Psychotherapy & Trauma

[Ulax]

I'm pretty sure I want to start a small business centred around being a psychotherapist.

However, I still have a lot of trauma to work through. I want to do my practice in good faith. And in keeping with that I wouldn't want to become a psychotherapist whilst I still had a load of this trauma to work through.

I'm working on overcoming my trauma atm, yet I'm not sure what to do in the meantime.

Any ideas?

[Grateful Dead]

What exactly do you mean? Are you already studying psychology?

Get into systems thinking and work on becoming mindful.

[puporing]

Most therapists (I should really say all because none of them understand reality and the truth of what you are) I came across don't fully understand what healing means due to their level of consciousness, most are not what I consider "fully healed" themselves or have experienced things like depression, but they can still be of help and it's a job that allows room for creativity. Healing bleeds into spirituality and expansion of consciousness which is not currently a focus in psychotherapy. So all in all if you're in this community and interested in trauma healing, my sense is that you don't necessarily need that official registration, unless you can't see yourself doing something different/on your own.

The main advantages with a registration (and also simultaneously disadvantageous) is that you are regulated by a board, it is more recognized by the public, and people with insurance can get reimbursed.

Edited December 13, 2022 by puporing

[vladorion]

I think it's a good career path but a university degree is a waste of time.

It's much better to study particular modalities, such as IFS, Kiloby Inquiries etc.

You can try those methods and find one that works best for you, then you can do facilitator training and start working with others.

[Cathal]

@Ulax Deeply investigate why you want to 'become' a psychotherapist. I am in the same boat in some sense, yet I don't think you really need a degree, the purity of your intention will set the pace of how much you want to have an impact, you can start a youtube, a website, a personal business, any of that stuff, but if your utilitarian life is not secure and you are not developed within yourself you will absolutely fuck this up, the purity being to the extent you want to do this from a place of goodness or the self getting identfied as 'I am going to help' 'I want to help others' 'I want to change others' and those kinds of delusions - or choosing taking over giving, in its gross and subtle forms.

I agree with @puporing but not to the degree one needs to be fully healed, whatever that means, since most of the good therapists if not all are just people who are suffering as much as the people they are helping, at most the best ones are the ones who have actually transformed themselves - the real issue is when someone is really ignorant as to how much harm they are causing the patient they are helping and end up making the patient even more distrustful, unnurtured, and unwilling to develop themselves.

At the end of the day, if you sit for 5 mins you just know if you should do that or not, sometimes its helpful to journal, brainstorm, make a little web of notes but you always kind of just know

[flowboy]

You can only help someone to the level that you've gone yourself.

Few, if any, therapists will be able to get people to integrate their full trauma/shadow.

The field of regulated as well as unregulated therapy is full of very mediocre healers who constantly interject their judgments into the sessions.

I personally know full-blown pill addicts who haven't faced their own abuse trauma, but still think they should be giving group workshops on trauma release. That results in violating boundaries, such as recording the session without permission and showing off with it.

If you want to heal most or all of your trauma quickly, officially trained Primal therapists would be your best bet, but those are extremely rare.

It's not cheap, but once I can, I will work with one in the Netherlands to help me integrate my full shadow, or at least 80%.

I believe it will make me a better coach.

To sum up:

• Only you can intuit whether you are ready to help people. You don't need to be fully healed, but the more you have integrated the better you will be. And there's a baseline of trauma response act-outs that are just not acceptable.
• Be careful of "teacher ego" and healer ego. If you need your clients to give you positive feedback, you're probably not ready.
  I find it better to think of it as "healing happens sometimes, as if decided by a higher power, when both me and the client tune in to our intuitions", than "I am the one who helps/heals".
• Be humble and ask the tough questions. If your clients don't actually improve, you need to be willing to see that.