Any Therapists on this Forum? (Career Path Discussion)

[leebus99]

Hi All,

I'm 6 months into re-training as a therapist (counsellor / psychotherapist / talk therapist etc etc.). I'm 36, live in the UK and currently work in engineering management, which I have completely lost interest in, and was probably never truly interested in it in the first place. 

I had counselling myself 5 years ago during a miserable 2020. It was totally transformative, and led me to discover meditation, spirituality, developmental psychology and of course a lot of that has been through the Actualized YT channel. I found an almost inexhaustible enthusiasm for these topics, which hasn't remotely waned over the last 4 years, so decided it was time for a career change and a move towards life purpose, and becoming a therapist appealed to me for a variety of reasons.

I'm interested to know if there are any qualified or trainee therapists on the forum, and if so, how do the topics covered on Actualized inform/interact with your practice? Or perhaps if anyone has any related insights on the career path.

Lee

[Michael569]

I might be in a similar boat but not quite sure I understand the core question. 

3 hours ago, leebus99 said:

how do the topics covered on Actualized inform/interact with your practice?

was this the question or did you want to ask more about the transition itself? 

[leebus99]

Both really. I find that things like spiral dynamics factor heavily in my sense making of the world/people/problems now, but it doesn't seem to feature massively in the core modalities of therapy. I almost find it hard to not see things through a spiral dynamics lense most of the time, but it's probably because I found it so helpful in my own journey.

There seems to be an increasing amount of therapists incorporating spirituality into their practice, but not in a dogmatic religious way. I guess that's bordering on existential therapy as well.

So I guess I'm kinda seeing a Venn diagram of 'actualized stuff' on one circle and 'therapy' as the other, and wondering what people find sits nicely in the shared segment.

[Michael569]

@leebus99 I still don't think I fully understand the question but let me try. 

How you practice often comes down to the type of clients you see. You'll have clients who are very low on the spiral with very closed minded and low levels of personal development and conspicuousness. Trying to do serious spirituality with such person will immediately alienate them. They won't understand you, they'll get mad and they'll ghost you. You'll never find out what happened, they just disappear. 

So you kinda have to assess where the client is as you talk to them and how much of this theory/practice is safe to bring in. This is what discovery calls are for and if you pracitce enough you can assess, with pretty high accuracy, what that client's worldview is and then adjust your practice once (and if) they book your thing. 

That is if you want to open your practice to 'all clients'.   

Alternatively you can position yourself, with the way you do advertising, copyrighting and the stuff you put out there, to only see clients who are already a little bit higher up the spiral. The problem with that is that you are now significantly cutting of your earning potential and a client pool as most people are at blue-orange levels and anything above is still relatively rare, globally speaking. Even more so the rarity stemming from them needing therapy (lot of yellow/green folk would have had their issues fixed already or know how to work on it without needing therapists. And if they are looking, they might be looking towards stage yellow/turquoise therapy.

So there is a balance to be struck in there somewhere. Seeing plenty of clients but not ending up only with religious nutters and stage orange hedonists while making sure you still find joy and meaning in it. 

From a personal experience (I work as a different type of therapist), in the past I niched my practice too narrow and it didn't work. I aimed incorrectly and took me 3 years to realise it. The problem was also that my values were not alligned with the way I was leading that practice. So I took it off market and am rebuilding it to something new that invites more people in. I feel like its the right thing to do but can't really tell whether it will work or not. Time will show 

I don't know if that helps? 

Edited January 10 by Michael569

[ricachica]

@leebus99 

My personal end-goal is to become a psychedelic-assisted therapist. I’m 27.

Three months ago, I became a clinic coordinator/medical assistant for a psychiatrist. It’s just the psychiatrist, her physician assistant, and me. I’ve been trained to work as a TMS technician and run those treatments on my own, as well as start and monitor esketamine (Spravato) sessions.

I’m graduating with my two degrees in Psychology and Human Services this May. I plan to eventually get into a Counseling Masters program to become a MFT/LPCC. From there, become a psychedelic-assisted therapist, in whatever legitimate way that looks like down the road and research changes things. I saw something today that said Colorado can now issue licenses to psychedelic mushroom therapy facilitators . So hopefully something like that here in California one day for me…as “official” as possible.

I just started therapy again myself (like last week lol) with a Jungian/Depth psychologist. Hoping to learn a lot from that perspective…especially how to appropriately integrate spirituality in sessions. 

Honestly I’m just happy to see another person here on this career path and to share experiences on it. I’ll add more thoughts to this thread later!

[leebus99]

@Michael569

That's exactly the sort thing I was thinking about, and super helpful, thanks for bearing with me! What you're saying makes perfect sense, if I stay local I'll be practicing (face to face at least) in a small town, so would imagine most of my clients will be either middle aged blue/orange, and perhaps younger orange/green. So I think a lot of the theories that really interest me, and were really important on my own journey, probably won't land at all with a lot of my clients, and like you said, probably turn a lot of them off completely.

Working primarily with people higher on the spiral all the time would be fantastic, but like you said, probably very difficult to build a practice around. I wonder if there are trends between spiral stages and the need/efficacy of therapy. In my own case, being neck deep in stage orange values started to cause me a lot of stress, and it was mainly learning about SD and getting into green/yellow that helped me move on from those values I've seen a lot of stage green people though absolutely stressed/miserable/anxious with the state of the world/their world as well. But like you said, people solidly in yellow/turquoise are going to be much more self-aware and conscious, but then again that might actually lead them to seek out others who can help them continue to grow. I wonder how easy it would be to have a local practice focussed on common issues, working face to face, but an online practice, branded and marketed different to try and appeal to higher consciousness people seeking a different style of relationship to work on their less socially understood growth areas.

I'd love to know more about what you were talking about in your last paragraph if you are happy to share?

 

@ricachica

That's really interesting, thanks for sharing. Sounds like you've got some good plans to work at. I'm yet to explore psychedelics personally, but have read a fair bit on how useful they seem to be for treating various conditions. I can see that over the next decade more adoption of their use in clinical settings, so hopefully some options will open up for you. I haven't learnt too much about Jung yet, but I think I'll find his theories interesting once I get into the detail. Looking forward to what you'll share here in the future!

[Vercingetorix]

I don't think Spiral Dynamics is very useful for therapy because in therapy the content is not so important, you are more interested in the patterns of behavior which are independent of the stage. 

In Therapy You basically just want to get the client to accept themselves so that they "feel they are ok".

Now for the higher stages of the spiral/ego development, they will be more interested in coaching. (let's define therapy as dealing with the past to create a better present and coaching as dealing with the present to create a better future).

[Michael569]

20 hours ago, leebus99 said:

I'd love to know more about what you were talking about in your last paragraph if you are happy to share?

Message me if you wanna chat about it, I'd prefer not to go into it all publicly. 

Edited yesterday at 10:07 AM by Michael569

[leebus99]

@Vercingetorix

Thanks for your post. I agree that self acceptance can be a major objective in a lot of therapy, but not all.

I've seen a lot of different ways of differentiating therapy and coaching, and I certainly like your take on therapy being past/present focused and coaching being present/future focused. For me, coaching all involves a lot more knowledge/information/experience sharing from coach to client, whereas a therapist should be 95%+ focused the client's space, but with a little room for psycho-education etc.

Part of me thinks that with yellow and above on the spiral, therapy content/topics could became quite all encompassing, and it might be quite difficult to really differentiate between therapy/coaching/mentoring/guiding etc etc. at that level. In fact, I think as a general point when you get to yellow and above a lot of labels and definitions start to lose meaning and became much less useful.