When my clinic dies and the idea for a book was born

Hello, and welcome to The Business of Psychology. I'm Dr Rosie Gildthorp, a clinical psychologist, and as will be very relevant to this miniseries that we're doing, a mum to three neurodivergent children, and a soon-to-be author. So this is a short series that I'm recording to let you behind the curtain as my journey publishing my first book, You Are Doing Enough. And I'm not doing this as a kind of polished, look how easy this was, success type story. I'm doing it because I know so many of you listening are therapists and psychologists who have your own book idea sitting somewhere, maybe in a drawer, maybe in the back of your head, and I really want you to hear what the process has actually been like, and, you know, my tips for getting that book out of your head and onto the page, if that's what you want to do.

So when was the first moment I knew that this had to be a book? So when I was planning this podcast episode, I found it really difficult to know where to begin because there is so much to say on the topic of publishing a book. But I think it really makes sense to start with the moment I knew I was going to write it, because it was quite a odd experience for me. Like I said, I have written the beginnings of many books before. I write a lot. I write for my Substack, I write for other organizations' blogs. I write materials for Psychology Business School all the time. I write materials for my clients all the time. I really love writing. It's always been a passion of mine, and my love of writing actually is what I think made my business successful in the early days. Because back then, writing a lot of blog content was really helpful for search engine optimization. And it also meant that I could make some additional income from writing quite early. But the idea of writing a book has always really intimidated me, partly because I don't know that I have the kind of brain that finds it easy to structure something as long as a book. I have lots of ideas, quite good at the, like, actual putting of words on the page, I think, in a way that is engaging for people. But I've never been sure that I could hold somebody's attention for an entire book, because that seems like a real art to me of pacing, and kind of knowing where to put the major learning points, which I just felt like I didn't have, and I didn't have as much time as I would like to learn about it either.

So I think that's why I'd kind of started lots of books and then just been like, "Oh, God, I don't, I just don't know how to bring this home, as a complete book that somebody would actually want to read from start to finish", and then I kind of lost my enthusiasm 'cause I couldn't imagine it being successful. And as you're probably thinking to yourselves, that is a form of imposter syndrome, and it's exactly the same as the imposter syndrome that I coach people through all the time when they're starting their businesses. Because actually writing a book is a skill, and if you put your mind to it, you can learn a new skill, and I just hadn't really been allowing myself the time or the opportunity to invest in learning that skill, probably because deep in my heart I was worried I didn't have it in me to do it.

So those were all the reasons I hadn't written a book before, but this one felt really different, and I think that's because it came in a moment of my life which felt a bit like a crisis. As some of you who were having coaching with me at the time might have been aware, I quite suddenly lost the childcare that I'd been relying on to run my clinical practice, and it was really, really difficult. It's a moment I talk about in the book because as other parents of autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, or children with learning disabilities will know, finding childcare for a child whose needs are unusual is really, really difficult. If there isn't somebody in your family that can do it, it, for many of us, is impossible, and for a couple of years, I'd thought it was impossible for us, and that meant that my working time had had to be very, very limited. And that meant that my clinical time was extremely limited, because for good reasons we need to have, you know, very protected and secure childcare for clinical hours, slightly less so for coaching and writing work. So I'd always kept that going, and I'd always managed a few clinical hours a week. But I really wanted to scale that up. I think, you know, this is going back a few years now, I was really excited to get back into the swing of clinical work. We'd moved back to Kent, where I've got much more support network, and I was really excited about, you know, having an in-person practice again. Had a lovely premises in town, and I really put my back into filling up those books, and fill they did. So we had managed to find some childcare to support that, and she was brilliant, and my son, who was the person who, you know, most needed that individualized kind of support from her, formed a really close relationship with her. You know, he loves her. There's no... I don't know why it's, it's taboo to say that. Like, children form really deep attachments with the people that care for them, and I wouldn't have invited somebody into our home that wasn't deserving of that either. So you know, she was great. She was an important part of our family, and he had a, a really deep bond with her.

But unfortunately, for, you know, valid and important reasons, she needed to leave us after... I think she gave in her notice at about six months and left us after nine months. And as you can imagine, having put all of that work into building up my practice, to then need to wind it down again so quickly when I knew there wasn't gonna be somebody else around the corner was really devastating. But what was really interesting to me was there was no part of me that wanted to start looking for a replacement. I knew as soon as she gave me her resignation that I would not replace her. And I did my due diligence. I spent time talking to my business coaches and looking at spreadsheets and thinking about, you know, how sensible it was to not replace her. But ultimately, I, you know, knew very early on that I was ready to embrace a new chapter in our lives, and that that would involve a different way of working. Rather than just trying to plug gaps in childcare to make my old model work again, which is really what I'd been doing for the past, you know, five years or so, actually, I was ready to recognize that what my children need from me is different, and that actually I want to be the one that is around for the unpredictable pickup times, for the reduced timetables, for the meetings, 'cause there's so many meetings, and that I think principally I could not bear to bring in a conveyor belt of people who my kids would attach to and would then leave them. I just knew that I wasn't gonna put them through that.

As I've probably mentioned before, I tend to make big decisions quite instinctively, and I did know immediately that my clinic was going to close and that this time there was not gonna be a plan to reopen the doors. But that didn't actually make it any easier. I was certain, but I was really sad, and the grief hit me quite hard, I think, because it felt like a final acknowledgement that the career that I'd imagined for myself, which was already looking pretty different to the one that, you know, I'd been sitting in training at Salomon's imagining, but I think this was the moment where I accepted that I probably wasn't gonna return to that path, and that, you know, seeing lots of clients wasn't gonna be in my future for a while, at least for a long while. And so that was really difficult. And I think something I know about myself is that I tend not to sit for very long with the way that I feel about things, and that's something I often work on with my clinical clients. And actually, a lot of the clients that I was supporting at the time were also parents of neurodivergent children and children with learning disabilities, many of whom had come to me because they'd also been through traumatic experiences. And I noticed that something that I work with regularly with my clients was this idea of allowing the grief to be there, and that we all had different ways that we needed to sort of sit with that, and different people have different tolerances as well. My clients tend to be a bit like me and very often kind of dive into action. So I noticed that because I wasn't doing what I've always done before when we've had a big shock or a big change in the family, which is immediately think of a resilience plan, "Okay, how am I gonna make the business work now in this new set of circumstances?" I wasn't doing that. I was like, "No, it's not gonna work. Actually, my plan is not to replace this part of my income straight away. My plan is just to allow this to go for the time being." And so I felt like I needed some kind of outlet to help me process what that meant, what that meant for my identity, and so I just started writing.

And when I started writing, I wasn't really writing a book. I thought that it might be a Substack series or maybe even something I didn't publish. I was really writing to consolidate my thoughts about what we've been through, what my children have been through, what myself and my husband have been through as parents, what I've been through as a professional. I was really trying to make sense of it, and actually it's ended up being something I put into the book, and I've put on the marketing page for the book, was that it was really my attempt to make sense made ink, because it is such a confusing world. Like, especially I think for us, where we've got lots of question marks over the labels that we use for neurodivergence, the diagnostic process. I had so many questions about all of that. You know, what it meant for my children, what it meant for me, what it meant for the future. All of that kind of uncertainty pinging around in my head, combined with really not knowing how we're gonna make this family life work, how I'm gonna make my professional life work. And I just thought, "My goodness, this is too much for one mind. I need to, I need to put this on paper in order to process it myself." So I started doing that, it was kind of taking the form of shorter form articles because that's what I'm used to writing. But they weren't really designed to be read by anybody or go anywhere.

So I started doing that, and I set it up as a practice for myself that I was gonna take time, before the kids woke up every morning, just to get these thoughts out of my mind, to help me feel more settled and more regulated for the rest of the day. So I started that, and I found the practice extremely soothing. So I, you know, I've always been somebody that has found writing quite therapeutic, something I use with clients that also find it therapeutic. It can really settle my nervous system, and it was... I found it really beneficial. So it started off purely as a process thing, and then I guess probably about a month in, so maybe I'd been writing for about 30 days, I started to think that some of the stuff that I was writing about would actually be quite useful to share, because so much of it, you know, the more I wrote about my own experience, the more I realized, oh, yes, that has a lot of synergy with this family that I saw or this really reminds me of what this client went through. And I started to think, actually, what those clients had in common when they sat in front of me in the therapy room was they all thought that they were going through this alone. Like, almost all of them would talk about, you know, coming out of an assessment appointment or a meeting with the school and either on the walk home or sitting in their car just feeling this, like, wave of emotion crash over them and feeling all of this kind of shame and anxiety and fear, and then kind of buttoning it back up and just carrying on with their day and not talking about it until they came into therapy with me because they just couldn't find a way to talk to their friends and family who hadn't had those experiences about what they were feeling, about why sometimes the moments that don't look that big or dramatic are the ones that really make you terrified about the future, or really frightened that you're not doing the right thing for your child.

And I thought one of the biggest breakthroughs that tends to happen in therapy is that validation and normalization of those moments. And I thought, well, if I could put some of this stuff out there, then I could reach all the people that are willing to pick up a book, and sort of give that feeling of validation, that reassurance that those feelings don't mean that you're inadequate or that you're not doing a good enough job, or as the book is called, You Are Doing Enough, that, you know, those things don't mean that you're not doing something that you should be doing. I thought if I could give that to people, then that would be such a powerful use of the time that I can no longer spend providing therapy. And I started to realize, the more I wrote, the more I realized that the clinical psychologist in me that loves working with human beings, needed an outlet. That part of me needed a way to be useful to people. And the more I wrote, the more I started to think, I think this could be it.

So I guess that was the time when I knew that I was gonna keep going with this, and that I was going to try and shape it into a book, and that I wasn't just gonna leave it as a Substack post, or turn it into training or something like that. It was that thought of, you know, somebody who feels really alone sitting on the tube, coming back from some kind of harrowing meeting, just picking this up and going, "Okay, this is normal. I'm not on my own." And so yeah, it started from there. And everything that I wrote for the first kind of, three or four months that I was working on the book was more memoir. So it was stories from my life with a bit of psychological formulation about what was going on for me and my family. You know, but it was really about our story. And then as I moved through the kind of diagnostic process, I started drawing on lots more kind of research and clinical theory and psychological theory to try and explain to the reader, like, why our diagnostic labels are the way they are, and why it's okay to question them or think of them as a little bit blurry around the edges. Because the other thing that I would hear a lot from families, and that went through my own mind so much in the diagnostic process, it was really coming out as I was writing as a big theme, was this worry about, like, well, this label, it doesn't completely fit, or, you know, does this label mean... Now we've been given this diagnosis, does it mean that my child actually is not the person I thought they were, and they're actually gonna turn out to be totally different to the person I thought I was seeing unfold in front of me? And it just felt really important to me to start infusing more of the knowledge that I have as a clinical psychologist about all of that stuff, that I wouldn't have if I was, you know, in a different career. So I started to kind of infuse some of that. And then as I kind of got to the end of the memoir part and the stories about our life, I decided that I wanted to kind of go back through and after each story think about what I would advise or, like, what would probably happen in a session if an individual or a family had come to me with that story, very similar to the one that I'd just shared.

And so the structure of it started to come together, and I realized I was kind of writing a book where every chapter would be broken into two sections. So the first section is me talking about my experience, and the second section is me as a clinical psychologist saying what I would say in a session with a family going through that experience. And so once that structure hit me and I was like, "Oh, this is the way that it works as a book," then I started to research other narrative nonfiction books and how their structures worked and how they were engaging for the reader all the way through. And all of those worries I'd had about, can I actually write a book to completion that will be interesting from start to finish? Instead of just, you know, thinking that that was to do with my innate talent, I actually invested the time in those 6:00 AM sessions in seeing how other people had done it and actually learning, you know, how is a good narrative nonfiction book structured? And then just kind of imposing that structure onto my work. And so that was it really. Like, I never, I never doubted from that point that I was gonna get this book finished. What I wasn't clear about at all though, was whether there would be a market for this kind of book. So I, at this point, didn't know whether I would turn this book into just, like, a serialized Substack, because I have got a bit of an audience on Substack already, or whether I would, you know, seek a traditional publishing route, or whether I would, decide to self-publish the book.

To be honest, my thoughts were all about I want to complete this thing, partly for myself, but also because I have this really strong drive that it might be really helpful to other people going through this, like, utterly crazy and destructive system that parents of neurodivergent and children with learning disabilities have to go through. And I just had this real conviction that this is how my skills as a clinical psychologist can be useful in this season of life that I'm in. And because writing it was actually helpful to my mental wellbeing, it was never a struggle to show up every morning and do the writing. It was very kind of reinforcing in and of itself. I would not have regretted a single writing session even if, you know, no agent had ever been interested, no publisher had ever been interested. If the book never went anywhere, I would still not regret the time that I spent on it, because every moment of it was really valuable to me. It was my processing time, and I have had therapy as well, but I feel like I made much better use of that therapy because of the thinking that I'd done writing the book. I'm not really a very good verbal processor. I often... You know, I can think while I'm talking, but I have the best insights when I'm writing, for sure, by a really long way. And so I felt it was so powerful for me as an experience that it didn't really... The end goal wasn't the thing that got me up and writing every day. It was really the process of doing it, and that feeling of being the psychologist I wanted to be, even if it was just for an hour every day.

The other thing that I did with this book that I think was really different to what I'd done with other ideas that I had, was that even though I didn't know whether I'd ever publish it in any way, and I had really substantial imposter syndrome about it, you know, there was a very loud voice in my head that was like, "You have not worked in learning disabilities for nine years, 10 years maybe?" Yeah, probably 10 years since I last worked in learning disability, and I... most of my experience in neurodivergence is lived experience, not professional experience. Like, don't get me wrong, from a professional perspective, I've, I've done additional training, and I've got a huge amount of interest in this area, so there aren't many books that I haven't swallowed, but that's not the same as somebody that spent, like, 25 years in community pediatrics. And so there was a really loud voice in my head like, "You are not the right professional to write this." And, and I think every SEND parent will relate to this, I am not knocking it out of the park all the time in my own life. If you go on to read the book, and I hope some of you will, then you'll see that, you know, I have not got it all sewn up, because that's not possible because you're dealing with human beings in a really hostile and difficult system. And so there was also a part of me that was like, "Do I really feel like I'm in a position to give advice to other people?" But actually, writing the book was the thing that got me over and through that because I realized that the message that I'm trying to give to people is not, "You should do this, this, and this, and then your life will be golden." It's that actually accepting that life looks really different and that what looks like success for us and our families might be really different to what we thought it looked like. And that's the biggest adjustment we can make for our own mental wellbeing. I realized that me writing it from a place of imperfection is entirely consistent with the message that I'm putting out there. So I kind of wrote myself into a position where I was okay with that.

But the other thing that I did, and I couldn't recommend it more to all of you, and this is probably my biggest advice, is I connected with other psychologists who had written books, and I told them that I was writing a book so that I could be really honest about all of those wobbles and, you know, how awful I felt. And particularly Claire Plumbly and Caroline Boyd were just so kind and so, like, willing to share with me how vulnerable they felt writing their books and how challenging it had been at different moments for different reasons. I think that is what enabled me to kind of keep going with it, but then also eventually seek an agent's representation for it. It was knowing that those people that I really respect, and that I think their books are amazing, that they also felt insecure at points during their writing process. And so I think, as is the answer to so many struggles we have in business as psychologists and therapists, the answer is connection. It's, you know, make yourself a bit vulnerable, talk to your peers, and that fear of what people will think of you starts to really dissipate. It was so powerful for me, and I'd recommend it to anyone. So do go along to the Psychosocials events if you're a psychologist, or get out to your local networking events, and make sure that you know, if a book is on your to-do list, you talk to it, you talk about it with people who have done it before. Because, you know, hearing their insecurities might just kind of dilute your own enough for you to get a good start anyway.

If anything I've shared today felt familiar, whether that's the terrible imposter syndrome, the early mornings, or just wondering if your idea is good enough, I'd love you to come further along this journey with me. When you pre-order You Are Doing Enough, you get free access to Get Your Book Published, a live webinar I'm running with literary agent Louise Buckley from Hannah Shepherd Literary Agency. We'll walk through exactly how to turn an idea like yours into a real published book, and there's a live Q&A at the end for your specific questions for Louise. So pre-order the book using the link in the show notes, and fill out a 30-second form with your order number, and you're in. I'd really love to see you there and help you make your book a reality.