October 5, 1999, was different because although she caught the 7.44am as usual, she got a seat in coach E. Had she followed her usual routine she might not be here now, she says. Most of the passengers who died on her train when it was involved in the Paddington crash were in the first-class carriage where she usually stood for the final minutes of the journey.
Loader tells the story of that day in detail but does not dwell on what she saw. She was cut and bruised when she jumped on to the track through a broken window, but, inevitably, the lasting impact of the crash was emotional. When she attended the memorial service a year later she realised that she needed professional help.
“I was very weepy. I couldn’t find any enjoyment in much,” she says. “I was miserable. Everything was grey. My concentration was poor at work and I was fed up with myself. You’re then looking for things to be miserable about and you get into thinking about the what-ifs.”
This is said by a woman who has the competent and forthright presence of one who, at this time, was head of human resources for Oftel and who initially was determined not to change her life. But there is something vulnerable about Loader too. It is not just that she still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, but that she is talking with a perspective that has developed over the past five years, prompted by her experience of tramua therapy. It worked, she says, but she didn’t like it much because she found the process cold, a touch clinical, and directed by the therapist.
Following her voluntary redundancy in 2003 she decided to explore other forms of therapy with a view to becoming a therapist herself. Through this she discovered the Foundation for Emotional Therapy, felt comfortable with its emphasis on working through emotions rather than analysing them, and is now training to practise.
“I was surprised by the way the (first) counsellor worked. She was distant and I felt stupid crying, as though I was making a fuss about nothing. Intellectually, I knew I wasn’t, but I hadn’t been to therapy before and I didn’t know what was expected of me. I know you can’t be hugging and kissing clients, but I didn’t feel comfortable — something was missing.
“Meeting an emotional therapist was a relief because it revolves around how you feel. The therapists show warmth and empathy towards a client — they say things like: ‘I can see you feel really upset’. That validates how you feel, which is important. The emotional therapist I met was intuitive and sensitive — our personalities gelled.”
What Loader’s discovery of emotional therapy underlines is the importance in finding the right therapist or counsellor. If you are to explore your thoughts and feelings with a stranger, the outcome will depend in part on that relationship, says Phillip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy.
“When you go to see a therapist you really want to find someone on your wavelength. If you’re a number-crunching person you may not want someone who is touchy-feely. My advice is to audition your therapist — it’s a two-way assessment. Are you going to be able to work together? Do you like each other’s aroma, or aura . . . in the widest sense? If after one session you don’t really like the person, don’t go back. But do find somebody else.”
Sara Kernohan, an emotional therapist, believes that the relationship between patient and therapist should be “warm and empathetic”. “Sometimes a client will say: ‘I’m feeling as though I’m in a pit and you’re down here with me holding the torch.’ That differs from more traditional styles of counselling where the counsellor would be at the top of the pit looking in. We are right there with the client empathising every step of the way and there’s a very warm, caring feeling between the two. It’s that real sense of holding people while they’re there, and reassuring them and saying: ‘You’re all right. This is very painful. I can see that and sense it. I’m there with you’.”
The defining characteristic of emotional therapy, Kernohan says, is that it focuses on feelings rather than on coping strategies or rational analysis. “The way we see it is that the first thing that kicks in after an event is a feeling, which could be being gutted or enraged or shocked. Traditional therapists would look towards the mind, the mental coping mechanism, and the rationale behind what had happened. “If you’d been through a traumatic event I’d try and get you to talk through the feelings . . . Can you remember what it smelt like? I’d really get you to connect with the feeling. I might ask where you feel that feeling in your body — it might be your tummy or your chest — and what does that feel like?
“That can be very painful but by facing the emotions and accepting them, people’s behaviour can change and they can move forward. We use creative techniques, like drawing and visualisation. I recently saw a gentleman client who was bereaved but had difficulty expressing how he felt. When I asked him to draw how he felt, he drew a picture of himself with arrows going into his heart. That made him cry, which he’d been unable to do up to that point.”
This approach would not suit every person seeking to unravel an emotional difficulty, but it does suit Gill Loader. At 50 she lives alone in Berkshire and while she recognises that the train crash has left her with “slight underlying anxiety” at the knowledge that “it nearly happened to me”, in terms of her enjoyment of life, she is fully restored.
Foundation for Emotional Therapy www.emotionaltherapy.co.uk; British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy 0870 4435252; www.bacp.co.uk
The three branches of therapy
Part of the difficulty in distinguishing one variant of psychotherapy or counselling from another is that the industry is unregulated. Neither is there a definitive explanation of the difference between therapy and counselling, though Phillip Hodson suggests that if you want to change part of your life, see a counsellor; if you want to change the whole of your life, see a psychotherapist.
In broad terms, Hodson sees therapy as divided into three factions. One is the analytical tradition, exemplified by Freud and Melanie Klein, in which there is a psychodynamic interest in early childhood. Opposite this lie cognitive behaviour techniques where the focus is not on causes, history or your inner self, but on changing what you do and how you form your cognitions.
Between these is the person-centred therapist who follows Carl Rogers in offering the subject a positive response that can sometimes appear uncritical. “Rogers insisted it should be done with empathy and most person-centred therapists I know are warm, caring people,” says Hodson. “They have picked up on your pain before you’ve realised it. What they don’t necessarily do is analyse it.
“By definition therapists have a sense of morality and caring. I don’t see how they’d have success with clients otherwise. Clients look for reliability, somebody who’s accepting and can find the good in you.”
