How to publish a book: An inspiring interview with Dr Lucy Russell about Brighter Futures

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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 (05:24):

So we're sort of still in that phase, to be honest. My daughter was a great sleeper, but my son was quite poorly as a newborn. And my belief is that that's why he's always struggled with sleep. It's because he just needs that physical contact with you to feel secure, and if I had as many lumbar punctures as him, I probably would too. And I think actually, I found that there weren't a lot of other people that viewed sleep in that way. When I was really going through it in the thick of it, there was a hell of a lot of people telling me to sleep train, giving me behavioral kind of intervention ideas.

Lucy (05:59):

Oh, really?

Rosie (05:59):

Which didn't fit with the kind of attachment-focused view that I had of the difficulties. So it's just really nice for me when I find you talking about it in a way that really fits with my way of thinking.

Lucy (06:16):

Oh, that's great. Yeah.

Rosie (06:16):

And the fact that you've got that on paper in such an accessible way for parents to understand.

Lucy (06:21):

The book looks at difficulties from lots of different perspectives, including behavioral, but we also have a big attachment focus. And the book is based on what we call seven basic beliefs, and one of them is that the importance of nurture just can't be underestimated, and you can't really give too much nurture. That's obviously massively important in sleep, especially with really tiny ones.

Rosie (06:50):

And actually, the seven basic beliefs are something I really wanted to ask you about because I love all of them. As a psychologist and as a mum, they just fit so well with everything that I believe and the way that I see the world. But I thought actually there were a couple in there which I know from my work with families can be a bit controversial. For example, concepts like sometimes the environment needs to change, not the child. And some problems are actually a good thing, rather than always being negative.

Lucy (07:19):

Yeah.

Rosie (07:20):

I thought those are two which I know I've kind of had a bit of pushback about in my career, and I wondered what the response has been like to those.

Lucy (07:32):

Wow, that's a really good question. I mean, I don't think I've had a negative response to those areas. I think, for me, the idea that the environment sometimes needs to change instead of the child is possibly one of the most important of those seven beliefs along with the nurture one, because we have to be very careful not to always site the problem as being within the child or even within the family. And I think that some schools, in particular, some of the culture around some schools, not blaming anybody in particular, but it's just the culture that's developed, is very tough for some children, for a lot of children. So I think we need to acknowledge that and try and help change that culture or make helpful changes in schools and in families as well where those are going to be helpful.

Rosie (08:31):

Have you had any feedback from people that have used the book?

Lucy (08:36):

Yeah. We've had lots of positive feedback from lots of families and some families that come to the clinic. And we've had reviews on Amazon that have been really positive. So overall, I think it's been a very positive experience. We've had lots of people asking for us to do a secondary version, which we'd love to do one day, but it was a lot of work, so I'm not sure when that might happen.

Rosie (09:03):

Yeah, I bet it was. How does it feel when you get that kind of feedback?

Lucy (09:08):

It feels really, really good. It makes it feel worth it, because there were times when it was a slog writing those chapters and trying to make sure that there was consistency between the different psychologists that were writing and making sure that it was nice to read and accessible to everybody that would be reading it. So it was hard.

getting started: Writing a book as a psychologist

Rosie (09:32):

I bet. And actually, starting out a project like that, it must've been really intimidating. What were the first steps you took to get started once you'd had the idea for the book?

Lucy (09:44):

I must admit, the idea was floating around for a good while before we took any action, maybe a couple of years. I guess the first step was to acknowledge that I didn't feel able to do the whole thing by myself, that I wanted to collaborate on this. So I asked some members of my team if they would be interested, and luckily five members of the team were. The other important thing was that we had Mike, who's my husband, but also manages the clinic, kind of project-managing the book. So he was doing all the negotiating and liaising with publishers and so on, and that was massively helpful. So that was a big step for him to agree to take that on and for him to start making small kind of action steps. The first step for us as psychologists was to get together, decide on a topic, which we did over a couple of evenings of nice drinks and cakes and things.

Rosie (10:46):

Oh, that sounds amazing.

Lucy (10:46):

It was.

Rosie (10:49):

Yeah, I love the sound of having somebody