Showing Up for Your Clients

Showing Up for Your Clients

Curt and Katie chat about the importance of therapists in the therapeutic process. We look at how the medical model, upon which the continuing education and ethical guidelines are built, is flawed leading to solely client-facing training and rules. We talk about the importance of optimizing your practices as well as the negative clinical outcomes when you aren’t taking care of yourself.

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 case for self-care as continuing education
• The problem with looking at consumer protection bodies rather than the research
• The goals of helping people and the problem with sacrificing ourselves in those efforts
• How we protect consumers by taking care of ourselves
• The importance of being strong clinicians, optimizing our performance
• The problem with the medical model and framing ourselves as inconsequential to therapeutic outcomes
• When we aim models or regulations around the minimally acceptable competence or performance
• The benefit of seeing therapy as art versus as a science
• How non-specific effects (therapist effects, client effects and effects of the therapeutic relationship) are more important than the specific treatment modality or adherence
• Common factors and the Contextual Model
• The requirement for a Bond for successful treatment
• Pathways to change according to the Contextual Model: Real Relationship, Expectations, Specific Ingredients
• How we practice at being better humans
• Why we need to have more in our lives than being therapists
• Showing up in resourced ways
• Elements of burnout as specific predictors for clients having worse outcomes, dropping out, or not engaging actively in treatment
• The importance of optimal performance in creating a therapeutic alliance
• How we aren’t trained on optimal performance, focus, setting up our environment
• The need to refocus our graduate programs to support the education that is needed to be a good therapist
• How self-awareness can impact clinical work
• The lack of humanity in the medical model and research based on it
• Who we are makes a difference
• The need to understand how to take care of ourselves and structure our practice