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 yesterday at 02:26 PM by Michael569