Therapy for Therapists

Written by a clinician, to clinicians, including the part where sitting in the other chair is genuinely uncomfortable.

What You Are Carrying at the End of the Day

Some of it belongs to your clients. A disclosure from a Tuesday afternoon that you can still see. The client you worried about all weekend. The one whose material sits too close to something of your own, which you noticed in the room and set aside because you had eleven minutes until the next session.

Some of it is yours and predates the license. And some of it is the work itself: notes at nine at night, a caseload sized by other people, the particular tiredness of being regulated and attuned for six hours and then having nothing left for your own family at dinner.

You know the words for all of this. Naming it accurately has not made it stop.

The Awkwardness of Being the Client

I will say the quiet parts. You will watch me work. You will notice the intervention, and probably the moment I choose one. You may catch yourself formulating your own case, or managing the session so it goes smoothly for me, which is a habit and not a character defect. If that is happening, name it and we will work with it out loud.

The other real barrier is smallness. Our professional world overlaps: supervision circles, consultation groups, the same conferences, the same referral network. Working by secure video with someone outside your immediate circle solves a lot of that. I hold your confidentiality exactly as I would anyone else's, within the ordinary legal limits I go over before we begin, and I will decline if we have a connection that would make it a dual relationship.

What a Session Looks Like Here

You are the client, so we work on your material, whether that is a specific image from your own history or something absorbed from a client's story that will not put itself down. We choose targets and I guide the eye movements while you hold what comes up.

You do not have to explain your theoretical orientation, and you do not have to earn the hour by being an easy client or producing insight. I am not going to teach you ART during your own session. Sessions are 60 minutes by secure video, or up to three hours as an intensive, which many clinicians prefer because it costs one block rather than a weekly hole in the schedule.

What This Is Not, and When It Is Not the Fit

• Not clinical supervision, consultation on your cases, or hours toward licensure.
• Not a place to bring a client's case for advice. If that is what you need, look at the referring clinicians page instead.
• Not documentation for a licensing board or a professional health program.
• Not a claim about any outcome, and never a promised number of sessions.
• Adults only, by secure video in Kentucky and Ohio.

Fifteen minutes, colleague to colleague, no charge.

You can be as clinical or as plain as you like on that call. It is a conversation about whether I am a sensible person for you to work with, and whether our circles overlap in a way that would rule it out.