YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Williams

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62
first
2025-12-22
most recent
2025-12-22
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “One of the things since Roy asked what was it like being a child is in a mance is that there's an expectation that you'll learn to pray. I knew my parents had quiet time each day what they were doing there, I assume they were praying and reading the Bible and so on, but I could never really get on with regular Bible reading, and I never really learnt what prayer was, in the sense that I would keep trying and keep trying and keep trying, and it was really hard, and I felt that as a judgment on myself that really I should know how to do this thing, that other people seem to know how to do, do with ease. And I couldn't.”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Oh, plenty. I mean, growing up through adolescence. And then even when I thought I was committing to being a minister, there are areas of my life I think, well, this doesn't quite fit and I'm not sure I believe that. I mean, some of the theology is really very difficult to understand. And then you realize actually understanding it isn't probably the issue. It's a sort of commitment, like Francis Buffard says. It's a sort of sense of if you believe that this material world is not all there is and you also believe that most of the time we are assuming it is and we get lost in ego then is there as it were another realm or another way of being which is more loving and if that's the case how do you relate to that loving realm or loving aspect of yourself or loving aspect of other people are you going to reject it all the time or are you going to commit to it but”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, I think, to say it left her perhaps as a bit of overstatement, she was rebellious at school. Her parents were on the mission field a lot, so they left, they had eight children and they left their children in private school in England to go out to Africa. And first of all, her father went out and then he called for his wife and she went out. So for long, long periods of time. And in her diary, she says, it's such a hard thing to say goodbye knowing you won't see your children for four years. And that's tough, and he was in North Africa, first of all, in Kenya, then in North Africa and Sierra Leone. But she was rebellious, but also very conforming. And I think that also, you can think you're rebellious if you're in the Mans or in the Vicarage. But actually, it's within very tight. Being rebellious in a manse is not really being very rebellious, I think.”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, you know, when you've done in Wales, you do Bible exams at Sunday School. Every year you do a test on the Bible, and if you get a good percentage, you get a little prize. Of my first memories of being a child was practicing going up and receiving my prize, how to stand, who to shake hands with, how not to make a mess of going up the steps.”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “It's not very good, and then she would ask when I first went there, she would ask questions like right who in the class knows when Jesus sinned and I thought, oh my gosh, that's a hard question. I didn't think, I think, didn't think Jesus had sinned. That's what I was talking. No, no. All the hands shot up. So obviously this was a question they were used to answering. And they answered, the right answer was when he overturned the tables in the temple. And I thought, well, I was just about to say when he was in the garden of Gethsemane, he said, may this cup pass from me, but obviously that was the wrong answer.”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It's a strange sort of existence because there is an expectation that you will somehow represent the family, so there's a little bit of pressure if you're heard to swear or to do something slightly outside the boundaries, then there's a little bit of pressure. But it was a very loving family. There were five of us. My mother had been a priest's child as well, so she knew a bit about these sort of things. But she'd been a bit rebellious, but had come back to faith later on. The worst thing about it was when I first went to Stockton I had a teacher that used to say Ah Vickers Vicar's son, Vicar's son, and I had quite sticky out ears then, you should say the boy with a sticky out ears, the vicar's son. This was the teacher of eight-year-olds, right?”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And when I graduated, I thought, well, what can I do? I'd gone to study philosophy, but psychology was like an add-on. But then I thought, well, psychology is the thing for me. At that time, I had thought I would become a minister myself within the Presbyterian church, or by then it was called the United Reformed Church because it had united with the Congregational Church. And indeed, I was accepted as a candidate for the ministry, but they didn't like people going straight from university to theological college. So I did clinical psychology training, then did a PhD, and by then I'd lost interest, I thought, in going into the church and I became an academic psychologist.”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Episode, you know, people got bikes if they passed and watches if they passed, and all sorts of things. It was quite a big thing to do. Anyway, I went to the local grammar school. So by the age of 13, 14, 15, I was in this grammar school. It was a very small grammar school, 350 people, just 15 members of staff, I think, when we look now at photographs, like one physics teacher, one chemistry teacher, one biology teacher, one or two English teachers. That was sort of, that was it. And then it wasn't a school that sent people to Oxford and Cambridge generally, but my brother had just got in from the rival grammar school to go to Oxford and I thought, well, I'll have a try as well. He read history and I applied to do philosophy and psychology. When I graduated, I went to St. Peter's College, Oxford.”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Quite traditional leading thing and take you back a little bit to your childhood and give a sense of where you grew up, who you were, what kind of boy you were, let's say 14, 15. So I grew. I was born in Harden, or rather in the area down on the DS tuberculi, just below Harden, and went to Harden Infant School just next to Gladstone's Library for about six weeks until my parents decided to move the whole family to Aberystwyth, where I lived till I was eight years old. Then my dad, who is a Presbyterian minister, Presbyterian Church of Wales minister, moved the family to a place called Stocktonese in the industrial heartland of the northeast of England where I went to primary school there and then to the grammar school there. In those days we had the 11 plus, which was the big sort of event that happened when you were 10 or 11 years old and sorted people. It happened also to Alistrawle, though he's in current denial about it, but it also was an experience in his own life.”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “of mind that usually works quite well in life, but actually gets us more and more entangled with our negative mood. I could say more about that later, but I think when you know it's not your fault that the depression is getting worse and worse because your mind's using its best efforts to help but actually its backfiring, that explanation, that insight itself lets you off the hook and you can go, oh, right, I now see why I haven't found it helpful, it just insight I think helps a lot.”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So, struggling with mindfulness, well, welcome to the club. I think that's the most common reaction to mindfulness, I think. Some people find a little bit of mindfulness practice through apps or through books and so on can help them just de-stress, learn to regulate some aspect of their emotions. But when we use mindfulness for clinical depression, especially recurrent clinical depression, the depression through depression, it keeps coming back again and again. What we offer is a whole eight weeks in which we ask people to try it for eight weeks and to see what happens without too much expectation, but knowing that the research trials show that it can help prevent, reduce the risk of further episodes. And I think that what really helps is to know that the way we normally deal with our negative moods is to use the sort of mode of mind, the problem solving mode of mind.”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “No, I don't think so. I don't think so. And actually, when I first came to mindfulness, I didn't really understand what it was. I thought it was a form of relaxation. And it was only later that I came to understand it was a whole... Different thing that relaxation was a byproduct of training oneself to be more mindful, but it wasn't actually the main point of it.”

    2025-12-22 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 167. Faith, Depression, and Finding Calm in the Chaos (Professor Mark Williams) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source