Ep 19: A Nurse’s Journey through Psychosis and Recovery with Emma Henry

Posted June 13, 2023

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Show Notes —

Nursing seemed like a good career path for Emma Henry. She had finally found a profession she enjoyed, where she felt she could make a difference.

But things changed. She had stressful experiences with her young children. She had stressful experiences at work. As things deteriorated, the unimaginable happened: She started experiencing hallucinations and delusions. She was having a psychotic episode.

Listen to this powerful conversation as we dive deep into Emma’s mental health journey and subsequent recovery.

We’ll see what factors led to Emma’s decline in mental health, and hear all about how she has now retrained as an Emotional Freedom Technique therapist and helps nurses with their own stress.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM EMMA’S JOURNEY IN THIS EPISODE

It is not healthy when somebody tells you to go back to work when you do not feel safe to go back to work.
Having at least one compassionate person who will make you feel heard is vital.
Nursing culture makes it hard to have open discussions about mental health. Emma did not feel she could share anything about her mental illness as she did not trust that her managers would be adequately trained or in a position to appropriately hold what she had to say.
Emma experienced thoughts about ending her life. We talk about how suicidality is a complex and individualized topic that can arise in different people for different reasons.
Emma did not want her kids to have any trauma, and that thought stopped her from acting on suicidal thoughts.
Emma would like to introduce coping mechanisms in nurse training if she were to redesign the support the staff is receiving.
She believes there should be better education about mental health.
After quitting nursing, Emma found EFT an effective tool that made her feel better.
EFT, or the Emotional Freedom Technique, is what Emma helps other people with, teaching them about coping mechanisms.

Today’s Guest:

Emma Henry, a former UK nurse, faced challenges with her mental health after experiencing prenatal and postnatal depression following the birth of her first child.

Emma decided to leave nursing. During this time, she encountered two coaches who introduced her to Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). EFT proved to be a highly effective coping tool that was unavailable to her during her struggles as a parent and nurse.

Recognizing the value of EFT in improving her well-being, Emma embarked on a journey to become an EFT Practitioner. Through her newfound profession, she now helps others by teaching them coping mechanisms and providing support using EFT.

Connect with Emma Henry here:

emmahilaryhenry@gmail.com

https://www.instagram.com/emmahenryeft/

https://m.facebook.com/p/Emma-Henry-EFT-Practitioner-100075966822830/

https://twitter.com/EmmahenryEFT

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/emma-henry-257074195

Follow Nathan and Nurse Wellbeing Mission for more practical preventative mental health tools for nurses and midwives:

Join our free Facebook group for wellbeing resources: https://www.facebook.com/groups/nursewellbeingmission

Find our wellbeing services at our website: www.nursewellbeingmission.com

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Transcript —

Nathan Illman 00:00

Welcome back to the podcast everyone. It’s me, Nathan Illman, your host. This is Nurse Wellbeing Mission. In today’s episode, I’ve got a special conversation with you with Emma Henry. Emma is an ex-nurse who experienced a psychotic episode as a result of a number of. Factors, including the stress that was being caused by her work as a nurse that had accumulated over a number of years. Emma shares her story in this episode with me, and it is a fantastic window into some of the failings of staff support within the nursing profession to help us to understand more about some of the particular challenges that nurses are going through and how some of these different challenges. All come together to create intense levels of stress and what we can do to better support people. So Emma’s story is one that involves severe mental ill health. So experiencing hallucinations and delusions, and having a psychotic breakdown is something that most people would absolutely dread happen to them. Of course, we don’t want that to happen to anyone. And Emma courageously shares her story about what happened to her. And we learn from this conversation some of the things that could be done differently and also share what she does now. So she has been on her journey through recovery and is now helping other nurses and other people manage things like anxiety and stress. So if you don’t know me, I’m someone who is big on preventative mental health. I believe in having open, honest, vulnerable conversations. About mental health and trying to remove some of the stigma and shame around having these conversations in nursing, midwifery, and healthcare in general. So what you’ll be getting in this conversation is just that there’s lots of vulnerability. There is a courageous and bold discussion about mental health and what can be done to improve that and support it within healthcare. So if you don’t already follow me, a Nurse Wellbeing Mission, you can do it, you can find us on Facebook, and join our free Facebook group, it’s Nurse and Midwife Wellbeing Mission. You can sign up for my free community. So this conversation that I had with Emma was a live event. That people had access to. As part of my free community, I open up these conversations to the community to have guided reflective practice after them with Q and a with the guest. So if you’d like to be part of that in the future, then go over to my website, it’s nurse wellbeing mission.com, and you can find it. Through the individual nurse’s section of that, how you can join up to the community. You can also find us on Instagram. It’s at underscore Nurse Wellbeing Mission, and on Twitter it’s at Nurse Wellbeing. If you’d like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. If you don’t already subscribe to the podcast, please do so wherever you get your podcast from. So I’m gonna finish my little intro for now and leave you to this amazing conversation about mental health and recovery with Emma Henry. Everyone listening or watching Emma and I just had a brief chat about this conversation. And I think this is worth sharing at the beginning, at the outset of this conversation about how open and honest EM was gonna be about her experience. That she very kindly offered to share with us this evening. And I was saying that I want Emma to be as courageous and open and honest about her experience as possible. So I’m really looking forward to this. Emma, thank you so much, for joining me. Why don’t we start with you just telling us a little bit about your background, where you came from, and how you got into nursing in the first place?

Emma Henry 04:01

Thank you Nathan for letting me tell my story. So I’m Emma. I’m 50 now. I got into nursing when I was 32. Before that, I tried to do engineering at university, but it was just too difficult. The math was crazy, so I kind of bummed around for a while and I wanted to go to Australia, so I thought nursing would be a really good idea. To do it that way. So I did my nursing, qualified when I was like five, and went to Australia for a year and a bit, which was amazing. And the nursing out there is completely different from how nursing is in the UK. Came back and, yeah, I, nursed for about. 10 years in the UK and started to feel a little bit ill after having a couple of kids. And my youngest one didn’t sleep until he was nearly two. I had gone from the wards that were so stressful into dermatology, so the hours were better. But then, started to feel a bit strange and started to hear voices and yeah, it was a bit scary. Heard them for two weeks and it was. There was nobody there. First of all, I thought they were playing hide and seek with these patients who were gonna get their leg ulcers done so they can’t walk very fast. So I was thinking, well, where are they? They can’t be hiding that quickly. So yeah, it was an incredibly horrible and scary time. And a little bit after that, it was well booked day, we were in Waterstones and my daughter’s face turned into the devil and she was only five. So I kind of realized then that things weren’t so well, and maybe I should be taking some time off.

Nathan Illman 05:35

I’m really curious to go back to the point at which you first started noticing things weren’t quite right. You know, it sounded like there was a gradual progression of, that feeling burned out or feeling stressed, and one of the main catalysts for that was lack of sleep from your youngest. Was he your son?

Emma Henry 05:57

Yeah, he was little Zachy.

Nathan Illman 05:58

Yeah. Yeah, Zach. So. Can you just talk a little bit about any other sort of symptoms or like how you were feeling before the onset of those, the voices and the other hallucinations kind of how were you feeling at that time? What, happened before the onset of those?

Emma Henry 06:18

I had really bad prenatal depression with my first and postnatal depression because I had a miscarriage before that when I was at work, which was a little bit horrendous. So then I was really paranoid that I was gonna miscarry again. And so the pregnancy was fine, but I was just really scared. And after having Daisy, I. Was awful. And I thought that she would get up in her little cot at a couple of weeks old and tell me how awful I was as an old woman. And yeah, it was pretty awful. And you have all these horrible, crazy thoughts, you know, the worst-case scenario. And after about a year they went. And another year later, I got pregnant with Zach and it was all fine. I felt fine in my pregnancy. I felt fine afterward. And when he came out and I went, oh, this is what you’re supposed to feel like when you have your baby. This is like the joy you get. I didn’t have any of that with Daisy. It was all fear and panic. And then suddenly I had this other child and I was like, oh, so you can relax when you have your child and you can really enjoy them. You can actually see them for who they are. And it’s just, it was a beautiful feeling. But then, About a year or so afterward, I was just moody all the time. He hadn’t slept or couldn’t understand why he couldn’t sleep, and we were trying everything. There was no pattern. We’d keep diaries off his sleep and we just go to the doctor saying, look, we don’t understand what’s going on. He just does not sleep. There’s nothing here that would say that we could do. And so, yeah, it was pretty horrific and just felt very snappy and I was noticing that. I was hearing things a bit louder and I was thinking, why am I in this coffee shop? And everything has suddenly just gone poof. It’s really loud and it all seems a bit freaky that I don’t quite understand what’s going on and it’s too loud and I don’t like. I want to run away. I’m quite scared right now, and I was thinking, this isn’t normal. This isn’t like me. I like to be around lots of people and noise, and then suddenly when you’d walk past a room that had a pump, but the noise would just be extreme and you’d just, I just wanted to hide. Just wanted to hide and yeah, not be around anything, you know, wanted to be really quiet, which is quite difficult when you’ve got a two-year-old and a five-year-old because you have to go places with them and that’s gonna involve indoor stuff and so, yeah.

Nathan Illman 08:29

I’m sure that’s an experience many people who are listening can resonate with, with being a nurse or midwife or indeed just working in healthcare in general and having young children demands that are being placed on you. In that, your example, that nursing environment as well as having some of these ongoing issues that come along with parenting don’t just easily sort themselves out sometimes, do they? It sounds like you were doing everything you could to try and support your son’s sleep, but of course, that’s stressful not being able to change it, but also because of the lack of sleep you’re getting as well. Right.

Emma Henry 09:08

Yeah, it’s pretty horrific not having a good night’s sleep and you’re never quite sure, so you can’t really go into that deep sleep cuz you’re never quite sure when he’s going to wake up. And yeah, it was a horrible time. So I really feel for people who say their children don’t sleep, it is horrific. It’s the worst thing ever. And you know, you’re trying to do. 12-hour shift on a couple of hours sleep, which is, I think, quite dangerous because you know, you don’t really know what you are doing. Oh, you’re doing medication. You know what it’s like being a nurse. You’ve got a lot of responsibility and suddenly you don’t have enough sleep and you just feel unsafe, and then that makes you question everything that you’re doing. Then there’s extra pressure. So it’s this big circle, isn’t it, of, of like, Doom and gloom and fear and stress and anxiety and yeah, you don’t wanna do anything wrong cuz you’re looking after people and Yeah, but you’re just so tired, you don’t really know what you’re doing.

Nathan Illman 09:58

It sounds like there was a whole storm, like kind of like that came before the psychosis, those hallucinations and other experiences. If later said that anxiety and stress and. Probably questioning yourself and doubting yourself as well. And before we get more into, the psychosis, I’m, I’m really curious actually to understand a bit more about you. So you were experiencing all this stuff before, you know, your mental health was deteriorating. You were having all these issues, um, around parenting outside of your nursing role, I suppose. Two questions. I’m really interested in what kind of support was. Offered to you in your nursing role and related to that, how much did people check in with you, like just in general, your leadership or other colleagues around what was going on for you?

Emma Henry 10:51

I don’t mean to laugh, let’s just say it wasn’t the best, but then I don’t think anybody really knew what to do. Some of them were a bit scared, thinking, oh my God, she’s hearing voices like I’m a bit scared of talking to her. Working in health, uh, is probably the least supportive of when you go off men when you got, you know, like mental health problems. I dunno, I hope it’s changing. I really do hope it’s changing, that they are supporting people better than they did five years ago because it really was right. You know, you really aren’t very well. You know, my boss would maybe check in with me maybe once a week, maybe once or twice, you know, but she did do regular updates and asked how I was. But yeah, and then I’d have to go in and see the doctor and she’d be like, we need to get you back to work. And I was saying, I’m not ready. You know, that’s the last thing I want to do. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel great. You know, I feel dead inside. I’m not ready to go back. Oh, but Emma, come on it. It’s been a few months. Let’s get going. You know? And it’s quite a stoic way of doing it, and. It’s not healthy when somebody’s telling you you should be going back to work when you don’t feel safe to go back to work. And you are paranoid that you are gonna go back and the voices are gonna start again.

Nathan Illman 12:01

Alright, so this is after you’ve developed the voices and the other, the loose nations and stuff. So this is when the psychotic episode is fully fledged. You’re getting this kind of check-in from your manager, but you, there’s a kind of almost pressure to actually return to work before you are ready. Yep.

Emma Henry 12:17

It was, yeah, so because I’d had psychosis and it wasn’t extreme psychosis, so I, I wasn’t sectioned and so I was, I was quite well for that part of psychosis, but also I was too ill to be seen by anybody else, so there was nothing for me at all While I was basically in limbo land, and I was seen by my GP once a month. And that’s what kept me going. Knowing that I could see my gorgeous gp, who was really supportive, who really helped out, who listened to me, got, you know, the mental health teams come out and see me quite quickly. And then after that, it was just nothing. Just him.

Nathan Illman 12:50

I suppose it highlights a couple of really important things. One is gaps in services and how people fall through the net, so to speak. And. Aren’t offered support for a particular difficulty when they’re in a particular circumstance. But I suppose the second point, which is really lucky for you, is how incredible just one single compassionate person, like the kind of impact that person can have, right? Mm-hmm. I’ve talked about that before with my own experience of depression and how I was lucky to have found The GP I went to when I was experiencing severe depression happened to be a really compassionate, understanding, empathetic GP who had time for me, and I think. You know, that person was instrumental in saving me from the depths that I was in, and it sounds very much like you had someone who was there even though there wasn’t access to specialist psychosis services or something else, or you didn’t get any kind of community mental health support at that time. You had this one person who was your sort of rock.

Emma Henry 13:56

Yeah, he was just stunning. He didn’t push me back at all. He’d be like, right, Emma, how are you feeling? And I would just sit there, just numb. I just remember being incredibly numb and just not crying or anything, just not having any emotions, just being numb. And he’d ask me like, how are you feeling? And everything else. And I’d tell him how awful I felt. And he just sat there and he was really empathetic. Because he’s quite a tough doctor as well and he’s one of those ones it doesn’t take full lightly and you know, if you’re there cause you wanna like bit a time off work, you won’t do that. But yeah, he was really wonderful. He sat there, I felt like I was listened to and I was heard because a lot of people weren’t listening and it was a very lonely, terrifying time.

Nathan Illman 14:37

Yeah. It certainly sounds that when, your reality is shifting, your grip on reality is, is shifting. And other people, it sounds like you had quite good awareness as well that other people weren’t experiencing this. So I can imagine just having that going on in your, your mind must have been really scary. Um, I just want to take a couple of steps back. So when I asked you about the kind of support that you were getting at work, I was obviously interested in what happened when the psychosis had developed, but I was also really interested before the psychosis developed because I, I guess there will be a lot of nurses who experienced a high level of stress and burnout similar to what you might have had sometime before the psychosis developed and. I’m always interested in people’s experiences of what kind of discussions happen in the workplace around mental health. So going back maybe some months before the psychosis developed, what kind of conversations were happening where you worked around mental health, and what kind of support was being given to not just you, but maybe colleagues?

Emma Henry 15:40

None. I didn’t really talk about mental health. It’s one of those subjects that people just feel uncomfortable about talking about. Even though we are healthcare professionals, it just makes people feel uncomfortable. We are the nurses. We are the ones who don’t get sick. We are the ones who don’t have the mental health problems. We are the ones that don’t, it doesn’t happen to. And when it does, everybody just doesn’t know how to react. And they’re all like, oh, you know, how’s going? Cause I didn’t think I did. I didn’t think anything was wrong. I just thought I was very tired and I just thought I was snappy not doing my job. You know the best as I could because I was tired. I had no idea what was coming, and I just didn’t see it for myself. I was very paranoid, like really paranoid, and I obviously couldn’t talk to my boss and say, oh, good morning. By the way, I’m really paranoid today and I’m thinking this is, and this, but I talked to one girl who I, who used to be a mental health nurse and used to chat a lot. I used to tell her like how I used to feel and she was so supportive and she was amazing and, and I thought, if I actually tell her really, really everything, she’s gonna think I’m completely mental. Because I remember being in a room with a woman and I could hear the voices and I went, can you hear that? She was like, no. Like I thought she was joking to begin with. Cause I just thought, oh, that’s a really good joke. But yeah, it was horrific and I couldn’t just come out and say to somebody, oh, by the way, I can hear. A multitude of people. There are many, many people talking, but there’s nobody there, you know. We all just think, oh gosh, what’s going on?

Nathan Illman 17:03

So in a culture in which mental health, in general, is not discussed, to then have experiences which are perhaps even more unlikely or even more severe, the thought of sharing any of that was just, or it just didn’t feel like it was possible to do that. There would be no one to really understand what was going on for you.

Emma Henry 17:24

It was a bit scary having to admit, you know, something’s this. Badly wrong that you’ve gotta say, you know what? This has gone so bad that I am seeing things. I’m hearing things that obviously aren’t there, and I dunno what’s reality. I dunno. You know what’s going on. How do I know you are real? And yeah, that’s a scary place. And to actually admit that to somebody, you have to really trust them. Yeah. And you know that whatever you say is gonna go in your record. And you want to be really careful about what goes on your record.

Nathan Illman 17:56

You mentioned about that kind of belief system that happens within nursing, which is like, we are the one to help other people. We don’t get sick. I’m curious to know if that fed into how you perceived yourself and what you were going through and whether that created any kind of internal narrative about it. Be like feeling this is a weakness, or I failed in some way.

Emma Henry 18:20

Completely. It is because you are looking after people all day and you know when you finish work you still think about it, your patients and everything else. We’re not the ones that get sick even though we do get sick. It just feels very strange and it does feel like weakness. You know, things have changed. Thank goodness for covid for one thing that’s come outta Covid is people talk about mental health now and they’re definitely more compassionate than they used to. Which is so wonderful to see. But yeah, it was, I felt like a complete failure. Like how comes, I’m the one that can hear these voices and nobody else can. I must, you know, be really weak. To be able to hear these voices and to feel so low and to feel so rubbish about myself, like, what’s wrong with me? Why am I feeling so rubbish? Like it, it was humongous worries me, you know? Like it was just horrific. It really was. And when I feel myself, We all get down days and we get good days, and when I get down day, I’m like, you know what? That’s just a little down day. That’s nothing like psychosis and feeling the worst you’ve ever felt in your life that you just don’t want to carry on living. You know? So I just know that if I get a down day, I can get myself back up just fine, cuz I know it’s nothing like having a psychosis.

Nathan Illman 19:29

Well, obviously we’re glad you, you lived to tell tale. It sounds like things really did get to the point at which you were having thoughts about ending your life. Can you just talk a little bit about how you navigated that and how you managed to get through that? Like what you would tell yourself, what you would do to get through those start periods?

Emma Henry 19:48

I’d be on the sofa downstairs and I wouldn’t sleep at night. And I’m just thinking, you know what? I just want this to end. I just want this feeling to end. I can’t see myself ever getting better. I just, I feel so bad about everything. I’m having to fake it in front of the kids. I’m having to fake it to everybody else. I can’t possibly tell anybody else how I feel, cuz I’ll run a mile. They’ll think I’m completely loony. They won’t understand and they’ll never talk to me again. So I, it was kinda like my dirty secret of what was going on. And I thought if I just cut my wrists and. I’ll be fine. It’ll all happen real quickly and but the only thing that stopped me, it wasn’t the blood that would’ve stopped me. It was the fact that my kids would’ve felt me and I would’ve been cold. That was the one thing. He’s not rational thinking at all. It really isn’t. It’s not like, no, the kids would’ve come in, it’d been this huge pile of blood horribleness. It would’ve been a fat, and they’d touched me and. That was the one thing that stopped me from doing any kind of harm to myself, cuz yeah, I just didn’t want my kids to have any kind of trauma from what had happened already.

Nathan Illman 20:51

Suicidality is a really complex and individualized topic. You know, the reasons people have for wanting to end their life, the reasons people have for ultimately living it can be very different. So that doesn’t sound strange to me about having a child myself. I can totally get that. But, um, You know, it’s obviously, it’s great that there was something there, even though it was perhaps a bit of a gory image or whatever in your mind that ultimately led you to not do that. So if you could go back and redesign the way staff, including yourself were supported at the time, or perhaps leading up to that point, maybe even the year or two before that, you know, Having been inside the system and now I guess sort of being a bit outside, looking back in, what would you change about the way you were onboarded as a nurse? What would you change about the kind of training that managers might get, the kind of training that you might get? Talk me through what would be an ideal situation to prevent the kind of experience you had.

Emma Henry 21:55

I would be, I would like to introduce coping mechanisms and talk about this in your training, in nurse training about, you are gonna see things that are gonna screw you up for certain things. You’re gonna get P T S C, let’s just be honest. You’re gonna see horrific things. So why not teach people about coping mechanisms there? Why don’t you say you’re gonna get really stressed, you’re gonna get incredibly tired. You’re gonna take your work home with you, you know until you learn how to switch that off. You know you’re gonna carry it with you, so you’re gonna get a lot of overwhelm. You’re gonna be pulled from the moment you start work, to the moment you finish. Like you’re gonna be pulled here, there, and everywhere. Teach them how to have this coping mechanism that they can do themselves so that they know whether it’s breathing or whatever it is that you can teach them. They can calm their nervous system down. They can think better. They can think nicer things about themselves than they can do their job. And they can do it to their best ability, even though it’s going absolute chaos around at times that you can still do this and the managers can go, right, okay, how was your day? If you felt it was rubbish day, you could go and talk to them and they could say, right, what can we put in place to help you? Like this is, I’m gonna teach you a coping mechanism. It’s gonna really help you. You can take it home, you can do this wherever. And there’s. Multiple things that you can do, but, I think that’s just not part of it. They don’t think outside of like, you know, obviously they want to look after their staff and they’ve got little tick boxes, but what if you thought a little bit differently? What if you were like right first thing in the morning, everybody we’re gonna like get together, we’re gonna do like some deep breathing, whatever, we’re gonna do something to calm your nervous system down so we all start on a better level and then, Carry on. And if it starts to go a bit hectic and you know, especially post-op wards, if you’re gonna like get lots of patients back at the same time, you can cope with all of this stuff.

Nathan Illman 23:42

Sounds like the few key things are like one is changing education and when people begin their career, so almost from the nurse training perspective, when you’re leaving that being more honest and open about the types of things that you might experience. I’m preparing people for that, but then setting them up for. As much success as possible, at least coping by providing psychological, emotional skills as well as continuing mental health education, isn’t it, around what you are going to experience. All of that helps to normalize people’s experience, doesn’t it? You’re experiencing anxiety or you’re experiencing post-post-traumatic stress. Whatever it is, as you know, something I believe strongly in as well. We have very much overlapping aims, goals, vision for all of this stuff. So let’s focus now if it’s okay on the recovery process. So talk us through what happened after you were getting that great support from the GP to share a bit about the next steps that happened after that, and then. You can tell us all about what, where that led you to now, what you’re doing right now if that’s okay. Yeah,

Emma Henry 24:56

Yeah, so my GP I’d seen monthly for six months, and after that, it’d be every couple of months. And then I didn’t need to see him anymore because I decided to quit nursing. I was like, I went back and it didn’t work so well and the voices came back and I was like, I can’t do this. So yeah, I quit nursing and it was a wonderful thing to do. The mental health team had to come back round because I had a little bit of a psychotic event again, and they were like, right, you know, they were said, Emma, you know you can leave nursing. And I was like, can I? Are you sure about that? They’re like, yes, Emma, you can. And it was kind of like somebody given me permission to say, you can do something else. You don’t have to be a nurse. Cause while you are nursing, they’ve all got a pension. Your pension, your pension, your pension. Oh yes, I must stay in nursing. Or I’ll do another year. Do another year. Or keep going, keep going, keep going. Unhappy. Keep going. And when somebody said, Emma, you can just don’t have to do it anymore. You can do something else. It was like a little low-bulb movement. And I was like, well, maybe I can. And so I quit and I felt very happy, but then I had no money. And then online, there were a couple of coaches that were talking about doing a free day event, and this was at least a year into psychosis, a year and a half. And they were two wonderful coaches who I went along and I did this three-day event and. They talked about E F T there, and yeah, it was something that just blew me away. And the first time I did E F T, I thought it was a bit strange, this emotional freedom technique where you tapped certain parts of your body and you say certain words. I thought it was a cult. I thought it was somebody was recording me and gonna laugh at me because I was thinking, this can’t be real. You want me to shut my eyes and say these things? And I laughed a lot. Second time I did it. It was something happened and something shifted and I was like, oh my goodness, for the first time ever, I feel better. I feel better. Something has lifted and I don’t understand how this has worked. And every time I had another session with them and another session, another session, I’d feel better. And I was like, oh, maybe there’s something in this. So then I found somebody who would train me and then this is what I do now, and this has been miraculous for me too, for my recovery because. I didn’t want the medication ’cause it made me feel so spacey. I had to be on board either. I had a two-year-old little toddler boy who’s got lots of energy so you can’t be spaced out. And yeah, there was something that I could take with me and do wherever, whenever, and it was free and yeah, you just feel immediately better.

Nathan Illman 27:23

He found it just a really effective coping tool that you were never provided previously when you were having all that stress with parenting and, and nursing. So it came quite late, but it was very welcomed by the sounds of it. It’s incredible that, you know, you, you did leave nursing, you broke away and took that gentle nudge from those people. But now you are doing something that is ultimately making you happier and not getting as stressed out by, uh, by what you were doing before. So with E F T. I’m gonna direct people onto, you know, your own resources to find out more about this cuz we could spend. You know, a whole episode. Couldn’t we talking about all of the background around E F T and exactly what it is, but you’ve kind of mentioned this a little bit, but it, I guess it, it’s a technique, isn’t it, that combines these methods where you’re working on a kind of bottom-up approach to calm your nervous system by. Directly get kind of accessing your nervous system by tapping different points on the body, but then also there’s the more top-down part of it, which is using words and phrases to kind of calm yourself. Emma very kindly did a session with me at V F T and it was great. It was really good to experience it and as I’m a clinical psychologist, but it’s something I wasn’t trained in and I was really curious to see and hear more about it, and it really was wonderful. Um, so Emma, tell us about what you are doing with that E F T now and kind of who you, who you work with, and what kind of problems you work with.

Emma Henry 28:50

I see a lot of people with anxiety. I’ve seen a lot of nurse and they’re off. Because they are done. They’ve done covid, they’ve coped really well, and now they are burnt out and they’ve just got nothing left. They’ve just got, you know, they’re just done. They’re depleted. So I teach them how to do tapping, and I teach them about coping mechanisms, about when they start to feel stressed, when they start to feel this overwhelmed, when they start to feel this anxiety because it is crippling when it comes and I show them how to use it. And they’re back to work and they’re doing fabulous. They’re flying and they’re, they’ve got this tool that they can just take wherever and you can tap wherever and people won’t know what you’re doing, but you are calming yourself down and you just talk in your head. If you are in public, you don’t wanna stand there going, even though I feel rubbish right now, you know? You can just do it in your head and you can feel amazing, you can calm it down, you can carry on, and you would do a better job because you’ve calmed your nervous system down. You’re not snappy. You know you can make better decisions, you can cope with, well, it’s not nice to cope with stress, but you can cope with your own environment much better. Your head is clearer, so you know less mistakes are gonna happen.

Nathan Illman 30:03

Sounds great, and it’s amazing that you are helping other people with that now after it’s, you’ve had your own journey yourself. Apologies. My son, my son’s just going to bed, so he is. Bless him. Some tears. Yeah, it’s absolutely incredible that you are sharing this. Really quite straightforward, but very powerful technique with other people. So we’re coming towards the end of this conversation. Why don’t you tell people where they can find you, where they can find your resources if they want to connect with you and follow you on social media and that sort of thing.

Emma Henry 30:33

I’m on Facebook and it’s just Emma Henry e f t practitioner. I’m there. I’m on Instagram as well. I think it’s Emma Henry. I think it’s the same thing. It’s not very exciting. Emma Henry, e f t practitioner. And where I talk about how E F T can help you, what it can help you with. There are multiple things it can do, and I can show you little videos of how you can do it yourself. And I love the little one of you can do it in your fingers so nobody knows what you are doing. And you could be, cuz some people take the park and ride to work and they think thinking, oh my goodness, I’ve gotta do this. I’ve, you know, My day’s gonna be really awful. But what if you did this on the way to work and you did a bit of tapping prior to starting your shift, so you started a lot calmer and Yeah, I just think it is something that everybody should be doing if they can if they want you, because it, it just, it, it’s so wonderful because it’s free. You would just tap on certain parts of your body and yeah, I’ve freed people of childhood traumas and. Yeah, lots of amazing things and phobias and anxiety, and they’re able to go into a room and not feel overwhelmed and go back to work and cope with all that nursing brings.

Nathan Illman 31:47

That’s fantastic. It’s definitely something for people to check out. Yeah. It actually reminded me of something that I, always say this to people when I’m doing any kind of work, is that the things that contribute to our well-being tend to be these little things, these little tools that we can just implement. Regularly, right? Mm-hmm. And if we have a kind of collection of things in our toolbox, it’s not just about having, you know, magic wand and just like one thing we can just. Throw everything about having these short, brief little things, and E F T, the tapping is definitely one of those. So I just wanna thank you so much for having this conversation with me. It’s been great to hear your experience again, and I just know a lot of people will really benefit from. Hearing your honesty and openness about your mental health. Like we said near the beginning of this conversation, it’s often something that is not talked about. There’s often a lot of shame around mental health or mental ill health. And having conversations like this and sharing them will help other people realize they’re not the only person experiencing something. So thank you so much, Emma.

Emma Henry 32:53

Oh, thank you for having me. I’ve really enjoyed talking about it.