Should Therapists Be in Therapy?

This is a different take because it opens up and identifies where therapy might be necessary. It starts some of the work that maybe needs to happen in therapy, and it also deepens supervision. And so by making this as part of the curriculum, which gets to kind of your concern here, does this make it too personal?

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Curt and Katie talk about Person of the Therapist training. We talk about a revolutionary training model that starts with who a therapist is and what will come up for them as a therapist – rather than setting unreasonable expectations of blank, neutral, perfect therapists.

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:

Person of the Therapist training – addressing the whole person therapist
The work of Dr. Harry Aponte at Drexel University
Looking at how pulling from your own history can impact how you approach the work in the room
The importance of finding your own personal themes and challenges, owning your own story
Innovative classes that start graduate programs with personal growth and insight
Normalizing reactions and individual differences from the beginning of our education
How close the line can be between education and therapy
The fallacy that therapists can be blank or neutral
The drive toward Evidence Based Practices
The depth of supervision that occurs when focusing on the person of the therapist
The problem of siloed areas of the field and how bringing it back into the same room
The vulnerability required for the depth of this work
The ability to increase maturity of the therapist more quickly through this type of work
The importance of structure and containment to do this type of work
Teaching self-awareness and self-monitoring
The power of building supportive community to do work more in the open, to decrease shame and perfectionism
Learning how to give respectful, structured, effective feedback – exercising your empathy muscle
How building resilience and connection can improve the profession as a whole
Increasing distress tolerance and capacity for taking feedback
Looking at the benefit of doing this work at all stages in your career