Reflections on the second series of Emotionally Speaking, the podcast.
Lisa Potts was 21-years-old when together with children at St Luke’s Infant School in Wolverhampton, she was attacked by a man wielding a machete one shocking July afternoon. A guest on the second series of the Centre for Emotional Health’s Emotionally Speaking podcast, she reflects, nearly thirty years later, how emotional health for her is about ‘making your mind your friend’.
After periods of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and anxiety, she places a premium on the act of talking as a means of coping. Talking to Peter Leonard, Chief Executive of the Centre for Emotional Health, Lisa said that however extreme the events she experienced that day in 1996, key for her throughout the years since has been practising self-awareness and communicating what’s going on for her. ‘You can’t see your mind. The only way you can [see your mind] is through talking and communication’. As a community nurse, and through her charity work for children and young people, she advocates taking notice of our emotions, continuing to communicate what we’re experiencing so we try not to feel isolated.
Emotional health isn’t about feeling happy all the time, but throughout the second series of Emotionally Speaking, guests from the worlds of science, psychology, broadcasting, education and spirituality agreed emotional health is about learning how to cope with the natural ups and downs of life. Asked how we might come to define it, guests were united in characterising emotional health as the ability to first attune ourselves to our varied emotions, and then to regulate how we manage both the negative and positive shifts in our emotions.
Kate Silverton, the former broadcaster and newsreader, emphasised that at the heart of what governs our emotions, and how we respond to them, is not our brain, but our nervous system. Her journey of becoming a child therapist has seen her write books bringing to life how we can learn to manage parenting challenges differently, from a place of self-acceptance and empathy. She paints a colourful picture. We can be ‘baboons’ together in an overcrowded tree, parents together with our kids, beating our metaphorical chests, and stuck in a stressed response - what Silverton quoted as “stress contagion” in her books ‘There’s No Such Thing As ‘Naughty’’ and ‘There’s Still No Such Things as ‘Naughty’. Alternatively, as a parent, we can step back, and building on this metaphor from nature, choose to be a ‘wise owl’ that swoops down to lend some calm and thinking to an overheated situation. If only we can regulate ourselves as parents more often, she argued, then we can lend some of our calmness to our children.
‘We’re feeling creatures,’ she said. How we model emotionally healthy behaviours is instrumental in how we parent and co-regulate in relationship with children. ‘It’s through relationships that we can heal - that’s why teachers are so important, that’s why parents are so important, we can break cycles and heal ourselves, and then we can help our children’. More and more she’s practising this skill of stopping and thinking. ‘The biggest gift to my own children’, Silverton concluded, ‘is that I work on my own emotional health’.
In my episode of Emotionally Speaking, I opened up about how as a first time Dad of a one year old, I sometimes struggle to maintain a sense of calm. I detailed how I can feel overwhelmed, dealing with multiple demands as I also cope with an ageing father who has support needs. I explained there were times I had to make a choice, prioritising my son. As someone who views myself as a carer for my father, it’s not easy, but I am trying not to feel guilty. This theme of needing to make choices, plus prioritising who we can help or what we can solve was a core theme on managing emotional health in the episode with Professor Sir Andrew Pollard.
Reflecting on the immense pressure he experienced working on the AstraZeneca vaccine for Covid-19, all at a time of public scrutiny, he reflects there was a point when he had to confront what was manageable, and what was plain unmanageable. At a time when he and his tight-knit team were receiving thousands of requests from the media, and social media saw conspiracists spread mistruths about the vaccination, he felt a huge weight on his shoulders. What was disturbing was how he and his colleagues found a media narrative emerging they couldn't always control. Telling the Centre for Emotional Health that in the end, he realised he had to step back from the whirlwind of public pressures, he describes intellectualising the best approach he could take at the time, which was that he didn't have to do everything, and nor could he.
We should only seek to do what we can and what we feel is within our power is a key message in the work carried out at the Centre for Emotional Health. ‘You go through a phase of trying to manage what is unmanageable’, Pollard reflected on the events of 2020, but he said what's best is when you stand back and only ‘put time, energy and emotion into things you can actually fix’. Knowing when to cede control is also important.
To his emotional health toolkit, Sir Andrew Pollard added cycling to work in Oxford during lockdown when nobody else was around. This felt as good an antidote to sitting in front of his computer screen as he could find. So too was working with a close group of passionate colleagues invested in the same outcome, and having the support of his family.
The value of relationships to emotional health was the focus of Imam Monawar Hussain’s uplifting episode. Imam at Eton College and Muslim Chaplain to an NHS Foundation Trust, Monawar has had to show remarkable calm in the face of tragedy, giving comfort to people at end of life, and to bereaved families of children. Reflecting deeply on what emotional health means to him, Hussain reflects it is his friends and family that sees him maintaining deep gratitude. They are a ‘gift’, he adds, and we must try not to take them for granted. Through his own experience of living with depression, he knows how tempting it can be to isolate, but it was a friend who reminded him to do the opposite.
After eight years of serving the communities of Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, he increasingly sees the need for laughter and lightness in life, and to smile at what happens in life, even if it’s just laughing to yourself after something initially frustrating takes place. When his kids tell him he’s faced a ‘micro-aggression’, he laughs it off if he can. He sees how a situation that at first seemed stressful wasn’t all that serious. Being playful is important, too, as it re-energises us and enables us to get through some of life’s inevitable difficulties.
In recent months, Monawar has been involved in organising and leading a series of interfaith and community discussions after the October 7th 2024 attacks in Israel and the bombing and war in Gaza. He sees the need to prize what we have in common with other people - actually listening to people, not just talking - and practising deep empathy. They’re contingent factors in building relationships, without which we can’t cope. ‘We share so many things with other people, and love and compassion is key as we share the same concerns and emotions with others.’ Whatever our differences, Monawar Hussain concludes we all have core emotional needs. It would work much better if we could get together more often, talk about what these are, and seek out our similarities, not what apparently divides us.
Ruby Wax, mental health campaigner and Founder of Frazzled Cafe, touched on the possibility that we’re living in deeply abnormal times, and in environments that trigger us to feel less emotionally healthy. However, she highlighted how mindfulness can pull us out of our heads, as we give our attention to our body.
Whether it was mindfulness, for example ‘noticing the breeze and hearing the birds singing’, as Imam Monawar Husain characterised his attempts to safeguard his emotional health, or simply ‘sitting down and drinking a cup of tea, taking a dog for a walk, dealing with the day to day’, as Kate Silverton referenced, covering how emotional health can be about taking things slowly, we can all work on improving our emotional health. First, though, we need to listen to our emotions and feel comfortable talking about them.
Written by Andrew Kauffmann, featured in Episode 10 of Emotionally Speaking.
Andrew Kauffmann tweets on mental health and other topics @JKaye82
Comments