Curt and Katie talk about how the mental health system is set up to lead to burnout. We look at how therapists typically develop over their careers and how educational, licensing, regulation, and business factors can get in the way of this development.
It’s time to reimagine therapy and what it means to be a therapist. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy talk about how to approach the role of therapist in the modern age.
In this episode we talk about:
The shift from therapist development focus to a focus on client-care
Sacrificial Helping Syndrome, Compassion Fatigue, and Burnout
The systemic problems that lead to burnout (education, licensing, regulation, business practices)
The impact of the economy on therapists being able to meet their developmental milestones
The standard developmental stages of therapists
The typical challenges of each stage and how a broken system can make these challenges even harder (or impossible) to navigate
Some of the educational or licensing requirements that seem to go against how people best learn and develop
The challenge of constantly being in crisis (whether it is about getting hours timely, financial strain, or working with clients with high risk) and trying to become a therapist
How the people around us while we are learning impacts how we develop as therapists
The struggle to set up a positive learning environment when you’re starting out as a therapist
The most important time of training (prelicensed years, especially the first 70 hours) being plagued with high productivity and clients with high risk, which lead to moving quickly, not becoming stronger clinicians
The reasons to slow down your prelicensed years for training and personal development and the challenges in doing so
The aspects of training that would be ideal (and seem almost magical and impossible)
Recovery-oriented training, crisis management, trauma-informed systems
The possibilities for improving public mental health and other workplaces to provide a better environment to start and grow as a clinician
EFT-Based Supervision as a good standard
The conversations that we need to have with stakeholders across the system to work toward change
