Relational Spaces presents ‘My Other Self’ – a series of free live ‘Zoom’ interviews exploring what the therapists who use our rooms once did, still do, or may well do sometime soon – in their ‘other’ lives.
Dates: Thursdays, 8.15pm to 9.10pm
Venue: Online, using Zoom video conferencing
About ‘My Other Self’
Famous pop-stars – some ‘retired’ and some still touring…
A Bollywood writer, ex-professional athletes, actors…
A previous Artistic Director of the BFI London Film Festival, a horticulturist, ex-Rambert dancers…
These are just a (very) few of practitioners’ ‘Other Selves’!
With a whole many more smorgasbords yet to be discovered, we thought the current ‘moment of space’ might be the perfect time to explore some of these alternative lifestyles, in a weekly online interactive ‘Zoom’ interview.
Each interview will last 20 to 30 minutes and will be followed by questions from you – our live ‘Zoom’ audience!
Episode 9: Here’s one I made earlier
With: Chai-Yoel Korn (gender pronouns they/them, or just Chai)
Date: Thursday 9 July 2020, 8.15pm to 9.10pm
Like for many of us, school was not the right environment for Chai-Yoel Korn. At age 16 they took the FE route and entered Westminster Kingsway College. There, following the footsteps of some of the best chefs in the UK and beyond, they took their chef’s diploma.
After a short work-experience stint at Atlantic Bar & Grill, they decided to leave college early and enter the heat and sweat of West End kitchens, working at some of Soho’s top restaurants: Balans, Smollensky’s, Mezzo, Simpson’s in the Strand and Steph’s.
After returning to college to study silver service, they ended their first career chapter (of what turns out to be 3 so far) as an assistant reception manager in a Buckingham hotel.
Chapter 2 began when Chai-Yoel started volunteering with buddying towards the end of the first generation of the HIV epidemic. They then worked for 10 years as an LGBTQ youth support worker, teaching young people about homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and heterosexism.
After their own health changes, they found therapy and healing. And so began Chapter 3, training as an integrative relational body and trauma psychotherapist.
Last year, after participating in the interfaith panel at Pink Therapy’s Intersectional Conference, their paper ‘The Chicken Soup of Identity’ was accepted for a book, Non-Binary Lives: An Anthology of Intersecting Identities, published in April 2020.
So join Doron as he experiences his first-ever online restaurant experience, while exploring with Chai-Yoel Korn how their career background and cultural heritage have shaped what they put in their emotional chicken soup today! It promises to be an evening of food for the soul!
How to book
To reserve your place as a Zoom audience member:
- Text Relational Spaces on 07848 013 328 stating which episode you want to watch
- We will then send you a private Zoom invitation
- To join the episode, click on the link at the start time
You will not need to download anything to attend, or be technically savvy. You just need to follow the link (which will open in your web browser).
Episode 10 (onwards): It could be you!
“It could be you!” is what the National Lottery famously states each week…
So please do let us know asap if you have an ‘Other Self’ that you might like to share or explore with the community – we would love to hear from you!
Stay safe, stay healthy, stay kind.
All the team at Relational Spaces.
All images by Doron Levene.
Previous episodes…
Episode 1: Polyphonic Overtones – integrating the song of the pop star and therapist
With: Manda Glanfield
Date: Thursday 30 April 2020, 8.15pm to 9.10pm
Join us for our inaugural episode as Darren Cheek interviews Manda Glanfield, exploring how a career in the music business led her to becoming a counsellor in private practice.
“What was it about the thrill of loud music that resonates with me now as a therapist?”
Manda Glanfield
In the late 1980s, Manda found herself, along with a couple of fellow music-loving and nightclubbing friends, signing a record contract as part of The Beatmasters – a dance/pop music artist and production combo who released a handful of records over the next few years, some of which became Top 40 hits.
The Beatmasters continued producing and remixing other people’s records for a total of 16 years. They were part of the youthful surge in dance music in the UK and Europe which persisted and still persists, although they didn’t know it then of course. During this time, they released 5 singles, 2 albums, produced or remixed over 50 songs for other artists, collaborated with many musicians, appeared on TV including Top of the Pops, made videos, played live and did various things for press and publicity.
But where is Manda the therapist in this story?
“It was exciting hearing music you’d made in the clubs and on the radio. But a lot of it felt quite surreal. I found myself saying ‘yes’ to a lot of scary things that didn’t quite sit with me. It was a long time – and a lot of therapy, a kid and a failed marriage – before I found my voice and had the courage to say ‘enough’.”
Manda Glanfield
So join Darren and Manda as they explore what Manda’s experience back then brings to her current life as a therapist.
Episode 2: Life as a Bollywood Script Writer – exit pursued by a man with a chair!
With: Brad Cole
Date: Thursday 7 May 2020, 8.15pm to 9.10pm
Episode 2 sees Doron Levene interviewing Brad Cole about his wonderful and sometimes terrifying adventure in Bollywood-land. Gun-toting producers, brown envelopes stuffed with cash, weeping Nepalese tailors fitting him with a brassiere, hundreds of Bollywood dancers dancing under the stars at 1am in the morning, and Saeed Jaffrey keeping up morale by handing out cut-glass iced beakers of Johnnie Walker from the back of his Mercedes – these are just some of the tales Brad has to tell.
Who knew that a boy from Birmingham who left school with a CSE in woodwork would soon be ‘dancing’ in Mumbai with a live boa constrictor wrapped around his neck!
Episode 3: What’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh
With: David Wrenn
Date: Thursday 14 May 2020, 8.15pm to 9.10pm
Dianne Levene indulges her green-fingered passions as she interviews horticulturist David Wrenn, “the only one of his family to have ‘escaped’ the rural upbringing for university.” Inevitably, perhaps, the growing part reasserted itself, quietly, inexorably without his noticing, until he found himself in Norfolk living on a couple of acres and with a business growing organic herbs and vegetable plants that has supported him and his family for over 20 years!
Training to be a therapist, he thought the weekly journey south was about the metaphoric transformation from ‘grower’ to ‘therapist’. But he soon found the two parts of him were bound together more tightly than ever.
Episode 4: Life at 24 frames a second
With: Sandra Hebron
Date: Thursday 21 May 2020, 8.15pm to 9.10pm
In this episode Darren will try hard to stay on-topic with ex-Artistic Director of the BFI London Film Festival, Sandra Hebron. Sandra has worked in independent film since the late 1980s; as Cinemas Director at Manchester Cornerhouse; and programming and advising a range of UK and international festivals. Today Sandra is Head of Screen Arts at the National Film and Television School, Programme Consultant to the Pingyao International Film Festival, and a member of the Independent Film Council.
Yet despite all this (and more) Darren and Sandra may still struggle not to distract each other with their other shared passion: examining the issue of class in therapy!
Episode 5: Confessions of an agony aunt
With: Susan Quilliam
Date: Thursday 28 May 2020, 8.15pm to 9.10pm
Since 1992, Susan Quilliam has been addressing the nation’s questions about matters emotional and sexual. In her advice columns for, among others, Good Housekeeping, Fabulous magazine and LBC Radio, she’s helped answer queries as varied as “I”m pregnant by my boyfriend’s father” and “We’ve not made love since our wedding night – 30 years ago.”
Dianne will guide Susan to explore the events, themes and passions in a life that has brought her from a post-war Irish-Catholic childhood in Liverpool, through teaching, journalism and authorship. And to her current agony aunt column at Woman magazine, where she weekly reveals to the public the most outrageous, often titillating, issues for all to gasp and gossip over.
But how has all that brought Susan to Relational Spaces? Her work as a relationship coach, guiding individual and couples face-to-face – and in a serious, boundaried, confidential, behind-closed-doors mode – could hardly be more opposite to the ‘tabloid’ / ‘reality television’ style nature of being an agony aunt.
So are those two worlds mutually contradictory? Must they inevitably collide? Or can they co-exist, within our society as a whole, and within Susan?
Episode 6: From the school disco – grooving – into classical ballet
With: Mark Kelly
Date: Thursday 4 June 2020, 8.15pm to 9.10pm
Mark Kelly’s Other Self – dancer – landed on his lap with no looking. Having been talent scouted at primary school, he was offered a place at the prestigious Dance School of Scotland, then later moving on to the Royal Ballet Upper School. This was the starting place of his journey as a professional dancer, which led the Glasgow boy to dance with Scottish Ballet and Rambert Dance Company.
Eventually, as the light went out on the passion for dance, the light came on strong for a journey of self-healing, and therapeutic relationships were born from his own work.
So do join Doron as he dances alongside Mark’s ponderings, and as they ask whether and how Mark’s career may have been different if he had had the insights he has now.
Episode 7: Please don’t let me die without seeing the worst the world can be
With: Keith Ewing
Date: Thursday 11 June 2020, 8.15pm to 9.10pm
Darren is back again to explore the experiences summed up in the prayer of the 20-year-old Keith Ewing, just starting out on a career in journalism in his native New Zealand in the early 1980s: “Please don’t let me die without seeing the worst the world can be.”
Now, nearly 40 years on, Keith is an Internal Family Systems therapist. But not before his prayer was answered. For 15 years up until 2011, Keith worked for aid and development charities. His experiences – which played a part in his later mid-life career change into psychotherapy – included witnessing famines in Ethiopia and Malawi, the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami of 2004, displaced people from the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the desperate poverty of southern Afghanistan.
Episode 8: It started with trauma, an injection of adrenaline and a lick from the dog!
With: Christine Habermehl
Date: Thursday 25 June 2020, 8.15pm to 9.10pm
When Christine was growing up, she was inspired by the stories (heard via her nan) of her uncle Harry, a police sergeant in Merseyside. So Christine soon decided she wanted to join the police.
At first, she was rejected as a cadet on the grounds she was female! Later, after seeing an advert for the office-based role of station officer, she reapplied to the force and got the job.
The police and Christine remained enmeshed for the next 28 years of her ‘Other Self’. This culminated in Christine ending her police career as a welfare manager and lead for psychological services. The role covered a wide range of disciplines: everything from critical incident stress debriefing and trauma risk management assessments to advising gold command and coordinating funerals.
Throughout her time with the police, Christine witnessed enormous positive change in the force’s culture, especially with regards to female discrimination. The letter W was dropped from WPC, and women were allowed to join the firearms unit and riot squads, and be dog handlers. Likewise, she saw men joining the child protection and domestic violence teams. Perhaps most importantly, she saw the seeking of psychological support become acceptable and well used.
So please join us as Dianne Levene talks to Christine Habermehl, one of the UK’s leading EMDR practitioners, about her ‘Other Self’ in the police force.
