Your Mind Matters With Maria Kempinska – Gabrielle Pinto & Martin Pollecoff, Psychotherapy

Everybody hurts. That's what the potent and strangely comforting song says by REM. With 84 million views on YouTube, it clearly echoes how we all feel at some point in our lives. I'm Maria. My question today is can we heal that hurt? I believe that there is more and more proof that there's a link between the mind and body. So can we heal the mind and body through homeopathy and psychotherapy, the organic and natural healing methods, rather than depending on allopathic medicine? And by healing ourselves with a more natural approach, can we affect change in our society? These big questions, I'm delighted to say, are going to be discussed with my two very important guests, Gabrielle Psychotherapy. So, first of all, Gabrielle, welcome and can you please explain your background and your training and how did you choose that particular field to train in? Well, thank you, Maria, for inviting me today. In the early 70s, I was studying a zoology degree and we had a wonderful professor, Professor Pat Wall, who was investigating the link called the gait theory of pain and how acupuncture might affect and control pain management. So, in fact, my first training was actually in acupuncture. I was very interested in, after my degree, in what Professor Wall was thinking about and I also was very interested in medicine. So at that time there was a choice to go to medical school or to practice acupuncture and learn about acupuncture. And I got very interested in the complementary side, which was the acupuncture. And later on I became a homeopath. I studied homeopathy in 1980, so that's my bit about my background. Eventually I went into work in the NHS in primary care, which meant we were looking at all sorts of modalities together. I'm very interested in a joined up approach, Maria, where the best of medicine and the best of the complementary field, so that we can all work together in a much more joined up way. And what made you choose that particularly? What was your sort of. What drew you towards that? I think that the Chinese medicine and homeopathy later on gave me a great deal of understanding about how much our whole environment affects us and how particularly in Chinese medicine, they've got very strong understanding of seasonal changes and imbalances in the body. And the same, there's a very similar philosophy in homeopathy, so they work incredibly well together, that there is an understanding that each of us are individuals, we aren't all the same, so that we've all got slightly different vulnerabilities to different sorts of issues. For example, some of us may be quite sensitive to climate change, whereas others might be sensitive to emotional issues. And this was why I got so fascinated by the two topics, by the two subjects. And I presume you've experienced acupuncture and homeopathy yourself, I take it? You have to, don't you, in your training? Yes, well, I did basically. I didn't come to homeopathy and acupuncture through illness myself. I came because I was absolutely fascinated by it. But yes, obviously it was very sensible to undertake a course of treatment both for my, you know, for myself to experience acupuncture. And then I had some wonderful homeopaths who also helped me over the years. Thanks, Gabrielle. And now Martin, can you give us an understanding to your background, your field and why you chose that particular field as a therapy? I'm a psychotherapist, I'm an integrated psychotherapist. I don't have a particular model, not a field I chose in that way. So many psychotherapists start off as patients. So I've been helped there. I had. I was not achieving what I wanted to achieve. Massive, sure. I got a lot of feedback here now and I went to. I really was having a bit of a breakdown. I was about 24 and I went. Not working. Maria, I can hear you. You can hear, but it's repeating backwards to me, okay? I went to the doctors, I was feeling really depressed. I went to the doctors and they gave me some Nembutol, which was a very old fashioned antidepressant or painkiller. And within a week I went back and said, I can't deal with this. This drug is worse than the depression. I can't feel anything, I'm not myself anymore. And they didn't have anything else for me. And I didn't know anything about psychology, I knew nothing about psychotherapy, etc. And I spoke to my father and he said he knew a guy who was a psychiatrist working in East London. This guy up and he said to me, look, I don't have. I will come and have lunch, come have lunch with me. So I went down there and it was in Whitechapel, it was in a railway arch in Whitechapel and he accepted as a free clinic and he paid for it himself. He was a sort of Marxist guy, very nice guy. Anyway, I went in there and I thought he was going to take me for lunch, but no, he opened a snap tin and gave me half his sandwich. Sandwich and chatted about how I felt and what was going on. And then I said, do you Think I'm going mad? And he said, no, you're not mad, you're just stupid. This is not what I thought he'd be saying. Okay, why am I stupid? He said, because you're trying to be somebody that other people want you to be rather than who you are and you're working very, very hard at it and it's hurting you. Now what I want you to do is stop doing that and starting to go with life. Just turn off and go down and see what comes towards you and at the same time look for a community to belong to. When I left there I felt great, I felt terrific because a I had feeling, I felt that I was falling off the end of the world, the edge of the world and I couldn't get back. But I wasn't, I was just doing something that I was able to change. As he said, it was a stupid idea, but it's one that like most young people you want to please your parents, you want to please the culture that you've been brought up in. You go again, it's painful, very painful. That started me looking for something and within a few years I found an organization, a community which I joined in which was psycho spiritual community called Exegesis. I did a three day training with them and it was fantastic, absolutely liberating. And so I went to work for them and around the next 18 to 20 years I lived within that milieu. We earned a living, we built businesses, we worked together, it was a community and I left. Complex. Both of us had to change and make compromises. Gabriel knew a very, very interesting therapist in Northern California and we went out there to be with him. We did about two weeks work with him and that was great because he was the first psychotherapist I'd met who was both masculine, funny, irreverent and really effective. I'd done him really well and he was a sort of, he acted as a role model in many ways for where I wanted to go. So then I started studying. It's about six years study including the first year which is a foundation year and then the five years of studying. There's a lot of other stuff involved in there. And becoming a UKCP psychotherapist, United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapy registered therapist. There's a lot of stuff. As a student you have to deliver 450 hours minimum of therapy for free. You covered in that with 200 hours of supervision. You're going to do 160 hours of your own therapy. Reviver time. You work in the NHS, there's a lot. And I qualified about 14 years ago. I've been working in private practice, I've worked in the nhs, I set up a charity for veterans. I've done quite a lot of stuff in that time. Wow. And that's, you know, that's so powerful and so interesting, actually, you must compliment each other greatly and actually taking that forward and there's a lot to your stories and there's so much knowledge here, it's going to be difficult to condense it into this one sort of hours program, but it's fascinating. And let me ask you one question to kick off with, apart from, you know, the link between the mind and body, which I'd like to come to or include that in this question, which is can or would you advise each of you, a client, if you had, say, Gabrielle, a client for homeopathy, would you advise them to go into psychotherapy as well? And Martin, vice versa? Is there a mind and body connection? Maria I'm going to start by answering that both disciplines in acupuncture and homeopathy very much understand that there is a body, mind, emotion and even perhaps a spiritual understanding in these disciplines, which allows us to think a little bit more broadly about why somebody might be unwell or dysfunctional, ease, as we prefer to use that word. And I very much think that I've seen it many times happen. There is a definite link between the emotions, the mind and the body. And I'm very. Over the years, I've always considered therapy because some issues belong psychotherapy and other issues belong to homeopathy or acupuncture. And like I said at the beginning, sometimes it belongs with medicine. So how do we as practitioners learn to hold attention of all these aspects for our clients? And that way we can make and help them make the best decision for their health and which way they should follow, you know, which. Which path they should follow. But I think Martin might answer that as well. Yeah. Before you come in, Martin, can I just ask you, Gabrielle, at what point do you decide what is it that would make you advise somebody to go into psychotherapy? Maria I might say something quite controversial here. I don't think everybody can do psychotherapy. I think it's talking cure and it very much involves somebody who's able to make personal and verbal connection with another. So as a homeopath we have many different ways, or as an acupuncture, we have many different ways of working with someone that can actually be non verbal, which is what some people prefer. If someone has quite serious emotional or Psychological difficulties. And because I also trained in psychotherapy with these Americans that Martin mentioned, I have a bigger view now about what each person might benefit from and we always have a discussion. So, for example, very recently, I had a very young woman who had some very complicated problems, one of which was perhaps she shouldn't. She wanted to get pregnant and have another child, that there was financial difficulties, this kind of thing. When she could articulate it very clearly with me, I really recommended that she should go back into therapy or can start therapy so she could tease out this problem with a psychotherapist, because it's quite a complicated decision, but she was able to think in that way. And lots of people don't want to think like that. But does that answer your question? It's very good. And we'll come back to. There's so much more there to unpick, but we'll come back to it. And Martin, what's your thoughts? Do you recommend homeopathy to some of your clients as well? I have done, but I've got to be very careful of, like, cross selling something to somebody. It would be against the ethics of psychotherapy to sell in something else, in a way. Okay, but how do you deal then with somebody who may need more psychiatric help? Then that's prosperity. Basically, my work is about health. It really is health and building that person. So when first come in, I may say, I really want you to go and see your doctor. I really want this checked up. So you have people who've experienced a sudden change of character and that happens quite often. You need to know how that follows. An accident of any kind or an injury of any kind. And so anything like that, anything, I suspect I want. Doctor, I want the X rays done on the head or whatever it is. You know, we need MRI scans, we need to know what's happened, because it really does waste somebody's time doing psychotherapy when there's a physical issue there and the time they're spending talking to you is time that whatever that physical issue may be getting worse. I tend to work with doctors and it's a habit that I've got from the NHS and work in the NHS and check things out first. The hierarchy of problems. If it's a physical problem, we can't really aid that very well with psychotherapy. We have to get that out the way first. If it's a financial problem that has to be discussed. Quite often the government uses psychotherapy to deal with unhappiness, which could be caused by financial problems, social problems, all sorts of problems which have to get out the way. Not everybody can do or wants to do psychotherapy. The people who tend to do it tend to be curious about themselves and their relationship to society and others. Curiosity they want to build themselves. They want to grow in some way or to remove childhood fears that have gone on and moved through their lives. When somebody comes, they're coming with a single unwanted condition normally. And it's normally one they've always had. It's part of the character or part of the furniture for them. You know, my relationships always end this way. Yeah. Or I was doing, you know, I worked with one guy who was. This is a long time ago, but he was. And he'd become an artist, a graphic artist. And he was very successful. Every time he hit earning £100,000 a year, something happened and he was sacked or he had to leave the agency and he became a director of an agency. And that didn't work for him either. Now in the work we did together, he realized that his father was a major trade unionist and being working class was a big thing for him, although he didn't realize that it was major. And every time it seemed he was moving into boss's territory, his life would fall apart. So having known he had, You know, that is on bigger, bigger things or saying, this is not what I want, I need to return to my roots here in some way. And so in that way, a psychological issue from childhood and the training where he's trained limited his future. And what he wanted to do was to take those limits off. I'm going to sort of throw in something, something that I really like to take forward and then in a way come back to. But know that it's there. Something that you said about hereditary information, let's say, and I understand that in homeopathy, Gabrielle, there's the term miasm, which is also a hereditary sort of physical illness to miasm is that. Yes, it's a name that we use to describe inherited tendencies. And we again from our beliefs and understanding and our philosophy do feel, and we know this anyway through genetics very much, families have inherited tendencies, which I think also includes behavior, psychological behaviour, that is, as well as issues with physical health and well being. So there is. There are these tendencies or miasms as we call them, that are sometimes considered to be blocking our development or could affect our development, as Martin says, somehow interfere in our ability to flourish in a much. So when you approach a miasm, is it a verbal questioning that you use? There will be questions I ask. Homeopathy has an understanding and an idea that we can help this historical dis. Ease, as I call it. Does that help understanding? Yeah, it does, because it's an understanding within the framework of the work you do. It's already sort of part of your training, the structure of our training, and we sometimes do spot it. And I know that science is really struggling terribly badly with homeopathy. And don't forget, I was trained as a scientist at university then. Scientists. My scientific side struggles with homeopathy and how the hell does it work. But having been 40 years doing being a homeopath and seeing it act so many times, when I have prescribed for these kind of things that you speak about, it is quite remarkable. But it's very hard to speak about because I would have to go through an individual case with you and show you what the traits were and how we use a remedy to help shift that tendency towards that disease or that illness. This has been probably another conversation. No, but it's such an important one. Let's just to have a little bit of a focus on that just for the moment, just so that we don't gloss over it, Because a lot of people, I mean, I've used homeopathy. I've been to homeopaths when my children were very small. They were brought up on homeopathy. And I think it's bad press. And I always come back to animals and how it's proven. And many farmers use homeopathic remedies with their animals. And that to me says everything, that if the animal can be cured or helped through homeopathy, then surely a human being must be able to. That's the take I take on it. And then there's the other attitude of is it a placebo? We have very specific timings which we're trained to look out for. And it's a very good question, is it placebo? I've often, in the beginning would wonder whether it's just the good talk we have. But when you start to work with babies and mothers, which I spent many, many years working with babies, you see when you prescribe correctly, and this is generally after the mother has been to the doctor and may not have got antibiotics for earaches, but the child still screaming. And then after 20 minutes after having the remedy, the correct homeopathic treatment, the screening stops and the baby starts to fall asleep and feels better in itself when they wake up. I've seen this several, many times. It's not placebo as far as I'm concerned. But again, we're in a very Controversial area here, I know, but I didn't want it to be glossed over because it's such an important subject, because this is an alternative that people can use for themselves. They can go to a homeopath as opposed to, you know, knocking on the NHS door that everybody knows at the moment is being overloaded. But coming back to this point, Martin, the whole, as far as I understand, as a psychotherapist as well, there's the conversation to be had about the placebo and the person who you are engaging with in your therapy. How important is the therapist to the client and who they are and what it means. They're essential. Psychotherapy is, at base about a relationship between two people, one of whom is a psychotherapist. It's a healing relationship. So it's essential that they have a relationship. They're in relationship with the therapist. Now, when you said about placebo, it used to be taken very seriously within medicine. They would have. There was a journal called Voodoo Deaths, where people died just because they thought they'd been cursed. And that is not far off from ordinary living. People do feel they've been cursed. I used to have practice in North Wales and a woman came to see me and she was very nervous. She was in her 60s, beautifully dressed, which in the area was not usual. Anyway, she sat down and the first thing she said was, do you lift curses? And I thought, oh, my God, yes, we do. That's what we do, actually. A sort of trust. If a curse is something that somebody puts upon you and you take it seriously, that might be being told you're stupid when you're at school. That's a curse. Told you're ugly or you'll never amount to something. You can't imagine how many people I've seen who've been told, you'll never amount to anything. That's a curse. And we do lift those. Yes, something we do. But that's not a placebo. That's using logic of saying, well, that was then, this is now. Let's see, is there any proof you're stupid? You know, all this sort of thing, we just talk it through. Because when it was said, that person was, oh, maybe five. And now, 40 years later, they're still carrying that around. There are deep curses where somebody may be sexually abused when they're a child and learn in that abuse that they're nothing, they have no will, they can't stop it. And that might carry through the rest of their lives. And of course, it can carry through to their children. Yes, trauma Can. Well, let's put it this way, your character shapes your children. We know that. Nobody would deny that. Nobody in therapy denies that. But allopathic medicine, when they do an assessment, a physical assessment, they only go so far back. They don't ever talk about the emotional traumas. Well, they probably don't talk about it, but I think what we have to realize is allopathic medicine deals with what it thinks, it can deal with the measurable. If it's not measurable, they don't deal with it. Doesn't mean they don't believe in it. I mean, these psychiatric. I think there are 27,000 psychiatrists in the UK and the Royal College has a spiritual sector with 2,000 psychiatrists in it. That points to me, and I know this for a truth, that although psychiatrists deal in the measurable, they also think a lot about the immeasurable. Can I say something, Maria, about. Please. I was just going to ask you, Gabrielle, a couple of things I want to just clarify. When I worked in the nhs, we very much spoke about what we call a gray area in medicine. Pretty much what medicine really hasn't been able to change, affect or treat. That's neither good nor bad. It's just knowing that they can't do everything through drugs. And I think it's very important to understand, and the complementary medicine systems can often address some of these issues to do with our health and our well being. And I always put well being in there, can often help address some of these issues in a different way. Now, many scientists will set placebo. At the end of the day, it would be great in an ideal world to have a lot of this really looked at through proper trials and understanding of how trials should be conducted for homeopathy. Because I come back to this issue, that we are all different. Our immune systems are, yes, generally the same, but we all have different vulnerabilities, different susceptibilities. This is very un in Chinese medicine and in acupuncture and homeopathy. So our vulnerability to coughs and colds, or Covid, if you want to use this example, as we've seen, is all different. So this is where I think these other disciplines can help aid and help generally with good, better health and recovery from serious illnesses, when medicine just doesn't have the equipment to deal with it. And I just want to say one other thing. I never encourage people to come straight to me if they're ill. I always want a medical examination. I really do believe in teamwork. It is so essential in this business to get the support from everybody who understands all these different angles. We have fantastic understanding in medicine, but we also have fantastic understanding in complementary medicine, which unfortunately keeps getting dismissed. That's such a big. I don't want to put that to a side. I don't want to dismiss that. I want to put it to a side. And we'll come back to that because it's such a big. And a social. I think it would make a great social impact if we could have that relationship and we'll talk about that. But coming back to a mother and child, for example, Martin, if a mother comes to you and says, I have a problem with a child, at what point would you send her to have a physical checkup? I wouldn't, because she's got. She hasn't got the problem, she's upset with a child. I'm not a child therapist, I was never trained in that, but I have a lot of friends who are and I would just refer on therapist. They will work within their own knowledge and if not, if they don't know something, they'll just send straight to somebody. Refer on. We don't do everything. We're not genii. We do what we're well trained to do. But Jung always said that if you want to look at the child, unlike Freud, Jung said that if you want to look at know a child, you've got to look at the parents. Yeah, well, I normally get. I work with adults, so normally the parents don't come with them, but they have done. They have done. I think you just need to be empathic because they'll tell you about their parents, they'll tell you the good things and the bad things about the parents. But even a child who's been highly, highly abused loves their parents and you've got to be very careful. I never criticize someone's parents because I stand in loco parentis. Anyway, a psychotherapist takes on a parental role whether you like it or not. And if you criticize their parents, you can agree with them on stuff, but do not criticise the parents because it will end the work. And at what point would you bring the parent in or the child in or would you not? I wouldn't because I don't. If someone's got a problem with their child, should I did have the child do the work or the child and the mother do the work together? It's not what I do. A family therapist could do that. Perhaps it's not my training. And at what point would you invite both the mother and Child or father and child or the whole family. Gabrielle. Or how would it be treated in homeopathy or acupuncture? Just thinking of a very difficult situation we had when we were in. When I worked in the nhs, in primary care, what we did is teamwork. So we did, you know, I remember some. We had some very difficult. There was a couple that I remember who had a very difficult, undiagnosed situation in a child who was behaving in a very difficult way and being very, very violent. Very hard to know why. This is a very young child. We're talking four or five years of age. And really, it boils down to getting teamwork, you know. So the parents were held, the therapist was engaged in the sessions, and I was invited to see if I could help as well as a homeopath. And that doesn't mean you can help everybody, because there are some very tragic cases where you can only do the best you can. And these children sometimes pass through these very difficult phases. We call them transitional phases. Well, I do, anyway. And we do have some homeopathies. I know this sounds really difficult to understand, but we do have some homeopathic remedies that seem to help with people who are feeling very, very angry and uncontrollably out of control with it, where therapy is also part of that process. But sometimes homeopathy helps, and sometimes we can't do anything. I would only do that kind of work in a team. And do you think then we don't have any rituals anymore? So when a child grew up, even Shakespeare said, show me the child till the age of seven and I'll show you the man and obviously the woman. But we don't have these rituals anymore that you come into teenage years, as they do in the Jewish religion, where you have a bat mitzvah or bar mitzvah, and they start growing and they acknowledge that they're now going to step. Step into adulthood. And then the marriage ritual was, you know, joining together and having a family. A lot of our rituals have been taken away. Do you think this is a help or a hindrance psychologically and equally, you know, for the mind, body, experience and how the individual can make sense of their world. And do you think that has an impact on our society in the mind, body, experience? Martin, what do you think? Ritual is always tied with mythology. Two things. It said that mythology is the story that comes out of the rituals. But ritual hasn't gone away, it's just changed. It's ritualistic, for instance, to go on a gap year that never be a ritual. And they go to the same places where they see all the same people they're at school with. So know rituals run out of juice. They're either juicy and meaningful or they're not. But we have lots of different rituals. It's just they're not community acknowledged. Because when we talk about rituals, we really talk about very small communities. Our families have rituals, maybe that every Saturday we go and see our auntie. It may be that we never go to France, for instance, because something happened to somebody in France. You know, these things. Nothing changes in human culture. The form changes, but human beings don't. Which is great because we can look back in history and see other people's experience. And what do you think, Gabrielle? What's your thoughts on ritual? I'm not clear how ritual necessarily would affect health or disease, so I find that quite difficult to comment on that. Well, you know, I've been. I've worked with Native Americans where ritual is a really big issue. But it happens within the family or the community and everybody believes in it. Once they start believing, it doesn't really work in the same way. You'll do something very simple, like if somebody's really ill, you might swap them, you might change their name. Big ritual, lot of fasting, a lot of dancing, sacrificial stuff. That is, they've got to go and do pilgrimages and things. But eventually they will be changed into somebody else, so the disease will go off. Coming back to North American Indians, I know that they used to use dreams to help a young person understand the role in their community. How do you think dream work is in psychotherapy and in homeopathy? Martin, what do you think first? Well, I think it's essential in. It's essential in psychotherapy because it's like, you know, when you go to the garage and they put the take card for the garage and they put the Krypton thing on there, which shows what's going on underneath. It'll show what's going on underneath. Most people when they come to psychotherapy have anxiety dreams, which are pretty straightforward. An anxiety dream is things like I'm going to catch a plane, I get on the train to go. The train breaks down, I get off and I go onto a bus that's going in the wrong direction. It's those sort of dreams or I find myself back at college, I'm in an exam room, I look at the exam papers. I don't know what's on. I can't read them. They're not in the Language I understand, but those are sort of anxiety dreams they have and we know where somebody's at. It also helps us, you know, the dreams, once you're used to working with dreams, help you provide a looser feel to the work. It's not intellectual, it shifts to another level of emotionality and instinctual work. I would love to answer that question. I particularly am interested in dream work and partly because I studied with these Jungians in America for many years and the understanding of dreams became very important, which I started to integrate into my practice. And I'll give you a very nice example of how we integrated the dreams into homeopathy and what actually happened. I had a young man, about 14 or 15, and he was being quite badly bullied at school and he came to me with a dream of a snake and how this snake was frightening him in the dreams. It was very fierce and very scared and he didn't know how to handle the snake. And he would wake up with a terrible fear that he was going to die because the snake was going to kill him. We spoke, and you might say again, this placebo effect, but we spoke about a bit about the bullying, not much. And I prescribed a homeopathic remedy. And I was. And I told him that we should meet in about six or eight weeks after the treatment and see how he was getting on. He also had some issues with his skin. He was very spotty at the time, which made him shy. Anyway, after this six week period, we met again and he had had this amazing dream about a snake that came to him in the dream, but it was actually trying to talk to him and communicate with him and it wasn't frightening anymore. And then I said to him, what has happened at school? How is the bullying going? And he said to me, I don't know why it's better. I've been more able to confront these difficulties in a different way and I can't quite say how, but I felt much better in myself, which is very, very important feedback for me as a homeopath. And I have felt more confident. And so the nasty boys at school have not been teasing me in the same way. And so I asked him whether he thought the dream in some way was related to some of the changes. And he couldn't say. But as far as I'm concerned, as a homeopath, the snake became his friend. It gave him empowerment, entitlement, it allowed him to challenge these other difficult children at school. He needed no other intervention. They didn't need the teachers to come and get involved Something happened to him which I would say was impossible. Empowerment. Now, how that happened through a homeopathic remedy or through the psyche or through the conversation is a good question for us to ask when we have these difficulties and we see these changes and how has that happened and what kind of research could be done in this way? I love dream work. I work with dreams all the time as well when I do my work. But coming back to that, in the Greek times, they used to actually wait for Apollo to come and tell them how they're going to cure that part of their body. And that was very much part of their ritual. Just staying. Coming back. We'll come back to dreamwork. I think it's going to be another program, actually, if you two are willing, I would love to do that because it's such a powerful understanding, as you say, Martin, that strips back and it goes right back into the depths and covers issues and explore. Explores issues. As you've highlighted there, Gabrielle, something changes, but you don't know how it changes. And very often you don't know how. Dream work by recognizing what's going on underneath. Something changes, but you don't know how. And it's very often not till much later, but coming back to the family and joining up med, you know, sort of practices like psychotherapy and homeopathy. And so can I just ask you both your opinion on hypnosis? How useful is that and do you ever use that? Well, I had a very early training in it when I. In the 70s, when it was kind of quite a buzzy thing to do and a fun thing to do. I mean, it wasn't all I learned was how to relax the body, to relax the mind, to come back into the breath. And then you could work with clients to get them in a very quiet and peaceful place. And maybe you could work with imagery. I haven't really used it much in later years. That's not been my view. I would occasionally use it if it felt very important. I think it comes into the tools that we collect, the years of being practitioners. So it's there in my repertoire but not often used. Martin, have you ever used hypnosis? I've used relaxation techniques. I don't use hypnosis to go back in time or anything like that. That's not what I've been trained to do. You know, there are hypno psychotherapists who are really excellent at this. Having said that, I have done. I've worked with groups where everybody goes into catharsis. Everybody does that. You hypnotise the whole room. So that's for a specific effect, that's for specific learning. So my answer is I think it's useful, but it's not my main driver going, your dreams thing. I think daydreams are as interesting, you know, our fantasies about what we'd like to be, who we'd like to be, we find, you know, really exciting in life. Our heroes and our heroines. You know, I often work with that. And also, that's where mythology and films and books come in. It's such a big and important part of our world. Can I just move on to trauma for both of you? I'm covering sort of more of the sort of psychological and then the sort of physical effects of that. Martin, how do you deal. How would you deal with trauma? And I know you deal with soldiers. Well, I. You know, I was trained ages ago by Babette Rothschild, one of the first people who write about trauma, because trauma wasn't spoken about until really about the 80s. It didn't even go on the books. But I deal with trauma by building up the resources of the client. I know that people say, well, you've got to go back to the original trauma. That's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. If something has happened to you that terrified you, absolutely stunted your life. And a therapist says, we're going to go back to it. When we say we're going to go back, that is, you're going to go back and I'm going to watch. That's not a great offer. So what I do, I spend my time building up the strength of the client until that trauma has shrunk because they've grown and they are now in a position to deal with that trauma. Yeah. So you add new parts. Do you encourage new elements to their world? No, I strengthen the existing elements. I can't add anything in there. No. But do you encourage that with them? Yep, I work with their character and strengthen their character and what we call resourcing them. Yeah. You know, and resource could be, you know, you're able to walk, at least that's something. Yeah. You know, we don't have to start with. You're a genius on this. We've got to start with something real they can do. Yeah. A lot of people who've had trauma one way or another, whether it's complex trauma, which is, I think, the new terminology for the deep sort of trauma from the Holocaust or from a war or something, rather than event trauma, which is perhaps an accident or, you know, a Robbery. It could be just that event leads to the trauma. Could be I fell off my tricycle. Yeah. Doesn't have to be dramatic. I'm always very careful with the notion of ptsd. You don't see it very much. You know, work with soldiers, you really don't see it very much. You do see enormous effect that war has had on their relationships. Yeah, that's an important thing. You also see the fact that no one has ever thanked them for what they did. Yeah. Nobody. That is purposeless. Well, for the nhs, we're all outside banging pots, but our kids who went to Iraq and Afghanistan, we asked to go there. They didn't go there because they thought it was a good idea. We asked them to go and we never say thanks. They're spurned. And that has always been the same with the military throughout history. When there's not a war on, people hate them, really. They spurn them. And you find that if you read or Longfellow or something, they write about that, you know, when the war's on. Their heroes, I mean, the guys who survived the Light Brigade attack, but they all ended up completely with nothing. Artists together to raise money for them, to see if they could get them into sort of old age homes or something. You know, being a soldier is tough. You don't get any thanks unless there's a war on, in which case everyone says, you go first, please. Yeah, I think that's half the problem. I've talked to a number of soldiers myself. I've worked with soldiers and that pointlessness of life after they've come back from something that they've done to protect the world as they see it, and that's what they've been asked to do. And then they come back and they're sort of dismissed. It's not that they. They don't want a home. They've got a home. You can get a home, you can get a little bit of money. But it's. How profound is their life? What's the point? Why did I do that? Why did I put myself out there to be shot at or killed or my friends killed? And the memories of all that, if there's no point to the work I did and nobody appreciates it, and that must equally affect them physically. Gabrielle, do you deal with the trauma we, as homeopaths have? And I'll speak more about physical trauma. A number of homeopathic remedies, which, again, we don't have in Western medicine, that can sometimes really help relieve physical pain or loss of memory a little bit Sometimes I've seen. We've got a fabulous remedy called arnica, used for very severe bruising after injury. So I'm talking more about physical injury to the body, and then there are some more. But again, it's very individualized that we can sometimes help some of the emotional, destabilizing things that have happened. And sometimes you do notice after homeopathic treatment, what people come back and say is, I do feel better myself. So. And somehow the density of the upset is less. Just like Martin said, you've somehow grown, but we can't say how. And this is such a problem in homeopathy because, you know, people often come saying, look, I feel much better in myself, but the problem's still there, but somehow I'm managing it differently. You can't measure that. It's very hard to measure it as it is in therapy. But what you're looking for is somebody feeling better in themselves. That's the most important thing. And I think that's the thing that should be stressed. And do you think, therefore, the fact that you've actually given somebody the opportunity to say something, the conversation, the dialogue you've had, the questions you ask, does that activate a cure in itself? Well, that's another good question. Something happened to me in the NHS that was fascinating. Again, we had. One of the clients was referred to me. They didn't know what to do with her. She'd had very severe headaches for many years after a head injury, and I prescribed for her, and within weeks she was feeling much better in herself. Now we can't say what happened. A conversation with me. I had 10 more minutes than the doctor because I would have 20 minute sessions, not 10 minute sessions. Was it the homeopathic treatment, but I replicate that in another class. No idea, but there we go. This was a case of a situation that was very vivid for me about, you know, was it the talk or was it the homeopathy? Yeah. And what's your view, Martin, about the specific questions or just generally? The questions, do they activate, activate a cure in itself? Well, Freud described psychoanalysis in a letter to jung in about 1916. He said, don't tell anyone, but it's a love cure. Love. That's what makes the difference now, love. Many different types of love. But one thing is listening to somebody is an act of love. And I can't work with anybody. I don't find. I couldn't love. I find nothing there. I can't work with them. I won't be rude about it. I sort of. I'm not the person for you. It's not going to work. And certainly with the soldiers, when you're saying you did what amazing how old you were. 17. Jesus Christ. You should be running the world now. You know, this is fantastic. Fantastic. Did people know about what you did? You know, I had a soldier come to me and he was. He was drinking, as often they do a hell of a lot. And he fainted outside the pub. He just collapsed and two calves ran over him. He said he thought he'd gone a bit far this time. He was so drunk, he wasn't injured. He had the luck of the devil. He came to talk to me and it turned out that he'd been in a detachment, a small patrol. Sorry. That took over a full in Afghanistan. And that fort had been run by another country who had paid the Afghans not to attack. The British didn't do that. So he went out on patrol and all hell set loose. And for a week they were attacked day and night by an army of Taliban. And for a week he was killing, dodging bullets and rockets, etc. For a week. A whole week before they were relieved. There were no medals for that. It just left him feeling, well, you know, why were we there? Why were we there? What were we doing? Yeah, so and so got injured in that. We lost X. He died then, you know, what was this for? Yeah, but I spent my time. Tell me more. Just. Wow, Peter, that's incredible. In this book, you know, that's really great you did that. And, you know, I thank people for doing that because, you know, like George Orwell said, I sleep safe in my bed because rough men stand between me and the channel. We are protected and I'm grateful for that. But I was brought up by people that all been in the. In the forces, all fought in the war. So I was sort of like, it's a payback me in that way. Listening to them is an act of love and helping them. And just to give a more definition, the Greeks have wonderful terminology for love because they have eros, which is the love that, you know, sort of between husband and wife and lovers and so on. And then you've got agape, which is the love for the world. And then you've got familiar love, which is family. And I think we're talking about agape, the love for the world. And I think that's wonderful that people should understand that you can separate those. All those definitions. We're coming to the end of this program, which has been totally amazing. Thank you both. But Gabrielle, can I ask you, if you were going to teach our new society, which we're coming to, something that they should learn or take with them, what would you suggest that people could do for themselves and take forward to their own healing and the help that they might need before they sort of dash off and go and get tablets or something? That's a very good question. I think one of the most difficult things for us to do, and one of the things that we have very little training on, which is why I became fascinated with psychotherapy at such a young age, because nobody had ever trained me in anything to do with my emotions, is how to take responsibility for who I am and what I am. And what I want to do means thinking much more carefully about how I am in the world. Not necessarily always playing the oh, I haven't got it card. I know a lot of us are really struggling right now with very difficult circumstances, doing the best you can, like Martin says, with your structure and using those strengths in you that get you about to do things in life to encourage you to explore and to be creative and when you hit difficulties, to use the difficulties as an opportunity to change. You know, I can end with this kind of statement that, you know, many ways our health in homeopathy is considered the ability to adapt to change. Health is the ability to adapt to change. And that means mental emotions and physical. So that would be my view, Maria. Yeah, it's wonderful. Martin, I'm going to take, if you can include a little bit there, but something to add as well, that you said that your. You went, you did some training with somebody in LA and you said humour was part of it, as, you know, part of my background. I did my. Both my MA and PhD in humour and ran comedy clubs, as you know. So humor is a big part of healing in my world and reconciling two complex attitudes from my own personality and other people's personalities. Where would you put humor in the therapy room? I put humour in the gap between reality and self. You'll have a gap. You're able to think, you're able to play with something. If someone's humorous, they're not stuck in something. And humor is black humor, where you've got a terrible thing going on and somebody's able to make a joke out of it and everybody roars of laughing relief. That's not gallows humor. That's about the gap between the terror of what's going on. You. You're not part of it. You're able to stand back and have humor in between Now, I wouldn't come across very much today, but I'm quite a funny person and I like humor. I enjoy it and I value it in my clients. I know if they start being humorous, we've got. There's no problems. There's nothing really there that's too awful. And is that you choose to use humor at a certain point, I presume you need. When I've used humour, it would happen instinctively. We're coming to the end of the program. Sadly for me as well, there's so much more to be said. I know because it's such a big not only does it take a lot of training, but there's so much more in our world to be said and now is the right time to say it, I believe. I just want to thank you, Martin Polakoff and Gabrielle Pinto for your input. It's been absolutely invaluable and I hope anybody listening wants to know more. And this is your mind matters on men's radio station and women's radio station. And please make sure that you listen to more of these programs and just remember that there is always a way to heal the pain.