The therapist friend

Burst / Used under licenseTherapists and counselors are a community’s experts in relationships. It only makes sense that our occupation impacts our personal relationships. With our friends, we often aren’t just their friend who happens to be a therapist. We’re their therapist friend.

Being the therapist friend affects how our loved ones respond to us. In most situations, our opinions are respected. In some, we can get written off as arrogant — something that typically doesn’t happen to, say, plumbers who speak confidently about how plumbing works.

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I’ve got beef with the Talking Therapy podcast guys

Talking Therapy podcastA couple of years ago, I appeared on an episode of the Talking Therapy podcast. I love the show. RJ Thomas and John Webber are good guys and good hosts, and I’ve thought that since before they invited me on. Their show is rightly popular. They’ve even featured one of the world’s most prominent therapists: Dr. Susan Johnson.

Johnson developed Emotionally Focused Therapy, which I use in my own practice with distressed couples. As you can imagine, a lot of her interview focused on couples and couple therapy. Almost as an aside, early in the interview, Webber noted that half of US marriages end in divorce. That’s flat wrong.

So I went back on the show to yell at him about it.

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On being the therapist in your family

Nicole De Khors / Burst / Used under licenseIf you didn’t know this about me, I’m a white woman. Most psychotherapists are white women. (See the demographics of psychologists as an example.) When I sat down to write about how families respond when a family member starts down the road to becoming a therapist, I knew that culture and family background would have a lot to do with it. So instead of just focusing on my own experience, I decided to also interview some of my colleagues, to see what it was like being the therapist in their families. The differences surprised me.

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Therapy Reimagined: A different kind of conference

This Friday and Saturday, I will be presenting at the Therapy Reimagined conference in Los Angeles. It’s a different kind of conference from any I’ve spoken at before, and I can’t wait. You should be there.

Different by design

Academic and professional conferences tend to focus on research and clinical application. Those are obviously critically important for keeping your practice up to date. But those conferences don’t tend to talk broadly about what it means to work in mental health. In other words, most conferences are more about doing therapy, and less about being a therapist.

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Cyber-stalk yourself

Matthew Henry / Burst / Licensed under Creative Commons ZeroWhen potential or current clients or employers search your name, what will they find? What impression do you leave? There’s one easy and absolutely necessary way to find out: Cyber-stalk yourself.

Even if you are still in grad school and not seeing clients in the near future, it is never too early to start caring about your professional reputation. This is not as simple as switching your social media accounts to private. When you search your name on Google or any other search engine, things from your past may come up that you may have forgotten about. And if those results show up for you, they’re like to show up for others, too. Like prospective clients. And potential employers.

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The price of professional accreditation

Shopify Partners / Burst / Used under licenseThe California School of Professional Psychology was the country’s first free-standing professional school of psychology. It was one once known for radically transforming the training mental health professionals. And at the 2013 Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference in Anaheim, its founding President said the school made a major mistake by choosing to pursue APA accreditation for its Clinical Psychology programs.

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