Farewell to the Therapist Connect Podcast

#TherapistsConnect is a platform for connecting therapists.
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Origins of #TherapistsConnect

Transcript

Dr Peter Blundell 0:00

Hello everybody. My name's Dr. Peter Blundell, and welcome to another episode of the Therapist Connect podcast. This is a very short episode. Well, really it's more of an announcement around the podcast. Just to let you know that we are gonna be pausing the podcast for now. So it's a little bit of a message to say farewell and thank you to everyone who's been listening to us over the last six years. This isn't gonna be the very last episode. We have two more episodes that we are gonna release, which I will tell you about in a moment. A couple of reasons why we're ending the podcast now. We get requests every week for amazing therapists and guests who wanna appear on the podcast. There's lots of people who we would love to interview. However, the time it's taking to interview people and get the episodes out, um, you will see that the episodes have become a lot more sporadic over the last 12 months. Um, due to work and personal commitments, it's been a lot it's been a lot more difficult too. Record, edit and publish the episode to the point where some people's recordings are taking like six months before they get out before they become released. Um, which is just a delay that, that, that's too long, really. So, yes, we've decided to put the podcast on hold for the moment. It's also been six years since the release of the podcast, so we thought that this was probably a good time to rest it and maybe we'll come back to it at some point in the future. Um, if you are interested in counseling, psychotherapy, social work. Also, if you're interested in qualitative research, I am still undertaking interviews. Uh, over on my YouTube account, which is at Dr. Peter Blundell. So there's a variety of content that's already on there and a lot more stuff that's gonna be added on over the next 12 months. And the reason why, uh, it's easier to kind of release things over on YouTube is there's not as much editing and processing to do as it is for this podcast. So originally the podcast. We were hoping to interview therapists about their life and work, and I think we've achieved that over the years. We were also hoping to record interviews with therapists in different countries and have kind of more discussions and debates, and I dunno if we've been as, as successful at that part of the podcast as we have doing the one-to-one interviews, which usually follow up. Follow a traditional formula and a set of similar questions, and I think it's been nice to kind of see how different therapists answer those questions over the last six years. We have had some amazing guests thank you to all of our guests who have come on the podcast and shared, um, a lot of the time, quite a lot of, uh, intimate and personal details about their life and their work. Which I know has been really enlightening for me, but also for lots of our listeners as well. A lot of people who are experienced therapists and students alike. Um, we have had over the last count, 50,000 listens of our podcasts, uh, across the different, uh, platforms. And there are new people listening to our podcast every single week from the statistics that come through. So even though the podcast is being paused, I know that people will continue to listen while it's still out there. We thought at one point we were gonna do some other different types of episodes, like ethical dilemmas to kind of discussing like an ethical dilemma with different therapists. We had suggestions to do a whole specific series on anti-oppressive practice. We've had requests for uh, student topics for the podcast. All of which we really kind of wanted to do. But just over the past six years, we just haven't managed to make those things happen. Which I think is a shame. But there's lots of kind of amazing and great other podcasts out there at the moment doing kind of similar things. So hopefully people will find that, um, in other places. I wanted to say thank you to all of the people who have volunteered their time to therapist connect over the past six years, but also to contributing to delivering this podcast or creating this podcast. It's mainly me now. It does the interviews and the editing and the transcription, um, because I have software that helps me with that. But, um, before we had that software, we had volunteers who were editing, transcribing, creating poster designs. All of those kind of things. So I wanna thank all of those therapists, connect volunteers, and specifically the ones who have helped make this podcast what it is over the years. I want to thank, uh, our guest hosts. We have had quite a few of those, um, over the past six years. There have been some amazing interviews because of that and also a different dynamic without me asking the, kind of the same questions that I usually do. So, really appreciate all those people who've kind of stepped in and offered something different to the podcast listeners. You might not know this, but I get quite grumpy, uh, when I ha think about having to edit and transcribe the podcast. It is really not kind of an enjoyable process, the technical side of things. Um, so I can, I can become a little bit frustrated when I've got to do it. However my frame of mind does completely change when I start to go back and listen to the interviews that I've had with. Somebody, and sometimes they could have been like quite a, you know, a long time ago. And so when I sit down and re-listen to those interviews, it's an absolute joy to listen back and just hear the wealth and breadth of experience that people are sharing. So it's really yeah, a really appreciative of everyone who's come on the podcast. I'd like to thank all of the sponsors of the podcast over the years who'd helped keep us going. We really appreciated all of your support. I want to thank the voice of the podcast introduction, um, which we played in a lot of the earlier episodes. Um, and we haven't played as much in the more recent ones. Who is a good friend of mine, Karen, whose voice I just think is absolutely lovely. And so I asked her if she would, uh, be the voice of the podcast and she was absolutely, um, joyous at the prospect of, uh, doing that for us. So, um, Karen, thank you so much and I'm sorry that we won't be playing your voice anymore as part of the podcast. Finally, I obviously wanna say thanks to Caz as the therapist connect, co-lead who has covered every possible role that there, there is on the podcast, including being a guest, being interviewed being a host, being a co-host, and also being a guest host over the last six years. So thanks Cas for all your hard work on the podcast. And I'm sure we'll be hearing more from you in our final episode when it's released. And finally thank you to all of the therapist connect supporters, but particularly those, uh, people who were there at the beginning of this project. We wouldn't have been able to grow so quickly and we wouldn't have been able to achieve so much without all of those people supporting us throughout those early days of the platform. Um, to now we've got, you know, tens of thousands of therapists following us across lots of different platforms. So thank you, uh, everyone who's supported us over the years. We are not ending as a platform. It is just the podcast that's being stopped for now. So if you do follow us on all the other counseling and psychotherapy social media accounts that we have, we will still be sharing posts and content on there for the ongoing future. So once again, thank you everybody who's been listening and I hope you enjoy these final two episodes of the Therapist Connect podcast. We've got some lovely clips and we've got some lovely, uh, content to share with you in those final episodes. So thank you very much and keep connecting with each other. Whenever you can. Bye-bye.