Reading · The Therapy Room by Dr Vicki Connop

I bumped into one of my phobias this week.

Yes, therapists have phobias too, even after many years of personal work.

I’m someone who identifies more at the introvert end of the spectrum, and I’ve had a long-held fear of public speaking. Writing is my happy place, where I can thoughtfully curate my words and send them out into the world from the comfort of my hermit cave, where I can edit and review what I want to say, before I dare to share it with others. But lately, I’ve begun to receive invites to take part in the scary world of Substack Lives.

I’ve wrestled with this for a while. My initial response tends to be a resounding No. There are many things in life I have avoided out of fear, knowing that as an adult I really don’t have to do things I hate. Sport is one of them. Teaching and presenting have often been another.

But I keep coming back to a question posed to me recently by one of my meditation teachers. We talked about how to discern the Nos that deserve to be respected and honoured, versus the Nos that may be reflexive and holding us back, and she asked me a simple question:

In saying no to this, are you limiting yourself and what you have to offer in this life?

That question spoke straight to the heart of the dilemma. The answer was clear to me, and it was enough to tilt me towards a tentative yes.

Cut to this week, and I found myself having accepted an invite from my Substack friend The Therapist Who Came Undone, and facing directly into one of my fears.

Over my years as a therapist, I’ve come to understand anxiety, not as an enemy that seeks to sabotage our life, but rather as an overzealous and overprotective friend who tries to foresee every possible catastrophe and avert disaster.

I’ve learned to smile as it manufactures everything that could possibly go wrong and all the myriad ways I could humiliate myself, fail, be judged, or rejected. The voice of anxiety can be very creative.

In EMDR therapy, we often use a practice known as an affective bridge or ‘floatback’ that helps to trace an emotional experience back to its origins. I played with that this week, tuning into the felt sense of anxiety in my body and the fear of humiliating myself, and letting my mind drift back through time to where this felt familiar from. Two memories quickly surfaced, both from my school days. One was the time our music teacher had us each stand and sing solo in front of the entire class without accompaniment, so that she could assess who was good enough for the choir. I could hardly breathe, let alone sing, and the voice that came out was awkward and strangled (needless to say, I did not make the choir). The other memory was from a much younger age, around six, from a time when I peed my pants in front of my peers and teacher.

It sometimes helps to recognise that the parts that hold those seemingly irrational fears are often very young and vulnerable. Making those associations conscious helps us to know what territory we are in, and helps us to respond appropriately, taking care of the young, tender parts. Making these connections offered enough distance to be able to recognise—that was then, this is now, and I am much more resourced today.

So, I showed up for the live chat and decided to be open about the fear. The pressure to appear confident when I’m not is far more challenging than simply being authentic.

It reminds me of something a supervisor said to me, at the beginning of my very first placement as a trainee clinical psychologist. I’d been handed a referral for a woman with a debilitating mouse phobia, and I confessed that didn’t know if I could help her because I wasn’t very good with mice myself. My supervisor’s response surprised me:

You’re perfect for it. Your clients don’t need someone who has never experienced what they’ve experienced. They need a coping model. Someone who knows some of what they’re going through, and is managing it.

Those words have stayed with me all these years later, and they’re often what I lean into in moments of self-doubt. It can be easy to imagine that as therapists we need to have it all figured out, but the reality is we are swimming in the soup of human struggle, alongside our clients, though we may be one or two steps further along in certain places, shining a light for those following in our wake.

That simple conversation about mice changed how I show up as a therapist and paved the way for how I show up as a writer too. Whilst I don’t always share my backstory in the room with clients, because it can cloud the focus and shift the spotlight away from them, I also don’t present myself as someone who has it all together or has all the answers. I show up as someone who has struggled, and continues to struggle, and who is happy to share what I’ve learned along the way, from many years of study and personal work.

This week, that struggle was speaking in public.

I faced that fear, and I think it went OK. Now, please leave me alone in a dark room for a few days so my nervous system can unwind.

Thank you for reading.

If you’re curious to hear two off-duty therapists chatting about writing, life, and vulnerability, you can catch the replay of our conversation here.

And I’d love to hear—what fears and phobias are you navigating? And how are you discerning your yeses from your nos? I always appreciate the connections that happen here.

Facing my fears in public

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