Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development

At the Bleeding Edge of Development, Reaping Benefit for Our Clients.

Reading Time: 10 minutes
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Personalised Learning

Personal Learnings: Looking Back at 2019 in Order to Move Forward (Part II of II)

(Update 20 March 2020: Like other countries, Australia has now instituted a travel ban. COVID-19 has impacted so many families directly and indirectly. My thoughts and prayers go out to you).

In the previous post, I talked about my resume of mistakes in 2019. Boy oh boy, what a humbling experience. More importantly, I’m really glad I’ve systematically capture errors, blunders and mistakes. This not only serves as a personal reminder, but it keeps me honest and on-track as I proceed each year in my endeavors. By intentionally looking back at them, it helps me to move forward with greater clarity. 

(Turns out that the act of “Retrieval practice” has got more leverage in learning that constantly consuming a stream of information, or even simply “revising” old materials . This is one of the tenets we touch on the web-based workshop, Deep Learner. For more, click here ).

Guided by my mistakes and other learnings that i’ve stumbled upon through 2019, I’ve grafted 8 learnings that I’m taking with me in 2020 (and through the global pandemic).

I hope you find them useful as well.

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Personalised Learning / Reimagining Education in Psychotherapy (REP)

Teach the 3 Types of Knowledge and Not Just 1

I propose that in order for us to reimagine education in psychotherapy (REP), these 3 types of knowledge—content, process, and conditional—can serve as a primary conceptual framework.
Competence in content knowledge can create a false confidence of ability. Meanwhile, analogous to a good music not necessarily needing music theory to make good music, it also begs the question if content knowledge needs to serve as a basis for process and conditional knowledge. Perhaps if schools treat these 3 domains ecologically, and not hierarchical; learners might experience the critical interplay early in their higher education.

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Personalised Learning / Reimagining Education in Psychotherapy (REP)

Kindling the Flame

There are two different ways to think about how we educate psychotherapists. The first is a banking model. Traditionally, in a banking model, we teach the theory, research, fill it in the learner’s minds, attempting to download and fill the learner’s mind with knowledge, and about 4 years later, we then send them off for practicum and begin the real work.

The second way is a kindling model. In this approach, we flip the banking model on its head, and start with the action, igniting a deep interest while continuously fanning the flame, and then learn to synthesise, join the dots and form new conscious knowledge—after the fact.

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Deliberate Practice / First Sessions / Personalised Learning

4 Lessons from 20 Weeks of Very Bad Therapy

Ben and Carrie got me on their show for one of their episodes. (Listen to Episode 11, regarding the problem with an intake model. More about this in the book, The First Kiss). What they are doing is so underrated. I asked them in passing, “Wouldn’t it be super interesting to hear what you both learned after doing the first 20 episodes, so that we can learn too?”

I was surprised that they took up the invitation.

This is a guest post by Ben Fineman and Caroline Wiita.

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Self-care

9 Distinctions of Burn Out

Despite our sophisticated understanding of various psychological mechanisms that lead to stress, anxiety, and depression in our clients, we have a tendency to conflate the signal for the fire. The alarm bells tell us that something’s burning. Unless it’s a false alarm, the sirens aren’t the problem.
The experience of burnout is symptomatic of a compounded problem. What we need to gain clarity of is what cumulated to the emotional exhaustion.