SoliCITOR, BARRISTER, PSYCHOTHERAPIST. A LIFETIME OF INTEGRATION. SARAH WOOLRICH
SARAH WOOLRICH
Ignorance is a wonderful motivator.
It is an accelerator to move on in life, to find the answer to the things we do not know.
The burning question propelling me to study and to work as a therapist at the Northern Guild was “Why do families get into such knots?”
I really wanted to understand what drove us repeat the mistakes and conflicts of the previous generations; to repeat destructive patterns in our lives.
The questions that followed included: Does therapy make a difference? How soon? Does it really take such a long time? What is the ‘best’ therapy?
I wanted to know if a parent, usually a mother, had the right therapy at the right time, would she be able to parent her children better?
I was asking these questions from my vantage point of being a family lawyer. By 2004 I been involved in family work and youth crime for two decades plus. The first half of my career at that time had been as a solicitor. After almost 12 years as a solicitor, I transferred to the bar to develop my work as an advocate.
Working with young offenders was quite exhilarating at times. They were a vibrant group though often committing really anti-social offences. The offender was usually a teenage boy with a hard-pressed single mother. I became very fond of these families, but the youth justice system had a hard time turning things round for them.
Most of my work was with separating couples in conflict over the arrangements for the children or the division of usually very limited assets. Very few families can actually afford to divorce and working through what they had and how it should be divided often raised psychological problems as well as economic ones. I would have loved to have the time and skills at that point to study ‘The Role of the Record Collection in Marriage Breakdown’. I was fascinated that couples could, with help, negotiate the division of the family home, pensions, and responsibilities for financial maintenance. Having done all this, they would find themselves in an intractable and heated arguments about the vinyl record collection.
More tragically of course were the family separations where one or more of the children is deprived of a relationship with a parent.
Many parents were so stuck in their narrative about what had happened in their marriage, that it was impossible to allow the other parent to have a relationship with the child. There were parents, more commonly fathers, so stuck in a pattern of controlling and coercive behaviour, who perceived their partner’s attempts to separate from them as a massive attack, that they retaliated with extreme and calculated violence. There were women so hurt by being abandoned as they saw it, that they could not foster a relationship between the children and their father.
Over time, I became more involved in safeguarding work and care proceedings. It became apparent that the parents had usually suffered trauma as children; that their problems were compounded by alcohol or drug abuse, mental health problems and / or a pattern of destructive relationships. Many of these parents were referred for psychological or other specialist assessment.
The assessments often concluded that the parent had a personality disorder or traits of a disorder, commonly borderline personality disorder. The recommendation was for 12 – 18 months of therapy. There was clearly a compelling need and an apparent answer.
Why then were perfectly deserving clients only offered 4 to 6 weeks of first tier counselling to address say their anxiety or depression with nothing offered to address their personality issues which had developed in response to early trauma?
Often the psychologist would nominate a specific therapy : CBT, DBT, person-centred, psychodynamic psychotherapy, attachment therapy, EMDR, counselling. What did all these terms mean? What was the difference between them? Does it really make a difference? Who offers such therapy and how do you access it?
Family law and lawyers were really skilled at finding out what had happened, gathering evidence, making sense of what looks at times like a jumble of contradictions. Greatly assisted by the Children Act 1989, courts make as good job as they can of working out what is best for children in the long run, whether to return to parents or to be cared for elsewhere.
At the end of these processes though, there would often be a grieving parent whose children were not coming home. Services lost interest in them. Or the parent may recover their children but would not have the support long term to really turn things round.
So I was drawn first to train in mediation and then to study therapy.
One of the very attractive things about the Guild is that people from such diverse professional backgrounds, or none, are drawn by their own set of questions to start a course of study and also to have therapy. It is a small and nurturing place in which to train and where you are encouraged not only to become proficient in theory and therapeutic ‘techniques’ but also to become aware of your own vulnerabilities and strengths.
Therapy is one of the few professions that really insist on a bringing together of who you are as a person, your story and your practice as a therapist.
I remember feeling a great sense of excitement as I started training. One of the very consoling features of therapy is that one cannot possibly fall into the delusion that you can know everything about the subject, it is vast and complex. Each person you meet as a therapist is an unknown. It is disrespectful to assess and neatly slot anyone into some diagnostic category. However, being aware of patterns of behaviour and what they might mean, how they might guide you to work with someone, was very helpful.
As I started practice, I discovered something that I had taken for granted about my profession as an advocate. Speed. You have to work incredibly quickly as a lawyer, to absorb a vast amount of information about a family in a short time, working with the facts, to slot everything together.
To be an effective therapist, you have to slow right down. The sense of pressure, urgency, to know it all now, has to go.
I also had to learn to be much more open to my inner landscape and my client’s emotions, and effectively face in a very different direction from being a lawyer.
In the course of training, I encountered so much theory which was relevant to my legal experience.
The structure of the training of course is adapted over time but the aim is that by the end of three or four year training, whether studying for a diploma or masters level, counselling or psychotherapy, you will have a number of models to draw on and will at least be in the process of developing an integrated approach to working with clients.
Learning each model was fascinating. Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis and the theory of Ego states, derived from Freud’s work; Stephen Karpman’s Drama and John Bowlby’s Attachment theory were the foundational models for me. The Drama Triangle of course is a concept lying within TA but is such a great and accessible tool for seeing what is happening in any situation of conflict.
In due course, having completed the masters course and having studied, worked and taught at the Guild, I realised that so much was relevant to my work as a family lawyer.
It seemed to be a vocational calling to return and take back what I had learned, at least in an indirect way.
I also understood better the constrictions on how the system works. My mental health placement left me with a sense of injustice on behalf of parents who could not access long term psychotherapeutic work on the NHS. There were services there but families that came from educationally and socially areas found them hard or impossible to reach.
I also learnt that such therapy is lengthy and challenging; there are no quick fixes. It did need someone to be in a relatively stable place in their life. Many people who I worked with had so many practical challenges in their life, that it would be difficult to commit to a long term plan of work with a therapist.
By 2010 I committed myself to a return to the Bar and to bring with me what I had learned. Suddenly I was back to absorbing the life of an entire family captured in a few hundred pages of reports overnight and had to regain speed over the capacity to reflect. I worked with a small number of clients over this time, and finally said farewell to practice after a year.
I use what I learned at the Guild 15 – 20 years ago every day, in my working life and of course, in my personal life. I continue my work as a barrister the family justice system within a local authority.
The concepts of TA are invaluable in working through struggles with power and control. A court room is an excellent place to watch the ego states at work. If there is one ego state most useful in this setting it is the observing Adult. When working directly with parents, I sometimes explicitly used the model to help them understand why having been raised by frightening adults might have shaped their own responses to their children.
Attachment theory is so incredibly value as a way of understanding what might be driving parental behaviour; what a child might need from a care giver.
At least as much as the psychological theories, the ethical practice of therapy shaped how I work as a lawyer. Understanding boundaries, appropriate interventions, learning restraint at times and also how to use yourself at others was really liberating.
Returning finally to theory, Erikson’s stages of development was one I found interesting. The idea of the key conflicts for different stages of development and the resolution of those conflicts in a competent and life-enhancing way, is a useful model. It needs an overhaul though. Given that my age next birthday will be 65, I was horrified to see that I was about to head into ‘integrity vs despair’ which runs from 65 to death. Since Erikson developed his theory around 1950, shortly after the birth of the NHS, life expectancy has increased by approximately 13 years, so for men, from 66 – 79 and for women from 70 to 83. I hope to remain in the previous stage of ‘Generativity vs Stagnation’ for some time yet.
It is useful to think about this whole question of conflict as central to both life as a lawyer and life as a therapist.
Therapists are working with conflict: the internal conflict experienced by their client; conflict as it may manifest in the relationship in the therapeutic relationship; conflict as it appears in a therapy group.
Lawyers are dealing with conflicts in more obvious and external way. The conflicts between their clients are often played out in conflictual relationships between the advocates.
Learning to observe the conflict, to see the impasse, to watch it, to understand it better, to resist if possible being drawn into it, are valuable skills.
I will forever value my time at the Guild. It was so much more than a training in theory and models. It inspires its students to really bring their whole selves into the work and, if they chose not to pursue a career in therapy, to take what they have learned into other fields.
Sarah Woolrich
3 September 2024
References
For more on the seven stages of coercive control, this is a helpful video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC99xS4mYw0
For the current position on NHS Talking Therapies https://www.england.nhs.uk/mental-health/adults/nhs-talking-therapies/
For information on the NHS at 70, thinking of changes to lifespan and healthcare:
https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/sites/default/files/2018-07/facts-and-figs-website.pdf