Therapy Works

Hello Therapy Works listeners! I hope you all enjoyed Season 3 of the podcast and if you happen to be tuning in for the first time I do recommend that you go back and listen to the amazing conversations I’ve had with my wonderful guests. Whilst we are in between seasons and taking a little summer break, I wanted to answer some questions about therapy that I get asked on a daily basis. As you all s...

Hello Therapy Works listeners! I hope you all enjoyed Season 3 of the podcast and if you happen to be tuning in for the first time I do recommend that you go back and listen to the amazing conversations I’ve had with my wonderful guests. Whilst we are in between seasons and taking a little summer break, I wanted to answer some questions about therapy that I get asked on a daily basis. As you all s...

Vanessa describes with great honesty her experience of living with an alcoholic husband. The difficult decision to end her marriage and the resulting challenges she faced. Her loneliness, along with the necessary reframing of her future. 45% of marriages end in divorce which can lead us to treat it as ‘part of life.’ In this conversation we hear how very personal that experience is, and what a los...

David Harewood is a celebrated British actor, presenter and author. I was very moved by this honest and courageous conversation. I both learnt and felt enriched by it – as you will. It is a must listen.  We discussed many important issues: David recalls the years of racist abuse that pulled him apart.  How important it is to have an integrated sense of identity and the struggle he experienced bein...

There are some episodes of this podcast that are more heart-breaking than others. This is one of them. Lisa Smart describes in loving detail the terminal diagnosis, illness, and the death of her beloved 22 year old daughter, Emily. Lisa also shows us how she has learned to live and love again despite the tragedy of her daughter’s death. In this episode we discuss: How living with someone who is dy...

Sadie Frost is an English actress, producer and fashion designer, who ran fashion label Frost French and a film production company. She is also the mother of four adult children.   Whilst Sadie’s roles may seem distant from our own experience, everything she discusses with me, in this open and honest conversation, is very relatable. You will see yourself in her challenges and learn how she has man...

Amber Jeffrey is a celebrated podcast host and online community facilitator. Her work & podcast, The Grief Gang,specialises in grief, breaking down the stigma of it, one conversation at a time. One of the great innovative changes that has swept through the grief community in recent years-- through access to social media--is the voice of bereaved young people. This younger generation tends to be mo...

Will Young is a singer, actor and author of multiple hit singles and albums of the last 20 years.  If you are like Emily, Sophie and I you will remember Will Young from his nascent pop self in Pop Idol, the first of the talent shows that we all became hooked on.  You will be grateful, as I was, at Will Young’s capacity to have this conversation about profoundly important and complex issues with me...

My conversation with Meg is one that touches on universal themes about love and life. Who is my life partner going to be? How and when can I have a baby? What can I do and how can I create the life I want when the odds seem against me? In this episode, you will hear topics that put you in mind of your own life, and Meg’s decisions will give you insights into how she made the life she wanted.  We d...

Rosie Jones who has cerebral palsy is known primarily for her comedy appearances and stand up, she is also an established writer, actor and author. This is a great episode, open your ears, your mind and let go of many assumptions that we all make about being able bodied and having a disability; this conversation will inspire and fascinate you.  We discussed : Rosie’s great strength is her ‘constan...

I am very grateful to Joanne for having the courage to talk to me about her estrangement with her daughter.  Estrangement in families is stigmatised and coated in shame and so it isn’t something we hear about very much, although research shows one in five families have a level of estrangement.  In this episode, you will learn: How frightening and painful it is to be estranged from one’s child  How...

This is an episode about change, and showing how even change that we want and choose can be hard to process.  The wonderful Dr Rupy Ajula is a well known Doctor who founded The Doctors Kitchen and believes that food is a powerful medicine. He has succeeded in life because of his innate warmth and genuine intent to make the world a better place. He talked to me about the challenge of moving from be...

As a parent watching your child suffer is unbearable. For Clare her beautiful son Harrison aged 16 admitted to feeling suicidal.  Clare’s conversation with me, which is deeply personal and painful, represents the mental health pandemic in young people, which is wrecking lives – individually, in families and in society as a whole. In this episode you will hear: The first time Clare heard that Harri...

As most of you will know Ruby Wax is a comedian, actor and author as well as a mental health campaigner.  Our conversation was particularly powerful because we got under the hood of the performer Ruby, and gained insight into who she really is, and how she got to be who she is. In listening to her honesty you will connect with yourself and recognise some of the influences that led you, the listene...

Welcome back to Season 3 of Therapy Works! To mark the publication of the paperback of my book Every Family Has a Story, we decided to do a role reversal and I invited the fantastic comedian and podcaster Cariad Loyd to put me in the therapy chair. Can I just say being interviewed is not my happy place! Although I did love this conversation, as I ended up being very open, I laughed, cried and said...

For those of you who don’t know Zoe Blaskey, she is the founder of Motherland, the host of the brilliant podcast of the same name and a transformational coach. For those that do know her I think you will be delighted by this open and honest conversation, from which I learned so much.  Zoe is a mother of two and openly speaks about learning to lean into what she was struggling with, which was every...

Abi Morgan is the brilliant screen writer of huge films like The Iron Lady, Shame and the hugely successful TV series, The Split. She is also the author of the memoir ‘This Isn’t A Pity Memoir’ charting the devastating story of her husband’s illness in which she was ‘absolutely the same and profoundly changed.’ As someone who uses words as a profession, we discover in this podcast that Abi uses wo...

Today I am joined by Jonny Wilkinson, widely known as the best British Rugby player of all time, who represented England and British and Irish Lions, and is famous for scoring the winning drop goal in 2003 at the Rugby World Cup Final.  We all need to hear this conversation as it challenges many of our fixed beliefs about winning and losing, control, success and freedom. Jonny broke through the ch...

This beautiful, moving and revelatory conversation is about loss and also of course, about love. Dr Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist as well as the host of the extraordinary podcast A Slight Change of Plans which was Apple’s Best Show of 2022.  In this episode we discuss: How to navigate a life full of unexpected challenges, particularly around fertility. We discuss surrogacy, a subject that...

If you want to hear someone who is crazily famous and who is totally unchanged by her fame then you want to listen to this wonderfully open and honest conversation. It is tender, funny, warm and wise. Evanna Lynch is best known for her role as the quirky Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter, she is also a podcaster, a supporter of animal rights and an author. She is an incredibly interesting woman that I...

My first conversation with Geraint John on this podcast had a big impact on you all. You were moved by his honesty and the psychological difficulty he faced for himself and his whole family when his beautiful wife Debs was terminally ill. This conversation is as heartrending, letting you know how he, Debs and his family have navigated her devastating loss.  This is a powerfully emotional episode w...

Susannah Constantine is a former TV fashion guru (one half of the eponymous What Not To Wear duo), TV presenter and author. This conversation is full of therapeutic light bulb moments where Susannah begins to see something familiar in a new way. As you also might expect like anything with Susannah, it’s also full of laughter, wisdom and humanity.  Topics we discuss include: What we inherit from ou...

Andrew G. Marshall is a well known marital therapist and I sat down with him to discuss the grief he felt following his father’s death. His understandings are rooted in his decades as a therapist and have a particular clarity I think many of you will find helpful. In this episode, we discuss: How the death of a parent in old age is still a big psychological event and brings up many related losses...

*Trigger warning - includes references to racial abuse that some listeners might find distressing* This is a fast moving energetic conversation which will at times stop you in your tracks. Trisha Goddard is an extraordinarily successful actress and television presenter. In this deep and emotionally revealing interview, Trisha takes us on a ride with courage and honesty. You will discover how she o...

This is an episode you need to listen to if you want to understand the experience of suffering mental illness. Yvette, as one of our unheard voices describes with stigma blowing clarity what it is like to live with mental illness. She suffers from bipolar disorder, depression and binge eating.  The first thing you will realise is that suffering from a mental illness is very different from having d...