regardless of what label or diagnosis someone has been given, it is vital to be curious about who they are as a person and what their needs and desires are. As psychologist Lucy Johnston often says, not ‘what’s wrong with you?’ but rather, ‘what’s happened to you, and what did you have to do to survive?’
To do this job you have to be willing to meet each person with an open heart. Everyone who I have worked with has left their own unique mark on me.