Martin Fenerty

#TherapistsConnect Podcast – Episode with Martin Fenerty
 

In this rich and thoughtful conversation, Dr. Peter Blundell interviews person-centred therapist Martin Fenerty about his life, work, and the values that shape his practice. Martin reflects on his early influences, what drew him to the person-centred approach, and the realities of working in today’s therapeutic landscape. With warmth and honesty, he shares personal insights into what it means to build authentic therapeutic relationships, navigate professional challenges, and stay grounded in humanistic values.

Whether you’re a student, a seasoned therapist, or simply curious about the person-centred approach, this episode offers both inspiration and depth. Tune in for a moving and meaningful dialogue between two passionate therapists.

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Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Therapist Connect podcast. My name is Dr. Peter Blundell, and I'm back this month interviewing therapists about their life and work. This month's guest is a long term friend of mine, someone I've known for a very long time. Martin Fenerty. Martin is based in Liverpool and has been an accredited member of BACP and been in practice since 2012. Previously working in the NHS and Charitable Services. He's a person centered counselor, is also trained in CBT and EMDR, and it's recently set up in private practice. We discuss all those topics in today's episode. If you'd like to support this podcast, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did recording it.

Dr Peter Blundell: 0:45

So Martin, welcome to the Therapist Connect podcast. It's lovely to have you on board.

Martin Fenerty: 0:50

Yeah. Lovely to be here.

Dr Peter Blundell: 0:52

So I'm gonna dive straight into the questions. So that's probably the best way to get to know you a little bit and I know you, but for our listeners to get to know you a little bit. Better. So can you tell us a little bit about how you came to be a therapist then in the first place?

Martin Fenerty: 1:05

So my, all my working career, I've done helping work. It wasn't where I started. I actually started as actually studied by Chemistry at University. I was meant to be. I was meant to be a scientist, but I was hopeless.

Dr Peter Blundell: 1:22

That means you weren't meant to be a scientist.

Martin Fenerty: 1:24

That's what, that's where I was directed, shall we say, to be a scientist of some kind. And so that didn't go tremendously well. And so I had to rethink at the end of university really realistically what I was doing. So I started doing various bits of voluntary work, so with a local LGBT youth group and with the Citizens Advice Bureau. And that was probably the prime thing that got me into helping was. Work with Systems Advice Bureau.'cause at the time, the training volunteers was quite considerable and went into sort of models of helping. So that was an interesting introduction and that was where I started from. And then things over the years moved in different directions and eventually became a therapist.

Dr Peter Blundell: 2:21

That's really interesting. So was the stuff around the citizen advice, was that like advocacy work then and that type of support?

Martin Fenerty: 2:27

Yeah it was advocacy and advice work. So very directive. But very much focused on actually let's compile all the options that there are for somebody and. Let them choose. It may be that they make the decision that you don't think is the wisest, but as long as they've got all the information, that's what you go with and that's what you support them with as far as you, as far as you can. Yeah. So it was good. You it was good. First principles around helping around. You have the resources and you offer them to the person and they make of them. What they will, and you, so you people, especially with advice work, you they're asking essentially legal questions around benefits or housing or debt. The temptation is to be very directive and you are to a certain, you are to a set extent.'cause you've got to be realistic and people want that. But you are trying to give people, hand people some power of some agency. Within that. And the advocacy is really, is you, is that basic principles of what does that person want to say or need to say and you are presenting it. So yeah, many years of doing that as a volunteer, but also as a case worker. So as a money advisor, and I guess part of what I experienced through that help was a bit of frustration that I was doing lots of practical things, but with debt, people would call profoundly distressed'cause it's a very stressful experience and people are overwhelmed with contact from creditors. And so often I found myself frustrated that I. Felt I couldn't really do enough for them emotionally. There's maybe actually quite a lot I could do for them practically. Yeah. But the burden of being in debt and the circumstances that led up to that, whether that was job loss and just the profound changes in people's lives, it can lead to that. And you, that was probably the earliest point where I started having a yearning to support. People emotionally and wanting to help them find the resources to, to have some resilience or some power in their situation.

Dr Peter Blundell: 5:00

Did you train as a therapist while you were still working at the Citizens Advice Bureau then?

Martin Fenerty: 5:06

No. So I did about 10 years in Citizens Advice Bureau, eventually. Eventually was managing a bureau. And I moved on from there. I. Because it was very, it was a very difficult role leading a very small charity.'cause each bureau was a, an individual charity at that time. And my experience as Citizens Advice Bureau and my volunteer work in the LGBT and HIV. Community led me to getting to work in the NHS getting a job in the NHS in a sexual health outreach service which gradually transformed into an LGBT and sex worker support service. My sort of career took me in that direction. And as well as doing health promotion, I was doing much more emotional support, particularly around sexuality and gender and working with women who were working on the streets. Street-based sex work. It was their experiences of sexual violence, physical violence, homelessness, abusive relationships. So during that time I did a basic counseling course, did that basic 10 week course, and then it went from there. So I ended, yeah, I ended up doing my counseling training whilst in that service. And that's where I did my placement in work. So I was managing sort of dual relationships at the time as well. That's where my start in therapy began, which was work was working with people from the L-G-B-T-Q community. And women involved in sex work. It's, I so for a period I worked in a local cancer charity. Of course, some flowers. There was big cuts with this austerity in public health fund, which impacted drugs, services, and sexual health services. So my role in the in sexual health. Changed quite profoundly and I went really behind the scenes rather than delivering services. So to keep up my practice, I ended up making links with that charity and worked there for a number of years. And then it's gone full circle the last couple of years I've been working in. Sahir House the local LGBTQ and HIV charity. So I've come round, full circle. And that's where I'm currently working, employed. Yeah, just branching out into some private practice as well.

Dr Peter Blundell: 7:35

That's great. Maybe talk about your private practice stuff a bit more in a moment. One of the things that struck me then when you were talking about mentioned austerity and I was just, it just. Made me think about'cause we're both in Liverpool and it made me think about how many colleagues I've seen over the years who work in kind of the charitable sector, how much their career paths have changed or shifted, not necessarily based on where they wanted to go, what they were planning to do, but based on funding and services closing down and money being shifted to other services and stuff like that. And how people end up maybe take unplanned routes. Because of that, yeah.

Martin Fenerty: 8:12

That's probably reflected across the country, but I think Liverpool is one of those places where that's been quite acute. It's recognized Liverpool has had some of the most significant cuts in local authority funding, and that's, that has had an impact on the city that has had an impact on the picture of the support that's available to people overall.

Dr Peter Blundell: 8:36

Definitely. How would you define your therapeutic approach? And has that changed over, over the time you've been qualified?

Martin Fenerty: 8:46

So fundamentally, I'm a person centered therapist. That's what my training. Was, and really that is where my heart lies. Subsequently I have trained as a cognitive behavioral therapist as well, so I do provide some CBT and often integrate the two, but that person centeredness really runs. Through my work whatever I'm providing. In the context I've worked, often people come to charitable services having tried NHS services and they just haven't fit. And sometimes they feel like CBT in from primary care just hasn't been the right fit for them and. I think it works well for lots of people, but maybe the restricted nature and the restricted model just doesn't fit for some people. They need to talk, they need the connection, and I wonder sometimes whether some of the principles of CBT are lost in that bigger picture. So I work. I guess in a very person centered way, if I am doing CBT very much focusing on the relationship and the principle of collaboration and being led by clients and feeling the way through that process. I don't know. Some people would argue that I'm corrupting all the processes altogether. But I think it, it's, I think it's a, it's, I think it's a reasonable way to work. It's an ethical way to work. I guess that's made me become bolder in my person centered approach. So sometimes people come maybe a bit skeptical about that experience, previous experience of therapy and. So I, over time I've become bold. I have become bolder in my person centeredness. And you, I believe it is an act. You, it's an active relationship. It's an active process. And I think there are more commonalities in lots of ways between person centeredness and CBT than we articulate or have thought through. We just do them in different, we just do them in different ways or use different, maybe use different language.

Dr Peter Blundell: 11:17

I wonder that, how do you see the wider therapy community and how connected you feel to other therapists?

Martin Fenerty: 11:24

I think I'm in an interesting place. Just branching out into private practice. I. I guess in terms of my connection I'm conscious really in some ways of feeling quite isolated from other therapists, so I'm. Trying to reach out and make connections with other therapists. And it's not through lack of supervision support, but really from a desire to try and make connections with peers. Just have that peer support a bit like you do when you are working in an office. You have it automatically sitting next to you. And I think you, we need that peer connection just from a support point of view, the wider therapy community. I think overall in this country, we're still not terribly diverse. I think it the stereotype of it being very white, middle class. Profession, and that's you and dominated by women still stands. I think that's not the same as it was maybe five, 10 years ago. But I think there's the, there's still work to do around diversity and look and thankfully some of that is happening. But it, yeah, there's more work. There's more work to be done with diversity, and that's not just around protective characteristics. I think some of that is around class as well. You, I think that you therapy does work best when people have an opportunity, often to have therapy from somebody who. They recognize as having some sort of common experience or are able to project maybe having had some common experience with them. It gives them that confidence and that connection.

Dr Peter Blundell: 13:24

And I think think about class. There's so many barriers for people entering into the profession in terms of costs and things like that. Yeah. Which I think really can have an impact on the class base of the profession.

Martin Fenerty: 13:34

Yeah. And I think there's also, I guess from my own experience actually with therapy, I, I came from a, I came from a relatively middle class background, not hugely wealthy, but in comparison to. Most people in Liverpool, clearly middle class background and some of the joy of my work having worked in the charitable sector and with services that are targeting particular needs is that in therapy. Lots of my middle classness has been. Beaten out of me for whatever a better phrase. It's very easy to hide behind your polite, middle classness and professionalism, and you, and that's actually not very congruent. It's really a nonsense. I've had. Clients call me out on my bullshit presently earlier in my career, or just be really puzzled about why I am being the presence that maybe I'm being in the therapy room. And that's been a huge influence I guess on my practice around actually I just need to be human. I just need to be me and I need to shed some of my layers. And you intense the wider therapy community. Sometimes I am frustrated in my interactions with some therapists where it feels like I'm up against a wall of therapy and therapy speak and therapy, a therapy attitude, and it's not necessarily very human. And it doesn't feel very connected. So I think there is something around we really do need to keep doing the work around diversity because maybe there are shades of us still being a bit, being a bit Freudian and being that frosty presence across, across the room or a bit removed from the rest of society. We need more involvement actually, I think and keep on trying to create that, that human element of therapy. Just on the basis actually in principle of making it accessible, of making it feel like it's something that people can access and you relate to.

Dr Peter Blundell: 16:00

What's the biggest challenge that the counseling and psych therapy profession faces right now in your opinion?

Martin Fenerty: 16:07

You we're, we are recording this after a couple of weeks. Quite high profile. Media coverage, particularly in. The Guardian around regulation and a drive for regulation. And I think that's part of our biggest challenge. And along with the the work around SCoPEd and trying to articulate the commonalities of different therapy roles and. You gather together the different strands of training and making that making sense of that to other people and to ourselves. And I think though that is the biggest challenge and I'm torn in lots of ways I think. We probably do need some more regulation and particularly some of the stories we've seen in the media of people working really quite un ethically and actually not even necessarily even being trained as therapists, actually we would benefit maybe as a profession to having that protected status and the means to, to to demonstrate that we are part of that. Part of a protected profession. And the principles of actually trying to create a structure around careers and providing clarity to. Clients to the public, to potential funders around what do all these terms mean? What is what's the difference between a counselor and a psychotherapist and a counseling psychologist? I don't think we all, we actually even necessarily understand that ourselves. In the push for that. That's where I worry. I worry about who gets left behind, how they get left behind and potentially how narrow the profession becomes. And I think that's really something that, that needs to be considered really carefully. And I don't think it's necessarily clear from the work that's happening in the profession about how that is being tend to and being considered. And there's a, you, there's a rush to, to professionalize without necessarily thinking, okay, you, you can define what professional is without losing actually some of the richness of that we have with the freedom of not being a regulated profession. So that can, that concerns me and it concerns me about what talent and what perspectives we potentially lose from within the profession that actually help it, it grow and evolve and progress

Dr Peter Blundell: 19:12

idea, if I could close shop is coming up for me in terms of does it create this narrow idea of what it is that, that we do? And then we don't have any critique of that or openness to explore what it possibly could be.

Martin Fenerty: 19:24

Absolutely. And you, I think you, this is in parallel with the drive to create a research evidence base, a greater research evidence base around therapy. You, and that bias towards CBT from person centeredness that is based around. The lack of apparent evidence base. I'm glad that there's a push to to look at person-centeredness and counseling and push resources to, to look at that evidence base to demonstrate its effectiveness. But with that closed shop, with that professionalism, maybe there's a danger that we've become hyper-focused then and completely restricted on what other people think is a credible evidence-based and yet therapy is a felt experience. It's a felt, it's a it's a feeling. It's a feeling role. A feeling profession. It's a feeling process. And there's something around us actually capturing or experiences and articulating them and. Enabling clients to articulate their experiences, which is also part of that evidence base. This isn't, therapy isn't like medicine where you are providing a pill under some really easy empirical parameters you can put on that to determine its effect effectiveness or its acceptability. This is, there isn't. We don't have the benefit of that, we don't have the benefits of doing precise operations on the body. It's a much more creative process and collaborative process.

Dr Peter Blundell: 21:21

And can you actually measure every aspect of that?

Martin Fenerty: 21:25

You can't. You can't. You, and I think that's you in my work in the charitable sector, you. We are in the HIV work, we're, we are funded through public health and naturally we have to report and quite rightly, report on our activity, on our and or outcomes. But the challenge around that is actually if we do our measured outcomes or core tens, sometimes people show no change. Sometimes people, their Core 10 schools are actually worse. They feel better. And actually it's because they can tolerate their distress more, and that's the strength that they have. Or they have the courage to, to articulate it more or more clearly. And that's really hard to capture in measured outcomes. That's really hard to capture, potentially in. Evidence-based research and hard to articulate in terms of how important that is.

Dr Peter Blundell: 22:33

And even the idea of a core 10, 10, 10 measures. How many things shift and change within a therapeutic relationship over the time? It's way more than 10. Yes.

Martin Fenerty: 22:45

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So you there is that the, there's an ongoing dialogue and I think maybe it'll be never ending in some ways around just fighting the corner that there, there is more to therapy than those fundamental outcome measures. And reduction of symptoms and. Resolution of depression or anxiety are only very, in some ways, narrow parts of what people get out of therapy.

Dr Peter Blundell: 23:22

So Martin, that's the end of my questions. I suppose my last one is can you tell us about what your future plans are? What's next? I suppose setting up in private practice and focusing on that is one of the big things

Martin Fenerty: 23:34

That's probably the biggest thing for me at the moment. It's very early days for me, so I've. As well as working as a therapist. I've worked as a manager in the NHS for 20 years, and I've just finished working as an operational manager. It was time for me to end that phase of my career. So I'm in the very, very early days of private practice and building that private practice. And that's an interesting experience. Exciting and frightening in equal measure often. So that's where I'm, that's where I'm developing. I'm doing some work online and exploring that. Means to support my private practice to just in terms of my presence. So I've created a social media profile from a private practice and I think as I've been doing some videos on there and they've often reflected things that just have cropped up in my own life or just issues that are around a particular. Time, but talking about them in relation to therapy and people's felt experience and maybe providing sort of information and education around it. I'm not a huge social media person for all my talk of embracing technology, hosting selfies and doing videos isn't my natural isn't my natural environment. So that's been really outside of my comfort zone and very much I'm learning as I go along. But I'm hoping that is an is another way for people to get a sense of who I am and how I might be if I'm working. With them. So I'm, I'm reaching out to potential clients there for them to get, have a safe way of observing me without actually having to speak to me, and they might have the courage to speak to me.

Dr Peter Blundell: 25:27

We've known each other for a long time, but we haven't seen each other for a while. So when I saw your videos pop up, it was so nice and I mean you say it's outside your comfort zone, but I felt like they are a very authentic representation of you and what you're like. And you're doing great on this podcast maybe you've got more skills there than you.

Martin Fenerty: 25:50

That's been very much my intention with those videos. Yeah. So you, lots of stuff online is very performative and I think you there and my videos come with the rough edges of me. I'm not, it's not necessarily that slick in comparison towards content on the internet, but that's very much my intention is I'm trying to, I'm trying to present me unfiltered. So I'm, yeah, I'm glad that, that comes across that's reflected in those videos. And I guess in terms of in terms of my private practice, I am gonna get around to training as a clinical supervisor. So I'm very much just a practitioner at the moment. But you, they supporting the student that we have on placement and. My years as an operational manager, I guess a very different role, but my approach in terms of managers very, was very much based around trying to get people to reflect and and support people in their, in, in their work in a similar way to supervision in lots of ways. So I'm excited to hopeful start that training in the new year and offer that as an extra strand as well.

Dr Peter Blundell: 27:04

Fantastic. That's exciting. What we'll do is we'll make sure we put all your social media websites and stuff in the show notes so people can get in contact with you and follow you if they're interested. But Martin, thank you so much for being a guest on the Therapist Connect podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Martin Fenerty: 27:20

Thank you. Thanks very much. It's been lovely. Thank you.

Dr Peter Blundell: 27:23

Thank you.