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You can buy "Brighter Futures", Lucy's amazing book here.

www.theyarethefuture.co.uk.

Facebook @tatfwellbeing.

Instagram @tatf_drlucy

Twitter @DrLucyRussell.

https://learndobecome.com/

Transcript of Episode:

Rosie (00:00 ):

Today I'm talking to Dr. Lucy Russell. Lucy is the clinical lead for a successful child psychology group practice in Buckinghamshire called Everlief. If you follow her online, her passion for reaching parents of school-aged children is clear, and she's done an amazing job of reaching more families with the book she co-wrote with her colleagues, Brighter Futures. Brighter Futures is a book that I'm really happy to have my hands on before my kids hit school age, and Lucy is here to tell us how she made it all happen. So Lucy, hi and welcome to the podcast.

Lucy (00:31 ):

Hi.

Inspiration: What motivated Lucy to Write Her Book

Rosie (00:32 ):

Can you start by telling us a little bit about what inspired you to write the book and who it's intended to help?

Lucy (00:40 ):

Well, okay, what inspired me, like you, wanting to do something more. I do face-to-face therapy, and I enjoy it, but I wanted to do something more that reached a wider audience of parents and also something a bit more preventative because parents come to me when they've hit crisis point pretty much. So I was looking to do something that helped them before they got to that stage. And also the families that come to our clinic have suggested writing a book over the years, and so finally a few of us got round to it and wrote that book.

Rosie (01:22 ):

Yeah. I mean, I really resonate with that experience because I think so many families that I see are just saying, "Why couldn't we have had this help sooner? Why wasn't there something available that was more affordable at an earlier point?" And a lot of people are also saying, "I've got a friend who really needs this, but they can't afford to come and see you." And that's definitely what drives me to try and do something at a more affordable price point as well. What I love about the book is that it imparts a lot of the knowledge that we spend the first few sessions of therapy talking about anyway. So I think it would give people a real standing start coming to your clinic.

Lucy (02:01 ):

Yeah, that's what we were hoping. We were hoping that it would provide kind of the voice of a psychologist so that parents could really understand the process that they and their children would go through if they came to Everlief. But I mean, hopefully, most of them won't need to come to Everlief. It's just that it will provide the step-by-step process that they will get if they were to see a psychologist.

Rosie (02:32 ):

What I love about it is there's a lot of really human content. There's a lot about how the brain works and how development works and how normal a lot of quite distressing experiences actually are. And what came through from the way that it's written is that it's based on personal, not just professional experiences.

Lucy (02:54 ):

Absolutely, yes. I mean, there were six of us that wrote the book, and all of us are parents, and all of us have different aged children, some at university and some preschool age. Mine are 10 and 14 at the moment. But we all have experiences, and we've all had difficulties obviously, because that's human.

Rosie (03:16 ):

And I was really interested actually, before we did this interview, you told me that you'd had some difficulties with sleep when your kids were young. And I thought, "Oh my gosh, the number of parents I see because of sleep." It seems like something that's a real passion for you. It's also a real passion for me. So could you talk a bit about that?

Lucy (03:36 ):

Yes. Whenever I encounter families that have sleep difficulties, it's the one area that I really feel I can empathize with and really feel I can kind of give experienced advice on. I have two children, but the youngest, in particular, had severe sleep difficulties when she was a baby and really didn't sleep through the night till at least two. But up to about age six or seven, we had massive difficulties with her. She's 14 now, and she sleeps pretty well, although she still struggles to get to sleep.

Lucy (04:14 ):

But it really did. It had a massive impact on everything. It had an impact on my health. My immune system just wasn't functioning properly at all. We did go out, but we couldn't go out as much as some of the other families. For example, in my NCT group, I was so jealous of some of the families whose children slept. There was one whose child slept for 12 hours pretty much from birth, and I just... Oh, I was so envious. So I really did a lot of research, and there was a particular book called The Baby Whisperer that really, really helped me at the time, and things did get better. And hopefully, I can help parents to see that things do get better.

Rosie (04:58 ):

I think that empathy coming from that standpoint of I know how desperate you are, I know that you feel like you'll try absolutely anything, and just that shines through the way the book's written, and I'm sure it shines through all of your clinical work as well. I think that is so powerful for people because definitely my experience was that my little boy... I have two kids. I've got a daughter who's three and a little boy who's 20 months.

Lucy (05:24 ):

Oh, wow!

Rosie (<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/Edit?token=