‘What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’

It's lovely to see you Sian. Maybe you can start by telling me a bit about your background and what inspired you to pursue a career in psychology.

Well, I've been a journalist for nearly 40 years, and when I was growing up, the expectation from my school was that I wasn't going to achieve very much. I didn't score particularly well    in my exams and I was told I would probably make a good secretary, but I shouldn't bother applying to university. Neither of my parents went to university. My dad was a journalist on Fleet Street and it seemed like he had a tremendously exciting job. My mum was a nurse and she would have liked me to go into medicine, to become a doctor or a nurse like her, her mother and her mother's mother. But I couldn't even watch Casualty or Holby City  without feeling a bit sick, so I thought, that's it, that's not going to work. 

Also, for me, the exciting part of my dad's job was the storytelling aspect, hearing other people's stories, using a narrative to help explain an issue and helping them use their voices. Journalism was exciting. I did go to university in the end, I also studied journalism in the UK and USA and then I got onto the BBC training scheme and went all over the country; Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester and it was the late 1980s and these cities were full of intense news stories.

Can you give me an example?

The Hillsborough Stadium disaster. I quickly became aware that at the heart of many news stories is someone's worst ever day. If it's a disaster – and I subsequently reported from many – you're with people when they're at their most vulnerable and it's the job of a journalist to help tell their story, if they want to tell it. And to know when they are unable, or unwilling to do so. You have a responsibility as a journalist to hold that story well and respectfully, whether you are alerting the audience to something horrific so that something can be done or because their voice hasn't been heard anywhere else. That was a really important part of the job, but I felt as if I didn't have the knowledge to truly understand what the brain and body was doing in that moment, because when you're standing with somebody in shock, grief or distress you have to be incredibly careful. How close do you go? What do you ask? When do you stand back? You obviously get their consent first, but what does consent mean when they're in a state of shock? 

I needed to understand the psychology behind all this and began a part-time master's in psychology at the University of Westminster. My research project was on journalists, post-traumatic stress disorder, and how they recover after experiencing it. I wanted to go on and do a doctorate but I had cancer and that put my training off for a while. I was still a newsreader and was very lucky to be able to keep working and recover successfully, but then I thought if you don't retrain now… bear in mind I'm in my mid-50s, still reading the TV news every night… I thought if you don't do it now, you will never do it.

I remember seeing a Professional Doctorate in Counselling Psychology course at City University, and I applied, got an interview and began a full-time, three-year course. I continued to work as a newsreader and it felt a lot, finding the placements, getting up the client hours, deciding on research projects, doing the assignments… I relied on early mornings, late nights, long weekends of study and an incredibly supportive husband and family. I would counsel patients in the morning and then run off the Channel 5 and write and then read the news, and come home to study again. It was a very strange time, but I felt so honoured and humbled to be doing it. I love being a journalist and presenter and I'm still doing it, now on BBC Radio 4, but I chose to give up the daily TV news reading job to practise counselling psychology regularly. Retraining means starting again, being a student, and there's so much you don't know. 

After qualifying, I went back to work in the NHS. I'd been there before, working with those experiencing cancer, and I've been in the NHS again, over the past two years, this time working with people experiencing anxiety, stress and trauma. When I think of the places I worked in during my training – in cancer, in complex family trauma, with adolescents, in a charity setting – I can honestly say it was the most intense, glorious, terrifying, and exhausting experience of my professional life. I finally qualified in 2021.

What was it about counselling psychology that you were drawn to?

I feel like most of my career has been involved in telling stories or helping people tell stories. There is something about counselling psychology which is very relational. You are there to walk alongside someone as they try to understand and perhaps re-narrate their own story. It's as if they're the driver and you're the navigator alongside. 

Counselling psychology felt humanistic. The idea of unconditional positive regard, I like that, I liked the stripping away of power. Part of it for me as well, was having been a cancer patient and really feeling as though I didn't want to be in a psychology discipline which had a patient-expert dynamic or have an overly-medicalised, diagnostic-led approach. I'm not anti-diagnosis, it's been very helpful for members of my family, but I wanted to be in more of a client helper role where the focus is on strengths and facilitating growth, and that actualising potential, you know that Mick Cooper talks about, as being so essential to a counselling psychology discipline.

Those I trained with and the people that work in counselling psychology are a pretty diverse bunch, maybe more so than other psychology disciplines. People often come into it as a second career, perhaps because they're funding it themselves, and there are real issues around funding we need to address. But it does mean that a lot of people who become counselling psychologists have had a whole heap of other life experiences, which helps inform their practice, and I liked being in that group of people.

Did you encounter any challenges or barriers during your training?

There were a few things, not barriers so much, but a few things that I had to get my head around. I think the first was that I've always been the problem solver in my family. Ever since I was a kid, if there were emotionally charged moments or people, I would want to pacify and make better and solve things, and I guess that continued into adulthood, having five children and working in highly charged newsrooms. I think one of the challenges for me training to be a counselling psychologist was trying not to solve, trying not to be the one that comes up with lots of different 'Oh, have you tried this?' 'Have you tried that?'. There's a temptation you're when you're starting out, you've been taught all this stuff; you've got psychodynamic in your backpack and you've got humanistic approaches and you've got thirdwave CBT and you're with somebody and you think 'I want to help you. I really want to solve your pain'. There can be a temptation, I guess, to just reach into that backpack and just pull something else out, so if an approach isn't working, let's try this or that. That was something to notice and address. And I think it was also learning that you're often only with people for one hour in their week, and the rest of the time you're helping them focus on their own strengths and potential to grow. And that growing and that strength might take place, and it probably does take place, outside the hour you're with them. It's our job to become redundant so that people can manage their own obstacles, eventually.

A lot of your training was during the pandemic. Was that challenging?

Yes. My dad was ill at the time and we couldn't go and see him. The kids were at home and they were being home schooled. I was newscasting from home in my back bedroom, so in the morning I was with people who were experiencing cancer who couldn't get into hospital and after morning sessions, I'd walk through the kitchen and grab something to eat, put my makeup on and then turn on all the kit upstairs and then I was broadcasting. I'd be talking about the horrific statistics and the numbers of people dying and the necessary restrictions, making sure the kids are doing their homework and then worrying about one of my older sons who is a doctor and not having the PPE he needed. That went on for 18 months and that was a really strange time.

And of course, the pandemic was a challenge for us all. I was doing research into cancer and self-compassion and there was something very profound about hearing people's experiences with cancer during the pandemic and how they were trying to look after themselves because they couldn't get into hospital and the complexity of emotions that came with that. I felt very privileged to do that piece of work. I published that research and have another article being peer-reviewed. Again, it's important to get those voices heard.      

I was also helping out at the NHS Trust I was working at, who were doing one-off peer-to-peer support with ICU nurses. It was just a phone call to check in, as they're walking home or just finishing their shift. There was a lot of moral injury at that time: I see it in the job I'm in now in the NHS dealing with emergency service workers, and I think I first really became aware of moral injury as a journalist. That feeling of not having the resources you need to do the job effectively can feel like a wound to your soul. It was particularly psychologically painful for a lot of people who were trying to help during the pandemic in the NHS because they often felt they lacked the resources to be able to do the job they wanted to do, and because my mum had been a nurse and my son is a doctor, I felt that profoundly.

What did you learn about yourself during that time?

I did learn more about self-compassion, and sometimes the dominance of the self-critical voice during the pandemic. It's much easier to hear the voice that says you're not working hard enough or you're not doing enough or can you do more? Why aren't you doing more? That voice can be very bullying. Whereas this quieter, self-compassionate voice which might just be a whisper, you may barely hear it, but it is there and it's focusing on that. It's focusing on that self-compassionate voice that says you're doing the very best you can with what you've got at this moment. I think perhaps a lot of us learnt that during those times.


But also, when I was doing my masters, I remember being told by a lecturer after I challenged feedback, 'while you might be a success outside of this institution, here you are a student and must learn'. He was right, of course and it brought me back down to earth pretty quickly. I had to learn not to let perfect be the enemy of the good… knowing when to stop. I can drive really hard and always have done, and it's knowing when you might be reaching a point where you're not being very effective and to just hold back a bit. I think I learnt a lot about myself and how to regulate during that period, and be a bit easier on myself, otherwise I would have burnt out and I just wouldn't have got anything done.

It must have been a big shift to change tack from your broadcasting career: has anything about that change surprised you either pleasantly or otherwise?

Well, I've got a Radio 4 programme called 'Life Changing', which is on BBC Sounds as well, and that's about big shifts in people's lives, life changing moments, which change everything and which are extraordinary and which make you perceive life in a different way. I think what surprised me was how much of my psychology informed my journalism and sometimes how much of my journalism informed my psychology. Doing a programme like that where you're almost straddling two disciplines – you're not a practising psychologist in the room, but of course that's still a big part of who you are, and you're also a journalist in the room. I liked the way those two work together. That surprised me, how much psychology I was already using as a journalist even though, before training, I didn't have the knowledge and the credentials. I'm a better journalist for being a psychologist and I think I'm a better psychologist for being a journalist. 



I was brought up to be a compassionate journalist, with my Dad and with my family background in hospitals, we've always been aware of the responsibility of our role in helping people in distress, whether that's in an active way, or by listening and validating their story. It was only when I went into psychology that it was a light bulb moment: 'oh, right, this is why I've always wanted to do this!'

It sounds like Psychology has always been a part of you then.

Well, Psychology was never open to me as a child. Nobody was a psychologist in my family, and it was never suggested as a discipline at school or even university. When I started out things were quite linear. So it was only when I was going out to these national tragedies like the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989, the 7/7 bomb attacks, the Kashmir earthquake, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Westminster Bridge attack, the Manchester Arena bombing, the Grenfell Tower fire. Sadly, so many disasters and tragedies. When you go to all these places as a journalist, your way of helping is being a witness to suffering and showing the world what's going on. And I think that's what we do as psychologists, we bear witness to suffering. I think I've probably been doing it ever since I was in my early 20s, but in different ways.

What about the differences?

One big difference is that when you're a journalist, you often don't go back to the story you covered. That's quite sad. The audience doesn't get to see recovery. And I think the beautiful thing about psychology is, in the main, we get to be with people as they're moving towards recovery and hopefully help them with that growth in understanding what's happened to them and how to heal. As a journalist, you don't get to do that.

I was reporting from the Grenfell Tower fire for a few days. I knew the area because I used to live around the corner and my kids went to the local nursery. It was a terrible tragedy and its impact is widespread and long-lasting. At the time, like the other news journalists, I was trying to tell a bewildering, shocking story but it must have been hard for the community, seeing new crews descend and then disappear. 

Now I'm working in the NHS with emergency service workers who were at that fire and it's many years later and the pain and scars are still very raw. Seeing the real, long-lasting impact Grenfell has had, and helping some people recover if that's where they are and that's what they want, that has meaning to it in a way that my news journalism couldn't.

Yeah, as a psychologist, you're part of that person's journey. 

I remember talking to Julie Nicholson, who'd lost her daughter in the 7/7 bomb attacks. I asked her whether the media were kind to her at the time and she said 'sometimes'. That made me think about journalism as an entire discipline. You know, you do your bit, but you hope that your discipline stands up to being fair and compassionate when we're helping tell people stories in shock and grief.

Growth is not linear and it can be really mucky and difficult. To assume there's always growth after trauma feels wrong, because that puts somebody in a position where they feel they have to grow. Working with journalists with PTSD, I remember one saying recovery was 'hard fought growth' which involved 'going into the labyrinthine sewers' of his mind. What he found there was difficult and unsettling, but being able to reflect on it, safely, helped him. It took a long, long time though. You don't start sick and end up well, you don't start with PTSD and then all of a sudden 'ta-da!', everything's fine. It's a wibbly wobbly bridge, recovery. You need to hold somebody's hand going across it. When you get to the other end and look back, it might look a little different to how you thought it would, but you've done some learning along the way as a therapist and a client. I learn a lot from the people I work with. It's not their job to teach me, but I do find that, whoever I'm with, I'm learning something new every time.

What was the role of the BPS in your change?

My first degree wasn't in psychology, so I needed to do a psychology master's which gave me graduate basis for chartered membership. I knew that I wanted to do a BPS accredited course because to me the BPS suggests academic rigour, and so I went to the University of Westminster and then did the DPsych at City University where the courses were accredited too.

I've spoken at the BPS and done keynotes and hosted panels. When I was doing my master's, I was invited to give the BPS gala after-dinner speech at the annual conference, and I was deep in that study on journalism, post-traumatic stress disorder and post traumatic growth. And the organisers said, well, we want you to talk about trauma but could you just lighten it up before the bhangra dancing starts? That was fun. I've also done a couple of panels for the BPS on the importance of psycho-oncology and delivered the keynote at the recent Division of Counselling Psychology Conference in Glasgow for their 30th anniversary. It was on the power of storytelling in journalism and psychology.   

I'm part of the BPS division of counselling psychology, which has been going for 30 years. As Ray Wolfe said back in 1990, counselling psychology is an idea whose time has come, and it still feels like we are emergent. There are 4000 of us in the division, and yet we don't have our own journal, to connect our knowledge, practises, cultural resources and understandings. I think that's an idea whose time has come.      

I believe there is a real opportunity for the BPS in today's society. The NHS long term plan calls for a huge growth in the number of psychologists and psychotherapists and the Government says it wants to see another 8,500 mental health workers. There are already high vacancy rates for psychologists and this is where the BPS has a voice, a platform where it can say what's important in training, funding, research and development, so that we can get a larger pool of psychologists from all backgrounds and experiences, so people can get faster, better access to healthcare.   

And what do you do now?

I work with the Metropolitan Police, the London Fire Brigade and the London Ambulance Service. We're currently working with the UK Government, and the Government of Jersey on trauma-informed practices and care for their employees.

Part of my NHS role is trauma-focused therapy, another part is helping organisations consider a trauma informed perspective. That doesn't mean that everybody who works on something difficult is going to experience trauma, but if we think of trauma as a normal reaction to an abnormal event, when does it start to become sticky for either you or your colleagues and what can we do about it? I'm a believer in catching people upstream. There aren't enough of us working in PTSD, but what we can do is have a more proactive, preventative response, where we can talk about what we can look for as individuals and as teams when we're working in really challenging environments.

I know certainly from journalism; trauma wasn't something that you talked about much because it's part of your job to just get up and get back out there and I think that's what a lot of emergency service workers and healthcare staff feel. But you're only going to be able to do that well if you're resilient and you're only going to be resilient if you're aware of what's going on in your body, your brain and your behaviour, to spot things before they start to affect your life.

I work privately with media companies and individuals because anyone who runs towards danger has to look after their mental health. In journalism, we talk about putting on a protective flak jacket when we go out to report from war zones or disasters but we often don't have an emotional flak jacket as well. We need to prepare psychologically as well as physically. It's knowing what to look out for emotionally, who our support systems are, what our coping strategies might be. It's the before, the during and the after and having a clear strategy for all of it. 

I've done quite a lot of work on online harm as well, and managing distressing content. That's difficult, but there are tactics and tools we can use to protect ourselves before we see it.

Tell me about the BBC Radio 4 'Life Changing' podcast that you host. How does it relate to your own journey?



'Life changing' hears from people who've experienced moments which transform the way they look at themselves and the world. From a man who had to learn to talk again after his boss slit his throat in a coffee shop, to twin sisters who survived a crocodile attack, to a couple who became firm friends in an orphanage in the '60s but were split up and spent a lifetime looking for one another. They're now married. One woman who got a huge audience response told us about overhearing a nasty remark from teachers in primary school, calling her stupid and slow. She thought she had some sort of genetic fault, so she didn't have a long-term relationship, didn't have children and took low paid jobs. In her 60s, she was diagnosed with dyslexia. She felt she could finally shake off this narrative that she'd believed since childhood and has now got a Master's and is going for a PhD. We've got a new series coming out in the autumn, and there are great stories that are coming up.

Life changing moments for me? Perhaps having breast cancer and a sudden double mastectomy, although I'm lucky and grateful to have had such great NHS care. It did make me reassess how I wanted to spend my time and with whom. Also, having my third son, who was born without oxygen and who had fits for the first four years of his life. He's now 18 and a wonderful lad, but part of the reason for starting psychology was to try to understand his brain, because I didn't know what challenges he might face and how to help.

There are moments in your life that make you think it's not all about work. It's not all about striving. It's about taking a breath and reflecting on who you want to be with. I remember when I was doing my research into cancer, rumination and self-compassion and hearing from a man with incurable prostate cancer. He'd been reading a Mary Oliver poem as part of the mindfulness course. It had stuck in his head and he quoted it often: 'what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?' And that is what I keep asking myself. You don't have to have a life changing moment. We can all ask: What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Leaving BBC Breakfast after 11 years as its main presenter felt like a professional shift, having got up at 3:30 every morning to do a live, 3.5 hour programme every day with a team I loved. It felt risky stepping away from something I knew, to an uncertain career. My eldest son gave me a tiny brass plate, which still sits in front of me today and it says: 'The ship is safest in the harbour, but that is not where it's meant to be'. He was saying it might feel unsafe, but it's going to be extraordinary and it has been, and it is. I'm so grateful to those around me that encouraged me to do that, to go into a place of what felt uncertain.       

It's not as well rewarded as being a television presenter, although my goodness it should be! We do not reward our helpers, psychologists, healthcare workers, anyone who helps someone up. When you step away from something like television and do something like this and see those around you, and see how hard they're working and how much of themselves they give to the job, that is really humbling and I'm so proud to be with this extraordinary bunch of people. To learn, reflect and be tested, and have your thinking pulled about a bit. It's the best decision I've ever made. It's not always easy, but it was right.

You've also written a book.

Yes. It's called Rise: Surviving and Thriving After Trauma. I'd done a number of programmes for Radio 4, one of them was called the Science of Resilience, and another series called 'How to build a better brain' about how we strengthen our emotional and psychological reserves.  I was researching this and the impact of potentially traumatic events and then I got cancer. I write diaries when there's something on my mind that I can't vocalise, I find it much easier to shout on a page, and when I was diagnosed I didn't tell many people because I was still on the television and I didn't want the narrative to be, 'Brave ex-Breakfast star battles cancer'. It was important for me to focus my strength on our family, no-one else needed to know. I was writing the book and the publisher said to me, well, I think your story ought to be in it. They'd asked me if I'd written anything and I showed them some diary extracts and they said, yeah that needs to be in it. It was really raw and I hesitated about whether to show it to anyone, let alone put it in a book and publish it, but it felt honest to do that. I was trying to understand what I was going through and how best to recover and then I talked to all these extraordinary people, who'd gone through different challenges to see what worked for them and thought well, there's a body of knowledge here. I used experts and research, collating everything I knew about recovery after adversity. I had an extraordinary response from people and it probably sounds cliched and corny, but I did think if this helps one person, if there's somebody who can find some strength in this book and these stories and try some of these things, then it's worth it. People said it did help them, so I'm glad it's out there.

I'm also at the Senedd in Cardiff soon speaking about the importance of psychological support for people with cancer, on behalf of Maggie's Cancer Centres. I'm back in the Radio 4 studio recording 'Life Changing' and there's an exciting new radio project I'm working on too.   

We've spoken about your work and your career. Tell me about your life outside of psychology.

Gosh! Crowded, busy. Wonderful. I live in Kent and of our five children, two are about to go into GCSEs and A-levels. We've got a dog and I try to run, not as far or fast as I used to, but I keep that up. I do yoga and I read a lot. I try to go out with friends and to the theatre. I try for balance, even if it doesn't always work. I think if you work in psychology, it's really important to find those bursts of joy because you can be immersed in trauma, difficulty and challenges, and you need to step outside and reconnect with things that bring you happiness. The more grounded, rested and connected you feel, the better psychologist you'll be. It's not always easy.

The brilliant researcher, Kristen Neff, says 'you can't pour from an empty cup'. Having done research on self-compassion, I know how hard it is to show ourselves some kindness. But we need to focus on nourishing activities because if it's all depleting, we will just run out of fuel. There's still an attitude that it's selfish to look after yourself. We need to let go of that. Even if it's to say, and I've had to do this myself, think of looking after yourself as being in the service of others. If we're burnt out then what use are we to anyone? I encourage others to keep finding pockets of happiness. I need to take that advice too!