What Helped Me Become a Better Therapist?

Deliberate Practice

• Deliberate practice is a structured and active form of learning focused on skill development. It includes being uncomfortable, role playing, receiving feedback, breaking skills down into manageable steps, and practicing these skills over and over.

• Think of an athlete, musician, or professional of any sort. Of course, there’s innate talent, but for most people, dedicated daily practice over the course of 5-15 years makes this person exceptional and even better than the average person.

• I focus on my areas of growth/weaknesses in therapy. This includes:

  • Impatience and wanting clients to heal quickly

  • Perfectionism and rigidity

  • Difficulty receiving feedback

  • Repairing therapeutic ruptures

  • Over responsibility and merging with clients’ stories and feelings

  • Silence and not knowing what to do/say

Ongoing & Lifelong Education & Trainings

• I regularly do multiple trainings a year now in my 8th year since graduating from my MSW program.

• I attend trainings related to: 1) Grief, 2) Trauma, 3) Attachment and relationship issues, 4) Couples/dyadic and systemic work, 5) Multicultural therapy and attending to differences.

• I also read clinical books regularly not just for the client work, but for my own growth and healing. At one point early in my career, I read several books a month due to not having enough money to attend trainings. I would also watch free videos on YouTube and listen to clinical podcasts.

• I find this work both personally and professionally enriching, so trainings, reading books, watching videos, listening to podcasts, etc. were generative and fun for me.

Ongoing & Lifelong Consultation & Supervision

• I still engage in unpaid peer and paid clinical consultation even though I am independently licensed. I find it to be a good way to “check myself” and also have a space to process dynamics/themes that may be coming up, I am not even aware of.

• Consultation also helps me with the loneliness and isolation of private practice, which in turns helps with burn out.

Common Factors

• I am a huge proponent of the Common Factors in therapy and use this with every client

• Essentially, common factors are common factors or ingredients that make therapy successful, no matter what treatment modality used (e.g. CBT, ACT, EMDR). This includes: therapeutic alliance, client expectations, feedback, empathy, attending to cultural differences, the client, etc.

Doing My Own Healing Work (Learning From the Inside Out)

• Attending my own therapy as well as healing outside of therapy.

• This includes:

  • Attending meditation retreats

  • Having a mindfulness practice

  • Attending to my own grief regularly

  • Having a wellness recovery action plan (WRAP) and following it as much as possible

  • Understanding my own triggers and self soothing/self regulation

  • Going for a long walk a day

  • Going for runs and jogs as my main form of exercise

  • Strength training

  • Stretching regularly

  • Lifestyle medicine (getting enough quality sleep, drinking enough water, eating nutritious foods, decreasing stress as much as possible, decreasing substances as much as possible)

  • Acpuncture appointmnets

  • Massage/body work appointments

  • Taking time off regularly

  • Asking for help and support from others I trust

Nervous System Regulation & Somatics

• Engaging in somatic work like cranial sacral therapy, reiki, massage, body work, acupuncture, breath work, guided imagery, yoga, and stretching

Being Okay With Not Knowing Everything & Continually Questioning Myself

• I love Suzuki Roshi’s concept of the beginner’s mind. He wrote, “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few.”

  • When you have an expert mind, you know everything and if you know everything, you have nothing new to learn.

• The more I do this work, the more I realize there is so much I do not know and there is not enough time in this lifetime to know everything related to psychology, mental health, childhood developmental theory, attachment, diagnosis, assessment, etc.

• I am good at certain areas/topics/populations, and yet there are many areas/topics/populations, I struggle with and am an amateur at.

• Even with the certain areas/topics/populations I am skilled at, there are still nuances within this area that I am still learning more about.